“This is Bunny,” I said. “She’s my administrative assistant.”
“Of course,” Grimble shot me a sidelong, reptilian glance, then went back to leering at Bunny. “You always did have exquisite taste in ladies, Skeeve.”
Still annoyed at Bunny’s treatment by Queen Hemlock, I wasn’t about to let the Chancellor get away with this.
“Grimble,” I said, letting my voice take on a bit of an edge. “Watch my lips. I said she’s my administrative assistant. Got it?”
“Yes. I … Quite.”
The Chancellor seemed to pull in on himself a bit as he licked his lips nervously, but he rallied back gamely.
“Very well. Let me show you our expanded operation.”
While Grimble might have been essentially unchanged, physically or morally, his facilities were another matter entirely. He had formerly worked alone in a tiny, cramped cubicle filled past capacity with stacks and piles of paper. The paper was still there, but that’s about all that remained the same. Instead of the cubicle, it seemed he was now working out of a spacious, though still windowless, room … or, at least, a room that would have been spacious if he had it to himself.
Instead, however, there were over a dozen individuals crammed into the space, apparently preoccupied with their work, which seemed to entail nothing more than generating additional stacks of paper, all covered by columns and rows of numbers. They didn’t look up as we came in, and Grimble made no effort to halt their work or make introductions, but I noticed that they all had the same fevered glint to their eyes that I had originally assumed to be unique to Grimble.