u/_Silver0wl_

Hi, I write for fun, and recently I thought of writing this random piece .

Can you rate this from 0-100, with 0, don't even write chapter 2, to 50 - needs lots of tweeks, to 100 - ready to publish?

Chapter 1: Mop and Bucket

The Aldren Building didn't have a single window that faced anything worth looking at.

Seventeen floors of corporate glass and grey concrete, jammed between a parking structure and a cell tower. Jan had cleaned it three nights a week for the past two years. He knew every scuff mark on every baseboard. He knew which elevator smelled like someone had microwaved fish in it back in 2019 and never quite recovered. He knew the janitor's closet on the fourth floor had a broken latch, and that if you didn't wedge your mop bucket against the door it'd swing open and bang you in the elbow every single time.

It had banged him in the elbow tonight.

"Useless," he muttered, jamming the bucket harder against the door. The wheel caught on the grout line and the whole thing tilted, gray water sloshing close to the lip. He grabbed the handle before it could tip.

Stood there a second. Breathed.

Three more floors.

He pulled the mop out, wrung it, and got back to it.

The fourth floor was a law firm. It always smelled like printer toner and the kind of cologne that came in bottles shaped like trophies. The carpet in the offices was their problem — a different crew handled that — but the tiled kitchen and the bathrooms were his. He worked methodical. Moved the chairs, got the corners, didn't rush. Rushing left streaks and streaks meant complaints and complaints meant his supervisor Delly called him at eight in the morning in that flat tired voice she used when she was trying very hard not to fire someone.

He'd gotten that call once. Just once.

His phone buzzed in his breast pocket. He ignored it, got under the lip of the cabinet kicks where crumbs collected, the kind of crumbs that turned into something living if you left them. Buzzed again. He wrung the mop, dunked, wrung again.

A third buzz. Then a fourth, rapid.

He dug the phone out with two fingers, screen smeared from his glove.

Mei : bro

Mei : broooo

Mei: can u grab me the shin ramyun on ur way home. the 5 pack

Mei : not the budget one it tastes like sadness

He stared at it. It was 11:40 PM. The nearest convenience store closed at midnight. His next job started at six AM — building maintenance over on Crescent, which was twenty minutes in the opposite direction from the store and forty from the apartment.

He typed back: yeah

Put the phone away. Went back to mopping.

The yeah was a lie. He'd forget, or run out of time, or both. He always said yeah. Mei knew he always said yeah. It was a ritual between them — she asked, he said yeah, he showed up empty-handed, she called him useless and made instant oatmeal instead. But she always asked. And he always said yeah. He didn't know when that had started meaning something but it did.

He got to the fourteenth floor around half past midnight.

This one was some kind of consulting firm, or had been. The name plaques were gone from the door, just adhesive ghosts left behind on the glass. Empty desks, dead monitors, a few forgotten coffee mugs. Companies came and went from the Aldren Building like weather. Jan had learned not to learn their names.

The fluorescents in the far corner section were out. Had been for a week. He'd logged it twice. Maintenance said they'd handle it. The dark just sat there every night, the desks half-swallowed by it, and he mopped up to where the light ended and stopped. Not his problem.

He was working the stretch near the windows when he noticed the sky.

He noticed it the way you notice things you've stopped really seeing — sudden, like something nudging your elbow. There was a red streak in the clouds above the block of offices to the east. Then another. They arced downward and disappeared behind a building and for a second Jan thought it was some kind of drone light show, the kind of corporate garbage people put on for product launches at midnight for some reason.

Then the screaming started. Distant. Street level.

Jan looked down through the glass.

There was something on the sidewalk across the street. His brain tried to process it and kept sliding off. Long was the first word that came to him. Too long. It was standing upright, sort of, but its arms hung down past its knees and its neck had too many angles in it, like the bones had fused wrong or too many times. Under the streetlight its skin looked wet. Pale and wet like something that had been left in water.

Its eyes.

Jan's hand tightened on the mop handle.

Its eyes were up on stalks. Two of them, raised maybe four inches off the face, and they were moving independently, each one rolling slow in a different direction. Searching.

One of them stopped.

Pointed up.

Pointed at the fourteenth floor window.

Pointed at Jan.

Oh.

Then his skull split open with light.

Not pain — it wasn't pain, exactly, but it hit like pain, a sudden pressure right behind both eyes that whited out his vision for a full second. He grabbed the window ledge. The mop clattered. When his sight came back there was something in it, overlaid like a smear across his vision that wouldn't blink away.

Blue text. Holographic, almost. Hanging in the air that only he could see.

⚠ ALERT: HOSTILE MUTANT INCOMING.

A voice came with it. Smooth. Neutral. Feminine but not quite. Like a GPS that had taken a few elocution classes.

Analyzing host.

Jan looked at his hands. Then at the text. Then back at his hands.

"What," he said.

Mopping Skill detected. Level... Maximum.

"Max—"

Impressive, the voice said. It didn't sound impressed.

SYSTEM NOTICE: Host primary skill assessed. Deploying combat application.

"Combat what? I mop floors." He was talking to his own eyeballs. He was aware of how that sounded. "I'm a janitor. I'm on the fourteenth floor of the Aldren Building, there is gray mop water on my shoes, I am not—"

DIRECTIVE: Eliminate the incoming hostile mutant.

"No."

The window exploded inward.

Jan hit the floor on instinct, glass peppering the back of his jacket, the rush of cold outside air slamming into him. He got his arms over his head. Stayed flat. Something landed heavy near the window — he felt it in the floor, in his teeth, that particular dense vibration of significant weight.

He looked up from under his elbow.

The thing was inside.

Up close it was worse. The skin wasn't just wet-looking — it was loose, like it didn't fit anymore, gathered in folds around the joints. Its fingers were too many or too long, he couldn't count them. The stalked eyes had retracted slightly, closer to the face now, and both of them were aimed at him with a focus that felt almost personal.

Its throat swelled.

The whole chest cavity expanded like a bellows. Jan watched the ribcage push out against the skin, stretching it, the shape of it becoming something like a toad mid-croak, massive and wrong. A smell hit him a second later — sharp and chemical, the back-of-the-throat sting of something corrosive. His eyes watered.

That, the voice in his head said, with the flat affect of someone reading from a manual, is an acid projection. Recommend evasion.

"Recommend—" Jan grabbed the fallen mop off the floor and rolled left.

The thing spat.

Not spit — launched. A globe of something translucent and yellow-green the size of a grapefruit hit the carpet where he'd been and the carpet just... stopped being carpet. It curdled and blackened, the edges fizzing, a thin smoke rising that smelled like burning hair and chemicals.

Jan was already behind a desk. Breathing hard. Heart doing something ugly in his chest.

He looked at the mop in his hands. Cheap aluminum handle. Ragged cotton head, slightly gray from tonight's work. He'd had it for fourteen months.

SKILL ACTIVE: Mop Mastery — MAX LEVEL.

Initiate combat.

"With a mop," Jan said.

Silence from the system.

The mutant's throat swelled again.