circle7 | (no subject)

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Casual engagements, although they occupied a lighter (arguably trivial) side of politics, were for Garamond as necessary as any other social obligation. The face of circle seven, Garamond handled his public relations smartly. He attended as many events as his schedule permitted, delegating the rest to representatives. This particular event, however, required Garamond in person. The invitation had been extended to him by a large corporate head and political lobbyist. Dudbar Trolt was a businessman with his claws deep in politics. To say he was a puppeteer was to put it lightly — This guy had his politicians on a noose.

The event was Trolt’s fourth marriage. The venue was a luxurious space aboard the Lunessa, a modern entertainment vessel used for meetings and conventions. It travelled around the inner Solar System to wherever it was summoned. The impromptu announcement of the wedding had forced Garamond to make quick arrangements. He’d spend the prior day cancelling and rescheduling meetings and handing out tasks to lower management. He’d packed the next morning and, after finding out his son would be unable to attend due to his pooch having an illness, plucked Calibri out of the lab without warning.

Two white suits and three hours later, they were aboard the Lunessa, waiting in a grand ballroom with upwards of a hundred others. The room was square with a high, arched ceiling. The ceiling panels looked like they opened up to reveal a window, doubtlessly to let in a view of the stars when the lights were dimmed. There were bars set up at every corner of the room and long tables with hors d’oevres. The minimalist décor on the Lunessa was the only thing that kept the environment a step away from gaudy. People shuffled about, making idle conversation and snacking. They stayed in groups of two or three, mostly. The fact that it was an hour before the wedding ceremony and that no one had much drink in them probably contributed to the lack of mingling.

Garamond, not quite sure what to do with the unexpected hour of free time, had sat down at a bar and was nursing a small glass of bourbon and ice.

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Calibri, previously nursing a finely filtered glass of just pure water (a request that had the bartender politely raising a brow before he handed it off), now sat beside Garamond with an empty glass, devoid of even the remnants of melted ice. He, unlike most other people, did not see the appeal of carrying the same half-finished drink around for extended periods of time. The only thing that accomplished was to raise the rate of possible suit-meets-beverage collisions. He had topped off his drink within five minutes of receiving it.

Granted, he hadn't seen the consequent appeal of carrying around an empty glass, either, but he had yet to find a waiter to foist it off on. Future experimentation with drinks and acquisition times would have to take that into account, he mentally noted.

"Sir," he began slowly, looking around at the lifeless party. Only the faintest hum of conversation drifted around the hall. It was like one of his petri dishes, where two entirely incompatible chemical compounds simply refused to mix or even cause a volatile reaction. The compounds just drifted around each other, politely making way, and never giving the other party the time of day. Wholly disappointing. "How long is this affair?"

Garamond had been observing the stagnant crowd with the same enthusiasm as his water-drinking neighbor. He raised his eyebrows at the inquiry, looking at Calibri, thinking on it, and looking back to the crowd of attendees with obligation written all over their faces. He reasoned that the after party wasn’t likely to last especially long.

“Four- Five hours,” he mused. “Putting a drink or two in you might make it more bearable.”

Mild disgust - mild enough such that it only showed in a slight downward quirk of one corner of his mouth - registered on Calibri's face at that. He turned to Garamond, aware that the Boss was well-informed about his distaste for alcohol considering the older man really never ceased to harp on it in some way or other over the years, and glanced down at the bourbon on the rocks being sloshed around in its cup in his hands. He just couldn't wrap his mind around the allure of it - it wasn't nearly as hallucinogenic or endorphin-inducing as some of the other substances on even the legal market, and it even tasted like poison. Unappetizing.

"I will pass," Calibri declared. "Imbibing an alcoholic passage would just make the passage of time even more labored, I believe."

“Ah,” Garamond said, and he turned his glass on his fingertips. The drink made slow spirals around the two ice cubes inside. His inflection didn’t change, but his lips were pulled straight in quiet amusement.

