Life at the Office
      
      
      Riley grumbled to himself as he struggled to push aside the glass door that was the (medium-sized) entrance to Cosmopolipid Headquarters. His head still hurt from the night before; he really shouldn’t be drinking so much, but after being forced to spend so much time supervising Nefertari he couldn’t help but let himself go. It had taken all of his willpower to pull his lithe body out of bed at 6 AM, even more to take a shower, properly comb his hair, and put on a suit and tie.
      
      The front lobby of the building didn’t do much to improve his mood either; all of the decorations were laid out with the express purpose of adding to the vanity of the establishment. The emerald walls were lined with large, gold-framed photographs that depicted the company’s heavyweight models wearing several of their more popular designs, but of course the most prominent and attention-grabbing, hanging at the far wall over the secretary’s desk, was one of Nefertari herself, wrapped in a red dress that left very little to the imagination and posing seductively. He averted his eyes, instead looking down at the desk where there was a young Dragonair woman sitting and tending to a computer, wearing a business suit with the top few buttons undone to show a few inches of cleavage and a large blue sphere embedded in her chest.
      
      She looked up as he approached, most likely alerted by the sound of his shoes tapping on the polished marble floor. “Good morning Mr. Montblanc!” she said to him cordially, but in her thoughts he heard her saying, [i]Oh my gosh, it’s him! I hope he notices I got everything prepared early today for opening, and I bought a new suit and everything too![/i]
      
      “Good morning, Pearl,” he replied without eye contact as he continued to walk briskly past, quickly cycling through the list of employees in his brain for her name – she was a recent recruit, joined because she’d dropped out of college and had a weight problem, and seemed to show an unusual interest around him during interviews. “I think you have a little something on your cheek, you might want to get that cleaned up.”
      
      “What? Where?!” Pearl began frantically combing her hands over her face in search for the phantom smudge, and then began to fumble in a small purse on the desk for a pocket mirror.
      
      In the meantime, Riley snuck away, more careful with his footsteps, to the elevator on the right side of the lobby, which conveniently opened for him only a few seconds after he pressed the button to call it down. As the doors closed behind him, his hand automatically reached for the array of further glowing buttons on the side, pressing the topmost one, which was not a number but rather a letter, a stylized N. A crackly mechanical voice announced from a speaker above the buttons, “Please provide identification,” to which the Gardevoir pulled a plastic, green and yellow card with a picture of his face, a rare instance where his visage appeared to actually bear a smile, from his pocket and held it up to a scanner next to the speaker, leading to a loud ping before the hanging box finally started its ascent. Eventually the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, revealing a hallway lined with further elaborate portraits and billowing red curtains hanging from the ceiling, leading to a wall of semi-translucent glass, a sign over the double door at its center declaring “Mistress Nefertari’s Office” in elegantly curving green letters.
      
      This, however, was not Riley’s intended designation, as he instead turned to the right down a slightly smaller hallway tucked into the corner, lit with dimmed golden and red lights that gave the impression of being at sunset. At the end of this passage there was another large gateway, but this was made of polished black metal with looping whorls and patterns of leaves molded into its surface, and above it there was another sign in the same font that said “Private Boudoir”. There was no handle on this side of the door, but to the right of it there were two card scanners, one roughly at his shoulder height while the other was above his head; he swiped his identification card through the former of the two, and there was a small ping of confirmation followed by mechanical clicking and whirring as the door swung ponderously outward.
      
      While the owner of the Cosmopolipid company had her own place of residence, after many nights where she had stayed in her office past the building’s regular opening hours in a state of being completely engrossed in her work (or, on occasion, in a state where it would have been ill-advised for her to go out in public, for her own good and for the image of the group) an addition was made to her office floor so she could have sleeping and living quarters on site. Access to these chambers was exclusive only to Riley and Nefertari herself, barring invitations extended to others of sufficient standing within the organization, and there were no security cameras for the purpose of maintaining privacy. The room was dark at first, but as he stepped into it a set of lights turned on to a dim setting similar to those in the adjoining hallway, illuminating a room that appeared akin to a dining room, a table with tall legs sitting in the center with a few wine bottles resting upon it, and in one corner there was a series of countertops and cupboards affixed to the wall alongside a stove, oven, sink, and refrigerator. The floor was covered with a deep blue shag carpet, where in select patches it had been pressed flat from repeated heavy steps.
      
