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Show white teeth, eyes chilly, the fingers of one hand drumming on the tabletop in front of her. Her blood-red laquered fingernails might have startled a SaurianLynx. The young Assistant Deputy, sitting beside Chu in a smart white tunic and leggings, nodded his light blond head enthusiastically to assure Brandon that he was not only there but marry, he was eager for meaningful work! His glistening coif was arrayed in bangs, all the way around his head. The young AD was Chu's second-in-command and on the way-he hoped-up. Indeed his was not to answer questions at all but to insert into the conversation significant observations at appropriate moments so that he could be remembered favorably at promotion time. The remaining Manager had slipped in the door directly behind the short man in blue and was a bit out of breath. The latecomer, none other than Phrapp, took a seat unobtrusively at the lower end of the table. In all of Phrapp's forty years in the BauerNetwork he had not been able to rise above Assistant Vice Manager because the word eccentric kept creeping into his annual reviews. Alas, and he had showed so much promise when he entered service upon his seventeenth TwelveMonth! However; that was before he fell in love with a lady of the Doctor Class, Kostya's devils take the BauerWorlde Network and all its absurdly concocted traditons! But Phrapp had left off grinding his teeth about his lost love long before and harbored only a great sorrow within his breast and an unbridled desire to shake the BauerNetwork into a vast pile of dust. He settled back in his chair at VM Brandon's question and raised a finger laconically. "I be right bonny," he said, mournfully. Then he began searching the pockets of his brown longdoublet in an abstracted way for his cache of peppermints. 48 |