“I think for a while now you’ve had labored confused for relaxed. Anyway, we’ve got an hour to kill, so how about some fun?”

Calibri's eyes narrowed slightly behind his glasses. Garamond was the boss, so he must have known perfectly well that Calibri was highly unlikely to turn down anything he proposed, even if it did go against his better judgement, but...

"Every time you say that, injury is inflicted upon one of us in some manner."

“Not entirely untrue,” Garamond agreed, taking a drink from his glass. “But it’s better than wasting time being bored, you’ve got to admit.”

Putting his glass aside, Garamond fetched a skinny plastic pouch from behind his pocket square. It was filled. A line of blue powder sat along the seam. Like a well-mixed loam, it was heavy and filled with clumps, leaving a cloudy residue on the inner walls of the bag. Calibri would have recognized the substance as ground Astaronian Quartz. More commonly, it was known as ‘laughing powder.’ It was named after its unique effect, discovered by chance when human miners had inhaled the dust while carving crystals out of the mineral, as a powerful emotional stimulant for several warm-blooded species. To call it ‘laughing’ powder was a bit a misleading, however. It didn’t really make people laugh, per say. It could, definitely, but it could make people cry all the same. The quartz, much like an excitable teenager, prompted any perfectly normal emotional reaction to reach some kind of overenthusiastic, melodramatic extreme.

It was one of the few pranks Garamond liked to play that was actually legal.

Garamond reached over, stuffed the plastic bag into Calibri’s front pocket, and putting his hand on Calibri’s back, ushered him away from the bar. “Now,” Garamond began, stooping his shoulders and speaking close to Calibri’s ear. “Follow me to the center table. I’ll distract the party-goer’s. And you—” he paused to pat Calibri’s pocket.

“You’ll spike the punch behind my back. Give it a few minutes and this party’s bound to pick up a little bit, hm?”

After the pat, Calibri peeled up the small fabric flap covering the jacket's breast pocket and peered down at the barely-concealed packet of laughing powder. The distinctive light blue coloration of the substance stood out against the dark color of his clothes, even in the shadows that the pocket containment cast.

"This isn't exactly the best way to keep a low profile," he cautioned, but Calibri, too, was somewhat interested in the effects of Astorian Quartz particles on a mass of people as subdued and introverted as this. It was a much more interesting prospect than what he had witnessed so far. Maybe there would even be some rare phenomena of hysteria, and that would just be fascinating. "On your lead, Boss."

With his hands knotted together behind his back, Garamond took his place in front of the punch bowl. Garamond’s shoulders were wide and sharp when he stood without a slouch. Garamond’s frame could potentially hide two average-sized men. In front of Calibri, he was like a wall. With a mangled face and a monster-like height for a human being, Garamond naturally stood out in a crowd. He was commanding a little more attention than usual now, holding a narrow glass of cherry-topped mousse up between his thumb and pointer and using his other hand to tap on outside with a spoon.

“Your attention, If you will,” He began. “No doubt you’re all eager for the ceremony to begin. I know I am. But given that we’ve got around an hour to kill, I figured I’d take this time to say a few words about the groom.”

Considering the groom was the last of his worries, Calibri only kept a sort of peripheral sense of attention on the words Garamond was no doubt pulling out of thin air. He could care less about the groom of this event; he knew no one at this party other than his boss.

Waiting for the milling crowd to filter around to Garamond's front (a man of his charisma, even when just speaking, did instill a sense of mild curiosity), Calibri leaned over the table and kept up the pretense of inspecting the high-cost but low-interest fare for a few seconds before he finally slipped the blue powder out from his inner sleeve. He opened the small container and dumped the entire contents of the vial into the translucent, pinkish-purple bowl of drink adorning the center of the table in one smooth movement. Topping it all off, he gave the drink one good stir with its crystal ladle, though the Astorian Quartz had been ground so fine that it dissolved into the room-temperature liquid almost instantly.

