Orientation
Part 3- Plumbing Nightmare

Warning: I'm not any form of professional

The remaining two new hires tailed behind their tour guide, visibly shaken from the spectacle they'd just witnessed. Ethan glanced over his shoulder apprehensively.

"Are you sure Maggie's gonna be alright?" he inquired of Ms. Himura. He had heard about inflations before, but this was the first one he had ever witnessed. It set his teeth on edge, watching Megan's body give way to that inhuman-looking orb. The sheer helplessness of the bubble-girl's predicament as she was rendered an immobile, floating sphere. He couldn't stop thinking about the giant, pink ball that she had become; there was something perversely infatuating about it.

"I can assure you" the manager replied "She'll be in perfect working order by the end of the day. We have a team of experts dedicated to this sort of thing. Now, if you'll follow me to shipping-"

"Dedicated?" Wanda exclaimed. "Exactly how many times do you deal with this sort of thing?"

"Would that be weekly or monthly?" Ms. Himura replied coyly. "We work with a lot of experimental technology, unstable compounds and more than a few phenomena that are simply beyond our understanding. More often than we care to admit, our employees are exposed to one of these various professional hazards, either accidentally or intentionally. When that happens, we have a team to collect the result and restore them, to an extent"

"Wanda…" Ethan attempted to interject.

"An extent?" Wanda yelled "What extent? Are you telling me she's still gonna be pink?"

"We all carry our little souvenirs of employment" Himura replied warily, tugging at her skirt. "But we always manage to find a place for our employees. So no worries about not being able to work"

Wanda was losing what little composure she had left "I don't care about working here, all I care about is getting out of this place in one piece!"

"Wanda, enough" Ethan swiveled to face her. "What happened to Megan was an accident. Panicking, yelling at us and refusing to co-operate accomplishes nothing." Something drastic had changed in his tone. He never shouted, which seemed to make it worse. There was just intensity to his voice that neither woman had seen previously "I've had enough of you, your pessimistic attitude and your constant whining, so if you're going to complain, do it quietly"

Significantly cowed, Wanda shrunk back, falling silent. Ethan turned back to their tour guide, all evidence of the fire he directed towards Wanda gone from his creaseless face. "Sorry Ma'am. Please continue"
Ms. Himura fixed the future supervisor with an approving glance. Smiling, she turned her back on the two.
"Now, with that settled, we have one more stop to make, the shipping room. If you'll follow me…" She made an abrupt left turn through one of the numerous identical doors lining both sides of the hallway they were walking along. Past it lay a long, winding staircase that lead straight down.

"Be honest" Ethan joked, stepping after his guide "Is there a team of contractors an hour ahead of us constructing this place as we go along?"

"Yes, but don't tell anyone." Himura replied with a small smile. Ethan honestly couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. The trio wound their way down the plethora of steps, Ethan feeling Wanda's eyes on the back of his neck the whole way down. Finally, they reached another door, which Ms. Himura stopped in front so suddenly, Ethan practically collided into her. As he steadied himself against the railing, he could have sworn he felt his hand had touched something…fuzzy, as though he had just stroked an invisible cat.  
Before he could comment on it, Himura pushed through the door into an expansive, well lit chamber. It was absolutely woven with crisscrossing transparent pipes that ran across the ceiling, across the walls, along the floor and all throughout the space of the room. It looked as though an entire circulatory system had been blown up, transmitted into PVC piping and packed into a single room. Ethan could only catch dark blurs pass though the network, speeding through the innumerable passages to parts unknown. Some of the pipes were too thin for Ethan to fit his thumb into, others looked wide enough to fit an entire suitcase. One pipe that ran from floor to ceiling looked big enough to drop an elephant through without it touching the sides. And as present as the tubes was a dull roar that echoed through the entire room, the sound of massive vacuum engines keeping the pressure up. The whole thing resembled a screen saver run amok.

"This is our primary transport hub!" Ms. Himura yelled over the din. "We utilize a vacuum powered inter-office communication system to transport documents and the like!"

Wanda was about to note the redundancy of such a system since the invention of E-mail, but bit her lip as Ethan afforded her an over the shoulder glance. She decided to reword her comment.
"I guess you use this to transport other things, like materials between labs, or even specimens and equipment, in case something breaks down!" She stated conservatively.

"Exactly!" Ms. Himura replied "Normally a system like this would be a little too rough on the delicate materials we handle here, but with our bio-maintenance fields inside of the tubes and the special momentum cancelling in/out ports, anything sent by our system lands safe and sound on the other end!"

"You ever sent a person through one of these things?" Ethan smirked.

"It's happened once or twice, mostly to either settle or pay up a bet. The results…have been varied!" Ms. Himura answered, as similar smile playing her lips. The Ethan kid was getting more and more into their way of doing things here. It would only be a matter of time until he could be properly inducted. As for Wanda, Ethan had clearly shown an ability to keep her contained. For her, it was only a question of whether she would last the rest of the tour.
"Over this way!" She yelled, stepping over and ducking under the labyrinth of cylinders until she was standing in a clearing in what the others could only guess was the center of the room.

