"[color=#FF47AF]You must be Ms. Ví. If you’re ready then he'll see you right now.[/color]"

Oozing with a great smugness, almost to the degree of flippancy, the secretary's eyes slid from her lap to her desk's computer screen, and then from that place into Ona's face, cavernous with makeup which dried and peeled in layers like sedimentary rock; ancient, geological, as measured in the calendar of the workplace, where a proper woman would rather arrive in a toga and laurel wreath than in [i]yesterday's[/i] belt-dress (that dreaded modifier, [i]yesterday[/i], indicating a fashion too stale to be new and exciting, but still too young for quaintness and historicity). Between her minimal makeup, her squared, boyish clothing, and the fickleness with which her locks of hair could not decide whether they wanted to stay in the bun or fall playfully to curtain her face, the girl-woman's aesthetic screamed mousey and meek and girl-next-door, and undoubtedly her handler devoured this ploy with gluttony gleaming at his teeth. Ona knew better. She knew that even though, when she passed the desk, she saw that the girl's lap was empty, and her computer screen was set to the snowy glare of calendars and spreadsheets, the secretary spent most her day cackling at her "friends'" fashion mistakes on social media, staving her boredom away with her favorite pastime, [i]schadenfreude[/i]. Further, she knew this girl flung at her perhaps the most vicious, venomous insult she as a modern woman could conceive: pretending not to notice the many flaws in her grooming.

Skovgard, too, carried plastic airs about him. But his, somehow, had a penetrative quality, gentle and frictionless as they slithered through Ona's mental blockades. For one, he was perhaps the last man on civilized earth who still wore glasses, rather than plastiglass retinas, or even the contact lenses which themselves were much outdated, but which at least bestowed the invaluable gift of modesty. The feebleness of his eyes was something he felt no great urge to conceal, not when they had withered away in fleeing from the wrinkles which conquered his face, and the grey which commandeered the fine, wispy hairs both on his scalp and his silky chin. His suit, like the rest of him, was old-fashioned and stuffy, but it only augmented the grandfather’s woolly must which he wore like a thin mask of cologne, a subtle change in the hues of his atmosphere.

"[color=#FF6363]Just a moment,[/color]" he said in his accent, rich and thick like custard. He had cast his gaze sidelong, toward a sputtering machine near the far edge of his desk. "[color=#FF6363]For all our technological prowess, we still haven't learned how to make our printers do what we want of them.[/color]" The machine wheezed and writhed as it tried to comprehend his orders.