Then, he stepped away, wandering back to a shadowy corner of the hall where his view of the imminent experimental observation period would be unobstructed and hopefully unnoticed. Garamond was still mid-speech, going on and on about a no-doubt imaginary story about the groom that made the guests titter with humor, but no matter. The boss knew him well enough in social situations that surely, Calibri wouldn't be difficult to find.

The name Dudbar had never seemed so exciting. While perhaps of dubious credibility, Garamond spun a tale that paid its hero more praise than the bible (also dubiously credible) did God. Garamond had a way with words in the same sense that politicians had a way with remaining humorless and stony-faced, and he lied like a fox. He was chipping away at the cold atmosphere with a story about how he knew Mr. Dudbar Trolt when they were lads, and how they once were stationed in the same acadamy abroad program, and how they had once chased a gorehog into a cafeteria kitchen spoiling that day's lunch and causing around ten grand in damages. Garamond achieved the desired result of making his audience laugh, but, being the humorless and stony-face bunch they were, it sounded something like a wheeze mixed with wet noodles going through a coffee grinder.

"And so," Garmond said, after seamlessly leading his recount of cafeteria destruction into a heartfelt list of why Dudbar Trolt was a good person and certainly not skeevy and ultimately a useless, flip-flopping pawn. "I propose a toast."

Garamond put down the dessert in his hand and exchanged it for an empty punch glass, which he prompty filled. Some raised their own drinks, others lined up at the punch bowl. Garamond's speech had captured the audience well. No one apart from a few clinging to walls and the outer bar counters had seen Calibri behind Garamonds broad square of a back, and even they put it out of their minds when they saw Garamond sipping from his glass on his way back to the bar. He took a spot at Calibri's side, his glass balanced on a tray of confections he'd taken from the table.

"Should be enough to get them started," he said

"More so than your story, hopefully," said Calibri with about as much extra dryness as he could muster to spare into his already dry tone of voice.

It was, of course, not Garamond's fault that the crowd was perhaps the most droll collection of persons found on this side of the galaxy because, honestly, what did they expect when attending an affair of this nature? But the laugh that the Boss had worked so hard to elicit had really been nothing more than a quite murmur of amusement, quarter condescension and quarter obligation, passing through the crowd like a tapering breeze.

Calibri watched almost all in attendance take a sip of their drinks, some more generous than others, maybe because they were also trying to pass the time quicker than it stubbornly wanted to go. Predictably, the smaller and slighter of the men and women came first, evidence in the heightened rate of blinking, the incremental hitch of their smiles. Those symptoms were like volatile chemicals, waiting in the bottom of their tubes.

They only needed a trigger.

Calibri tugged on Garamond's sleeve without turning back. "Do something else they'd find funny," he said, almost looking eager. It was sheer bull-headed adherence to decorum that kept the entire hall from exploding into laughter right now. It was like walking on egg shells. Once one person laughed, once they let out that first bark, the entire hall would surely follow suit. "Do you have another story?"

"I could tell another story," Garamond said as he tossed the punch out over his shoulder. "But if you'll bear with me, I think I can do better."

That was the only warning Calibri got before a flaky custard tart collided with his face. Garamond ground the pastry into the side of Calibri's face. A few seconds later the custard had spread over his hair and glasses, and the sticky crust of the pastry was clinging to his suit, droopy and deflated. Garamond quickly passed the tray of confections to the nearest attendee.

"Oh dear!" he said in what sounded like the least convincing voice he could manage, and made a grand gesture to Calibri: "Who threw that? How dare you!"

There was a very, very long silence. The party-goers directly around them looked like wide eyed animals. They were frozen in confusion. They all knew Garamond had been the offending tart flinger. They'd seen him. But they were all either too bewildered or too terrified to accuse him. Then, after a few seconds of stunned silence, one of them laughed. The scene had been so ridiculous that eventually his laughter had lost to his fear of Garamond, and it had slithered out like a long snort and then exploded into a guffaw. The two adjacent to him were the next to fall, succumbing to a fit of laughter.