      The lithe Gardevoir paid little attention to these details as he continued his brisk pace through the chamber, past the table, to the wall across from where he had come in, where there was another huge door of the same material and design as the previous one, although this one actually had handles to grasp onto, again one at his height while another was considerably higher. Handles or locks were not a matter of importance, however, because the door was already open ajar, and inside this new room there was an even deeper darkness, and no additional lights turned on as Riley stepped inside. In the gloom, he could discern a massive shape that took up a large chunk of space on the floor, a tall boxy shape that rose high up, nearly to his shoulders as he approached it, and even higher there were flowing shadowy masses that came together to form a canopy over the box closer to the floor. At the center of this structure there was a giant figure lying on its back with a blanket stretched over its form, swollen mounds rising up beneath the layer of cloth in huge sloping hills.
      
      Riley approached the bed, walking around to its side, in the process feeling his feet snag briefly against articles of clothing that were strewn around the floor, and at one point kicking against a hard, round object that he could only assume was another wine bottle. “Nefertari?” he said aloud when he stood at the side of the mattress, looking into the darkness at the top of the bed where he could just barely make out the outline of a head, “It’s time to wake up now.”
      
      The massive body moved lethargically, only a slight shifting of the thick arm that was directly in front of his face, and there was an incoherent mumbling from the direction of the head.
      
      “Nefertari?” he asked again, this time more sternly as he began to tap the hard leather sole of his shoe against the wooden frame of the bed.
      
      There was still no verbal response, but this time the huge body rolled over until on its side and its back was facing toward him.
      
      “I know you’re awake, Nicole,” he said with ever-mounting frustration, crossing his arms over his chest even though he knew she couldn’t see him. If one were to look close enough at his eyes they would notice that they had begun to take on a pale violet glow.
      
      Somewhere beneath the blankets, around the lower of the two tall humps in the concealed mountain range that represented the figure’s hip jutting skyward, there was a rustling, whipping movement, and by the time Riley became aware of this he looked directly at the source of the noise to be met with a thick tail tipped with leafy fronds that smacked him in the face. He stumbled backward, taken by surprise though not particularly hurt by the weak force of the blow, but it did deal lasting damage to what little remained of his temper. “Alright, fine!” he shouted, lavender light emanating from his eyes intensely, “If you want to be a spoiled brat, then we can play that way too!” His head whipped rapidly toward a seemingly random direction, staring off into the darkness, but Riley was familiar enough with this room to know where the light switch was, and with an extension of his mind he felt the panel embedded in the wall, where there was a spinning knob that seemingly of its own volition spun clockwise as far as it was able to.
      
      Light flooded the room instantaneously, washing away the darkness from the walls, painted in mosaics of greens and yellows, the oversized cupboards and dressers that were placed at irregular intervals around the perimeter of the area, and the huge bed at the center of the room with its snowy white canopy and lone occupant resting upon it. Rest was hardly upon her mind any longer, however, for as soon as the glare of the light fell upon her eyes she let out a shrill shriek and began to thrash wildly, or at least to as best as she was able to with the flesh that engulfed her entire body. The blanket was cast aside, revealing the entirety of the enormous Serperior’s body as she heaved herself upward in a series of strained motions, and she blinked her bleary eyes while her head swiveled to and fro atop her long neck until finally finding the Gardevoir. “What do you think you’re doing, Riley?!” she shouted furiously, her voice even more booming, “Don’t you know how sensitive I am?! A sudden flash of bright light like that could damage my perfect eyesight and I wouldn’t be able to see my brilliant fashions anymore!”
      
      The sheer scale of Nefertari’s size was beyond any conventional comparison available, certainly without equal within the company of Cosmopolipid – which was a good thing, for she was fiercely competitive about any of her subordinates who might rival her “beauty”. Not only was she simply colossal in stature, the top of her pointy-eared head peaking at over thirteen feet tall, but on top of her already huge form there were hundreds and hundreds of pounds of fat packed on in heaping piles. Her gut spilled out from her abdomen in a massive glob of lime green flesh that rested over her lap, lined with thick creases and rolls up its sides, but for as big as it was it was almost completely overshadowed by the impossible immensity of her breasts, a pair of sagging spheres that rolled down over the slope of her belly and nearly touched the surface of the mattress, each swollen tit large enough that it could have completely smothered Riley with ease. She sat on a rear that bulged and spread out in all directions, forming a shelf of flab directly behind her that could have served as a dinner table to a family of four, each buttock roughly as large as her breasts (regular measurements tended to conclude that she was slightly more top-heavy, but due to her size the process is difficult to carry out and has a high margin for error), and thick thighs wider than tree trunks that were permanently mashed against each other all the way down to her knees.
      
      “If you wanted beauty sleep then you shouldn’t have stayed up all night drinking,” Riley scolded, and as he stretched out an open hand the bottle that had been lying on the floor floated up and into his grasp of its own volition, and when he turned it upside-down and shook vigorously nothing came out of it. “We don’t have any time to dawdle,” he continued after letting the empty container float harmlessly to the soft floor, “we still have lots of preparations to complete before the start of the summer expo, and until then we can’t afford to lie around like a lazy lump all day, so get up and get dressed.”
      
