"Dr. Banner, there's a call for you on line 2."

"Alright, thank you Annie."

Bonnibel Banner, a woman with a scientific fire in her heart, a woman who seeks answers to her never ending questions. A woman who has also spent the last 26 hours in her lab, with exactly 7 bathroom breaks and 32 minutes of sleep. It truly wasn't her fault that the formula wasn't working as it should.

She supposes she could maybe take a call, manners and all.

"Hello? This is Dr. Bonnibel Banner speaking."

"Yes, hello Dr. Banner, this is Jeff Marshalls from Leoni Pharmaceuticals. I was hoping to-"

"I've already told your company no, Mr. Marshalls, I would appreciate it if you would respect my decision."

"Ms. Banner-"

"Dr. Banner."

"Apologies, Dr. Banner. But if you could just take a quick listen to what Leoni can offer you-"

"I said no and that is the end of the discussion, Mr. Marshalls."

She quickly hangs up the phone, seeing that this was going nowhere fast. The nerve they have to call her while she's at work, asking her to join them instead and leave Kingdom Genetics. They don't care even a little bit about the research they do, they only care for the money they make. At least at Kingdom she knows that the work she does has real world consequences and that she's making a difference somewhere.

With that, she sighs, assuming her next plan of action should be to head back to her apartment and catch a shower before she goes to sleep. No use staying here and working when her groove has been all gunked up by those Leoni wads.

She makes her way out of the lab, stopping to tell Annie 'goodbye' and check her schedule for the rest of the week. Nothing pressing until Thursday, though she's sure she will find her way back here far before then. It is only Monday after all, and that formula isn't going to fix itself.

The walk to the parking garage really makes Bonnie realize just how goddamn tired she is. She promised Lady that she wouldn't pull these stunts anymore, but she really can't help it. She's living her dream and it's all just too exciting. Lady just doesn't understand the nuances of chemistry and genetics.

It would be hypocritical of Lady to be mad at her for something like this anyway, with Lady always being so busy touring the US every couple of months. She knows for a fact that Lady gets less sleep than her in a normal working week. Jake agrees with her on that too, so she also knows that she has back-up.

While in this train of thought, she figures that she may as well sketch them into her schedule sometime soon. They haven't been able to really sit around and hang out for awhile, and she knows that Finn has a bit of leave from his job after that nasty shootout that happened a couple weeks ago between the police and a local gang. We always told him that being a cop in New York was going to be dangerous.

That had honestly caused quite a stir in our group when we heard the news that Finn was shot in the line of duty. Jake and Lady took an emergency flight from Boston to come and see him, and Fionna, Phoebe, and Bonnie were already at the hospital among the chaos when they arrived. We had already assured them that Finn was fine, but knowing and seeing are two very different things.

Now that everybody is currently in the city, it shouldn't be hard to get everybody together for one night. She misses them a lot when they're gone, especially Lady and Jake, considering that their music tours last for months on end, though they always end in New York. They're in between tours right now so that means a few months of down-time and some local shows before they're off living their dreams again.

Getting home to her apartment never felt so good (a lie she's completely sure), and she wants nothing more than to climb into bed. Bonnie knows though, that she will regret it if she doesn't shower. She smells like lab and whiteboard markers. She makes quick work of her shower, and as she walks through the hall she can't help but overhear her roommate and her partners playing some video games (probably Mario Kart) loudly from the other room.

Bonnie's happy to have a roommate, it makes coming home much easier knowing she won't be alone. It's extra rad too that Fionna's partners are some of the coolest people to exist in this space as well. They bring so much good energy around here and everyone likes each other, so that helps a lot. Bonnie may not be dating anybody of her own, but she's just as happy living vicariously through the relationships of her friends (read: family).

Her career has always been her top priority, before she even came to terms with herself in late high school. The most confusing years of her life, thus far, had been spent putting all personal things onto a back burner and pushing forward everything she needed for professional development. Her and her friends blame that exact thing for her lack of any intimate relationships, not that Bonnie thinks she needs any right now anyway.

When those personal issues finally became too much to handle, of course her friends were there to help her, without asking and without judgement of any kind. This is referred to as the Meltdown of University (2nd Year), and without her friends, she knows that she wouldn't have been able to handle it. Friends doesn't really sum it up though, because they are her family, they are the people who support her and who she supports. As it was, she couldn't speak to her real family about any of those issues she knew, and when she finally plucked up the courage to tell her parents that she was gay, her friends stood by her. They stood by her too, when her parents decided that maybe they could scream and yell and maybe the gay would go away that way.

Her friends stood by her the whole time, and they held her up when she felt that her legs would give out. That very same day, they also helped her gather all of her belongings from her childhood home and packed the boxes away in their separate cars before all of them drove to Lady's house. Lady's mom knew of course, that this might happen. She knew that Bonnie had been struggling with herself for a long time, and she knew that after the conversation with her parents, Bonnie might not have anywhere else to go.

Keeping with trend of course, Lady welcomed Bonnie into that house as she had for years and years before, but this time knowing that she would become a much more permanent fixture within its walls. That same day also, once Bonnie had dropped off all of her things and returned with her friends to campus (to return with Lady in 3 months at that point for the summer), Lady's mom wrote to Bonnie's parents. She told them how disgusted she was with them, how vile it was that they reacted how they did, and that they were no longer welcome at her house or at any of her functions.

Bonnie hadn't known any of that until years later of course, but she's very glad for Lady's mother. If not for her, Bonnie is sure that she would have had to go back to that house with her weak-minded parents for summers to come. As it is, Bonnie hasn't had contact with her parents since that day in February of sophomore year of university. She can honestly say that it no longer stings, and she no longer feels any negative emotions from it. She knows that she's better off with her wonderful friends and the people that she now surrounds herself with. With these people, she knows that she has developed greater as a person than she could ever have with her parents around.

So Bonnie feels happy when she thinks of her friends and the wonderful people that she is around all the time. They fill her with love and joy, and she knows that she doesn't have to seek out an intimate relationship to be happy, even though it may be nice to let off some of her more… complicated frustrations.

She shoots off a couple of quick texts to her group of friends about meeting up soon (Fionna calling from down the hall that that is a "fucking great idea, Bon"), and checks her emails before going to bed. As with the previous week, there are multiple emails from Leoni Pharmaceuticals asking her to fill in a position that they "opened just for her" in their genetics department. Money means nothing to Bonnibel, so of course she's not going to go because they think they're paying her more (they wouldn't be), and she sure as hell isn't going to go there because they have "great ideas about what we could do with your skills". She doesn't want people using her skills for their own gain. She wants to use her own skills to help people around her in the real world, not the world that the corporate pigs at Leoni live in.

With those being promptly ignored, Bonnie closes her eyes and hopes (in vain) that maybe Leoni will take the hint and stop pestering her. Maybe Thursday isn't as far away as she thought.