There was a commotion happening somewhere in the KaibaCorps building. She looked up just in time to see several employees rush past her open door. Generally, there was a lot of rushing about in the KC building, but this time the employees looked excited. Giddy even.

Blood in the water. That was the go-to phrase anytime something of interest was happening in the building. Somebody was probably getting fired.

She closed her laptop and sprung up from her chair. She had spent the better part of the day trying to find her Entertainment Emporium post. It looked like somebody had deleted it. Only a few other people had access to her credentials and they wouldn't have gone reorganizing the account without at least consulting her first.

At least she hoped.

She rushed down the hall after the employees. They were chattering quietly amongst themselves, and Marie could only catch a few words here and there. Others began to peek out of their doors and open windows as they passed, and soon a pretty large group was gathering in the hall for no particular reason. To Marie, they all looked like a group of well-suited tumbleweeds rolling down a dusty hill.

Finally, they reached the glass hallway looking into the Cyber Security department. The group of employees stopped and pretended to busy themselves with random whatnots as they cast surreptitious glances at the window. Marie elbowed her way through them - hitting quite a few ribs and tits in the process - until she reached the closest window. She put her hands up and peered past her nose through the fogged-up glass into the large room. Everything seemed normal. It was the beginning of the workday so the many rows of desks were occupied by the straight-backed staff of the Security department. Everyone had their eyes forward, engrossed in their work except for one person. Sara.

"Shit," Marie whispered. She tried to open the door but it was locked, and her credentials didn't grant her access. "Anyone got a keycard," she called over her shoulder to the milling crowd. They ignored her. "Okay," she said. "Good talk."

She turned back to the door and tried to wiggle the handle again. "Sara," she mouthed at the woman bent over her desk. Sara looked back over her shoulder and gave Marie a dirty look. Marie pointed at the doorknob and gave it a jiggle for emphasis but Sara didn't seem too keen on letting her in anytime soon. Her's was the only computer that had been turned off. A large box surrounded by random office supplies stood open on the keyboard.

"Sa-ra," Marie called again and then tapped on the glass. Several Cyber Security personnel looked back at her in annoyance. The large screens above them flashed rotating rows of numbers and symbols, thoroughly coded for privacy purposes. Not even high-clearance employees could crack the code. This was done on purpose as it afforded their boss the ability to scan their progress in passing. Kaiba had never been one to linger around for chit-chat.

Finally, after a few moments, Sara picked up the box and began to climb the stairs towards them. Her wig had been tossed haphazardly on top of the pile within the box and her hair streamed around her like a crackling yellow thunderstorm.

She threw open the door with a scowl, almost taking off the heads of several employees as she did so.

"What are y'all staring at?!" She barked. "Go back to shoving pencils up your ass before I make a scene!"

The employees startled and scampered away in a cloud of smoke. This left Marie and Sara standing alone in the hall. Sara took a quivering breath in and let it out in a huff. Tears gathered along her eyelashes and then slid along her face, smearing forbidden blue mascara across her pasty cheek.

"Fuuuuuck," she whispered, her voice laced with hopelessness and anger.

"Tell me about it," Marie said. "Those Cyber-punks get into your secret stash of Gaston tentacle porn?"

"If I were in the mood for humor, I'd throw Kaiba to the dogs and watch him get torn to pieces. That dickweed."

"I understand the sentiment." She didn't, not yet anyway. "What did he do now?"

Sara bit her lip and shook her head. Marie noticed that she was purposefully avoiding eye contact. "Don't worry about it. I'm leaving, that's all that matters."

"Rome's gonna fall without its lead sentry. Sara, what happened?!"

Sara sniffed. "'Member that video you took of me spinning around? The one that you posted? Upper management didn't like it. Said it was 'unprofessional' and 'not a good look on the company.'"

Marie's eyebrows jumped and she took a disbelieving step backward. "How's that the case?" She demanded. "The background was nondescript enough to not be an issue. I made sure of that before I posted. Your ID tag was blurred out and everything."

