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[A direct sequel to 'Dress Off: Sasha vs Tara', as we learn more about the new career of Stacey Shackleton. As Agent Shackleton sets out on her first mission, two new characters enlist the charitable support of Decider Enterprises to end their feud, by putting it all on the line...]
The black Volvo had now been parked outside the main administration building of the community college for a solid hour and a half, the steady rain outside seeming to go from vertical to horizontal as the wind worked its way along the spectrum from playful zephyr to pre-cursor for a gale. Inside the waiting car, a man and a woman were also speeding along their own spectrum. They'd briskly departed anticipation station shortly after arriving outside the college, and were now a mere five minutes away from their final destination of complete and total frustration. The woman in the passenger seat - a beautiful brunette whose strikingly blue eyes were hidden behind an entirely unnecessary and wildly optimistic pair of sunglasses - flicked a bit of paper back across to the man in the driver's seat. The man glanced down at it, thought for a moment, spun a pen in his hand, and made a mark before passing it back, returning his gaze back to the entrance to the college for any sign of their unsuspecting target.
For the past twenty minutes, the woman had been trying to convince the man of the folly of hanging around. Several spirited arguments had been made about the merits of returning to base, and the needlessness of loitering around when the afternoon sun had clearly given up doing likewise, and was now hiding behind several layers of black cloud. The man had rebuffed all such arguments with appeals to the importance of the "mission", along with pointed reminders of the responsibility handed to them by their employers. The woman had long since begun to suspect that the man's dedication to the mission was also in no small part down to the fact that he'd be staying in the car when, or indeed even if, their target showed up, while she'd be the one having to get out in the rain.
The woman looked down at the paper handed to her, and realised that the latest in an interminable sequence of noughts-and-crosses games had once again reached a stalemate. As she summoned the last vestiges of her willpower to try and convince her companion of the futility of this exercise, the man nudged her and pointed out the windscreen. The main entrance doors to the college slid open.
From the relative warmth of the administration building, an agitated yet statuesque redheaded woman, around 27 years of age, paused momentarily as she re-arranged the green raincoat that covered but in no way hid the curves of her clearly well-maintained body. There was, the woman in the car mentally noted, an awful lot of gym visits required to allow you to look that good even when the weather was this bad. Either that, or some breathtakingly unfair genetics at play. The redheaded lady pulled the green raincoat hood over her hair now, looked up critically at the black afternoon clouds, and managed to exceed the temperament of the wild weather around her by storming off towards the car park.
The man leaned over, smiled encouragingly at his companion, and theatrically gestured towards her door.
"Perhaps you'd be a gentleman and hop out and open it for me." the female companion suggested, with a slight edge to the request. The man's smile only widened, and in a mock show of regret he declined the kind offer to show off his gentlemanly side. The woman raised an eyebrow in response, but nonetheless removed the superfluous sunglasses and made sure her own coat was zipped up tight as she turned to open the door. The wind and rain suddenly buffeted into the interior of the previously warm car, and the man hurried her out, unceremoniously slamming the door shut as the woman began to hurry across the street to intercept Miss Green-coat, who was already halfway to her own car.
The man reached for his phone, tapped a button the interface and waited for someone at the other end to pick up.
"Agent Mitchelson here" the man said as a voice at the other end acknowledged the call. He saw his companion `accidentally' bump into their target, share a surprised and necessarily brief conversation, and then hurry to shelter with their red-headed quarry under the doorway of a neighbouring building.
"Agent Shackleton has made contact with the target."
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"Stacey, it's just not fair. That stupid bitch gets all the breaks and I'm sick of it."
Stacey took another sip of her coffee as Erica launched into the now familiar rant about her arch-nemesis and sole fountain of all that was wrong with life: one Miss Kimberly Reed. Stacey had known Erica Matthews for almost exactly one month now, having enrolled in the same community college classes as both Erica and Kimberly at the beginning of the term, and in those short four weeks Stacey had heard a dozen takes on the same tale of woe, from both sides.
