"You are my SECRETARY," Merriam Ksyhsravor bawled in her best drill-sergeant voice, the sound ringing through the mostly-empty offices she'd claimed as her own. "And you WILL have your own office. Your own desk. Your own area. And your JOB, Andrew Evan Gibson, in case you have forgotten, is to take my calls and greet my visitors and constituents at the door if necessary. You will do this. Do you hear me, young man?"

"Yes, ma'am," he stammered out, far more pale than he was when he'd begun by complaining at the task Mer had laid out for him. Laptop in hand, he scurried into his office and shut the door behind him, while Mer, left in the hallway with her personal assistant, gave a sigh. The Twi'lek regarded her coolly with those red eyes before she spoke.

"You will teach me this, yes?" Kinsa asked. Mer liked to imagine that there might be a new note of respect in the female's voice, and she turned to the much-shorter woman and grinned.

"Stick with me long enough, and you'll learn." That earned her a shark-grin in response. Mer just led her to the office that faced Gibson's. "I swear I'm going to put a sign on his door that says 'Paranoia Pit'. It'd work."

"I heard that," A whine sounded from behind his door.

"'Course you did, I wasn't hidin'," the technomancer growled back, with a wave of one fist at the closed door. "Anyway, Kinsa, this will be your office. You can get it set up however you'd like. Drake Valkonan has offered to set up a communications suite, or we can order stuff specially for you from Coruscant, if that's what you'd prefer."

So far, the junior offices had only been set up with a filing cabinet and a desk. Not that the Minister of Science and Technology wasn't just down the hallway. Mer had done most of the work on her office already—it had truly taken her longer to get her secretary in gear and track down a viable personal assistant than it had taken to get her own act in gear.

She'd painted the walls a pale shade of dove gray, while the carpeting was a rich blue. The furniture itself—a desk and a few cabinets—were in dark woods, and her filing cabinets were black. A crystal set of bottles shared space on a cabinet with a coffee pot, with glasses and mugs arranged between. Mer had a single plant—ivy of some sort—trailing tendrils down one of the filing cabinets.

On her desk sat a jar of pretzels, and a rather large mug of still-steaming black coffee. Her own personal laptop stood open on the desk, waiting for her.

Finally, everything had fallen into place.

Mer gave her office the same skeptical look as the Twi'lek had.

"You've got a point," she admitted. "All right. Get on that for me, would you? And Kibo knows that Gibson will need all the help he can get." One never knew what else the kid was going to get up to. As valuable as her student was to her, he was also two fistfuls of trouble, and Merriam knew that just as well as she knew her own name.

Offering a slender envelope to Kinsa, then. "Here are the cards for your expense account and one for the office in general. I don't expect you to pay for things for the office in general out of your own account. And especially not for Gibson."

She cast a glance back over at the secretary's office, and heaved a sigh. "And finally, I've got a special request for you. He needs a tuxedo, you see—he's going to be a part of someone's mating ritual soon, and that's required. He hasn't got the first idea of where or how to avail himself of one, and I'm about as useless—my homeland's military issued me mine." Which explained where Mer's outfit had come from, when she'd made her acceptance speech.

"Any help you can give will be much appreciated."

Mer knew that look. It went through another pair of acquaintances' heads often enough, and she smelled danger every time it did. There was, however, the matter of the fact that she was now a Minister and had to look the part.

She pointed a finger at Kinsa. "All right. I can probably tell what you're thinking—" And I don't like it, the look said. "I need stuff for formals, but I don't do backless, and I don't like showing my arms." Mostly because the scars started at shoulder level and continued on down her back. "I prefer suits to most other things and dark colors, but I'm sure you've got some power color in mind you want to put me in. If it's gonna be yellow, make it more towards gold than buttercup, would you?" Personal preference. Luckily she'd learned how to negotiate with the fashion conscious as a safety maneuver. Or a sanity maneuver, maybe, for her own sanity's sake.

"As for my erstwhile secretary—" With another glance down the hall. "I can get you his measurements. He still has to go talk to the groom, I don't know if they have a color scheme. I don't know the kids very well—most of them. There's one of them—I helped pull his ass out of the fire a couple years back, and he still feels like he owes me." Mer planned on calling in one of those favors.