Sara shook her head again, this time smiling like Marie was an insolent child insisting that Batman was real. "You don't get it. It's not about the video itself. It's about breaking tradition. The woman who worked the accounts before you would have never posted a video of a KC employee smiling and having a good time. Actually, she'd never post a picture of us at all. They like things black and white here. Mechanical. Cut, dried, and pasted. But you wouldn't know that, would you? You've only been with us for three years." The whiplash of accusation in Sara's voice cut right through Marie's heart. KaibaCorps hadn't pushed Sara away. It had been Marie's naivete and over-eagerness to shatter the proverbial glass ceiling. That's what Sara had really said, in so many words.

Sara lifted her leg and bumped the box higher in her arms with her knee. Pencils and post-it books went clattering to the ground. Marie reached down to pick them up but Sara was quick to kick them out of her reach.

"But you go on doing you, sweetie," she added. Marie looked up and caught Sara's bright green eyes staring back down at her with dislike. "You break those barriers. You make that impression. But maybe don't do it at the expense of those who've been here for ten fucking years." Sara growled and threw her box on the ground. Marie stepped back as the contents went flying everywhere and Sara stormed away

"How was I supposed to know that the people in upper management were a bunch of freaks who don't like fun," she called after her through the flurry of papers raining down on her. Sara stopped and held her hands out in disgust.

"Christ, Marie, take a look at where you work! How's that for an answer?"

With that, Sara jogged down the hall and disappeared into the waiting elevator. Marie stood there panting until she noticed the faces of the employees peering around the doors at her.

"Enjoy the show, you pencil-pushing rascals!?" She yelled, waving her fists. "Don't make me get on Santa's naughty list today."

Silent as ghosts and smirking like children, they disappeared from view.

X

Marie's appeals to the HR department and upper management fell on deaf ears. The former was sympathetic but ultimately unable to do anything and she hadn't even been able to make it past the robotic assistant guarding the mysterious lair of the UM (or, as she called them Ultimate Meatbags.) As a sign of extreme desperation, she had sought out her boss, Mr. K. But the man was missing in action as had been the case for the past three years. As per usual, his voicemail message stated that he was working from home that day but Marie assumed that he had Gone Fishing, as his doorway tile proclaimed, with no intention of ever coming back.

"Hey, yeah, Mr. K, sir. It's me, Marie," she walked back and forth across the rim of the courtyard fountain as she spoke into the phone. Water gushed from the mouth of the lanky dragon and sprayed across her face. She plugged one ear with her finger and lifted one leg above the water. "Listen, I don't know if you get service up there in the Big Blue, but I need you to call me back ASAP. There's been a bit of a situation and I need some help."

She tapped the red End button and shoved her phone deep in her pocket. Trying to involve Mr. K in the present matter was useless. Sara wasn't under his chain of command and even if she was, he'd probably roll over on his belly and play dead before ever even thinking of going against Upper Management's decision. But she had to do something. Sara's termination didn't sit right with her at all, partly because she felt that she was responsible and partly because she thought that the decision was flat-out stupid.

She jumped off of the fountain's edge and dialed Ryo's number. She began to walk towards the glistening outdoor cafe as she listened impatiently to the ringing on the other end. There was a crackle of static on the other end and Ryo came on the line.

"Before you launch into a holy rampage, I'd like to remind you that your line may be tapped," he said. "Provided to you courtesy of KC." He was breathing heavily and rushing about, judging by the clamor on his end. She smiled at the young man at the register and pointed at the menu pasted to the glass counter. He turned to retrieve her items and she dropped her smile.

"Have you ever heard of someone getting fired for fucking smiling?"

"Have you ever heard of KaibaCorps," Ryo responded in an impatient tone. Wherever he was, he wasn't very happy to be there.

"Everyone keeps saying that as if we're supposed to accept tyranny." The cashier returned with an ice-cold bottle of Coke and a bag of cotton candy. She slid her change across the counter - she had just enough left over for the toll gate - and carried her food to a nearby bench. "Nobody wants to help me help Sara get her job back," she said indignantly as she shoved cotton candy into her mouth. "They're all wimps."