"Think it's funny?" Garamond menaced, and the man in the center looked all of the sudden looked so petrified he may as well have been a very shocked looking statue.

As Garamond stalked up to him his bones were shaking in such a way that you might think his skeleton was planning on leaving hia body behind.

"Let's see how you like it, then."

Splat.

The man, now obviously high off his ass, broke down into tears. A fist full's worth of sashimi tumbled down his head and off of his coat, each hitting the floor with its own little isolated 'plop.' And while the man had been scared to the point of crying like a cornered baboon, he was also laughing. He was releasing huge wails of it. Sashimi still shaking off of his shoulders, he bowed down on his knees, and it was impossible to distinguish anymore if he was incredibly sad or incredibly amused.

The people next to him also began to cry.

The fit of laughter spread like wild fire. Around Garamond, there was nothing but bright red faces and watery eyes. Even many that hadn't partaken in the punch were howling.

And then came the eclair.

It wasn't clear where it had been thrown from, but it sailed a good ten feet above the crowd, attracting. Whoever responsible had impeccable aim, because it cut through the air like an eel in water, and when it landed, did so chocolate side up, flat on Garamonds face.

Hidden behind flaking layers of an impeccably baked tart crust, Calibri huffed out a breath. It sounded like a short-lived laugh, but then again, it could have as well been a breath of disbelief that someone would retaliate, or a breath of vindication that he was avenged by means of cream and chocolate, or it might just have been a particularly pronounced exhale that he might have been holding after being taken by such surprise.

But it might have been a laugh.

He reached out to where the nearest food attendant was stock still with confusion and disbelief, wondering just how such chaos had broken out considering the relative little Garamond had actually done (and what he had hadn't all been funny). The waiter's shock served Calibri well enough - it made the dish of little tiramisu squares not even an arm's reach away. It was all too easy for Calibri to grab one delicately with his thumb and forefinger, and then pelt it into the crowd where it landed half in a woman's mouth, open wide with laughter, and half smeared across her cheek.

With not one but two proverbial bullets fired, the entire hall all but dissolved into a laughing, food-flinging frenzy as poor aim and, in some cases, lack of aim entirely made for a free-for-all in the center of the room.

Picking up an oblong pot lid, Garamond held it up over his forearm as a makeshift shield. He flattened his other hand against Calibri's chest, maneuvering the both of them backwards out of the crossfire. He had the smile of a trouble-maker on his face. It was the kind that, even with its obscuring veil of chocolate frosting, would give him away as the mischief maker in an instant if someone where to take notice to him. Now, though, not a soul was focused him. The hall had erupted into a full blown food fight. And despite the trouble it would no doubt cause, and the mess, and the possible consequences it could incur, Garamond looked at the moment like he had been freed from a thousand responsibilities.

A more sentimental man would have taken a moment to appreciate it for what it was - a second where sixty people high on laughing serum could relieve even the head of the System's largest organized crime organization of his worries, a second where he was having a genuine bit of fun (even if it was at the expense of others). A more wise man would have let it last for as long as possible, knowing that the pressures of the outside world would all too soon rush back in for the beat-down, that it was worth hoarding these precious seconds when you could, considering they were in such short supply.

But because Calibri was neither of those things, he ruined the moment anyway by smashing the last custard cake he had managed to nab on the way back into the underside of Garamond's chin - the closest part of the man's face he could reach at his height.

They stood staring at each other for a second after that, with Calibri watching his handiwork dribble down his superior's chin. "I believe that makes us even, sir."

Garamond looked reasonably shocked for someone who had been assaulted with a fistful of custard. The shock, however, was not actually linked to the cream filling, but to the fact that Calibri, usually a slope-shouldered textbook bundled up behind an oversized labcoat and a pair of glasses, was playing along. A grin quirked the line of his lips when he looked at Calibri, but his brows were still scrutinizing.

