Everything about Mist's job was the worst. Most people probably think the same thing, but in Mist's case it was actually true.

Every day, she went to the same office, to the same desk, put in eight hours and hated everybody. For eight hundred years.

It was her job at Constellation to make good mood spells, and the fucking things didn't work on her. Mist disliked every single coworker, every person on her team. And worst of all, at work her desk was nowhere near the window.

Wasn't the entire point of climbing the corporate ladder to get an office with a view from the levitating tower?

From the center of the Alcyone tower office she could hardly make out the magician's college library tower ascending to its record height every afternoon. Restaurants passing on their flight paths captured the attention of the workers in the windows with flashy firework advertisements (the booms muted as per bylaw 1216.SE.3A), she rarely caught the display.

Every week she would tell all of this to her therapist, Asakaze, who had an office to herself in her levitating practice. Clients must get distracted by the motos zooming by, but it was probably worth it for the natural lift such wonders could give to a depressive's mood.

"The skies outside my bedroom window are gray and my room is a mess buried in a mess. I want to sleep all the time." She never wanted to get out of bed in the morning, out from the heavy weight of mounds of blankets — not in the morning or any other time she collapsed into it. The last time she was happy? She couldn't recall.

Would the advertisements and miraculous architecture have improved Mist's moods? Maybe not — not if the spells, mood schemas she designed personally to take customers to euphoric heights, never made even a dent in her fog — but who could say? Her desk in the middle of the pen, in the center of a ring of underlings, pissed her right off. The more she got promoted, the further she got relocated from the action.

Mist wanted to look out the window down at the non-magical pedestrians she flew over. So far she had only climbed to the fortieth floor. If she didn't get to see how high she'd risen, what was the point?

She certainly didn't work for Constellation out of a passion for the cause of the mood improvement spell department.

"Test on me," she used to beg coworkers. The good mood spells had spent shivers up her spine once upon a time. They lit up the dark places, lifted a weight, blew off cobwebs. A few centuries later she sounded so grumpy when she requested, "Please do not test on me."

There was only one remedy that worked for Mist. Every darkened morning when she had to get up before the sun did, and link to the office, every day clocking in and clocking out felt the same, and only one thing could make her feel better. She wasn't entirely sure whether she should tell Doctor Asakaze about it.

It all started with the gatherings around Mist's desk of coworkers coming to whine and moan to her about the baby brigades. Before she knew she was doing it, Mist began to tell Asakaze the setup of the story. "Every noon, new parens come to visit the Alcyone to show off aer star born little immortals, just to make all us barren paupers who could rarely even afford a ticket in the animus lottery feel jealous."

Mist let the baby brigade be, but she couldn't resist making mischief with the wannabes who gathered to be mean and throw shade. The scene came to Mist's mind as she pieced out what she should and should not tell Asakaze about it.

Here was Nyuki, leaning backwards over the desk. The one Mist hated in the middle of the pen. One hand placed on Mist's desk to support her while she complained. "I would have enough saved for a star born and an animus if I had just made promotion last year," Nyuki moaned.

Standing next to her, one hand on hip, Fable joined the rant. "I can't believe Lai's a parens, aeh was the laziest copy magician I've ever worked with — yeah that was a century ago, but do habits change that much? I couldn't believe it when aeh got a job in link engineering. Aeh does not deserve it, and aeh doesn't deserve. . ."

She didn't seem able to finish the sentence, but Nyuki saved her with, "Not more than we do, anyway."

Some airprint papers under Nyuki's hand suddenly became desirable to Mist. "Excuse me, Nyuki? Could you get your hand off my—"

"Oh, sorry Mist!" Nyuki turned, saw, lifted her hand. "We were just being enchanted by the starborn brigade." A mean twinkle flashed in her eyes.

"No worries." Mist picked up her documents and sweetly added, "Look, love, you deserve a little one more than any of us. I'm going to write you a performance review, and I'll make it positively stellar. But look, if you want that promotion, you can't stand here all afternoon looking like you're not working. Get back to it, hun!"

What? It was good advice. Even if the endearing tone was one hundred and ten percent fake, fake, fake.

Nyuki did see through one part of it. "You want the AB test report on the new Lil Lift spell."

"Guilty as charged, lady. Let's have it!"

Inside the group hug Fable and Nyuki piled on Mist, she silently screamed.

"You're the best, Mist. I'll have it to you in a mo'. I just need to wrap up testing on the increased dose anxiety/depression combos."

Mist batted her lashes. "Could you send the AB results first, pretty please?"

"I can't say no to you, Mist." Nyuki tripped off to her desk and the airprint results linked straight to Mist, appearing in the air before her and falling at the speed of gravity into her waiting palms.

Now that Mist had what she wanted, she could torture Nyuki. A quick trip to the magic router in its dark room would go unremarked, since Mist's duties included regular oversight that all magic connections were online. And to cover her malfeasance, she timed her visit to shadow Mvua, so witnesses would be unable to determine who dunit.

The star router needed to be shut out from any and all light. Mvua and Mist stood in the pitch dark making small talk. Like a sun dial, the router was a circle with a large circumference and a gnomon no different from the rod that casts a time-telling shadow — except that this gnomon provides a magic connection to the 2000 employees who work in the Alcyone. The wand that Mist withdrew from a pocket in her suit jacket was the same angular shape, constructed of the same gleaming extraterrestrial substance.

The magic connections for each employee appeared as tiny pinprick stars that filled the globular space coming out from the dial's surface. Thousands of 'em. And with a wave of Mist's gnomon, one star connection winked out — Nyuki's. Now Nyuki wouldn't be able to get any work done. She'd miss her deadline on the increased dose anxiety/depression combo testing.

She would never get that promotion. She would never get her starborn.

Instead of telling Asakaze the whole story, she stopped at the group hug part and lied: "The one thing that made me feel a little better was when my coworkers embraced me in their support."

When really it was making their lives miserable that took the edge of her own misery.

"Let's try a new formulation today," said Doctor Asakaze, leaning over the purple lilywood desk top. "It's not dissimilar from the spell your office developed last week — but it's a more customized formula. It might get your body to better . . . absorb the spell?" The doctor didn't sound all that sure.

Looking at the glass of a passing cafe, the Cloud, Mist leaned away from her. A transparent orb, fog and aerosol cumulonimbus droplets sailed across the sky like a real cloud, but this one with a patio and fine dining. "It won't work," said Mist. "I'm a mood spell engineer, I'm the expert on the workings of mood spells. They don't affect me. If they could be calibrated to affect my moods, I would have cracked it myself by now."

"That may not be so," Asakaze said, neck craning forward to reclaim some of the distance Mist had put between their heads. "You, a mood spell engineer, have come in for a session with a mood spell doctor because our specializations are different. You develop spells that work on mass consumers, and I calibrate them for outliers. It's my job to determine why they aren't working and determine a remedy."

No, she definitely shouldn't tell Asakaze about torturing Nyuki.

"Shall we try the spell?"

Mist couldn't decide whether her imperious optimism was grating or . . . surprisingly fortifying. She sat up, gave her neck a side to side stretch, and grumbled, "All right, let's."

Thank you for reading Part I of Mist's Star. It's a favorite story of mine that has been sitting on the back burner for a while. She's such an awful person, an anti-hero, and what she's about to do next is one of the first ideas I ever had for the Constellations shorts.

So please enjoy part II, out now, and please leave a star as you pass on through!