"C'est la vie," he said distractedly as something electronic beeped in the background. "What're you gonna do about it?"

"Take it all the way to the top."

"And make it drop?"

"I'm serious."

Ryo paused. The line went silent. And then, "by top, you don't happen to mean floor one hundred and twenty-two, do you?" The dreaded floor one hundred and twenty-two housed only one office. Seto's.

She licked cotton candy from her fingers, vengeance burning in her heart. "Plan's simple: go in there guns blazing, teeth-gnashing. Demand an audience-"

"-and get your head cleaved off. Marie, pardon my bluntness, but you're being stupid."

This caught her off guard. Though he had always implied, he had never outright called her stupid before. She could tell that he was under immense stress, but what his issue was, she couldn't figure it out. His anger definitely didn't seem to be directed at her or Sara's situation.

"Fight fire with fire," was all that she said. She finished the cotton candy and began to untwist the top off of her soda bottle. "Where are you, anyway?"

"Picking up coffee for our Lord and Saviour Seto friggin' Christ."

"I thought that was Mizumi's job."

"Funny how that works, isn't it? She took my spot behind Kaiba's desk and I got demoted to coffee duty. Gotta go, love. It was nice knowing you."

He hung up the phone. She sighed and retrieved a paddle ball from her backpack. It was a silly little thing that she had gotten for free from the Emporium, but it was good during times of stress. She waddled around the bench, skipping and hopping to keep the tethered ball from bouncing off of the paddle and wondering just what, exactly, her future held. The TV and movie heroines made it seem so easy: go in the lair, slay the dragon, walk away adjusting the lipstick. There were a thousand ways that she could approach this: she could rush into Seto's office and demand reparations. She could threaten and curse and throw a tantrum the likes of which he would have never seen before. Anything, really, to get Sara's job back.

A group of employees were sitting beneath the umbrella of a table a few feet away from her. As she thought of ways to make the impossible happen, she kept one ear on their conversation.

"-wait, I have proof, I'll show you," one of the male employees was saying. He had his phone in his hand and was scrolling through a set of pictures.

"I heard Seto's a war refugee from Bosnia. Him and the little brat."

"I don't think Mokuba's a brat. Poor little thing, KaibaCorps made him grow up so fast-"

"I heard he has a thing with Mizumi-"

"Mokuba?!"

"No, you idiot, Kaiba!"

Of course, their midday break was peppered with gossip about Kaiba. It was all that anybody ever had to talk about when out of ear range of the higher-ups. She had heard enough gossip on Seto to write a fictitious biography and its sequel and its prequel. But she was curious about the thing with Mizumi. Was it a fling sort of thing, she wondered, or was it a sexy sex sort of thing? She imagined Seto Kaiba taking off his shirt in a darkened room. In her head, he walked towards Mizumi who was sitting in a black bustier dress on the edge of the bed. Except, it wasn't Mizumi whose bottom lip he put his thumb on. It was her's. She had heard tell from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone else that the janitor might have maybe walked in on Mizumi giving Seto a hickey in his office. This was a much less thrilling mental image.

One of the women at the table shook her head. "That's nonsense. I heard that he's secretly engaged to a Saudi Arabian princess. But her father didn't approve of the arrangement, so they have to date in secret."

"No, no, that's not right," another woman said. "It's Mizumi who's engaged to a Saudi Arabian princess, not Kaiba!"

"-you know he has OCD, right?"

"-I've heard that the FBI's secretly investigating him for a string of serial murders back in California. They found his DNA everywhere, if you know what I mean."

"-and he has that disease, you know, the one that Benjamin Button had in that one movie? That's why he looks so young. He's actually seventy years old!"

"-and he had leprosy."

"-and a little dick."

The group laughed. "That explains so much!"

