Serious

by sapphireswimming

A Mystery Meat fanfiction

June 8, 2012

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"You can't possibly be serious," the woman said slowly. Unbelievingly. Impatiently. At her wit's end.

"But I am," he protested, with a hint of panic in his voice. The need for someone… anyone… to believe him.

The redhead looked at the man with a sarcastically quirked eyebrow as she straightened up the folder on the glass table in front of her. Then she folded her hands ever so elegantly and said, "You mean to tell me that not only do you now believe in the supernatural—you, they guy who refused to every step inside a church or watch a horror film in his life—now believe in the supernatural, but beyond that even, you are trying to tell me that the reason you were late for your business meeting—the meeting that you had to schedule months in advance…"

She broke off here to start another rant, fuelled by the righteous indignation of a manager who had spent far too much time and effort into setting up a single meeting that could have changed everything.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to get an appointment with Vlad Masters? The man's a billionaire. He owns companies around the world and he rarely, let me repeat, rarely… as in once in a month of Mondays… lets any outsiders meet with him unless they're the president of the next company he's looking to buy."

She stared at him accusingly. "You were going to be able to. But you missed that appointment. You lost… that opportunity. Not only did you lose it, but Masters will brand you… and this company…" she accentuated every word with a hard tap of her finger against her files. "As a failure for the rest of his life. He will refuse to have anything to do with us ever again."

She stood up and paced the room for a few hectic seconds, her heels driving into the marble floor as if she were trying to crack it. After putting her hands to her head and breathing heavily for a count to ten, she turned back to the man sitting at the table.

She explained, "He has refused point blank to let us reschedule. Every time I try to call, I get put on hold or hung up on. The last time, it wouldn't even let the number through. He's blocked it. We are never— do you hear me?— never ever going to go anywhere now."

She rested her hands on the table and leaned in closer.

"Masters is the one who makes or breaks you. What he says is law for every single business the world over. We were never going to get another opportunity like that again and you blew it. Before you even got there—oh! and that's not even the best part. That comes next. Because you said the reason that you missed this meeting was because you were attacked by…" she was pointing her finger at him, barely able to keep her words straight as her tone of voice fell dangerously low. "Let me get this straight… a ghost?"

"Not attacked, exactly." The man fidgeted in his seat and straightened his tie.

"Not… attacked… exactly?" She fumed.

"No. He… it… flew through the plane. And…" his eyes flickered down before returning to the irate stare of his boss. "…and it grabbed my glass of water."

She stared, unmoving, for a full twenty seconds before exploding.

"You miss a meeting with Vlad Masters and you have the nerve to tell me that the reason is because a freak of a spectral hallucination took your cup of water?"

"Yes…" he managed in almost a whimper. "It was the most harrowing experience of my life. Look at me, my hands are shaking."

"Your hands are shaking? Your hands are shaking?" she gasped. "They'd better be shaking because in about five seconds I'm going to tear you limb from limb!"

"No, but the delay wasn't my fault, Susan! I know you think it was, but I was ready to go on with the meeting, I was going to go right ahead. I was planning on heading straight to Masters', honest I was—!"

"Then what, in heaven's name, stopped you?"

"They had to emergency land the airplane. The stewardess serving me fainted and they thought she had gone into cardiac arrest. All of the other passengers were screaming too and the pilot couldn't calm anyone down until he contacted Midway for an emergency landing."

He looked up and was finally able to take a breath when he saw that the woman didn't look ready to kill him that instant but was ready to continue listening to what he had to say.

"Then we were ushered off the plane and all had to give statements before they let us take a different flight. And I tried to get there, honestly I did, but the plane was… we took off… I didn't get there until nearly three hours after the appointment was supposed to start, but I even paid the cabby fifty dollars extra to get me there in under twenty minutes."

He stared at her, pleading. "I did everything that I could. It was not humanly possible to make it to that meeting in time."

He blinked and looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Maybe… maybe if I had ghost powers, I might have made it…"

Susan gave a strangled sort of noise and left the conference room, slamming the door behind her until the glass walls rattled.

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