Ald Firt (pronounced /ɔːld fɑːɹt/), once an idealistic engineer, is now a relic under the staircase. Ald’s pleasant weariness hides the sharp wit of a man who has watched every “bold initiative” collapse under its own weight. He occupies a forgotten office he calls Harry Potter’s Room, decorated with ironic plaques and reptile photographs. Ald is not bitter — only bemused. His humour is dry, his mutterings legendary (“Another glorious step sideways!”). He keeps peppermint schnapps in his drawer “for emergencies — which is every day.” Field staff and “citizens” trust him; leadership ignores him.

Ald is the ghost in the system: neither reformer nor rebel, but the witness who survives.

is Ald’s inseparable companion, usually found nested in the oversized pockets of his oversized coat. Balthazar twitches, wriggles, and occasionally surfaces at awkward moments during meetings, causing rumours of Ald’s eccentricity to flourish. Officially, Balthazar is “not present.” Unofficially, he knows more about the system than most managers.

The charming accident of leadership, imported fresh into the system. Johnny arrived in SHOTE as a promising young professional — loud, eager, and endlessly self-assured. He had no real accomplishments to his name, only a CV padded with vague but important-sounding titles and a mouth that never stopped moving.

It didn’t take long for him to seduce Manager the 4th, the Lionbum, with his smile, his slogans, and his ability to say everything without meaning anything. Lionbum, always hungry for someone harmless yet charismatic, took Johnny under his wing and soon pushed him into the spotlight.

Johnny thrived there. He spoke in slogans that sounded visionary while promising nothing concrete: “Building Tomorrow Together Today™” became his creed. To staff, he was a mouthpiece; to his superiors, a useful shield. To Ald Firt, he was proof that charisma beats competence every time.

Johnny’s future seems bright — though only because it burns with borrowed light.

Lucius ap A. Ratchik carried the air of someone permanently on the verge of frailty. His face was pleasant, almost youthful, but sat uneasily on a pale, narrow body that seemed one draft away from collapse. He often appeared sickly, though this impression was usually false — a useful illusion he never corrected.

What defined him was not volume but restraint. Lucius never spoke too much; he spoke just enough. His sentences drifted at the upper edge of hearing, soft and careful, so that listeners had to lean forward to catch them. This allowed him the necessary room to shift his message later, to recalibrate his meaning depending on the audience. His words were like reeds in shallow water — always upright, but always bending with the current.

His opinions were rarely his own. More often they mirrored those of his immediate superior, or the last person who had spoken persuasively in his presence. Independence was projected, not lived. He cultivated the appearance of reflection, sometimes by stretching silences just long enough to seem deliberate.

Among staff, his favour was unevenly distributed. Lower-rank managers who reported directly to him were granted a polite warmth, occasionally even encouragement. The rest — field technicians, small people at the far end of the reporting chain — barely registered in his gaze. He was not cruel; he was simply not interested.

In the hierarchy of SHOTE, Lucius stood as Ald Firt’s N+3: close enough to shape the horizon of Ald’s working life, distant enough to remain untouchable. His role was never to illuminate but to obscure, to filter the directives from above into fragments, spoken softly enough to be misunderstood — or remembered in whichever form proved most convenient.

A quiet anomaly in SHOTE, the Rebel was never loud, reckless, or openly defiant. He was, like Ald, a real field worker at heart — a man of practice, with a scientific mind and a no-nonsense approach to life and office strategies. He preferred evidence to slogans, and precision to metaphors.

His defining moment came during the reign of Manager the 3rd, the Philosopher. In a meeting drowning in circular eloquence, the Rebel delivered the “Organigramme Presentation”: a calmly assembled slideshow of decades of restructurings, looping endlessly, morphing into each other like a bureaucratic Möbius strip. The room fell silent. And then, as expected, moved on.

Not long after, he disappeared. Officially “promoted” to a special project, in reality he was quietly exiled. The role was harmless, half-time, obscure — designed to keep him invisible without letting him go.

The Rebel was not fearless. He was not a revolutionary. He knew better than to overexpose himself. And yet his absence lingers. Citizens whisper his name; colleagues recall his slides. Seeds of doubt remain, sprouting slowly in the cracks of SHOTE’s polished nonsense.