"Wait, here it is!" The male employee leaned forward and showed them his phone. "Check it out. There was this article in the Bi-Weekly Gossip magazine where they interviewed this teacher from an old orphanage. According to him, Kaiba and Mokuba were dropped off there when they were little kids and then later on adopted by a rich businessman. Look, here's a picture that someone took of the kids at the orphanage. Call me crazy, but I'd recognize those dead eyes anywhere. And there's Mokuba standing right beside him."

The group ooh-ed and ah-ed as they leaned over the phone. Marie gave the paddle a sudden jerk and it went flying out of her hand. The group looked over at her alarm and she scowled at them. For some reason that she couldn't explain, she found their rancid speculations on Seto's life annoying.

"Don't you armchair historians have work to do or something?" She called out. They sneered at her as the male employee quickly put his phone away.

"Don't you have your own business to mind, newbie?" One of the women called back.

"No, she's right," came a new voice. Mizumi appeared like a shadowy demon from beneath the awning of the cafe. The sight of her standing there holding an ice cream cone sent a visible ripple of fear through the group and they hurriedly stood up. She ran her tongue around the edge of the vanilla ball and sucked her teeth. "I passed by you guys five minutes ago. Here I am again and you're still here. KC employee's lunches don't run that long. Get back to work."

"Yes, Miss Mizumi. We're sorry about that. We'll get right back to it. Sorry."

Marie watched in amazement as the group of them bowed like apologetic children and then scurried back into the building. She resumed paddling, all the while sensing Mizumi watching her from beneath her large purple sunglasses.

Much to her disappointment, Mizumi walked towards her and sat directly on the bench behind her. She wasn't sure why she had suddenly ended up on Mizumi's radar. The woman was cold and about as friendly as a wooden bat studded through with rusty nails. She sat down on the bench as Mizumi ruffled around in her purse for cigarettes.

"You smoke," the woman asked, a cigarette bouncing between her lips.

"Not if I can avoid it," Marie said back, heavily implying that she wasn't interested in having her lungs filled with cancer at that moment. Mizumi ignored her and instead lit her cigarette. She crossed her legs and spread her hands out along the back of the bench. If she wanted to, she could have slit the back of Marie's neck open with the sharp tip of her press on red nails. Ice cream dripped from her cone onto the ground below them.

"You wanna know something?" Mizumi said to the smoke rings billowing towards the sky. "All work, no play doesn't make Kaiba a dull boy. He plays really hard, actually."

"Okay?" Marie had no idea what else to say to this. Mizumi glanced over at her with a slanted grin. Even though the glasses that she wore were dark and hid her eyes, Marie could still see the outline of her heavily coated lashes. "Don't tell me you're not down for a little Kaiba gossip? I mean real, real gossip."

"Is this some kind of test," Marie asked. But Mizumi ignored her again and pursed her lips around another smoke ring.

"I once saw Seto bet his entire company on the color of a man's socks," Mizumi stated in a faraway voice. "The man who he bet against lost, of course. Kaiba knows how to work people, like, psychologically. You wouldn't know that by looking at him."

"What happened to him? I mean, the man that he bet against?" Marie couldn't help it. She was intrigued. Mizumi shrugged.

"Kaiba made him the test dummy for a new VR experience he was building. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Wrong. Kaiba knew the system was glitchy as fuck. It created these avatars that were warped out of proportion. Imagine being strapped down in a VR world where the people are tall as towers and glitching out like monsters right in front of you." Mizumi giggled. "Poor sap was shaking from head to toe when Seto finally let him out. Couldn't even put in his resignation, he was freaking out so bad. That was fun. And then, there was this time when Seto and I were walking back from having dinner at this swanky Chinese place. Chef Alex's, ya heard of it. No? Your loss," Mizumi ran her tongue along the ice cream again. It was impossible for her not to have noticed the droplets gathering on her black skirt. Marie peered at her face and wondered about her mental state. Maybe she wasn't just dealing drugs...

