*knock* *knock*
She waited a few seconds without response.
"If the same thing happens again, I swear to God I'll-"
"Who's there?" A voice answered from the other side of the door.
"Who's," Thaught replied.
"Who's who?" the voice said in a puzzled tone.
"Who's a cute little caterpillar?" Thaught eagerly said while entering the room. Inside, she saw Mr. Crowner, a tall, well-built British man in a beige suit with a slight shade of green. He was sitting down, trying really hard to fit into a tiny school chair.
"Wait! You are NOT a caterpillar!" She pointed at Mr. Crowner. Although she only heard about him four minutes ago, she felt like her whole life was a lie.
"How do you know my code name?" He asked and then wondered to himself: "Was it Paul? Must have been Paul. He can't keep a secret."
He then looked back at Thaught, trying to understand why she was there and how he would make this chair actually comfortable. "I suppose you are either the new recruit or the coffee delivery chap and surely hope for the former, because I didn't order any coffee."
"Who is going to eat this vegan donut now?" Thaught said with despair in her voice once she realized there were no herbivores in a five-mile radius. She started panicking as she was holding in her two palms what seemed to be a green donut in the shape of a leaf.
"I can have it, it's okay," Caterpillar said while lifting his index finger. After struggling a bit, he managed to get up from his chair and then proceeded to examine the green donut, looking at it from all angles, in different lightings and under a broken microscope which had no purpose other than looking cool.
"It seems edible," he concluded.
"No! It's disgusting! It doesn't even have butter in it," Thaught continued, not a bit less panicked. She was a firm believer that recipes should not be changed or messed with unless there was a valid reason, like being out of brown sugar and being too lazy to go to the grocery store. Especially when it comes to butter, which she insisted was nature's eighth miracle — it would not have such a perfectly golden color otherwise.
"Just give it to me. It can't be that bad. It's still a donut, isn't it?" Caterpillar said and took the donut back in his hands.
"Is it though? Can you even call an abomination like that a 'donut'?" Thaught was sticking to her dramatic tone, which had improved immensely ever since she took those classes a couple of years ago so she could go to the neighborhood's bakeries minutes before closing and get any leftovers they had.
Caterpillar took a big bite out of that leaf-shaped donut, maybe a bit bigger than he should have, because some of the green glaze ended up on his nose making him look like some kind of evil clown looking to get revenge on all the other, red-nosed clowns and Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer.
"Look, it's not that bad," Caterpillar said. Or at least that is what he wanted to say, but with this much donut in his mouth, it sounded more like "oughiothabaah".
He was chewing slowly, looking at his upper right with his eyes, without moving his head, trying to analyze and judge every ingredient and every taste he could identify. It was going really well, and he was looking extremely cool and sophisticated in front of Thaught, until a sudden, bitter taste hit him like a truck.
An expression of disgust and confusion covered his face. He slowly turned his back to Thaught and spit the donut out. Before it reached the ground, he kicked it and the donut landed right inside the trash bin, leaving a chunky green mark on his well-polished shoes.
"That was not your best idea, was it?" Thaught said while looking at the practically ruined shoes.
Caterpillar took his shoes off and placed them inside the trash bin as well. He then opened a drawer that was next to his desk, took out a brand new but identical pair of shoes and wore them. "Yeah, it was not very well thought out. But who puts chunks of spinach stems inside a donut of all things?"
"If it doesn't have spinach, tofu or humus, can you even call it vegan? There was a decision to be made." Thaught explained.
"True," Caterpillar agreed. "But enough of this, we are here to work, not to eat donuts." At that point, Thaught let out a sad sigh. She was hoping she could do both at the same time. "I'm sure you know why you are here, right?" Caterpillar continued.
"Of course!" Thaught said enthusiastically, "I am Thauticia, a travel agent!" she lifted her hands and one leg in the air. "It is my duty to inform anyone who is and isn't willing to listen about our great prices and plethora of destinations they could visit," she continued as she started spinning around the room. "From the Caribbean, to Hawaii, to Massachusets, it is my divine calling to help people fulfill their dreams and convince them that said dream is to travel to our most expensive and profitable-for-us destination!" she concluded with a spin around herself. She had prepared a few more lines to say, but she ran out of breath and decided to smile and take a bow instead.
"So you don't know why you are here. At all," Caterpillar said. "It's okay, let me explain."
"Long, long ago, a few hundred years after the first human was created from God's human-makin oven called 'evolution', there was a man named Jimothy. Jimothy was not like other humans; he had two names combined into one. Some psychologists claim that the name you are given has an impact on your character, and so Jimothy was a weird fellow. His personality was also different from all his peers."
"I don't know how this has anything to do with our job, but I'm hooked now. How different was Jimothy?" Thaught had sat down, with her legs crossed and a cup of hot cocoa in her hands, like an excited child listening to their grandparents tell a story.
"Different enough to make history," Caterpillar said. "He was the first bad person in the world. No one else before him had harmed another human or committed what we would now consider a 'crime'."
Thaught put her hand in front of her mouth and gasped. "What did he do?" She asked.