Ethan and Wanda joined her. They were surrounded on all sides by big, bullet shaped structures that resembled large furnaces, at least four or five pipes snaking out from them at various angles. The mouths and surrounding perimeters of the large chambers were marked with a black and yellow pattern that recommended caution. A loud, sucking sound emanated from their depths.
"This right here is the communications hub of the entire building. At one point, everything passes through here and these ports send it in and out to the right locations." Ms. Himura espoused "Normally, we have a small team here to ensure everything goes where it should. They're on break at the moment".
She wasn't about to let Ethan and Wanda see the state of the average employee just yet.

"These things look kind of dangerous" Wanda frowned "Shouldn't there be some kind of screen or safety shield here?"

"That would cut efficiency pretty heavily" Ms. Himura replied "The men down here are smart enough to stay out of the suction zone"

"Can we meet them?" Ethan asked. Ms. Himura rolled the question around in her head and turned to face him.
As the two chatted, Wanda noticed a small lug nut lying on the floor. Morosely, she kicked it towards one of the ports. It landed just short of the opening. Approaching it, she kicked it again. As soon as the tiny piece of metal crossed the threshold, it hung in the air for a split second, twirling in place before it disappeared, off like a shot through a narrow tube to parts unknown. Wanda imagined it firing out of an exit on the opposite end of the facility and nailing an unsuspecting employee in the back of the head. It made her giggle slightly.
Glancing down, the young woman noticed her foot was still extended towards the entrance of the port. She attempted to withdraw it, but felt an unseen force draw it closer to the gaping metal maw.
"Oh hell" She muttered. Suddenly the pull became a genuine tug, taking her off of her feet and on to her backside. She yelped as her left foot passed completely into the machine. Wanda felt a tingle at her ankle and in a second, it was gone. She gaped, where her foot once was, a long, brown fleshy rope the thickness of her calf extended up out of sight. Wanda looked upwards and paled as she saw her foot, her foot, speeding along a narrow pipe, what she now realized as her extended leg trailing after it, painting a dark line along the web of otherwise clear pipes, zig-zagging this way and that before finally disappearing out of sight. That machine had stretched her leg out like a rubber band.

Wanda was so busy gawking at her predicament that she barely noticed her leg slip in completely, up to the thigh, followed by her right leg. Only watching a second line of flesh join the first snapped her out of her reverie. Wanda yelped in horror and propped herself up on her arms, watching both legs disappear into the entry port up to her mid-thigh, both legs zooming off in different directions down different causeways. Her khaki shorts were sucked right off of her legs, warping slightly when they reached the divide, then being torn apart in both directions, reduced to shreds and leaving her bottom half in a simple black thong.
Wanda gritted her teeth and clawed at the stubbled rubber floor, trying to back away from the relentlessly devouring machine.
"I...am not…urgh….ending up like Ioan Gruffudd…in fucking Fantastic Four!" Wanda grunted as she was drawn closer to the opening.
Then she remembered that there were two other people in the room with her.
"Help! Help me!" She cried out.

Finally, Ethan and that damnable Himura woman turned around, a look of surprise on both their faces. Ms. Himura's gaze traced Wanda's torso up to the long, twisting path of her legs while Ethan scrambled over to grab her arm, pulling her away from the foreboding hole with all his might. In an effort to assist him, Wanda flailed her other limb, trying to grab onto something. Ethan saw her legs stretch like chewing gum away from the port. Wanda's right hand finally found something to grab: the edge of another port's threshold. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as she felt her fingers, then her entire hand disappear up into the pipes, a third line of brown flesh joining the other two. Now being pulled in three directions at once, Wanda let out another howl. "How is this happening!?"

Ms. Himura, as usual, provided the answer. "The compensators and stasis field inside of the system ensure that their contents stay in one piece. This can occasionally result in some slight…warping, but the object in question usually returns to normal once it reaches the other side. Unfortunately, due to your case, your body isn't going down a single tube, causing the preservation mechanism to…replicate your biomass to avoid tearing."

"So she's going to keep stretching like this?" Ethan asked, still trying to pull away the remaining percentage of Wanda's body.

"Until her various body parts reach their final destinations, I think" Ms. Himura nodded. Wanda let out another yelp as her abdomen entered the pipe, sending her round backside shooting up a third pipe, trailing her extended legs and midsection behind it.

Ethan had gone to all fours, attempting to distance Wanda's head, upper torso and left arm as far from this madness as possible. He gripped her by the forearm, tugging with all his might before he realized that the portion of her arm that he had positioned himself in front of had become ensnared in another port. Finally giving up the ghost, Ethan scrambled to his feet as the once trim girl became a female, African American Stretch Armstrong , being tugged in three directions simultaneously, her elongated limbs painting a network of dark lines across the entire room like the world's weirdest Etch A Sketch drawing.

