Centered, steady, or none of the above (OPEN)

[Yulia Sokolov]

She really needed to fix this desk. Ideally she also needed to figure out what happened to the desk in the first lace was but was aware that it was unlikely that would happen. Either her students had gotten really bold or else someone had mixed up her room with another trainer’s because when Lia had come in this morning the door had been unlocked. She had thought nothing of it until about thirty seconds later. Lia had placed her coffee and her bag down on the desk and suddenly there came a clank and a crash. The two legs on the left side of the desk had almost instantly collapsed. Everything had slid across the desk and onto the floor into what became a coffee covered mess.

Lia had watched with some surprise but absolutely no amusement. She knelt down and took a look at the legs. Yes, there it was, the screws were missing. Lia pursed her lips together, but there was nothing she could do about it right now. She would have to call maintenance in a little while, but she had sessions to do first. In the meantime she set about trying to salvage as much as she could from her bag. It seemed like the brunt of the coffee spill had fallen on her library book, leaving it less of a paperback and more of a paperblob. She picked up the rather pathetic looking collection of sopping pages and moved it closer to a window. It would dry out, but there was no way she could return it. She went back to the bag and kept digging.

Then she heard the door open. She spoke without yet looking up. “Just a moment and I’ll be right with you. Let me just find the schedule if it is still in one piece and readable.”

[Evan Coleman]

(OOC = Hi! Mind if I jump in?)

"Oh, sweet coffee," Evan murmured tenderly as he wound his way through Hammel's early morning calm, "not a morning goes by where my love for you does not increase a thousandfold. What do you say I make an honest woman of you and we get hitched?"

If the coffee cup in his hand had any thoughts on the matter, it gave no sign. This did not deter Evan.

"Just think of it, coffee! You and me, settling down in one of those old bunga -" a slurping sound briefly punctuated this tender speech, "(ooh, that's good) - bungalows, like they used to make in the thirties? You and me, growing old together, maybe a few little expresso shots running about underfoot after a few years time?"

The coffee cup remained impassive to this display of romantic zeal.

Evan briefly wondered if this job was driving him slightly crazy. He'd only been working here for less than a week, and already his life had taken a turn for the decidedly strange. He found himself writing notes constantly, trying to set down every student that he sensed might need someone to talk to, every set of adolescent emotional hieroglyphs flitting around this wonderful madhouse of a school. And when it wasn't notes, it was paperwork, correspondence, trying to figure out the bloody listhost system some jokester of an IT guy had seen fit to grace Hammel with in his absence.

He loved it all, of course. It was like working in a combination of an art museum, a nuclear power plant, and the most dramatic archaeological site on the planet. But he was beginning to wonder if his increased affection for coffee (he, who had once boasted that he would never submit to caffeine as an expediter to his body's natural wakefulness!) might be indicating that he had bitten off a tad more than he could chew.

A sudden wet clatter from one of the offices jerked him back to reality. He strode over and opened the door.

The spectacle that greeted him behind the doors was, in many ways, pitiful. The desk was off-kilter, and its contents appeared to have slid onto the floor and met with an unfortunate coffee-related end. A blond woman was rifling through a similarly soaked bag, clearly in the hopes of saving the contents.

Her emotions had palpable texture to his senses, a sculpture of iron self-control and marble solemnity, although highlighted by red and orange accents of a quiet enjoyment of life (ooooh, and it was a new growth! Fun!), all framed by . . . hmm. Anxiety? Caution? Some cocktail of the two? It was a familiar design from an odd angle, and Evan's curiosity was mildly piqued.

"Oh, I don't have an appointment! I just followed the sounds of catastrophe from the hall. Anything I can do to help?"

[Deleted]

((OOC: Jumping in on this, I meant to last night but sleepy times interrupted. ^^ ))

Just as soon as Renee heard the clamor from the one of the other offices, a smile found its way onto her lips. She set down her pen, giving the poor thing a break from all the paperwork she was swamped with this morning, and pushed herself away from her desk. A desk that was more than stable and hadn't broken once in the nine years she'd been a trainer at Hammel.

Her pink floral A-line swayed in subtle ripples as she made a b-line for the source of the calamitous noise. Outside the door of one of the younger trainers was the new counselor, a gentleman who had only been at the school only a short while, but whom she desired a chance to counsel with. As in small talk.

"Mr. Coleman," Renee started upon her approach. "Fraternizing already?" she teased. "I didn't take you for that sort of gentleman." Renee leaned against the frame of the doorway and crossed her sandled feet. She leaned forward and poked her head around the corner of the open door to look down at Yulia. "Goodness. What happened here, Yulie?"

[Yulia Sokolov]

And there was the schedule, damaged but mercifully still readable. It wasn’t something that she needed terribly, given that at the point the kids knew where they needed to be and when, but all the same she liked to keep track. Plus, it tended to be the paper on which she collected important bits of information whenever someone stopped by or called while she was working. As a result it was also riddled with phone numbers and emails and the other odd note that she could not remember the purpose of. Many of these had gotten smeared in the aftermath, but that was ok. Those were things that she could live with losing as most of it had already been backed up. All this meant was that life was telling her it was time to get a proper schedule book rather than one piece of very abused looking paper. She sighed and started to blow on it to try to help dry it off.

