Vanity & Vein Headquarters

Octavia sat quietly at her cubicle, though she preferred calling it her cell. She was typing an article about the improved efficiencies of Sanitarium City's pumbing system. In reality, they hadn't been improved at all. If anything, they had gotten worse. But like most of the articles she was assigned to write for Vanity & Vein, her boss, Blake, told her to fudge the numbers. After a few minutes the article was done. She saved the document, breathed an apologetic sigh, and sent it to the mainframe to be added to the other articles.

She looked at the clock and saw that it was 12:47. "Time for lunch" she thought. She pulled out a plastic lunchbag and opened it up. But before she could even take a bite of her sandwich, Blake reared his pasty face into her cubicle. He scowled at her lunch then turned his stern gaze to her.

"No time for that," he said in a snarky tone "You have a special person to interview today. They're waiting in the lobby."
"I hate you" she thought to herself.
"Who is it?" she asked in a polite tone.
Blake grinned. "Oh no," thought Octavia "A grin. A grin can only mean the worst."
"That's a surprise" he smirked.
"But how do I prepare?" asked Octavia "How do I know what questions to ask?"
"Oh, you're smart" replied Blake, suddenly disinterested in the conversation "You'll figure it out."

He turned and left. If Octavia had anything of a spine, she would've slammed her hand down on the desk and demanded he stop giving her bullshit tasks like that. But unfortunately a spine was something she didn't have, so she just sat in her chair and quietly muttered "Thank you for the compliment, sir."

"I guess I have no time to waste" she thought to herself. She picked up her notebook and pen and headed for the lobby.

Octavia was talking to the desk receptionist when Jasmine walked in, but immediately whirled around at the sound of her voice. Her sudden appearance had startled Octavia and she began to stutter,

"Oh hello Mr. McGa-, erm, I mean Ms. Mon-, I mean, Ms. Peach! Sorry, you surprised me."

Octavia winced at her accidental dropping of Jasmine's original name.

"Yes, of course I remember you!" she stuttered, in a poor attempt to fill the sudden awkward silence "You were on the cover of one of our issues! Let me tell you Ms. Peach, that issue was flying off all the stands! I showed it to my aunt and uncle, who in turn showed me Some Like It Hot and-"

Octavia winced again. Some Like It Hot was a Marilyn Monroe film featuring two crossdressers.

"...yes, that's how I remember you." she finally concluded.

But she knew that that wasn't how she knew Jasmine, and she knew Jasmine knew it too. She gulped in preperation for what the rest of the day would hold.

"So how can I help you today, Ms. Peach?"

Octavia couldn't help but gape at the magazine in Jasmine's hands. Where did she get it? Octavia wasn't even aware that they had begun printing it. Half of her wanted to ask if the article she had just written on the (not so) clean sewer systems was in it, but decided this wasn't the time or place.

She wanted to tell Jasmine the whole story, but she knew about Vanity & Vein's strict policy about things like this, and what Blake would do if Octavia's whole story was found out. But just then, something came out of the back of her mind,

"Screw him!"

After all, Octavia knew she owed Jasmine after the whole incident with her gender identity. She grabbed Jasmine by the arm and led her swiftly through the building. As she walked she spoke with swiftly to Jasmine,

"What I am about to show you would cost me my head if anyone found out I was letting you look at it, so you saw none of this from me, got it?"

She finally stopped at a large vaulted door. She quickly entered the combination and heaved the heavy door open. She lead Jasmine inside and stood at the center of the room.

"These are our archives," Octavia explained "It has all our articles, published or unpublished."

Soon she was shuffling through a series of folders on the far end of the vault, until she finally stopped and removed some stapled sheets of paper from one. She held the papers up for Jasmine.

"This is where I got started. This is an unpublished interview from about seventeen years ago. It's an interview between this woman who used to work here named Cheryl Dones, and Marni Wallace, that girl Rotti Largo was going to marry a while ago. In it, she explains that her friend, Magdeline Defoe, which is Mag, obviously, was blind, and that Rotti tried to woo Marni originally by giving Mag eyes. But then Marni ditched him at the last second for some guy named Nathan, and Rotti was upset. And look at this,"

Octavia then showed Jasmine the extremely explicit part of the interview wherein Marni described Rotti's reaction to her breaking up with him. She briefly talked of him mentioning Blind Mag.

"That little slut friend of yours, why did I even give her those eyes? She's mine now, Marni, if she wants to keep those eyes." Octavia read aloud from the sheet. She looked up at Jasmine "Marni was too ashamed to tell Mag, but I'm sure Mag found out on her own. And then look at this!"