      Nefertari groaned loudly, a whiny, bratty tone that would have been far more fitting of a girl far younger than her thirty-nine years of age, and she said, “I don’t want to do all that boring paperwork, that’s supposed to be your job. Wake me up when it’s time to put together the clothing designs and the big show.”
      
      She then began to pull the blankets back over her body, but she had barely even managed to reach the hem of the massive cloth before Riley leapt onto the bed beside her – cringing instinctively at the thought that he was stepping on these fine linens with his dirty shoes – and seized a handful of her flabby bicep. “You’re the head of a multi-million-dollar fashion company, Nicole,” he said firmly, squeezing the green flesh with equal forcefulness, “it’s not a little label you peddle in high school anymore. You studied business in college so you could get to this point; you can’t just have me do all the hard work for you now.”
      
      The Serperior only harrumphed at him in response, crossing her arms over her chest and twisting her head away from him, her pointed nose turned up in the air. Riley buried his face in his hands briefly, running his slender fingers through his emerald hair and taking long, deep breaths while mentally reassuring himself as best as he was able to, and eventually he said, “Okay, okay, look, if we both do work on the paperwork together, then…we’ll get done with it in half the time, and once I’m finished with everything I’ll…I’ll be able to spend more time working with you!”
      
      There was no reaction from the giant serpent.
      
      “Um, I’ll…help you with the modeling and clothes designs?”
      
      One of her pointed ears twitched, though she still said nothing; he was getting her attention now, but not enough to convince her of anything.
      
      After much inner turmoil and weighing his options Riley eventually sighed and said, “And I’ll take you out for dinner tonight at that Italian restaurant that you love so much.”
      
      A sudden rush of movement later and the Gardevoir found himself explicably pinned against the side of Nefertari’s immense bosom, being pushed into the mass of tit flesh by the same arm that he had so easily held in place before. “You certainly know how to please a woman, Riley,” she said softly to him, her head lowering down to him on her long neck before a thin black tongue flicked from between her lips, lightly tickling his cheek. Riley only rolled his eyes as he felt a deep pit beginning to preemptively form in the heart of his bank account.
      
      He dropped down onto the floor again as the Serperior stirred into motion, swinging her luscious legs out over the side of the bed until her small feet touched down on the ground as well, and with a few barely audible grunts she stood up to her full height; while Riley was quite tall compared to the average person, Nefertari was even taller than him, so much so that his head only barely reached up to her waist. She yawned loudly while she stretched, arcing her back, straightening out her arms, rolling her neck from side to side, even her tail flexing and waving about, and Riley took care to maintain a safe distance from the long appendage. Getting her out of bed was only the beginning of the efforts to get her ready for the day, however, for she would still have to make herself presentable in public – she couldn’t very well go out in the main office building wearing her pajamas, which amounted to little more than a thin white shirt that couldn’t even cover her stomach and a pair of underwear that could barely be seen, its straps obscured by her fleshy folds.
      
      Fortunately, if there was one thing that Nefertari had in abundance, it was clothes to wear, as she walked ponderously across the room, stomping all the way, to a pair of giant sliding doors, and as she pulled them apart the darkness inside was replaced with a bright golden light. The whole room was one massive walk-in closet, of course with plenty of walking space for the individual intended to use it, and the walls across from and to the right of the entrance were lined with racks upon racks of clothes hung up, both mundane everyday articles, shirts, shorts, pants, and the like, and the exotic and often bizarre dresses that Cosmopolipid was known for, and the floor was absolutely littered with shoes. To the left there was another set of sliding doors which led to the suite’s bathroom, and in the corner there was a large ceramic mannequin in the Serperior’s likeness that bore her favorite dress, currently a billowing blue skirt with a looping fold of cloth attached to it that stretched upward, crossing over the statue’s belly and reaching over its bounteous chest before wrapping around the back of its neck.
      
      Riley respectfully turned around while he waited for Nefertari to complete her business; though seeing her in the nude was hardly a rare occurrence for him, and it was very possible that she would have liked for him to look, he preferred to maintain a professional attitude as her assistant as much as possible. The suite was quiet, soundproofed from any other activity that went on in the building and high above the honks and beeps of traffic in the bustling city streets, and his trained ears could hear the faint rustling from behind him as cloth slid over scaly skin, followed by the muffled thump of a shirt large enough to be used as a ship’s sail landing on the floor. There was further rustling accompanied by the scraping of metal against metal, the sound of clothes lining the racks being slid from side to side rhythmically, every now and then punctuated by a dull clank as one hanger was lifted up, its contents to be examined, before being placed back down.
      
