Second installment of the no longer a oneshot.

This chapter's a little more boring than the previous, it has a lot to do with Techna and Timmy's work. Mostly, it's showing how though she tries, Techna can't really keep her emotions reined in even in a professional environment.

Hope it's not dissapointing.


Each and every body, android, parasite, and humanoid alike, who sat in the room instantly felt a chill the second Techna's teal eyes narrowed on the bespectacled man who ran the company so gleefully with her, side by side. It wasn't that the air had actually declined in temperature, but with the bite of fury her eyes were showing, the many personnel attending the meeting certainly would have preferred that, which was saying quite a bit for their secretly-parasitic psychic mind residing in the warm depths of her host's body. Androids, who usually were impartial to any form of intimidation beyond that which could severely damage them, even found her anger frightening.

Techna was level headed. Everyone knew that. Timmy knew that it took quite a lot for her to actually show ire at any situation, no matter how grave. She was admired for it, loved for it, and above all her reasonability was why she was so greatly respected among all the workers. Timmy was surprised most out of all.

He opened his mouth just a single fraction, sending Techna off. "You authorized these plans"—her hand shook, no, jerked, scrambling the hologram that the metal tube in her hand sent out—"and you didn't even mention it to me?"

It seemed Timmy was the only one who couldn't tell that her voice was lethally calm and that she was holding back more than just the bitterness she felt at being omitted from his decision committee.

Timmy adjusted his dark-framed glasses on the bridge of his nose and blinked stupidly at Techna, driving her wits even further away from grasp. "You were gone. I assumed you would agree with the plans, Techna; you always do. The logistics team has assured me that the plans are foolproof."

Her face was nearing beet red. "I was gone for less than a day, Timothy! How could you possibly think—the plans aren't foolproof!"

"The Logistics team went over it inch by inch, along with Construction and Wiring. The base will hold down perfectly."

"Sekkumine is crumbling apart. It is literally a barren, hollow shell that happens to have drifted into Zenith's orbit and at any moment could collide and cause mass destruction. The moon is completely volatile and has an irregular pattern and you think that you can stick a whole operations base on it?"

The parasite loved watching the two go neck to neck, even if the gangly boy didn't know it was happening. The android elders, however, were quite appalled by the squabbling. The thought that the future of the company and that the sway of fifty-nine and three quarters percent of the Binary galaxy's people was solely in the hands of the before so straightforward intellectual couple with only progress on their mind who now couldn't agree on a single thing shook them to the core with disdain.

If the pair couldn't come to a common consensus soon, then the public's views would wither and the company's profits would drop, dragging all the status built up down with it and there would be widespread discontentment and upheaval. It had happened once before, during a time only one of the remaining elders could still recall, and it had almost cost all of Zenith to surrender to attacking forces.

Timmy straightened a stack of mundane papers on the chrome table before him—he still received cross-eyed glances for the fact that he had the audacity to carry around such primeval tools. He smoothed a corner of once sheet and then looked up to his business partner (he couldn't call her his girlfriend, not at work. It was just too unprofessional).

"Everything has been thought out. There is plenty of solid matter for the construction site. There are no natural resources, so we'd have to send enough for the building and then restock after all of our people are settled in. But think about it—if we did this, it wouldn't be too much longer before our expansion could reach new heights. We'd have buildings from here to TarineT Ti and satellites beyond there. We'd be able to have someone in to fix a problem within a moment's notice without any trouble at all."

"There is no physical possibility of Sekkumine ground supporting anything," Techna rebuted. "And to add to that, it's impossible to transmit any signals from anywhere in the realms beyond the atmosphere. If we sent someone—anyone—up there, they could die and it would take years for anyone to even have the slightest idea. Technology fails within ninety-thousand feet of the surface and the only way in is with natural magic. Currently, there are four on staff who possess such skills, myself included. Then of course there's the fact that our services wouldn't even pass through the atmosphere to our outreach database. Did you even think about how your plan would fall through before you drew it up?"

