The cacophonous clacking of keyboards was even more furious than usual today. The engineers at Software Support Section LLC of Crossbell City were hard at work putting the finishing touches on their first major project.
With a long creak, the glass door separating the lobby from the main office space opened.
"Oh, it's much bigger and more open than I expected." Noel exclaimed as she glanced around the vast office.
"The Epstein Foundation conducted a study last year and found that productivity increases by up to 22.4% with an open office plan compared to those with cubicles or separate offices." Tio explained. She lead Noel over to the break area for a late morning snack.
"Randy! Rixia! Hiii!" Noel hollered and waved. The two turned around.
"What's shakin', bacon?" Randy said, casually spinning around in his chair.
"Hey Noel! Good to see you again!" Rixia waved back.
"We'll catch up later! After Tio is done showing me around." Noel waved again and Randy and Rixia nodded in approval.
Noel's gaze wandered to the far corner of the office where she noticed an unfamiliar figure. "Hey Tio," She asked "Who's that in the corner? With the weird outfit?"
"Oh yes. You wouldn't have met her yet. That's Velvet Crowe." Tio stopped at the orbal coffee maker and started to prepare a cup for Noel. "We received a request to handle a supposed demon that had appeared near the Sun Fort. We found Velvet there. She wound up here through some sort of portal formed from a large septium ore deposit. We've been looking for a way to return her to wherever she came from."
"Oh that's horrible… Why was she mistaken for a demon though?" Noel glanced back at Velvet quizzically.
"There was no mistake. She is indeed a demon. A therion, as she calls herself." Noel froze mid-sip of her coffee to process what Tio was saying. "Don't be alarmed though. She used to be a human and her mental faculties haven't been compromised. She only wants to return to someone named Laphi."
"Wait..." Noel pondered. "You're building an app for orbal phones that can detect septium deposits using orbal waves. Is that related to finding a way back for her?"
Tio nodded as she took a long sip of her coffee.
Rixia was sitting at her desk, staring at a particularly complex section of code on her orbal computer. She was propping her head up; a very tired and disinterested expression worn on her face.
"So when you buy or sell something with Orbcoin a record of it goes on the blockchain, and everyone gets a copy of the blockchain, so it can be decentralized." Randy excitedly explained.
"Oh, really…?" She was no longer hiding her contempt. As Randy continued spouting nonsense he didn't really understand, Rixia's vision drifted toward Velvet. Despite arriving some time ago, she chose to keep the ragged clothes she had originally been found wearing. Those somewhat provocative scraps were apparently a meaningful relic of a particular time in her life. Just as Rixia realized her gaze had lingered on Velvet slightly too long, Randy spoke up.
"Rixia? Zemuria to Rixia, are you there?"
"Huh? Yeah, what's up?" Rixia quickly snapped out of her trance.
"Lloyd, Tio and I are heading over to Vingt-Sept for lunch. You wanna come?"
"Thanks, but I think I'll pass this time. I want to finish this thing." Rixia waved goodbye to Randy as he went out to lunch. She resumed staring at the code on her computer. Her eyes started to cross as she lost her train of thought.
"Rixia Mao" A stern voice came from her right. Startled, Rixia quickly whipped her head around to face Velvet.
"We need to talk about your last code commit."
"What about it?" Rixia stood to match Velvet's eyes.
"On the orbal wave modulation screen, the confirmation button to add a new profile is blue." Velvet paused briefly "UI elements that push updates should be red." Rixia thought for a moment.
"That doesn't push anything permanently though. The save button on the main modulation screen does that."
"It adds a new row. Whether it's prospective or final doesn't matter." Velvet put her hand on her hip.
"That doesn't make sense. The color is supposed to tell the user that their changes are being finalized." Rixia crossed her arms, clearly becoming annoyed.
"It goes against the standards we've set up throughout the entire app." Velvet spoke slowly and sternly, losing her patience as well.
KeA was startled by a loud crash from the main room. She quickly hopped around her desk and opened the door to her HR office just as a keyboard went flying by.
Rixia slid backwards for nearly three meters, her sword held in front like a shield. Velvet was in pursuit, her demon arm unwrapped and pulled back, ready to strike. Rixia quickly lept into the air, gracefully pirouetting and flowing into a powerful downward sword strike toward Velvet, cleaving a nearby desk nearly in half and embedding the sword several centimeters into the ground.
Velvet narrowly dodged the strike, but it managed to shave several threads off of her attire. With a feral roar, she lunged at Rixia. With her weapon firmly embedded in the ground, Rixia somersaulted over the hilt, produced a kunai and pitched it at her foe. The talisman attached the kunai exploded just in front of Velvet, leaving an obscuring cloud of smoke. Rixia took this opening to dislodge her sword, but just as it came loose, Rixia saw the glint of Velvet's blade bursting through the smoke far too fast to avoid. Rixia tried in vain to dodge, but she felt a profound chill overtake her body, rendering her motionless. She closed her eyes realizing she had lost.
Other than the sting of the icy chill, the coup de grace never arrived. Rixia opened her eyes to see both herself and Velvet immobilized in a literal formation of ice.
"Just what has gotten into you two?" Tio said, standing at the door with her orbal staff raised high, conjuring the ice around them. "We need to ship tomorrow and you both are trashing the office… again." She lowered her staff, allowing the ice to being melting "I didn't want to resort to this, but I've exhausted all other options to get you two to work together." Rixia and Velvet glance at each other, their eyes wide in horror.
