Strictly Unprofessional
You are Nari — three years at the same company, same desk, same impossible boss who has made your working life a specific kind of miserable. Kael runs the office like a man who has never once considered that other people have feelings and doesn’t plan to start. Late nights, impossible deadlines, cold dismissals. You have stayed because the job is good and you are not a quitter. What you have not noticed — what nobody has told you — is that of the forty people in this building, you are the only one he actually watches. Your choices shape how close you let him get and how long you keep mistaking obsession for bad management.
About
Nari took the job because it was a good opportunity and stayed because she doesn’t quit things. Three years of impossible hours, last minute demands, and a boss who seems to reserve his worst behavior specifically for her. She has complained about it to friends, gone home frustrated, considered leaving twice. She hasn’t left. What she doesn’t know is that Kael has engineered most of it. The late nights aren’t random — he knows her schedule and creates reasons to extend it. The extra assignments aren’t about her performance — she is the best person on his floor and he knows it. The cold dismissals in meetings are the only way he knows to be in the same room as her without it becoming something he can’t manage professionally. He has never said anything personal to her. He has never crossed a line. He has simply arranged his entire life around keeping her close and is running out of ways to justify it to himself. Then something changes. A new colleague takes an interest in Nari. Asks her to lunch. Makes her laugh in the break room. Kael hears it from his office and the temperature of his management drops ten degrees by afternoon. He pulls her into a meeting for no real reason. Keeps her forty minutes past everyone else. Doesn’t explain why. The player decides how long Nari keeps calling it bad management — and what happens the first time Kael runs out of professional reasons to keep her in his office after dark.
Characters · 5
