Beautiful Disaster

by C. J.

  “Well, maybe they are so pre-occupied with the lab damage and reconstruction they forgot about the fabulous new formula.” But there wasn’t much conviction in Danny’s voice.

  Kevin shook his head. “A huge company forgetting about a new formula? I don’t think so. Business must go on. They have other people to worry about reconstruction.”

  “Then I guess we better take extra precautions regarding our stealth production.”

  “And for starters, let’s stop yakking about it in front of Lexi and get home and figure out what to do,” said Kevin. And with that, they jumped into the beast and drove back to their apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  KEVIN, DANNY AND MAGGIE decided she would continue to work at the university to deflect suspicion later on when she “discovered” the formula. Also, it might look odd for all three of them to be off work all at the same time.

  Maggie had just entered her classroom and heard a song on a student’s iPod for what seemed like the millionth time. It was a good thing she liked the Chili Peppers and really liked that song, otherwise she would have made an example of the student long ago and displayed his beaten carcass to the others as a warning.

  “OK, OK, music time is over. Let’s get to work, everyone” As she was saying this, Maggie spotted the head of her department skulking around her classroom’s doorway. “Uh oh, that Jacquess mishap has come back to haunt me. That didn’t take long. Oh well better play nice,” she thought.

  “Dr. Raymond, what do you want? If you want to audit this class, you’ll have to see admissions first.” Idiot, what happened to play nice? Just listen to what he has to say, nod and keep your mouth shut unless you want to end up as Trainwreck’s assistant.

  As with most of the professors on staff at the university, Dennis Raymond was in both awe and fear of Maggie. Today Dennis was more in anxiety mode and danced around the doorway in preparation for a quick getaway if things went sour.

  “Could I have a word, Professor Penny? I won’t take more than a minute of your time.” He then promptly shot into the hallway, banging the door closed behind him.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, while I speak with Dr. Raymond you can all pretend to start work on your projects while you are in fact draining the batteries on your smartphones.” With that snarky remark, Maggie left the room and nearly trampled Dr. Raymond, who was rehearsing his speech in front of the door.

  “Dr. Raymond, what is so urgent that you had to interrupt my class?” Damn it, what is wrong with you? Be nice.

  “Well, Maggie, may I call you Maggie? We’ve known each other for years. We should be on a first name basis by now.”

  “Of course you may, Dennis.” Now was that so fucking hard? Oh God, he’s staring at me, did I just say that last part out loud?

  Dennis gathered his thoughts and with deliberation said, “Yes, well, in the past we’ve had our differences, and as with all great minds, occasionally one may stray outside the norms of society and bend the rules a tad. You are one of our most brilliant if not the most brilliant professor I’ve had the pleasure to work with.” Raymond, who was walking in an ever increasingly smaller circle, aimed his remarks at the floor.

  Maggie’s patience, which usually lasted only several milliseconds, wore out “Dennis, stop before you wear a hole in the floor. This is going to be a huge favor, I can tell by the enormous load of sh__pooh you are heaping around me. Now out with it, man.”

  “Maggie, Associate Professor Tranwrach has asked to take a leave of absence for an indefinite period of time. I am asking some of the staff to fill in for him until we can get a substitute for the remainder of the year,” Raymond blurted out to a point beyond Maggie’s left ear.

  “If you want suggestions on a replacement, there’s that lovely Ficus plant in the student union. I think it would thrive as long as one of Tranwrach’s students remembers to water it regularly. You would see a huge improvement in student test scores and a downturn in accidents, especially in the flammable department.”

  “Now Maggie, be serious, a plant take can’t take a professor’s place, not even an associate professor’s position.” Dennis paused for a moment and then said thoughtfully, “No matter how tempting that would be. Besides that classroom gets minimal sunlight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “YOU DID NOT SERIOUSLY tell Dr. Raymond to replace Trainwreck with a plant,” laughed Danny later that evening at his place. “I mean really, a ficus? A redwood or a cactus would last much longer and need less care.”

  “Actually when Raymond started crunching the numbers in his head and realized how much money he could save with one less salary and benefits, I nearly had him. But I went too far and told him how photogenic Freddy would look on the web page.”

  “Freddy? You named him?”

  “Of course. You can’t have an unnamed professor teaching basic chemistry. Associate Professor Freddy Ficus. It has a lovely ring to it. Plus think of all the free figs we could have.”

  “I think I’m getting a headache. What does a ficus know about chemistry?”

  “What does Trainwreck know about chemistry?”

  “Well, you got me there. So when does the fig producer start?”

  “Unfortunately never. Freddy must remain in the student union for now. I and a few other suckers will be teaching Trainwreck’s classes until they get a replacement.”

  “So why does Trainwreck need a leave absence. It can’t be woman trouble. I’m not sure he would know a woman if he ran into one, which I’m sure he does several times a day.”

  “I don’t know. Raymond was rather vague on that. It seems Trainwreck was in such a state of quivering jelly no one could understand him when he asked for the leave of absence. Human resources just granted it to him figuring it was something traumatic. I think they just wanted him out of their office before something spontaneously combusted.”

