A/n:This fic is entirely crack and makes no attempt to follow the actual timeline or make sense but it made me laugh so here it is.
Ainur Corporation and Holdings were at their biannual interoffice meeting. Somehow everyone was actually there this time aside from the CEO who was dealing with the fire damage at one of their eastern locations. The whole place had gone up in flames overnight and it was lucky that no-one had gotten hurt. A fire investigator was trying to figure out what had been the source of the fire but it was proving tricky.
Locations in the east weren't always as well upkept as those in Aman.
Even Namo the head of the Legal Department was here and out of all of them, his schedule was both the most packed and volatile. It wasn't uncommon for him to have to conference call into these meetings from his office down in Mandos. Having him physically here was something of a novelty that was only possible because the CEO was dealing with the fire.
Tulkas from Security and Oromë the Chief Operations Officer were almost vibrating in excitement. They knew Namo from back in their college days and even though they were so close barely got to see him anymore than any of the other members of the Ainur Executive Team. How they were going to make it through this long boring meeting was anyone's guess.
The HR Manager Nienna glared at them as she took several sips from a cup of what had to be the strongest cup of coffee this side of the void. Coffee that she spat out all over Vairë from Customer Service's silk blouse when Aulë arrived.
At least she thought it was Aulë. It had to be Aulë.
Ulmo from Finance also choked but instead of coffee it was on a particularly plump garlic butter prawn that Varda from Sales and Marketing had to help him cough back up with the liberal application of the Heimlich Manoeuvre.
It wasn't unusual for Aulë to arrive late to meetings, even to ones as important as this one. The head of Research and Development had many plates he was spinning in order to get out the 'Second Born' product line on time. He and Yavanna from the Manufacturing Department were often seen arguing in the lobby about the lifespan of 'Second Born' without causing a diminished value in their original 'First Born' line that came with a 35,000 year warranty on joint damage and memory corruption. The fights had somehow got even more heated when they'd gotten married five years ago.
It wasn't his lateness that warranted the shock of the team.
They had all seen the strangely shaped products that littered the desks and shelves of the Research and Development offices. The piles of papers depicting strange runes and mining equipment that collapsed if you so much as looked in their direction.
Manwë had grumbled to Estë more than once about sending Aulë on a Professional Development course to finally get him to digitise his department. The sheer amount of paper that place got through was unbelievable. The Valar's over eagerness to get every thought down no matter where he was and the absolute refusal to do that digitally meant that they were going to have to build an entire team to deal with the company's confidential waste.
There was no way they'd be able to house train Aulë well enough to get him to shred his own documents.
This new 'passion project' as Yavanna was calling it was frankly smaller and uglier than even the less aesthetic of the 'Second Born' but it couldn't be denied that they cut a striking visual. It was impossible to forget them.
"Is the CEO letting you keep them then?" Manwë asked in what he hoped was a diplomatic manner from the head of the boardroom table. Seeing Aulë as one of these...things for a lack of a better word was ruffling a lot of feathers.
"Yes. They'll come later, after the 'Second Born' release but he says there is place for them in the release timeline. He said he admired my passion and how durable they are."
There was some commotion at that news and an uncomfortable cough from their Chief Communications Officer Irmo.
"When are you going to return to sporting regulation Hröa?" Irmo asked a rather pinched look of disproval on his face.
"I'm not." said Aulë. "The uniform regulations in the Employee Handbook and my Employment Contract only state that we 'must appear in the form of one of the Children of Illuvatar'. It says it right here in Article 25 subsection 7e."
His fingers are rather deftly pointing to the exact position in both documents Aulë was quoting. Where he had been storing both of these documents up until this point was a mystery.
"That is true, it's a workplace cultural norm to appear as one of the 'First Born' and your deviation from that will cause others to feel uncomfortable." Nienna said, finally finished drinking the coffee that had almost killed her earlier.
Aulë smiled. There was nothing you could fault about that smile. It was the epitome of corporate politeness but with his new face it was rather strange to see. "Precisely Nienna, appearing as a 'First Born' is merely a cultural norm and not a fast rule. As the CEO has personally timetabled a spot on the official release schedule calendar they are already counted as part of the 'Children of Illuvatar' project and therefore it's entirely within my rights to appear thus."
There were many titters of disproval and some louder voices of disgust, mostly from Irmo, from the gathered Valar. More than one of them rolling their eyes.