However, the voice that responded to her was not one she recognized. She stood and turned, the sad piece of paper still in her hand, and looked at the person. She did not recognize him, but that wasn’t all that surprising. After all, people came and went. “The only casualty seems to be my bag.” She paused and then added “Oh, and the desk as well.” She took a step towards the other end of the desk and tapped her fingers on it, and then pressed her hand down to see if those legs would give as well. They did not, they held firm. “It appears that I’ve been pranked. Honestly it could be much worse, I feel rather lucky that this was all of it.” But then something else occurred to her. “Oh, but I haven’t checked the drawers yet… hmm.”

Then came a more familiar voice. Lia still just stood there, unsure if it would be considered impolite or not if she went back to her ‘bag o’ coffee’. “Hello Renee, He kids have caught me it looks like. I’ll get everything back in order soon enough. I think I have a screwdriver floating around here somewhere, and they were good enough to leave the screws on the floor there. It should be a quick fix I think.” She put the piece of paper down on the desk then, which worked because the soggy thing stuck to the surface, and wiped her slightly damp hands on her pants.

“I’m Yulia, by the way,” she said, turning her attention back to the man she didn’t know. She extended a mostly-dry-of-coffee hand.

[Evan Coleman]

Evan took the proffered hand, doing his best to ignore the coffee coating it.

"Evan. New school counselor. Pleasure to meet you. And Ms. Hendricks, fraternize? Moi? Fraternization is my job!"

He spoke jovially, but remained somewhat cautious. Ms. Hendricks had been there when he was a student at Hammel, and he wasn't sure how informal he was allowed to be. He'd never had class with her, but he'd heard mostly positive and slightly awed things from those friends of his that had. Even his friend Emmet, who was so negative that Evan had been daily surprised that he hadn't hung himself in a fit of pique already, could only say of her that she was "domineering".

It didn't help that, to his senses, she read like a character from a Dumas novel, steel and velvet intertwined seamlessly with an overpowering smell of cinnamon. If Cardinal Richelieu were alive today and holding elected office, Evan reflected, he would find a worthy opponent in Renee Hendricks.

"Besides," he resumed, turning back to Yulia, "is sabotaging teacher's desks a regular occurrence around here? Because it definitely wasn't in my day. Should I be locking my office every time I step out?"

[Deleted]

"I see." Renee looked at the fallen desk, then down at the screws which were so generously left behind. "At least it was just a simple prank. No real harm done, it looks like. Aside from the coffee." Taking the screws out of the desk was a far cry from troublesome in Renee's book, just a mild inconvenience. Renee herself used to terrorize the teachers and trainers back when she was a student at Hammel, this was nothing compared to some of the stunts she and her girls pulled off.

Renee turned to Evan and playfully scoffed at his protests to fraternizing. "Just don't get yourself arrested. With the teachers is bad enough, but you'd be surprised just how many students will try to take advantage of your "friendliness"." Renee remembered this young one, though only from the other instructors. An awkward individual who hides his insecurities with humor. In other words, a goofball. Which wasn't a bad thing, not in the least. But it seems that awkward nature had trailed behind him like a lost puppy-dog on his journey into adulthood and, subsequently, as Hammel's new counselor.

"You might have to, if the students like you enough." She snickered at his paranoia and helped herself into Yulia's office to provide assistance to her fellow trainer. "I will have to say, at least they're being more creative than just putting a water bucket over the doorway or thumbtacks on your desk chair or even launching spit-wads at you through a straw." Renee giggled. Even now, as a "responsible" adult, she still found a sliver of humor and entertainment in such childish pranks. "Those were the things we used to do. Very old-school."

[Yulia Sokolov]

“No, it isn’t, really they are good kids. Nothing would have be damaged if I hadn’t put my coffee cup on the wrong side of my purse.” It was the truth, there was really no harm done. After all, the important things were inside the desk itself. Lia started to rustle through the drawers, finding nothing else out of order beyond just a tilt. She was looking for something specific, having realized that perhaps this was not the best time to shake hands. He had been kind enough to oblige her anyways. There they were just as usual, second drawer down on the right. She pulled out the container of hand wipes, opening it and pulling one out for herself. Then she offered them to Evan. “Sorry about that.”

“At least I can say I never got the bucket of water over the head. I would have hated that, I really would have.” She figured that they wouldn’t be so abrasive, given that she was tough by reputation. No one wanted to unleash that fury. It would be a bad mess for them if they did. “I’ve seen others get worse, I must be lucky.” If this was all she’d ever get thrown at her then she could go out happy.

She got down on the floor so she could take a good look at the desk. She could call maintenance, or she could probably fix this herself. It seemed like the job was a pretty simple one. She’d just need to figure out how to prop up the desk so it didn’t squish her fingers. She sat down in her chair and started to look through the desk to see if she had a screwdriver in there.

“I’m sorry, I’m not ignoring you both, really. Just the quicker it’s back on all its feet the better.”