Mariella Medina, Ph.D., was enraged. The cute-at-first-sight Mexican businesswoman furrowed her rather too broad brow as she shivered in her severely undersewn frilly strapless, backless tube top. Her figure was decent, with a pert pair of sandy-brown breasts over a flattish tummy and slender legs crammed into ludicrous seven-inch heels, probably to mask her five feet of height. However, one ought not be fooled, as her diminutive stature was compensated for by a bellowing voice and tremendous ego. In her two-and-a-half weeks since joining the company, she'd already been promoted thrice, climbing rapidly over the quickly fallen bodies of her slow and ponderous rivals. In an organisation seemingly more devoted to atrophy and self-destruction than profitability or good corporate governance, Mariella was a fast-rising star. Already, the lust-maddened and foolhardy Andrew John "AJ" Simpson, President of the Firm, was tightly wound round her little finger.
Her portfolio instantly and incomprehensibly expanded from her original mandate of Scientific Inspection to include such variegated and diverse offices as Corporate Finance, Business Strategy, Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Shipping and the newly-instituted post of Slurping On AJ's De-strung Ballsack (he'd had a nasty skiing accident in Colorado). You see, Mariella had a dangerous, overriding compulsion to climb the corporate ladder, and she did it both rather well and with absolute relish. Barely past half a month in and she was already running half the place while being next in line to succeed AJ's current main squeeze, the somewhat overused blowsy blonde Leslie Jameson, Head of Human Resources.
With all this success, why the rage? Well, it was all the fault of her original stupid Scientific Inspection department. Those cocky little assholes were always trying to make her look bad! Mariella remembered her first hour at the firm. AJ had asked her to help him forge lightsaber crystals in the microwave. Mariella had leapt at the chance to touch up the color on her poorly-mixed mocha nose, visions of company cars and bloated expense accounts pleasantly intruding within her mind, but then Cyrille had nearly ruined it!
Mariella's constantly exasperating Lead Inspector Cyrille le Corbusier was always nearly ruining it for her, mainly because of his maddening habit of injecting nasty, hideous, repugnant, awful, putrid, wretched and slimy facts into any discussion of AJ's latest syphillis-inspired proposals.
That time, Cyrille had mouthed off with, "Um...that was just a movie Andrew."
Andrew had frowned severely and stormed off with a "...no team spirit in these lab people," and Mariella was left nearly in tears at the situation.
The disrespect and impudence astounded Mariella. She'd never have gotten through for-profit, on-line, unaccredited postgrad without some astounding ability to give people exactly what they wanted. Certainly, the graders for her Molecular Biology class were impressed by her warm and pliant oral skills. Her department's insistence on the use of facts and scientific principles gave her no end of trouble, and every time she confronted them with it they defended themselves with some bullcrap about "scientific integrity", "the truth" and some other nonsense she'd certainly never heard of at UOP! It drove Mariella crazy.
Well, she'd show the little twerps! Mariella stormed out of her newly-gained corner office, causing the timid mouse-like girls of the Accounting department to shrink fearfully into their insipid grey cubicles. Within twenty strides of her awkward tottering high-heeled gait, she reached the doors to the main plant. Viciously snatching a hairnet out of a box by the big doors, she crammed her overstyled coiffure into it as she barged her way into the manufacturing facility.
The line workers knew to avoid her gaze now, as they dived out of her path. When she had first arrived, they thought they had been given an ally in the upper echelons of the borderline racist company and had sought to befriend her as she walked by, but she had soon put paid to those notions. Verbally blasting "La Migra" in a shrill Midwestern accent, she told them in no uncertain terms that they were "damn lucky" she didn't call the sheriff on them right that instant and that if they ever "fucking spewed that bullshit about La Raza" to her again, she'd deport them all herself. Being normal (if not entirely legally entitled to presence in the country) people, they soon spread the word to leave "la Perrita" alone. Just a few moments later, and Mariella was bursting in on Scientific Inspection's woefully-underequipped laboratory.
For a company which had experienced tremendous growth in recent years, the firm was oddly hesitant to make standard industry purchases in laboratory equipment. By way of example, most Scientific Inspection teams weighed out reagents and samples with digital scales. The company's SI lab had antique Phoenicean balances. Most industry SI teams used advanced Polymerase Chain Reaction technology in their microbiological test suite. The company's team had 2 slices of mouldy bread in Tupperware. Most industry SI teams had special laboratory dishwashers to handle the delicate glassware needed for scientific tests. The company's team had a wooden washtub filled with rainwater. Despite all of the foregoing, the company's team was possibly the greatest in the industry.
Cyrille was a master scientist, having completed a not-online, not-for-profit, not-unaccredited B.Sc. in Nuclear Chemistry after he realised that his dashing good looks weren't going to be quite enough to get by in the world. Known for whipping off perfect periodic tables of the elements on blank sheets of paper from memory, he was the preeminent young up-and-comer in his field. His intriguing Norman features were the herald of a formidable intellect and wry sense of humour.
