pencil pushing (contest)

[Ventus]

pencil pushing
- for contest (again)

bear with me. part I of several.

----

"So did you hear?" Scara said above him, using her hands to lean over the partition between their cubicles. Her height offered no assistance, and her chin poked barely over the black-edged top.

Fayt looked up from the reply he was writing, halfway between the words 'to' and 'hear', the cursor blinking forlornly as it ceased to move at one hundred words a minute. "Hear what?" Luck would have it that his cubicle was right next to the biggest gossip after the last rearrangement - Raines had slaved over the layout for a day or two before the new assignments were announced. He had long become accustomed to her running mouth that somehow must have made its way into the word processing document, judging by the sheer number of replies she had ground out thus far. The slim, short brunette had managed to bump even Lightning out of the top slot, something that earned Scara a friendly kind of ire from her mother-figure. It was a common occurrence for the last month or so that, upon passing the stoic rose-haired woman in the hallway, the phrase "fuck Scara" was to be heard. Without fail.

So with that expectation in mind, Fayt made eye contact with the brown-haired girl currently hanging over his divider, noting without relevance that she looked more than in passing similar to Sophia.

"Did you hear about Cid?" she said, tagging on the CFO's name at the end of that sentence.

"Uh," Fayt thought about it. "No?"

"Oh, wow, you have to hear this," she said, opening her mouth to tell the latest watercooler gossip -

A pink-haired woman in her mid-twenties strolled past, a saccharine smile on her face. "Back to work, twerps, or I get to tell the boss lady," she chirped, the smile turning wicked as she sharpened her gaze on Scara.

The brunette shrank back, and Yashiro Uzuki continued on, strutting with clicking heels down the hallway to the next block of cubicles. Fayt doubted anything Uzuki said to Lightning about Scara would hold any water, considering the way their replies weighted out - Scara held about six to one of Yashiro's.

"I'll tell you later," she said, subdued, and went back to her computer.

Fayt blinked.

Three sentences later, at the junction between "," and "and", the loudspeaker crackled on.

"Attention employees of Calamity's Cry," the voice said, distinctly masculine and holding the slightest lilt of a Welsh accent, "I have the displeasure of informing you that Mr. Cid Raines, CFO, will be retiring from his position."

Somebody - upon looking he recognized the pair of blonde antennae, yelled back "The hell are you gonna do then? You're too cracked to hold a different job!" It had been a stroke of brilliance to install microphones in their booths that were able to be connected to the main microphone's office when the loudspeaker was on, in effect allowing them to hold teleconferences through the building.

Fayt rolled his eyes.

"Oy," a voice with an Australian accent cut in. "Bossman, y'ain't quittin' on me, are ya?"

"I must, Fang," Raines replied. "My long-awaited dream is about to be realized."

"You get to herd sheep, right?" Larxene yelled into her microphone again. Kadaj groaned.

"Tonight, I begin my career as a vocalist. I bid farewell to you all." His microphone went dead.

The office was left in stunned silence.

"Now what do we do?" Vanille, a bubbly redhead with an ambiguous accent (read: continually changing) said out loud, and brought the rest of the congregation to agreeing nods.

"What did I miss?" Lightning came on the loudspeaker, and after a whole two seconds of disbelief, everyone was talking into their own microphones.

"LIGHTNING WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN" was the general outcry of the members' floor, having not seen the woman for a full three weeks. The rose-haired woman in question attempted to speak over everyone else, and their voices gradually died away, but Cloud was able to get one more comment in before everyone fell silent. "You owe me a reply!"

"Problems," she offered shortly, a gruff method of explanation. "No really, what did I miss?"

As a whole, the floor wondered where to begin.