As Erica settled into the routine for one more encore performance, Stacey tried hard to focus on what she was saying and not on the general awfulness of the college cafe coffee that was currently her single source of warmth. Erica had, as expected, been more than happy to coincidentally run into her new friend outside the administration building, and had been quick to suggest a catch-up and de-brief on the latest atrocity against justice that Erica has just suffered. Stacey already had a fair idea of what had happened, it being the reason she'd been bored out of her mind in a car in the middle of a storm for an hour and a half. Still, it wouldn't pay to let on that she knew, so Stacey put her acting skills to good use, and leant forward in concern.
"Erica, I know things seem a little rough right now, but I'm sure there's someway we can sort this out."
"Oh Stacey, you don't know Kimberly like I do. I mean, she's only got half the qualifications I do for that library job, and yet somehow she's managed to get promoted ahead of me! It's blatantly unfair, and I wouldn't put it past the slut to have slept with the head librarian."
Stacey involuntarily lost her focus on the conversation for a moment, as she tried to suppress a mental image of the 26 year old Kimberly Reed sleeping with the 70+ year old head librarian. She was half-way to suggesting that this seemed unlikely - though not, Stacey corrected herself, entirely implausible - when she realised that overly defending Kimberly's character wouldn't exactly play to the mission objectives.
"Well, you know how it is Erica. Kimberly isn't one to mess around when she wants something, and she's a risk taker. Sometimes when you're a risk taker you win big."
Both Erica and Kimberly had worked in the community college library for over two years now, while also taking their anthropology courses together. Close proximity in both study and work had made their early attempts at friendship fall foul of the old saying that `familiarity breeds contempt'. They'd begun to compete, as so many before them, for grades, for men, and for status in their jobs. Erica and Kimberly were, Stacey noted to herself, extraordinarily beautiful women, gifted with natural sporting prowess and a reasonably sharp intellect. In fact, if they weren't so easily distracted by this and past feuds, then both had glittering and highly successful careers ahead of them.
A senior position in the community college's not-overly-impressive library had opened up only a fortnight ago, and of course Erica and Kimberly had both jumped at the chance. The job came with a pay rise, but that was almost inconsequential compared to the fact that the job meant that the successful applicant would effectively be the boss of the unlucky also-ran. Stacey wondered if it occurred to either woman that they could of course just change jobs, and that both had the qualifications - both mental and undeniably physical - to walk into any decent administration job, especially if men were on the hiring committee. Of course, Stacey thought, to be fair it wouldn't have occurred to her if, no, be honest now, _when_ she'd been in a situation not-dissimilar to Erica's.
The final decision had been made thirty minutes ago, and Erica had been in the same room as a beaming Kimberly when the victor was informed of her promotion. Stacey hadn't known who was going to win the position, although she knew someone would be coming out of those doors upset and in need of a friend with a helpful suggestion. The fact that it was Erica did make Stacey's life slightly easier, Kimberly would be the easier sell on the idea even though she was already winning life's little contest. A victorious Erica would have been harder to convince.
"I take risks too Stacey, it's not like I'm just sitting back and letting Kimberly walk all over me. It's just that the bitch is on a winning streak at the moment."
Stacey looked across at Erica's emerald-green eyes and saw hopelessness begin to well up in them, a hopelessness that seemed completely at odds with everything Erica had in her favour. Stacey reflected on that for a moment, and saw a lot of her old life in Erica. Unbidden, she felt genuine empathy for both Erica and Kimberly at the moment. Still, on to business.
"You know Erica, it's a times like these when the chips are down that sometimes you've just got to roll the die and hope for a hard six."
"Yeah, well, right now I'm open to suggestions because I'm all out of ideas. I'll be damned if I'm going to work under her, and I'll be damned if I give her the satisfaction of quitting."
"Right, right. So, seems like we're at an impasse," Stacey continued, smoothly, "perhaps what you guys need is a little outside help. Some professional assistance that can figure out a way to settle this. It's not healthy for either of you, after all."
"What, you mean counselling? I have to sit down in a room with her, and what, talk about our feelings?" Erica couldn't hide the incredulousness in her voice as she sank back into her chair, her lithe body managing to incidentally turn a defeated slouch into something approximating a sexy pose.