"And the words you were looking for" 'Gibson is special'," Mer said, implying briefly that he wasn't just riding the short bus, that the kid was its driver and had the thing rigged with a train whistle just for giggles.

How did he get himself IN to these situations"

Well, that was simple enough: He was Mer's apprentice. And Mer apparently believed this was either a good life lesson, or miserable work that was suitable to foist off on an apprentice.

Joy.

Gibson's fingers drifted over the keyboard as he pondered just how things had gotten this far. Kinsa would be bursting in relatively soon with some things she'd want him to order — the heuristic-predicative algorithms tied to the daily planner pinned that as seven-nines probable. Might as well start that now.

Ugh, Kinsa. Why had Mer hired her" Sure, she was hot — really hot — awkwardly hot, honestly, the sort of girl that led a man to hate himself for thinking she was hot when he had a perfectly, gorgeously hot girlfriend of his own, but he was only human, it's not like he was immune to this sort of thing....But Kinsa was a bitch. And not in the good Mer-sort of bitch; Kinsa came off like a high-school cheerleader, coy and catty and focused entirely on destroying anyone one iota less socially perfect than her. That sort of attitude took so much edge off the attraction it went clear the other way into blunt-object territory.

Unpopular loner computer geeks had entirely too much experience with the wrong side of that sort of girl. Assuming they had a right side.

This was all gonna suck.

Oh, wonderful. Here she came.

The trick with girls like her is to never show weakness. Naturally there were certain biological cues beyond his control — a slight tensing as she entered, a slight tightening of the jaw muscles, a slight refinement in his ordinarily poor posture. Still, he flicked a look and a nod at her, then resolutely pulled his eyes back to the computer screen. Must not look at attractive girl. Attractive girl is really a hungry spider. Imagine the big hairy spider, Gibson.

That actually helped a little.

As did having her outplayed. "Mer was already in touch with the MiSTy office. I confirmed your setup earlier today. S'over there." He waved vaguely at the corner of his office, where several small boxes with buttons on them sat. "They're apparently some sort of Poketech. Push the button and toss the box and it springs out. It might help if you yell 'I choose you!' while doing it."

A few keypresses and the printer on his desk spit out paper, which he snagged, then offered to her. "Your datapads are on order, they should be here in standard shipping time." Another printout shot out. "Here's a line on some local nurseries that have those plants you wanted. I'd order them, but I didn't know how much you wanted the Environment mood improved by." Man, he hoped she wasn't getting these references.

"Anything else?"

Oh no, Kinsa: Gibson's not falling for your tricks. Never, not for a second would he be taken in by pretensions of airheadedness and vacuousness.

He hadn't been out of high school so long that he'd forgotten everything he'd known about it, and well did Gibson know one lesson: to be the cheerleader queen of the social scene, with all the vicious sociopathy and political maneuvering that'd make a standard-issuecorrupt chancellor weep, you had to have some brains. Not necessarily book-brains, but no fool ever succeeded in high-school popularity.

Plus, Mer wouldn't hire a bimbo.

Gibson *almost* managed to give her a professional and courteous answer on subcue-comms, but then she started vamping, got up, and made a crack about tea. Well then.

The next morning found a stack of papers in Kinsa's inbox: Five product spec sheets from communications-technology manufacurers (two on-world, three off; three technological, one magical, one biotech);

A product comparison (based off the official spec sheets);

Actual performance specs on each of the products involved (in some cases, hilariously discrepant from the official specs);

Mean TTF of each product and a cost/value extrapolation based on this number and factoring in the actual specs (specifically included: five pages of algorithms used to calculate this number, none of which make any sense whatsoever when compared to "real" mathematics);

Reliability estimates for the company in whole (including data Gibson has absolutely no business possessing, such as the fact that one corporate executive would be caught in some adulterous scandal at 3 pm this afternoon);

One professionally-typed bid entered on functional behalf of the Science and Technology Ministry (Bid time: "Eh, he said he'd hook us up"; Potential disadvantage: "subcutaneous possession of a device probably capable of destruction hitherto unfathomed by man");

One messily-scrawled note of "Mer and I could probably make one" (Reliability: "Mer does good work"; potential disadvantage: "I'd be programming it, mwa ha ha, mwa ha ha ha").