  “Well, don’t take on too much Maggie. You need all your strength to invent the formula of the century, and to take care of your man,” With that, Danny grabbed Maggie and flung her on the couch to find out how much strength she had left. It turns out she had quite a bit, and Danny discovered he was quite fit himself.

  In the midst of tearing off Danny’s clothing, Maggie paused, “Where’s Kevin? If he appears, this could be very embarrassing for him. He is such an impressionable and naïve young man.”

  “He’s off on a date and told me not to wait up for him, like I’m his mother, for God’s sake” and tore off his pants, both legs at once.

  “Kevin, a date? Who is he seeing?”

  “That female SWAT person from the other night. She actually fell for all his bullshit.”

  “How nice.”

  “Yes, could we not talk about Kevin while you are getting naked?”

  “Naked? Was I getting naked? I thought this was inside-out day, and we were just turning our clothing inside out.

  ”I’ll show you inside out, baby,” Danny said, and fell on top of Maggie much to her delight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “HOW’S THE PATSY DOING? Gretchen asked, Cintia Escobar, head chemist in Teaberry’s R&D department, after Gretchen had received an urgent message from her. Cintia was one of the few people at Teaberry who Gretchen could trust, up to a point. Cintia had been with Teaberry since graduate school. She had minored in business and was no one’s fool. She looked like your everyday mother and housewife with her plump figure and easy going smile, but she had worked her way up the company ladder balancing career and family, and she was very business savvy.

  Gretchen had told Cintia that they needed Martin Tranwrach to protect them from Lexi’s lawyers. They would put his name on everything and take all the profits. She had given Cintia the ingredients and approximate quantities she’d gotten from the video feed from Lexi Corp. and from Suzanne’s downloads.

  “You missed it. Today changed everything.” Cintia told Gretchen. “I didn’t tell you because there was a good possibility this new in
gredient wouldn’t go anywhere. The idiot, this wonderful sent from the heavens idiot, just made the formula even more miraculous. Several weeks ago he stumbled into the lab with a handful of graphs and charts mumbling something no one could understand. He wandered around with everyone guarding their stations to keep their work safe from destruction, shoved a folder into my hands and flapped out the exit. I looked it over and handed it over to one of my lead chemists who said it looked very promising. Yesterday we tried the formula out with this new additive, and you will not believe what the fuck happens. Remember that burn I’ve had since childhood?” Cintia rolled up the sleeve on her right forearm. “Gone. Not only that, but I had a cut on that arm from yesterday, and it’s gone as well.

  Gretchen looked at Cintia’s pristine arm and abruptly sat down, briefly speechless. “I think we are going to be fucking rich.”

  The first thought Cintia had when she discovered this miraculous side effect had been, I think we have crossed a line we were never meant to cross. But she saw the look in her boss’s eye as Gretchen asked, “How did he get that ingredient?”

  “Talking to Tranwrach was like trying to talk to a brain-damaged hamster. I have no idea. All I know is that it’s brilliant,” Cintia said.

  Several weeks ago before Teaberry called him, he remembered Maggie had those answer keys. He thus wandered into Maggie’s office when she was teaching a class. God knows he would never again enter her room when she was there given the last time he had been caught in her office. She terrified him.

  Tranwrach had just grabbed the answer key he was looking for when he then remembered he also needed some file folders. He didn’t dare go to the supply room since the supply room clerk frightened him as well. He pulled open a drawer in Maggie’s office and found, stuck all the way in the back, a couple of folders. Aha! But, no, they are used. But what was this? They were full of such lovely graphs. Graphs and charts, all in brilliant bright colors. Page after page of charts and graphs, oh my.

  Tranwrach, who loved graphs and charts, and OMG, and if they were in color, that just about blew his mind, and nearly swooned. He fell into the chair behind Maggie’s desk and slowly leafed through all the beautiful pages. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I took these lovely pages. These were shoved way in the back of the drawer, and they didn’t seem to apply to any of her courses. They must be some sort of promotional material of some kind. She’ll never miss these, he told himself. He stuck them under his blazer and coolly sauntered out of her office. He assumed he looked cool. In fact, if anyone had been watching, Tranwrach appeared to have glue on the bottoms of his shoes, as he would suddenly stop, sway, and then jump ahead, leapfrog like. So he took the trials home with him and placed them in his collection. He forgot about them until a week into his supervisory job at Teaberry when some of the paperwork done by his team looked vaguely familiar. He looked through his collection of graphs and charts sorted by date, and brought the trials to Teaberry.

  “Whatever that idiot did,” Cintia told Gretchen, as long as we keep him away from open flame, I think we will be fine. Right now I’ve got him doing busy work and away from anything vital. As long as everyone remembers to call him team leader, he’s happy doing basically nothing while the rest of us actually work. So far I don’t think he has a clue that what we are making has nothing to do what he submitted.”

  “How did you get around that? He can’t be that clueless.”