Not that Aulë cared. This new shape was ideal for working at their distinguished 'Forge' location. That location was Aulë's favourite to work in because of the large windowed collaboration spaces but there wasn't any air-conditioning there. No matter how many times he put in a request for it to be fitted, nothing ever happened, even though in the summer it felt it was hot enough in there to melt Platinum. On days where the whole team were gathered trying to solve a particularly difficult problem the temp was even higher.
Hot enough to melt Tungsten.
He might be being a little overdramatic but it was profoundly uncomfortable in August. That's why the current products headed for the 'Second Born' launch were being developed jointly between the Formenos and Tirion locations.
The doorframes at Forge were also notoriously low.
Aulë still remembered the incident form he'd had to fill out when Feanáro almost cracked his skull open on the Gem Room door. The resulting wound had required four stitches in his forehead and treatment for a nasty case of concussion.
Apparently the whole ordeal had given the elven head of Aulë's Research and Development team the idea of something he was only calling 'The Silmarils' and refusing to explain any further.
No-one had any idea what his crazed emails meant. Which was probably a good thing in the long run. All Aulë could make out from the tea stained technical drawings Feanáro kept air dropping him (very unprofessional but that was just how Feanáro did things) was that it had something to do with making a crystal glow.
He didn't have the heart to tell him that a craze amongst the Teleri for pink salt crystal lamps had already been and was at this point mostly gone.
"If you would just act as the others do." Ulmo from the Finance Department and Aulë's personal nemesis demanded.
"I am within the terms of the contract to appear thus." Aulë said, spinning on his tiptoes in a jaunty little circle as if to fully show off his creation.
If beauty pageants for mortal three year old girls had existed at this point in history, Aulë truly would have won the crown. In that world he'd have scored very highly on the unsteadily turning around in a circle portion of the scoring.
The horror in Manwë's face as the sheer cacophony his movement caused as the half ton of gold and drilled gem beads Aulë had added to his hair clacked against one another. It was all part of this really cool messaging system that he was currently developing with the dwarves in mind.
It involved a lot of complicated braiding and specific positioning of beads.
Right now it was only a concept and Aulë was planning on workshopping the whole system with the seven fathers prior to the full Arda release of his creation.
He was open to a lot of suggestions, so far the children had all been rather more complicated than anyone in the company had imagined. There was no way that he would be able to plan for all of their needs on his own.
"So-" Started Yavanna, obviously trying to change the subject before an actual fight broke out. "I need your help with the Mithril Volume, are you sure you want it to be 8 in 1?" She didn't give her husband any time to answer and just pull him out of the room.
As the door closed behind them, Tulkas patted Manwë on the back in what he hoped to be a comforting way. Aulë had been acting really weirdly for a while and it had been setting Manwë on edge.
Besides the fire, they'd already had to deal with the Vice President's problem brother. Who was trying to sabotage the CEO's plans, launch his own competing product line with zero research or legal support. That had ended in a lengthy copywrite lawsuit that had tanked the sales of their newest floor lamp design as collateral.
That was without having to talk about how Melkor seemed determined to seduce the entirety of the Ainur Corporation and Holdings' middle management to his new LLC that he was apparently calling 'Angband' and the attempted hostile takeover last winter.
Melkor's schemes and industrial espionage had everyone on edge without Aulë trying to cause havoc too.
"Don't worry about it." Tulkas said as jovially as he could muster. "It's just another one of his phases. Remember the two months where he was absolutely sure that he wanted to change his name to 'Mahal'?"
Unfortunately for the Valar, dwarven Aulë wasn't a phase.
End
A/n:When you hyper focus on a project so hard that you accidentally create a race of beings that have the same interests as you, to hang out with but you never really get to because your Boss' brother keeps having a tantrum that no-one wants to listen to his experimental ska-jazz fusion music.
For the curious, the melting temp of Titanium is 1670C, (HCP) and for Tungsten 3380C, (BCC)
Roles in Ainur Corporation and Holdings
- Eru Illuvatar - CEO
- Manwë - Vice President
- Aulë - Research and development
- Varda- Sales and Marketing
- Tulkas - Security
- Yavanna - Manufacturing
- Ulmo - Finance and accounting
- Nienna - Human Resources
- Námo - Legal
- Nessa - Purchasing and Procurement
- Vairë - Customer Service
- Irmo - Communications
- Oromë - Chief Operations Officer
- Vána - Logistics
- Estë - Training and Professional Development
There's no actual logic to this outside of the first three. Totally didn't frantically google 'What departments does a big company have?' and then just assign them at random...
No,I would never do that.