The Daily Grind

Working as overnight tech support, James Lyle has long said he’d do anything to escape the boredom. But his commitment to excitement is tested when a slight coincidence one shift sends him to a different part of his office building . . . and he discovers a stairwell that contains not stairs but rather a landscape of seemingly infinite cubicles against a distant horizon. Unwilling (and unable) to stay away, James and a few of his trusted friends begin to explore this endless maze of supernatural business ennui.

Ever since James Lyle found an alternate dimension hidden in the stairwell of his workplace, things have been, well, weird. For one thing, when he’s not working the night shift, he’s battling killer mail carts and ravenous swarms of sticky notes. For another, he’s dealing with some very complex and intense emotions for several of his friends. Meanwhile, his parents have offloaded his younger sister on him. As if all this weren’t enough, James’s voyages into the dungeon world seem to be having a strange effect on the world in which he actually lives.

You might think a month away from fighting sentient cubical supplies in a threatening alt-reality office would mean a break for James Lyle. But . . . you'd be wrong. Even though James has taken a beat from adventuring into the dungeon hidden within the stairwell of his workplace, he's been dealing with plenty of stress-inducing issues, from raising a recently corporeal infomorph to navigating his newly minted relationship with his best friends, fighting his own depression, and wrestling with the moral implications of his burgeoning powers.

James Lyle, Anesh Patel, and Alanna Byrne have spent much of the past year exploring a secret realm in which the phrase "cubicle hell" isn't just a metaphor. Stalked like prey by sentient staplers and hostile computer hardware, the trio has managed to amass a collection of magical abilities that are rapidly adding up to something more significant. But they aren't content to just sit back and take it easy; rather, they hope to harness their newfound power to benefit humanity.