  “Well, he is pretty clueless, but I told him that the ingredients are in unmarked different colored jars to prevent anyone from stealing our product, since that’s the protocol in most labs. I have the master sheet in my office. He never goes in there. In fact, I don’t think he knows how to find my office. He got lost coming back from lunch today, and the cafe is only around the corner from here. I just hate to rely on someone like him, that’s all.”

  “Don’t worry, I have another idiot to provide intel regarding our Lexi situation.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, and the less you know from that end, the better you are.”

  As clueless as Tranwrach was, he’d accidentally found Cintia’s office while looking for the men’s room, and thus saw the master sheet with ingredients and the approximate quantities needed to make the formula. If Cintia had been less professional or if she had stuck with a black and white copier/printer, things might have been different. Less pretty, but much saner. But Tranwrach saw sheets of paper with all sorts of graphs and charts and best of all they were in color. They were also labeled with his old formula number MT20. He’d nearly swooned. How lovely. I must have these for my binder and immediately made color copies of all the material.

  When he came home for the day and went over his binder as he usually did, he immediately looked at the new procured graphs. Oh my, they were so impressive. Pie charts and graphs all in beautiful color. As he read the list of ingredients, he did not recognize any of them from his original formula. In fact, unlike most beauty products, all the ingredients were natural. My god you could make your own formula after a quick trip to a produce store. Except for that one ingredient but you can get that anywhere. These thoughts disappeared quickly when he turned the page and saw more colorful pie charts. These had magenta and turquoise slices, how delightful.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  MILLWOOD WAS GOING over the weekly report on Danny and Kevin given to him by one of his outside contractors. Kevin had been correct. There was no way Millwood was going to let them out of his sight when they had been on the brink of a discovery significant enough to warrant an overt attack by another company. Millwood could only presume Teaberry was that company. They were the only ones bold enough and devious enough to try something like a full out attack on a competing company. As Millwood leafed through the report, he was amazed at the activity or rather lack of activity on the part of Danny and Kevin who spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping, playing video games, and grocery shopping. They certainly do not look like gourmet types to me. Well, maybe Montgomery but my God who are they cooking for, their entire apartment complex? Millwood thought.

  In fact, Danny and Kevin gathered ingredients for many trials to get the correct dosages for the formula. At night when Maggie returned home from the university Danny and Kevin would let their teenage neighbors play their video gaming system in exchange for their car. They then snuck down the fire escape and drove over to Maggie’s. Kevin, being somewhat of a paranoid personality, insisted on this cloak and dagger exit from their apartment while Danny just liked sneaking around and possibly messing with an unknown entity that might or might not be watching.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  MAGGIE HAD HER OWN contact with a small but profitable beauty manufacturer that specialized in all natural beauty products. Thanks to selling a few ideas to this company, Maggie had allowed been able to purchase the house and equipment for her lab.

  It had been almost a month since Danny and Kevin had ingested and absorbed the formula, and there had been no adverse changes in their appearance or healing abilities. They had also run the formula through standard FDA stability testing. The samples were left out for twenty-eight days and tested again after this period to determine if the product was still valid and the preservatives had held up. Since the formula passed all the tests, Danny and Kevin felt they had enough data to give to Maggie’s contact, so that production could begin.

  Danny and Kevin had also returned to work after successfully passing their EAP counseling sessions. Kevin had hacked into the counselor's computer and took a peek at the questions usually asked in these sessions and briefed Danny on what their responses should be. After their sessions, the counselor submitted a report to Lexi that both Danny and Kevin were fit to return to work. Since they felt that their time at Lexi would be short, since the formula was going to make them insanely rich, they promptly agreed to start the next day.

  Right now they were in Maggie’s garage, waiting for her to return from work and hopefully bring dinner with her. Maggie and
the guys spent most of their time in her garage and she had consequently poured most of her money into the comfort and design of the lab. The heated and air-conditioned lab had large comfortable leather chairs, a flat screen TV, and Blu-ray player. The old Victorian house was similarly furnished. The living room had comfortable leather sofas and chairs, which looked as though several wrestling teams held practice on them on a regular basis, another flat screen TV, and Blu-ray player. The dining room and kitchen, however, looked like they had just come out of a showroom. The majority of the appliances in the kitchen were in pristine condition, and the gleaming stove and oven looked untouched.

  Danny was concerned that Mr. Millwood and/or the board would want the formula they had been working on as soon as they returned, but Kevin had covered that problem.

  “You see, Danny, I wasn’t just working on the formula, I was also working on their formula.”

  “Isn’t our formula the same formula as their formula?”

  “Yes. Up to a point, except where ours erases all flaws and seems to be permanent, not to mention somehow turning us into self-healing machines, this second formula is a very watered down version.”

  “How watered down?”

  “Well, it seems to erase a lot of flaws but really just fades them quite a bit. And it lasts for only a week or so, and doesn’t turn one into a super healing machine.”

  “Still that is quite impressive and enough to get Mr. Millwood off our backs for quite a while.”

  “Yes, that is the point. And by the time Lexi produces our watered down version, the real one will be out there making us billionaires.”

  “Other than one of us getting super greedy and killing the other two, I don’t see what could go wrong with the plan.”