Calculating brown eyes suddenly filled with insecurity as Timmy flipped his stack of papers over. "We'd be able to send magically-wired transmitters and we could have our magic-based monitor chips implanted into the worker's bodies. Also, there would be a hired mage specializing in natural magic remedies with the crew at all times. And there are ways around the interference." Truth be told, he hadn't taken into consideration the fact that the technology, once planted there, would be virtually inaccessible.

Eyes of the council members trained on him, Timmy felt his heart drop when Techna still seemed unimpressed by all his careful, meticulous planning. She still stood at the end of the table, arms crossed and eyes sharp as throwing stars with all her out of character anger pointing directly at him. Timmy cleared his throat, clearing his head. "Why are you so opposed to this? The expansion would be good for the company."

She shook her head, pink tendrils of hair falling out of her carefully secured bun. "Expansion is one thing, this is something entirely different. We're not talking about a simple trial-and-error relocation project; this is the destruction of an environmentally unsound body that happens to be within our view seventeen out of thirty hours of the day. There would be so many different factors that would need to be considered. We would need consent from all of Zenith consecutively, including the First, Second, Fifth, and Ninth Vectors to even consider taking it to the other moon's officials.

"And then, of course, there is the matter of the immigrated locals who our company ordered evacuation out of their homes. To them, it would not be a simple convenient expansion of usable galaxy-wide services; to them, it would be as if we forced them from their homes not for their safety, but rather for our own devices. The small colony has been here for nine years, sending more and more petitions to the First Vector to legally have them return home. To them, their home isn't just a barren piece of space, it is the home where their deities once roamed and taught their ways to the people. If we were to introduce technology to their home, it would be an outright challenge that the Third Vector has no business in. Are you so ready to expand to an unreachable moon that you would be willing to start a civil war?"

After the words were said, silence stretched through the large room for the longest time in company history. The elders were bought to Techna's side of the argument, not willing to risk estrangement by the higher vectors nor willing to take part in the collapse of the strict order between the Zenians and the Sekkumi people. The VPs of the company, though desperately wanting to expand, for the most part agreed as well and felt there to be no reason to expand on a planet that would be useless to the cause. The parasitic psychic posing as one of the highest respected in the whole company, however, craved the chaos and bloodshed that was sure to come were the Sekkumi to challenge the Zenians for their home. However, when a cause was lost, it was best to be on the winning side.

Timmy's face fell when he realized that all the hype he'd built up over his idea had been squashed within five minutes by the very woman who he'd first stuttered the words 'I love you' to. If she'd been on his side, even if all the VPs were to oppose, then the elders would have been bought and he wouldn't feel like such an idiot. Timmy looked through his thick glasses at Techna, standing erect and still angry, and she refused to meet his eye for what felt like the thousandth time in just that day.

Techna drew in a breath and let her balled fists fall flat against her practical pencil skirt. She brushed away the pink hair which had fallen in her face and met the eyes of each and every person in the room save for the ex-specialist. Though quiet, her voice rung with the authority that, as the first fairy born to an android, had always been hers but she had never exercised.

"Now," Techna said briskly, "The Sekkumine Branch project is terminated. If anyone has any objection, please formally submit it to my secretary. Any future plans regarding such matters must be approved by both Mr. Gale and myself before any movement is put into creating a model, understood?" Techna didn't wait for an answer, not even a nod of agreement from Timmy or a respectful one from the eldest of the council. She picked up her hologram projector and stood sharply, storming out the door while throwing a, "Meeting dismissed" over her shoulder in a growl.

The room cleared out right behind her. Timmy, wide eyed and feeling like he'd gotten the wind knocked out of him, fell into one of the metal chairs liquidly while managing to jam his elbow into the armrest. He winced. He'd thought that his plan was genius; he'd even thought it might have been good enough for Techna to start speaking to him again outside of these horrible meetings.

At just about the same time, Techna's office door whirred open and the moment she was inside she wished that it was a normal door with hinges just so she could slam it shut in frustration. Her piercing glare followed the metal wall that seemed to be creeping at a speed that would make an iceberg reassess its life. It was so slow that she almost didn't keep her head together until it closed. The door closed. Techna screamed out her frustration to the open window.


Poor Timmy, so clueless...

There should be more, don't know when, but there will be. And they won't all be like this.

Any feedback is appreciated.

xxEcho