Characters: Tony, Pip, Marcus, Gibbers, Neil, Sophia
“Something’s not right,” Tony said, wiping his brow with the sleeve of his polo shirt. “My computer’s not responding anymore.”
“Did you try slamming your keyboard repeatedly?” Pip asked.
“Yeah, it’s not working. I think we have a virus in our systems.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. We’ll just have a really long and unannounced patch day tomorrow and then follow it up with three more on the weekend to fix all the additional mistakes we make.”
Marcus sat cross-legged on Tony’s desk, fiddling with a bobble head of Alf. “You geeks better get a move on. We’re not getting paid to sit around doing nothing.”
“Some of us are,” Tony muttered into his blue computer screen.
“Hey, guys!” Neil cried out, nearly knocking down the door as he barged into the room. “She’s coming!”
A sudden panic swept across the room. Marcus jumped off the desk and looked for a place to throw the bobble head, before finally deciding to shove it down his pants. Pip quickly closed out of all the 18-or-older sites that he was logged into, and Tony threw off his sweaty, grease-stained shirt and reached for another one in the box next to him. Unfortunately for the three of them, ‘she’ walked into the room when Marcus was in the process of reaching down his pants, a thousand ads of unclad females were flashing on Pip’s screen, and Tony’s hairy back was exposed to the world.
“…Ugh,” she said, holding up a hand in disgust.
“Good morning, Miss Sophia,” all the guys chanted, dazed, love-struck, gross.
“I really don’t want to hear it today,” she said. Her hand remained in the air as she walked, sidestepping, over to her desk in the corner. She took a seat with all the guys staring at her. She was a pretty thing, with ebony hair of midnight and two long strands, one on either side of her head, dyed a vivid pink. The knees of her faded jeans were decorated in butterfly patches and her skin was soft—not pale, but soft, like a pillow in the first morning rays of light. She didn’t look like she could smile, but she couldn’t frown either, and yet her face was full of emotion. Unfortunately, that emotion was annoyance now because the guys couldn’t turn their eyes away. They couldn’t believe it. A girl—a real living and breathing girl—in their presence, and she wasn’t even tied down.
This was the highlight of their so-called lives every day.
“Are you done now?” Sophia asked.
Tony sucked in his drool, slowly. “Can we…touch you?”
It had taken him months to work up the courage to ask that and she just dismissed him with something between a sigh, a click of the tongue, and another, “Ugh!”
“Honestly, you guys,” she said, putting on a one-piece headset, “I don’t even know why I work here sometimes.”
“Because your dad owns the business and you want to take it over when he bites the dust and then sell it so you never have to work an actual day in your life?” Neil guessed.
“Yeah, something like that.” She pressed the intercom button on her phone. “Gibbers… I’d like some doughnuts.”
Gibbers was sitting one desk away, but he picked up the phone anyway. “Right away!” He jumped to his feet and rushed to the cafeteria as if his life depended on it.
Sophia sighed and took off the headset, running a hair through her dark hair. “Alright, what are we working on today?”
“We’re not,” Pip said bluntly. He was the first to break out of the oh-my-God-it’s-a-female daze. “A virus has worked its way into our systems. It’ll take hours of back-logging and cross-checking to fix the problem.”
“I guess you have your work cut out for you, huh?” she asked.
“We sure do. It’d be great if you could get your dad to—”
But Sophia had already plugged her MP3 player into the computer and slipped on her headphones. That was okay, though, because as soon as she began to sway her body to the music, Pip fell right back under her spell.
“What I wouldn’t give to be in the same room as her someday,” Tony sighed, a lover’s sigh.
“Uh, you are,” Marcus pointed out. “But you’re still light-years away from her. She’d never go for somebody like you.”
“How do you know?”
“Duh. Look at you—you’re a slob! And put on a damn shirt, man. That’s just disgusting.”
“Oh, right…” Tony pulled a shirt out of his box of clean clothes that he always kept next to him and slipped into it. He began sweating again, though, when he saw Sophia peering at him out the corner of her eye. She did that all the time. Stole glances at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. He didn’t seem to realize that she was looking at the clock on the wall behind him.
Marcus leaned back against Tony’s desk, with his hand still in his pants. “Yeah… I can tell just by looking at her. She wants me. She digs the foreign guys.”
“You’re Canadian. That’s hardly foreign.”
“It’s okay, Tony. I know you’re jealous of us.”
“Us? You haven’t even gotten within five feet of her without her filing a restraining order.”
“She’ll warm to me in time.”
“Yeah, tell me when hell freezes over.”
Feeling the stares on her back, Sophia turned around and pulled the headphones down to her neck. “Are you guys planning on doing something constructive?”
Marcus just grinned and folded his arms over his chest, nodding. “Yeah… She wants me. Look at the way she’s looking at me.”
“I think she’s talking to you,” Tony said.
“Your words are sweet nothings to me,” said Marcus with an air kiss.
Sophia hurled a stapler at him. “Get to work, you greaseball!”
“Greaseball…” Marcus smiled with a staple between his eyes. “She digs me.” He collapsed to the floor.
Tony spun around in his chair and began typing frantically.
Pip grabbed a document from the printer and carried it over to Sophia. She didn’t acknowledge him at first, as if that was any surprise, so he just stood there, wriggling his fingers around the paper, until she looked up in irritation.
“What?” she asked.
“I-I-I thought you might want to see this,” he stuttered. “It’s a list of all the sectors that have been affected by the virus.”
Sophia snatched the document from him, but what looked like one sheet of paper suddenly turned into more than two hundred as the paper trail went on, all the way back to the printer, which was still spitting out paper. She looked down at the document and then up at Pip.
“…What the hell is going on? What did you guys screw up this time?”
“I…don’t think the problem originated here,” Pip said. “If the sources are right, then it originated somewhere in town. Probably in somebody’s house.”
“You’re telling me that somebody found an open door in your security system, hacked into a program designed by you, and managed to plant a virus right under your nose?”
“W-with all due respect, Miss Sophia, there are still many bugs to work out in the game. You know that. We suggested postponing the release date, but you insisted that we—”
“How does talking to me solve our problem?” Sophia asked.
“Well, um…”
“I expect you to fix it, Pip. If you don’t, I’ll find somebody who can.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He started to walk away.
“Oh, and, Pip?”
“Yes?”
Sophia tipped her lips in a light smile. “The next time you accuse me of something, I’m going to staple your balls to the inside of your underwear and fire you so fast that we’ll need an ash tray to carry you outside. Are we clear?”
“Crystal clear, ma’am.”
“Good. Now get back to work.”
Pip ran over to his desk just as Gibbers came back with a box of doughnuts in hand. Sophia took it from him without a word of gratitude, opened the box, and bit into a warm, jelly-filled doughnut as she watched the geeks pound away at their keyboards. Wiping a small glob of jelly from the corner of her smirking lips, she slipped her headphones back on and let the music carry her away.
Giantess World
