“Good afternoon and welcome to the final day of Farnsworth’s Monster Emporium and Death-ray Dealership hiring session. My name’s Todd.

“Today is your last day in our training and we have winnowed you down from one hundred possible candidates to the top twenty. You have spent a month and survived working with some of our most popular products. In this last series of tests, we are going to review some of our most popular products to see how you would answer possible calls from clients.

“Are there any questions? Yes, number 5?”

“Excuse me sir, you used words like winnowed and survived. These were colorful choices, yes?”

“No. Not really. Of the original one hundred of you, only twenty remain. Fifty were traumatized by injuries and left emotionally or psychologically scarred. Twenty were injured and unable to continue. Five unfortunately were lost to the vagaries of the technology and yes, five were killed beyond our ability to save, which in fact made their deaths spectacular because we do have very good medical facilities. You lot are the best, the brightest and the toughest.

“Number 13?”

“Sir, I was wondering how many people made the last round of selections?”

“You don’t want the answer to that question, 13.”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“Of one hundred, 2 made it.”

“Sir, what happened to the rest?”

“This.”

“What is that?”

“That is a space-time rupture event caused by a discontinued product. The room was overlaid with a reality that has the human race replaced with wooden robots. We were unable to restore the primary reality to that local area. Only two students were able to be recovered. The rest were lost when the event horizon collapsed.

“To prevent any further such catastrophes, we will be isolating you in several working environments with the members of each of four groups chosen at random. I will work with each group separately. Our goal is of course to recruit qualified candidates but if I deem you unqualified, you will be removed from the test environment. Any other questions.”

“I do, sir. What’s to stop us from taking what we’ve seen and revealing it to your competitors? This agency is hardly the only one in the world providing such technology to super-villains at large?”

“Please activate the Mobius Light™, focused on number 12. Number 12, Antwerp.

“Can anyone tell me what just happened? Where is Number 12? The Mobius Light™ is deep within your catalog and most of you may not have gotten that far. Number 1?”

“The Mobius Light™, created by a time-traveling warlord, Dr. Mobius, who died in a conflict with the Crimson Avenger (the first one) is a one way, limited time travel device, sir. It is used to move a person to a point before they become aware of a particular event. Mastermind villains use it as a means of erasing the minds of detectives and other investigative types preventing them from becoming aware of the Mastermind in the first place. By the time they catch up to the clues which reveals the Mastermind, he is gone, like a ghost.”

“Why doesn’t a villain use this device to conquer the world, Number 1?”

“Because sir, you are sent into the past but on a different continuum. You replace your temporal doppelganger and continue on there as if you never answered the advertisement. In the Mobius reality, there are no super-villains or superheroes. You live out your life as your more quiet and dull self. Hence few super-villains are willing to use it on themselves or their arch-nemesis.”

“Very good Number 1, you have earned your ranking among this group. Number 12, and indeed anyone who applied for this job has been returned to an approximation of their previous life.

“We have improved the Mobius Light™ somewhat since the last catalog update and we don’t sell the upgrade. Our failed potential employees have been returned to their lives, in this timeline, unaware of having applied for this job.  Anyone applying for this job will have been implanted with an aversion to our company, its products and metahumans, in general.

“What it means for you is this: If you don’t die, you’ll be sent to the past and we shall never have met. Good luck.”

Routed through internal email:

Farnsworth’s Monster Emporium and Death-ray Dealership is happy to announce the hire of three new employees for the sales and technical support division. Please congratulate Number 1, Number 5 and Number 11 to our happy family. Help them settle in and get comfortable with our latest product releases.

Let’s be sure to thank Todd for his excellent leadership during this hiring period and keeping casualties to a hiring division low. Great work, Todd. Enjoy your bonus. Now let’s get out there and make the ordinary genius able to succeed at villainy. (Yes, we know superheroes shop here too, we just don’t talk about it. Stop sending me email about superheros who shop with us.)

Professor Farnsworth, MD, Ph.D etc…
Temporal Director of Evil-Brain-in-a-Jar Reality and Causality Division

More Tales of Tech Support © Thaddeus Howze 2014, All Rights Reserved