He was on his way to Katzestadt Central Train Station, bound for the early morning train between the nation's capital and Inverhaven, a place he had last been to back when he was a doomed staffer at the Katzeburgian Football Federation - although this time it would be unlikely that he would be gracing the field of the Factory Grounds as part of this visit. That previous visit, like many KFF visits outside of Katzestadt, ended in disaster - from memory, Josef thought it was down to the fact that his visit to the city coincided with the day after his disastrous meltdown on air on KBC a few years earlier; something which led to him being mocked and laughed at constantly the second he got off the bus from Katzestadt.
At least this time around, he'd have the anonymity of the Katzeburgian morning to keep him under some level of cover at first, which he had hoped would be just long enough for him to get to where he needed to go in the northern city. Josef stopped for a moment, feeling a light tugging at his right foot. He glanced down - shoelaces untied. With a heavy sigh, he knelt down to tie things back into a functional loop - echoing the familiar rhyme all young Katzeburgians were taught when learning how to tie your shoes.
"Kaiser, Kaiser, sitting high and free,
Criss-crossed through the hall, trying to catch me.
Kaiser, Kaiser, tripped through the hole,
Fell to the ground, his body mangled and cold."
Criss-crossed through the hall, trying to catch me.
Kaiser, Kaiser, tripped through the hole,
Fell to the ground, his body mangled and cold."
In retrospect, it was a rather odd rhyme to use when teaching children such a basic facet of their lives, but what started as a way to mock the numerous amount of Katzeburgian Kaisers who met their ends falling from third story windows became a rhyme of defiance post Revolution - a rhyme to subtly implant the fact that the best Kaiser was a deposed Kaiser. To Josef, it was always something which reminded him of his youth - a time before grand conspiracies and constantly rewritten press releases dominated the majority of his waking life. It was an especially prescient reminder today, and as he got back to his feet he yearned to return to a life where he wasn't balancing his day job with a promise he made to a lady from Ynysgard all those months earlier, sucking him into a web of lies and high stakes which better suited a spy novel than a slightly overweight communications manager.
Regaining the rhythm of his route, Josef continued advancing down the street. It had been a couple of months since this web of conspiracies reached what he felt like was boiling point - being cut off from a call from Rowena Sowards, a lawyer at the firm that Josef works at who agreed to become involved after Josef showcased her former boss (and the firm's general counsel) Lee Reynolds was deeply involved in shady dealings with Jack Eulemann, while an unknown force was knocking down his door in a desperate attempt to get in. The nature of Rowena's call suggested to Josef that she had crossed him and the members of the Ynysgard Chess Club, who were waging their own war against Eulemann, but the whole thing turned out to be a rather flat crescendo - turns out the person at the door banging it down was none other than the ex-boyfriend of a neighbour who lived a couple of doors down, desperate to get a second chance.
But the impact in itself was all the cause for many of the deeply repressed emotions and struggles Josef faced to resurface in a white-hot fit of panic. All those feelings of anxiety and shame which he had to deal with for months after his KBC meltdown returned with unstoppable force all while Josef himself felt like he had put himself in a position where he too was now a target for Eulemann and another name to rub off the list when it came to his vengeance for even daring to challenge his status at the top. Soon enough, Josef would soon find himself being treated for a severe panic attack. He had flown too close to the sun, and the days at Royal Katzestadt Hospital would quickly meld into a week, and then a month - eventually getting to a point where his absence from work was finally being noted after a few fee-earners finally remembered the name of the communications person to ask where they were (if only because they themselves were being raked over the coals for not doing any PR of late).
Josef hit the breaks with everything Eulemann related while recovering, simply choosing to do his best to bat away Emilia Ziegler whenever she reached out to try and move Josef's part of the plan along. By the time he returned to work, he had mostly put the whole thing out of his mind - but the damage to his reputation within Darmstadt Oliver Nicholls & Grant was already done; he couldn't walk the halls without whispers of his breakdown following him, unable to scrub out the narrative that he melted down because it was just in his nature. If he could do it on KBC once, of course he could do it again over some miniscule thing like a late press release.
Not even Rowena - someone who knew the bigger picture and what Josef was doing behind the scenes - refused to engage with him while at work; simply freezing him out and even going as far as to throw him under the bus with ease when it suited her own ambitions. It was only since the Ynysgard Chess Club went over to South Newlandia for their defence of the Elephant Chess Cup that Josef would be pulled back into the plot, but not for lack of trying to separate himself entirely. He would like to think to himself that he put up a tough fight to be pulled back into the mix, but in reality it was a simple short phone call from Emilia which gave him all the reason to involve himself once more.
"I think we can get him and end this."
That's all Josef needed to hear - the change in his stomach almost instantaneous. The shame and anxiety as the outcast vanished, replaced with a new white-hot emotion. Rage. Rage at Jack Eulemann for being able to carry on this for so long with no consequences. Rage at the fact he had allowed himself to become a victim even indirectly of this scheme. Rage at the fact he had lost himself to the deep void which was shame and regret, surrendering so easily and not putting up a fight. Things were going to change. Josef didn't even bother looking to take the day off work as he turned the corner and began climbing the steps into the city's train station - one of the sole benefits of being considered an outcast by basically everyone you work with is that no one really cares what you do and how you spend your time; he could head to Inverhaven and not a single person would think anything of it.
But as footstep followed footstep up the stairs, Josef prepared himself for what would be a huge day to come. For if he could pull his part of the job off correctly, he'll be going home tonight having torn down the conspiracy from the centre. For today was the day that the Ynysgard Chess Club returned home from the Elephant Chess Cup, ready to meet with Jack Eulemann and end things once and for all.
(OOC Note: For clarity, this RP takes place whenever Katzeburg is eliminated from the ECC rather than ahead of the next matchdays - be it at the end of the casaran stage, second group stage, or the final (maybe? haha jk. unless??))