"Anyway," Mizumi continued. "We ran into this robber dude in an alley. Held a gun to our face and told us to put our hands up. You wanna know what Seto did? He convinced him to play a game of Russian Roulette. No, I'm serious," she said upon seeing Marie's raised brow. "He was laughing and everything. Robber dude must've thought he was crazy. Anyway, they did it. Seto has a way of making challenges seem irresistible. And let's just say...I'm sure glad that the robber's hand was shaking so much. Or else he might have lost more than an ear!" Mizumi threw her head back and laughed uproariously. Everything about her mannerisms in that moment screamed 'I'm Copying Seto Kaiba's Lunatic Laugh.' She was holding the ice cream cone upside down in one hand and gesticulating emphatically with the cigarette in the other.

"And then," Mizumi continued after wiping a smudge of eyeliner from beneath her glasses. "There was this one time. Seto had some Public Health and Safety bigwigs gathered in his office to check out this new jetpack that he had commissioned. They got stuck on theorizing whether or not it would actually work and if it was safe enough to release to the general public. Wanna know what Seto did?"

"Let me guess," Marie said dryly. "He strapped into the jet pack, opened a window panel in his office, and jumped out, right?"

"Bin-go. You get it," Mizumi said. "We all thought that he had died, fallen to his death. I was about to rush to the window when suddenly there he was, hovering in midair in front of us with his arms crossed and a smirk on his lips. You should have seen the bigwigs then. If I remember correctly, one of them actually fainted. But that was back in the old days, when I was still a baby-faced temp and he did those sorts of things. Nowadays he'd probably strap a bigwig in a jet that he made himself and convince him to jump out the window."

Marie had no idea what to do with any of this information. In fact, she was having a hard time believing that any of it was true. If anything, she was more curious about the nature of their relationship. The casual way in which Mizumi spoke of Kaiba was suspicious enough to make her wonder if they did have a thing going on. The thought of this made her jealous, and in turn terribly ashamed. Mizumi was built like an Amazon: easily six foot two and about sixty pounds heavier than her. Mizumi was the type two wear daring v-necks that stopped just below her breasts and heels that could pierce the heart of a vampire. Marie with her wool turtlenecks, boxy tan skirts, and scruffed Nikes had nothing on her.

Mizumi took a final drag off her cigarette and then smashed it against the No Smoking sign on the bench. "That's all to say," she said as smoke rolled out her mouth, "that Kaiba's all about principle, not action. He'll tear your heart out just to teach you a lesson."

Is this a warning, Marie thought, or friendly advice?

"You'd do best to remember that before you go blazing into his office."

"What're you talking about?"

Mizumi snickered again. "I know Sara was your friend. And the little issue surrounding that post that you made is probably making you feel pretty hot right about now. You have a cute face. I'd hate to see it torn to shreds, especially on account of the shots that I called."

That was enough of that.

Marie reared up and stuffed her paddle in her backpack. She knew what Mizumi was doing. Mizumi had reeled her in with a pretense of friendship, just to watch her shatter beneath the sudden condescending blow. It had all been a lazy Wednesday game to Mizumi, probably to pass the time before she went off in search of her next victim. The revelation that it was Mizumi who had gotten Sara fired was like a punch in the gut. Marie tried to hide the fact that she was pissed, but she knew her cheeks had turned red. She didn't care that Kaiba was the head of the company. She'd rather appeal to him than grovel her case in front of the grinning serpent of a woman.

"Ma-rie," Mizumi sang when Marie had gotten only a few paces away.

"What do you want, she-devil?"

"That little race you had with Seto the other day sure got him excited. Ever seen a boner in leather pants? I have."

Damn, Mizumi was good and knew how to shoot straight. The implication of that statement made Marie shudder. She imagined Mizumi blowing smoke from a gun and then licking the barrel. Mizumi laughed and began to sing a song in a foreign language that Marie had no doubt was aimed at her expense. The eerily clear sound of it followed her through the doors of KC, past the lobby, and up the concrete staircase to floor one hundred and twenty-two.