"This is all your fault!" Wanda screamed at the two remaining people in the room, her head and stretched out torso suspended a foot or so off the floor as she bobbed up and down. Her bucking head finally crossed into a fourth port's danger zone.
"You two priiiiaaaaaaaaaaacccccaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuughaaaaaaaaaaa!" she screamed as her neck stretched out and sent her profanity spewing head hurtling up another pipe and out of sight. The words were crammed down Wanda's throat as, from her perspective, she was sent speeding along a long, well lit tunnel, seamlessly taking sharp turns. She glanced downwards and saw Ethan and Ms. Himura standing side by side far below her before they were whisked out of sight. Everything went black as she passed out of the shipping room, a few blinking lights speeding past the only sign that she was moving at all. It felt like riding the subway, being strapped to the front of a rollercoaster and standing upright in a wind tunnel all at the same time, her hair plastered to her skull with sheer velocity, the deafening roar and twisting turns scattering her thoughts and shattering her sense of up and down. Blinding light flooded her senses and in an instant, her momentum slowed to a stop and Wanda found herself, or rather, her head, abruptly ejected from the mail network, skidding to a stop on a long metal table.

As Wanda's senses returned to her one by one, she realized someone was standing over her. He was a man in a white lab coat, of slender build and would have been described as completely ordinary if it weren't for the fact that his entire body was a deep, rich shade of purple.
"Oh, crap" he stated, entirely too nonchalant for someone who had just witnessed a woman's head shoot out of his company's mail system and slid to a stop on his work table. "Hello ma'am, what's your name?"

"Ooooog" Wanda replied. "Muh-muh…I'm….Wanda" She slurred, attempting to wave hello. In some far off, distant part of the factory, her hand did indeed wave, but to a somewhat bewildered electrician, who calmed down significantly after realizing it came in peace.


Meanwhile, back in the shipping room, Ethan stood in one corner of the clearing, hands on his hips and jaw slack as Ms. Himura prodded Wanda's elongated midriff, it and her relatively unscathed chest still suspended between the four intake ports. Her stretched torso squirmed slightly in response to the poking. She sighed. "This might actually be a problem" she cringed, rising to her feet. No sooner than she spoke, a small beep sounded from her earpiece. Sighing, she pressed the call button.
"Yes, yes I know about it. She was one of the new employees I was showing around. What piece did you get? Alright, well look after it until we straighten this out. Excuse me" She pressed the button again, silently beckoning Ethan to follow her out of the room through a door he could have sworn wasn't there before.
"Hello. Yes…yes…I know. Believe me, this one wasn't ENTIRELY me. I understand…Well, don't tickle it. Do NOT stick it back in, that will just make things worse. Call Sam. Goodbye" She transferred to yet another call.
"Hello? Yes Isabella. You got her posterior? Oh dear….Yes, I know that when you asked me to send up a little entertainment, you didn't mean one piece at a time. I understand. No. Yes. Fine, but keep you can't keep this one. Alright, maybe."
Sighing heavily, she turned off her earpiece and smoothed back her hair and clothes with the other hand.
"That's going to be a nightmare." She muttered. "We'll have to disentangle her from the entire system, and that'll mean shutting it down for at least half an hour. What a nuisance…" At once, her cheery tone returned "Ah well, everyone has troubles on their first day, and it's my job to clean it up"

Ethan smiled again, slightly. Despite all that had happened, it was relieving to see his manager return to her chipper self after being browbeaten by three consecutive people.

"Don't you laugh" she smirked "By tomorrow, that'll be your job"

The two set out on a light walk down a simplistic, well lit hallway with a thick, vibrant purple rug.
"Will those two really return back to normal Ms. Himura?" Ethan asked.

"As normal as things get around here" Ms. Himura answered "And please, call me Cassie, I can't stand formalities"

The two reached a door at the end of the hall and pushed through, returning to the grand entry hall.
"I swear this place doesn't obey the laws of conservation of mass" Ethan mumbled under his breath. He turned to Cassie "What about Walter?"

"Oh. He's turned up" Cassandra replied "decided to get to work immediately"

"I guess I'll see him tomorrow then" Ethan nodded, heading for the front door. "I'll see you tomorrow too" he smiled towards Ms. Himura before walking out.

"Count on it" she called back as the door closed. Sighing, Cassandra Himura let her disguise slip partially, allowing her real ears to fade into visibility, triangular with black tips positioned on the top of her head. Her three tails faded in as well, each one covered in rust colored fur with white tufts at the end. Cassie wound one of them around her waist, the one that Ethan had accidentally grabbed when they collided on the stairwell. He was definitely a cute one, especially when he dropped that nervous act and started giving orders. All he needed was a tail. Cassie LOVED tails.
Tomorrow would certainly be a big day, Ethan would take on his new responsibilities, he would finally get to see the whole facility and it's residents for the first time and he'd find out that his boss was actually a junior member of a race of shape shifting fox demons with a knack for illusions. All manner of creatures worked here, and if Ethan thought that having a Kitsune for a higher-up was odd, wait until he met HER boss. Oh well, aside from the leadership capabilities and his eyes, the main reason she had chosen him for the supervisor position was his ability to take things in stride. You needed that if you were going to get by at Amalgatech.
"Speaking of which…" Cassie muttered, swiveling on her heel and walking back through the double doors "Time to check on the others"…