Octavia took a folded up poster out of her back pocket, advertising Mag's upcoming final show.

"Mag is leaving GeneCo on her own, but not with her eyes if Rotti has his way." she concluded.

Octavia stepped outwards, back into the center of the vault "Their are mounds of dirt on GeneCo in here, but" Octavia looked up shily "I probably shouldn't have told you that, because you work for GeneCo".

It was then that Octavia realized how deeply she had dug herself into this odd situation.

Octavia looked up at Jasmine. Even though the face was an extremely familiar one, the actual person seemed strange and distant. But now wasn't a time for judging character.

"I think I recalled seeing a few things about him," she shuffled through papers from the same folder and pulled some more out "Here we go." She flipped through them. "It says here that Marni was pregnant soon after marrying Nathan, but she died of a mysterious illness durring childbirth. Nathan was a skilled doctor, could probably have stopped this epidemic if he put his mind to it. Anyway, he managed to save the baby, a girl. The next morning Rotti visited them. Cheryl was there too. and she noticed Rotti taking Nathan aside and talking to him. He had this odd cylindrical helmet with him. Cheryl noticed Rotti almost smirk as he looked at Marni."

Octavia then checked the date of the document "This is the last article Cheryl wrote for Vanity & Vein, the company probably let her go after that. It didn't even get published."

She shifted through the documents "And that's the last time Nathan got mentioned, after Marni died he didn't really have any celebrity relations, so the spotlight faded on him. Though there were two other things mentioned. One is that he said that whatever Marni had that killed her, passed on to his daughter, and that she would have to stay locked up in their house. And the second is their address, if you need it." Octavia pulled a highlighter from the spiral of her notebook, highlighted the address and handed the paper to Jasmine.

"So now what?"

"We".

Was Octavia part of the team now? Could she step out if she wanted to? "I can't do this" she thought to herself "I have a job, I have a life, I have a career!" but then that voice in the back of her head, the same one that told her to screw Blake said "What's more important, revealing this company for what it really is, or your dumb old cell?".

And it was then that the answer was obvious to Octavia.

"The decision is up to you Ms. Peach, but if I could make a suggestion, we should do what we can now, because if we wait for Rotti, we may be too late."

Pavi was sick of waiting for his brother, he looked to where his father stood, seemingly occupied with a possible dent on his limo. Pavi decided that this would be a good time to sneek away for a minute. He ran to the side of the house and scrolled through the employee file of numbers in his wrist communicator until he found the one he was looking for. He dialed the contact number into his communicator...for a one "Jasmine Peach"

"Signora Peach, it's-a Pavi, I needed to know, did you involve Luigi in-a your endeavors? Also....I wish-a to help you to save Magdalena...but I think you a-knew that didn't you bella?" he said into the communicator in a quiet voice. He did a double-take over his shoulder to make sure nobody was listening in "and-a answer quietly....I don't-a know who may be listening in" he whispered.

Octavia couldn't believe her ears! Pavi Largo? She knew Jasmine had connections, but from what Octavia had heard, the Largo's weren't particularly fond of interaction with company employees. And now Jasmine was talking to one of them? Octavia's heart nearly skipped a beat. Sure she was just in a room while someone talked to a Largo, and sure it was the Largo who, from what Octavia had read, would throw her in the bed at the first chance, but this was such an exciting moment for her.

"If Pavi is involved, this MUST be serious" she thought to herself.

Pavi looked around again for safety measures "well, I'm-a pretty sure this goes further than my father being a-worried about Magdalena leaving. I have a theory about-a the repoman that my father has a-chosen to do the job...after lunch with-a my family i'm-a gonna go pull his file, anything interesting that I find I will bring to you"

Pavi checked in a window to see his brother and sister still arguing, he had time "and about help 'us'....who is-a there with you bella? someone a-trustworthy I hope"

'the last thing I need is-a someone sending this information to my father, lest it-a ruins my chances of inheritance...or speeds his decisions to a-hurt Magdalena' Pavi thought to himself'

Octavia's heart nearly skipped a beat again. This was the most exciting thing to happen to her since graduating college, and even that was really just a seven-hour bore full of speaches and awards. Now it was finally her chance to dig up some real dirt on GeneCo, like she had been trying to do for so long. She forgot about her job, about Blake, about the bogus articles and focused on her new task.

She stepped out of the door and on her way to what she hoped would be the greatest discovery of her life.

*continued at sanitarium square*