"This is ridiculous! Outrageous!"
"Something the matter, Mr. Brennt?"
"This is the second refinery you've bombed in the last five months, that's what's the matter!"
The wheelchair-bound man casually riffled through some documents on his desk, neglecting to look at the shouting face onscreen. "Mm, yes… must've been those terrorists from Bone Village. You know, the ones whose homeland your company invaded for those precious fossil fuels you love so much?"
"Don't play games with me!"
"Fine then, you want the truth? Not much you can do with that. Can't fix a leak with the truth, can't cure pinkeye with it… and I certainly wouldn't recommend using it to justify occupying neutral territory, heavens no! You want my advice? Stick with the Bone Village thing. Foreigners blowing stuff up? The public gulps it down and asks for seconds."
By now the reader should recognize our friend the man in white. The short-tempered character speaking with him via teleconference is none other than Karl Brennt, CSO of the Ibsen Oil Company.
A man of humble beginnings, Karl William Brennt III likes to think of his currently lucrative position as the apex of a long and fruitful career. Excelsior has been his lifelong motto and he's followed it without compromise, allowing no distinction between acquiring the last desire and desiring the next acquisition. It was this dual engine of avarice that ultimately propelled him to executive power, the insatiable hunger that saw him never content with his spoils but always wagering them on greater prospects. He experienced everything in anticipation and never in passing, as one reads a sign while speeding down the highway. Where some might have seen life as a stroll through the park, Brennt saw an eight-lane commute.
But before he could embark on his first commercial speculations, good old Karl had to start by paying dues, just like the rest of us. In his case it was a pedagogical gig: after his family's business when up in flames with Corel, he traveled to Gongaga and became headmaster of the village's newly established school for boys. He didn't have a doctorate in education as he had claimed, but he owned a tweed jacket and calabash pipe to make up for it, and by God, he was going to box those little roughneck bastards on the ears until they went deaf if that's what it took to get them saying "is not" instead of "ain't." Especially that one little punk, the one with the cocky grin...
It was around this time that Mr. Brennt came to the realizing that he hated children and gave up teaching to become a billionaire.
By shares of coincidence and causation, much of Mr. Brennt's inner-character and history extends to the features of his outward appearance. His hot temper, for instance, issues from a head bristling with flaming red hair. Feathered muttonchops spread like fire down his cheeks and converge in a handlebar mustache (Brennt has always prided his whiskers as a badge of manhood, counting among his most prized possessions a razor and strop inherited from his late uncle Chester).
Beneath the flaunted wealth of whiskers, however, the flesh and bone of this man are corrupt and infirm: childhood rickets has left him hobbling on a bamboo cane; he has liver spots on his arms and legs; and his blood pressure couldn't be any higher if his heart were a vacuum pump. His bulbous nose is lumpy and ruddy as a strawberry, and dotted likewise with seedy little blackheads.
For the bulk of his ailments and afflictions, Brennt has no one to blame but himself. He's made a routine of drinking two mint juleps a day and smoking from his pipe just as often, once at noon and once at midnight. By some bizarre compulsion, he has always lit his tobacco by striking a match across his dentures – a habit that has left his crooked smile skid-marked and his mouth reeking of sulfur. He eats butter and brie sandwiches between meals, takes his toast with foie gras and his coffee with more than a little brandy. Indeed, he is in every way the self-made man he boasts to be. And though he has since resigned to the inevitable day when his vice-riddled body will be his undoing, until then Karl Brennt accepts no defeat. He is pathologically determined to be the author of his own demise, the master of his own destiny – And if some blanket-faced cripple or anyone else ever thought they could deal behind his back… well, they were about to find out otherwise!
"Listen to me!" he barked. "People are going to get suspicious if we don't slow down!"
"Right…" The man in white made wagged his finger into the camera. "Here's a tip for you beginners in politics: people don't get suspicious, they're too busy thinking about themselves."
"But, but…" Brennt sputtered for a retort. "But these weren't the terms we agreed on!"
"What difference does it make to you? You'll still get to be my next CEO when all is said and done, I promise you that."
"But how the hell am I supposed to coordinate all of this when we aren't even on the same goddamned timetable? I don't even know what's going on anymore!"
Yellow teeth gnashed between black lips. "Frankly, Mr. Brennt, I could have just as easily bombed those refineries without your 'coordination'. Let's not forget who the mastermind is here."
"Don't get cheeky with me, you cotton-swaddled prick! We gotta stick by the plan!"
"Come now, surely I get to have a little wiggle room?"
"You take out nearly half of Ibsen's refineries in a few months when we agreed to do it over three years, and you call that 'wiggle room?'"
"You still don't get it, do you?" The man in white pulled back his sleeve and gestured potently with the decaying arm underneath. "I don't have years!"
And then, on the other side of the world, Karl Brennt doubled over in agony and clutched his chest as if he were having a heart attack.
"Honestly, I don't know why I bother. It's so much easier doing it this way."
Brennt reached for the panic button on his desk, but his limbs were quickly paralyzed. He opened his mouth to cry for help, but only strangled croaks came out.
"What… the… "
"The cells of Jenova: odorless, tasteless – completely undetectable to the senses when applied in trace amounts. They're also quite resilient – more than capable of surviving in a decanter of brandy for a few days."
Brennt gazed in horror at the empty glass on his desk.
"These happen to be a very rare and unique breed. You should consider it an honor."
"Son of a–"
"Language!" The man in white raised his arm and gestured a second time, silencing Brennt with further pain.
"Hurts, doesn't it? Although it goes against the cells' interests to attack their own host, just like the rest of you lower life forms I can easily manipulate them toward my own ends."
He shifted in his wheelchair and coughed.
"Ahem. Let's get to the point shall we? For the next forty-eight hours, I will be able to direct your thoughts, actions, speech, and bodily functions toward whatever ends I see fit. Make any effort to resist and you will die – do I make myself clear?"
Brennt managed a nod.
"Good. Tomorrow I want you to run a little errand for me downtown. Think you can handle that?"