"Hi Velvet! Hi Rixia!" Little KeA said, her face beaming with joy, as always "Did you finish the incident survey thingies from yesterday?" Even Velvet's hardened expression gave way to the sweet child's powers of endearment.
"Of course, KeA." Rixia smiled as her handed over a sheet of paper.
"Y-yeah." Velvet struggled to keep her heart from melting.
"Thanks!" KeA replied as she skipped off to the HR office to process the forms. When the door closed, Rixia and Velvet's gazes turned back to not only the single computer between them, but also each other.
"This is ridiculous." Velvet grumbled. "Not even that bastard Artorius deserves to have pair programming inflicted on him."
"We didn't even break anything important. All of the orbal computers were fine." Rixia bemoaned.
"Just don't get in my way." Velvet said crassly as she started writing a function that would limit a slider's range range depending on a different slider's value.
"You might be incredibly strong and agile in battle but I'm not letting you do everything." Rixia snapped back with determination. "Right there, waveAmplitude needs a null check or it might lead to a divide by zero error later on."
Velvet, realizing that Rixia was correct, growled under her breath and added the check. "Fancy Miss Graceful Dancer noticed a line I hadn't written yet. Great job." She said, dripping with sarcasm. The pair continued on throughout the afternoon. Velvet had control of the keyboard for most of the time, but Rixia managed to steal it eventually.
Despite the tense air around them, the pair had managed to complete all of their assigned functionality. The clean and efficient code perfectly fit in with the work from the other teams. Lloyd and Tio were both hard at work in the conference room going through the final QA pass. The rest of the team were waiting anxiously at their desks to pounce on any bugs that might be found. Except for Randy, of course, who was busy searching the orbal net for "Ilya Platiere feet pics".
"Look," Rixia finally spoke up to Velvet "we've had our differences, but you're incredibly strong and you know your way around this code very well. I respect that."
Velvet sighed slightly and replied. "The way you move in a fight is like a hypnotic dance. I've never seen anything like it." Velvet averted her gaze. "I… would you be willing to teach me how you do that sometime?"
Rixia was taken aback for a moment. She looked Velvet up and down, analyzing her figure. "I think I can make time for an extra training session here or there. You're honestly not that far off from having a shot at Arc en Ciel."
"Don't patronize me, Mao."
"I'm absolutely serious. You're more graceful than you give yours-" Rixia was suddenly cut off by Lloyd bursting through the door.
"Velvet, Rixia, we found an issue with the save button on the orbal wave modulation screen. It always shows red as if there are changes to save, but only when multiple profiles exist." Lloyd said as he looked at the clock, which read 4:42 P.M. "Can you fix it in time? We need it gold by the end of the day."
Rixia and Velvet glanced at each other with a determined look. "We've got this." Rixia assured Lloyd.
Velvet quickly started examining the relevant code while Rixia was already reproducing the issue. "The change event for each profile is firing multiple times on load. It's causing the button to think there are changes." Rixia reported.
"Damn. It must be registering another event handler for each profile every time another is added. I'm adding a condition to make sure there's only one handler for each." Velvet furiously mashed the keyboard as beads of sweat started to form on her face.
"That helped. It's only firing once per profile now, but the button's still red."
Velvet's mind raced. What else could be causing it? Are there any workarounds? "Shit, I don't know. I'll just make a flag to stop the button from going red until the initial load is done." Velvet began tying again, but Rixia tenderly placed her hands on top of Velvet's.
"No… I've got it." Rixia took the keyboard for a moment and navigated to an obscure piece of code. It seemed like what Velvet was about to do, but it had a problem: it set the flag after only one event fired. "If we make this count up to the length of the profiles array it should keep the button from becoming red until all profiles are initialized!" Rixia mashed the save button and Velvet loaded the app again to check it."
"It works!" Velvet jumped up in elation. Rixia did as well. The pair embraced each other in a lively hug as the clock struck 4:56 PM. Lloyd returned to do the final tasks with this new fix. As naturally as breathing, without thinking the pair looked at each other and pressed their lips together.
The delicate sensation on Rixia's lips sent a shock through her body. What am I doing? Did I really do this? She wondered, but quickly forgot as she lost herself in Velvet's warm embrace. Such a brash woman and yet her lips felt as lovely as her namesake. The stress that had been building exponentially all week was relieved in an instant. A bubble of time and space seemed to surrounded them. Had minutes passed? Hours? The distance between them dissolved as their spirits joined into one being of absolute harmony.
Rixia's eyes suddenly shot open, just in time to see Velvet's do the same. They looked into each others eyes unflinchingly as they slowly released their mutual grip.
"Uh…" Velvet stammered, finally able to break eye contact.
Lloyd suddenly burst through the door yet again. "It's all good! We just deployed it!" He announced to the whole office, just as the clock ticked over to 5:00 PM. "Huge thanks to Rixia and Velvet for getting us over that last barrier."
"Woo!" Randy said with a pleased expression still on his face thanks to the exhibition in the middle of the office.
KeA was poking her head around a desk for a view of the action and was giggling softly.
"I'm glad we were able to finish in time." Tio stated, then turned toward Velvet. "Now we can use it to begin a search for the septium ore vein that teleported you here. We can start whenever you wish, Velvet."
Velvet looked at Rixia, then back to Tio. "Laphi's a strong boy. We can take a few days off to… celebrate a job well done."
A clap came from Randy's direction. And again. Then Lloyd joined in, then Tio, then KeA, Elie, Jona and even Sergei joined in. The slow clap grew in speed until it was a roaring round of applause while Velvet and Rixia returned to each others arms.