"You're supposed to be on my side," he huffed.

Under the canopy of Garamond's makeshift shield, suddenly it sounded like hail on a tin roof, and bits of biscuit came crumbling down around the pot lid. They missed Calibri narrowly. Garamond had taken him into it like it had been an umbrella. Garamond used his unoccupied wrist to wipe his face, and lowered the lid once the pelting had forfeited. His knuckle stayed on his lip when his glance then left Calibri.

A few men in security suits had shuffled through the door. Unable to deploy their typical arsenal of taser guns and batons, they began sedating guests with fire extinguishers. A frothy fog slowly spread out around the ballroom floor, and foamy liquid expelled from extinguisher to party guest, doing little to quell the chaos but a lot to add to the mess. From the looks of it, Dudbar had gotten wind of what was going on. And in all truthfulness it would be hard not to notice. The volume of the room had been rising at such an alarming late that the live band had been drown out long ago (and had been forced to stop playing out of fear that their equipment would fall to victim to the flying carbohydrates).

Garamond anchored a custardy hand on Calibri's shoulder. "How about you and I duck out of here for a bit?"

"A reliable course of action," Calibri agreed, eyeing the hand but not bothering to remove it. After all, it was a lost cause anyway - despite how custard-coated Garamond's fingers were, Calibri's suit and appearance were already a lost cause that he hadn't cared much about to begin with.

Flicking a piece of mousse off his glasses, Calibri followed Garamond as the man, surprisingly stealthy even with his size, maneuvered around the frenzied crowd and slipped out of the hall before they, too, could be hosed down with fire extinguishers. (The crowd could have just as easily been subdued using minute amounts of neuro-tranquilizers. The fire extinguishers were just a superfluous waste of compressed chemicals.) Once or twice, he had to hold onto the slippery cream-splattered tail of Garamond's suit jacket to avoid getting lost in the still shuffling crowd, but they eventually managed to escape the premises none too worse for the wear...in a matter of speaking.

The valet staff looked appalled to see them.

"Is it human custom to carry around vials of laughing serum at weddings?" Calibri asked mildly.

"Of course not," Garamond said, slipping generous bills into the staffer's hands before they left the premises.

"Hungry?"

Calibri, covered from head to about knee-level in all sorts of edible delectibles, stared.

Or at least he gave a valiant effort at trying to. About three-quarters of his glasses were smeared with cream or jelly of some nature, but rest assured - the bottom half of his left eye was definitely staring.

Garamond smiled back at Calibri, offering an unapologetic shrug.

"Didn't have much of a taste for the Hors d'oeuvres."

"I suppose you expect us to walk into a food service locale like this?" he asked, illustrating his point of 'this' by raising a soppy arm. A piece of jellied maraschino cherry rolled off the top and splatted on the floor.

"Why not? We're paying customers," Garamond hailed a cab.

"Rather a change of clothes first?"

"Yes," Calibri said shortly, pushing his glasses for the umpteeth time up his creamed nose. "I am becoming increasingly aware that certain parts of me are beginning to congeal and I don't think that would be conducive to the rest of your...plans."

"You could be more convincing, but I'll fold," Garamond said as a taxi rolled up. He opened the backseat door, stepping aside for Calibri to enter first.

"We'll take this too the station and head back from there."

Calibri was mildly surprised anyone had pulled up at all. The statistical evidence given the contributing factors seemed to suggest otherwise, but Calibri supposed that homo sapiens sapiens were easily swayed to do just about anything if one waved enough currency bills in their face. Either way, he slid in gratefully, considerably less grateful about the squish of pastry against his back as he sat back in the leather seat.

"To the docking station," he said authoritatively once Garamond closed and he locked the door. Once the vehicle took off, he glanced sideways at Garamond. "And then to the cleaners, sir."

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Sorry I just made this up on the fly, hope it's ok!

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