Lunch With the Boss's Secretary

Part One

I

It was a war that had cost them much, but he hadn't had anything to lose when he signed up to be a soldier seven years ago. Orphaned by the first war, he'd had no home and no family to speak of. Everything had been in such dreadful disarray that no one had ever objected to a clever boy with deft fingers helping out in the shipyard. War machines was more like it. He had been raised on the engines and axle grease of massive mechanical weapons, and when the next war began, his war, he was accepted into the ranks of human robots.

But Trowa's time as a soldier was long over. At first he had drifted, spent some time with his fellows from the frontline, but eventually he had returned to the shipyard, and found brand new automobile warehouses eager for mechanics to help them get the new age moving, while the war's boost to the military industrial complex still held.

The work wasn't clean, but it was honest and simple. Cars were mode of two basic things- metal and electricity. Somebody else was in charge of the increasingly complex computer chips; Trowa just had to make sure all the rest fit together. He could've done it in his sleep, could've got more money for what he did, but he stayed where he was, because he liked the men and the cars were well-made. He had his own sitting in the lot; a trust little thing bought on employee discount. It fit well in the cramped parking bays outside his apartment building. That, too, was night and maintained, with good neighbors, even if it was small and nothing to boast about. Trowa always waved hello and exchanged a few friendly words with the old man walking his dog, the mother getting her lazy preteen to the bus, the men and women who left for work and got their mail around the same times that he did. He liked it, and the way everything just existed, harmoniously. There had been more than enough disruption and excitement in his life during the war.

Yes, that's all for Part One, and it's not because it's the prologue-ish thing. ALL the parts are like this. And you're just going to have to suffer through them. I'm challenging myself. So there.

Mwah.