As for Kinsa's other demand.....Gibson dropped at 2 sharp, a freshly-steeped, blissfully hot mug of Dagoban bentaxne berry tea on her shiny new desk (along with a detailed analysis of locally-grown teas and herbal drinks, prefaced with a sticky note that says "in case MoA policy becomes the support of local agriculture while on the clock"). The scent of said tea might almost, possibly, if one tried very hard, detectable over the crushing grip the almighty coffee bean had on the office. Gibson had broken out his old-fashioned percolator pot and, apparently, set it to Overload; the coffee now perking in it had enough strength that the Avenger Initiative might have its first mission if it escaped.

Reasonably pleased with himself — that'd all been no work at all — Gibson leaned one hip against his desk to pour himself a cup.

Truthfully, Kinsa was also one of those people bitterly that were hated by those who didn't handle mornings well. Whether she hadn't slept or whether it'd been a quick moment of shutting her eyes, she was up and ready before sun rose.

She really needed to get a more appropriate place other than the inn to live, for now, the twi'lek slid into a vehicle paid for by her own credit, and sped off to toward Mer's office.

Out of the vehicle without glancing over her shoulder. Today's suit was as tasteful as yesterdays (this was agriculture, after all, not a cantina), a Cavalli tuxedo-inspired pants suit in shimmery Crepe-de-Chine-satin like accents to the jacket. Boot-cut slacks accommodated her one and only vice which she refused to give up—a pair of heels. Today's were a pair of Jimmy Choo's, five inches, black and mesh. The details. They were important to Kinsa.

She wore no jewelry and no makeup but for the briefest touch of clear gloss to her mouth; if she never caught on to anything else—no one could say she didn't catch the look correctly.

A man in a worn suit met her half way on her long, clicking strides toward the office to inform her that the paintings arrived, but the plants from the nursery couldn't be delivered today and did she want him to call them and chew them out' She smiled sweetly and patted him on the shoulder, let him know it was fine and continued on in the office. Leaving him to watch Kinsa go with a sad mixture of longing, hope, and perhaps a glint of knowing that this was as close as he'd ever get.

Inside Mer's office, Kinsa already had her data pad out. Looking over the list of missed calls and Mer's itinerary while pacing through a gathering of wrapped frames and canvass.

Kinsa unwrapped them, double checked their quality and authenticity and then hung them. An abstract, colorful painting of a farm looked well over the wall behind Mer's head. Attention getting and bright, it'd be a good draw to keep people at the very least—focused in her direction. Horses feeding from hay, Holstiens staring off into the camera, a black and white snapshot of a field either ready for planting or just harvested, and last but never least a dramatically focused shot of golden wheat in a field was the last chosen piece to outfit the walls. They were tasteful and without overtly elaborate frames; the twi'lek figured it was the sort of artwork that warmed instead of cooled.

By the afternoon the tea she'd made Gibson fetch—which he did rather well— without protesting sat untouched on the dark, mahogany L shaped desk of hers. She had been sure, of course, to pick one much smaller and much more puritan than Mer's. Kinsa's walls were decorated with stranger pieces of art than Mer's. Some of them were obviously from her own collection, some of them chosen—surprisingly"—recent purchases as a reminder of whence she came. And maybe a comfort. The largest one on the wall beside her languidly cycled through a collection of images which she found herself oddly content to watch when she let herself do so.

She sashayed in and out of her own newly decorated office doing what it was Mer paid her to do. Never mind the fact that when she was back in her office she was immediately turned to the odd communications suite that flickered odd in contrast with the wooden desk, purple fingertips tapping away at virtual key display.

She stopped on occasion to ogle her in-box, set aside the things which did not matter and made note of the leads which Gibson gave her. Something in the papers caught her eye more than the others ( mwa ha ha, mwa ha ha ha). Her amusement was subtle, a small burst of chortling and she was back to her own work.

By the time she remember the tea, the smell of coffee that had filled every part of the office might have already started to fade and Kinsa had no idea where the hours from this morning had went. She roused from her desk with the tea in hand to seek out Mer and her office. Kinsa knocked even if the door was open. And unlike someone else's office Kinsa actually awaited to hear Mer give her okay before slinking in.

"I did not hear anything about the paintings, so I assume that they are not making your eyes sore?"