      “Hey Riley,” she suddenly said aloud after several minutes of continued sifting through the contents of the closet with no confirmation yet that she had actually begun to clothe herself again, “I was thinking about something that I wanted to ask you about.”
      
      “If it’s about what to wear, I don’t have any opinion,” he replied flatly as he looked down at his arm, pulling aside the long sleeve of his shirt to reveal a watch wrapped around his arm that stated a time of 7:39 AM, which in his mind translated to “late.” “We’re already running behind schedule as is, just pick whatever fits best; we’re just going into the office for work, you don’t need to get ready for a party.”
      
      “No, it’s not about that!” she insisted, and Riley was surprised to hear that her voice was lacking its typical haughty tone, the air of superiority that followed everything she did. “I was thinking about the expo coming up – you know; that thing you keep making a big deal about.” The Gardevoir scowled to himself for thinking that maybe Nefertari had become insightful even for a moment. “I remembered all those invitations we were sending out to big upper-class individuals and corporations and other league teams and stuff.”
      
      “Yeah, and…?” he replied, confused as to where this was going.
      
      “Well, I was just thinking, aren’t we limiting our potential audience if we only accept the richest people in the country?”
      
      “Of course we are, that’s the whole point of having an invitational event; we accept those who are most likely to be in our target demographic, weeding out everyone else. Besides, we’re supposed to be maintaining a proper establishment, it’s not like we can let all the riffraff on the streets come barging in.”
      
      “But that’s just it!” Nefertari exclaimed loudly, emphasized by a loud stomp of her foot as she turned to face Riley directly, “That’s over ninety-percent of the population here in Goldenrod alone! Just think about how many more potential followers we could get if we opened our doors to everyone for the fashion expo!”
      
      Riley nearly turned around to stare at her in disbelief, but he caught himself just before he could catch sight of the giant’s bare form. “That’s just ridiculous!” he said incredulously, and yet even as he felt frustration growing inside him it was coupled with a sort of rush of excitement for the debate that was ensuing, “Even if an acceptable amount of citizens would be able to afford the fee to come to the event, we can’t possibly sustain that many guests all at once!”
      
      “It shouldn’t be about the money all the time!” the Serperior shouted, and this time Riley was completely unable to suppress his bafflement at the notion of such an idea that went against the basic principles of business, “We should be making ourselves available to as many people as possible so that maybe, one day, everyone in the world will be able to look as beautiful as I am with the power of fashion!” After a few seconds’ pause she added, “Well, perhaps not quite as beautiful as I, but beautiful nonetheless.”
      
      Riley sighed, remembering the previous times that Nefertari had gone on such tirades about making everyone in the world “beautiful”; for as rich and powerful as she was, she seemed to fancy herself to be something even more than the head of a corporation, almost as if she were a god. It wasn’t particularly surprising that she’d start going on about this again after spending a night to herself while drinking. “Alright, fine,” he said with regret weighing heavily upon his mind at the thought of doing something like this, “I can’t promise [i]everyone[/i] being permitted to join, but…perhaps we can open our doors a little wider. Now just get dressed and we can get to work on the paperwork so any of this can happen at all.”
      
      “Oh, I’m already dressed,” she said matter-of-factly.
      
      “What?!” Riley whirled around to see the results only to be met with a wall of cloth-girded flesh that had been looming directly behind him, just barely grazing his pale face. He had to back away to get a good look at the Serperior’s whole body, which was now clothed in an oversized facsimile of a business suit that had been altered for her tastes, most notably in that the shirt was cut short to allow her midsection to be free, her gut spilling out from her abdomen and hanging low over her legs. Smooth black cloth was wrapped around her bosom, framing a wide plain of green scales with a deep crevasse of cleavage, and where it came together at the front the buttons pulled taut against each other, leaving gaps in between, and the skirt she wore was only barely enough to reach down to the lower curves of her wide hips.
      
      She smirked as she stared down at him, one of her hands planted against her thigh, and she said smugly, “What’s the matter? Don’t spend so much time gawking; we’re running late enough, it’s time to get to work.”
      
      A retort began to form in Riley’s throat, but he quickly swallowed it and instead nodded curtly, standing to the side so that Nefertari could walk past, jiggling and swaying the whole way – he noticed the extra bounce of her chest and deduced that this must be another no-bra day – before falling in line behind her. He sometimes wondered to himself why he bothered to put up with her antics, why he kept trying again and again to keep her in line and failing every time, and why he didn’t just leave her to flounder helplessly on her own. Then there were times like this where he forgot about all of those misgivings and all the difficulties he had to deal with on a daily basis, because if there was one thing he liked about Nefertari, it was that when she meant business, she meant business. It was almost enough to make him forget that he had promised to take her out for a dinner later that would drain all of his spare funds for the next month.
      
      Almost.