Lisette has made the greatest of mistakes - turn up to the first day of work hungover. She woke up in a strange bed, clothed and completely alone, at around eight in the morning. Blearily, she dragged herself out of bed, forced a glass of water down herself, and made her way outside to try and see if she could remember the way to the canteen. The summer sun pounded on her temples, and her wide, round sunglasses did little to drive it away. Ultimately, she forced herself to go through her ritual - a big, unhealthy breakfast, followed by a great deal of time spent in a single-person bathroom. Eventually, she emerged, and made her way to the arches, and back into London.
Which brings her to her office, a clean, fresh building renovated from the shell of an old market-warehouse. Ashlie did a very tasteful, if somewhat over-the-top, job of it. There's a lot of areas where instead of tearing up the foundations to build new floors, the crews simply put down steel piles and built glass floors on the rubble. The load-bearing outside walls are untouched red brick, but not a single one of them actually reaches the roof - instead, clean, white stone, cut so finely one can barely see the seams, rises up to a sheet-glass roof, simply steepled at the same angle the now-removed corrugated asbestos would have been.
In the middle of the lobby, a pit opens, yawning, into black, made again of ancient red brick. It's part excavation, part office - and the degree to which the entire thing is tastefully layered over the old is impressive, if only because the planning permission must have been hell to acquire. Not for Ashlie, though, Lisette thinks. The building is altogether too much for just Lisette - who has turned up at half past nine, just about walking upright without difficulty. Every joint in her body aches, and her temples pulse viscerally.
The building is partitioned by walls of two kinds; some rooms, obviously offices and boardrooms, have walls that are made of glass, though Lisette learns quickly that a flick of a switch in most of them can render it opaque for privacy. The more private spaces - bathrooms, the one shower, a non-denominational 'meditation room' that someone had apparently worked into the plans - were steel and wood, solid, insulated, and soundproof by means Lisette can't tell. There's an upstairs, and an even-more-upstairs, though there's only space for a single boardroom and a unisex bathroom, sitting on top of a column of plumbing which is held in a clean, steel cylinder stretching up the entire back of the space. The breakroom and all the toilets seem to feed into this unknown thing - far too wide to be just a pipe on its own, probably containing multiple pipes. The scale of the operation that Ashlie expects Lisette to develop becomes clear; or maybe she only expected it of herself, before she allowed someone else to take over. Still, even hungover, Lisette sees the opportunity of their position. She's been afforded a lot of resources.
The space is ambitious, efficient, able to fit maybe two or three hundred people. It turns out that less than half that many people actually work here, yet. Most of them are student volunteers, but a very few of them are paid, local staff, and it's those people that Lisette speaks to first, gathered not in a boardroom but in the staffroom; Lisette forces herself not to wear sunglasses.
She rattles off her facts and figures, makes it clear what she knows, and is given a swift reality check. Much of what she assumed is correct; though she immediately likes Ashlie, the general consensus is that she's out of touch, and much of the problem is that she's the face of the hand that feeds Mutant Town. "People don't really think she's human," offers one volunteer, "some metaphorically, some literally. And that isn't a great look for the human face of a pro-mutant movement, when a lot of people don't think we're human anyway." The volunteer has deep red skin - and Lisette doesn't fail to notice that he doesn't speak much to the local Londoners, nor they to him, but always to her, even when responding to each other. The rifts in the world live at home, too, it would seem.
Still, the meeting is fruitful. Lisette lacks anecdotal information, which is in itself useful - when it comes to PR, it can be more useful than having perfect knowledge of the statistics. She notes everything down by paper, listening more than speaking. "I know I haven't given you much to go on," she admits at the close of the meeting, "and I won't lie to you - I don't have much of a plan. But you've all given me things to think about and work with, and I think I can see some key areas to improve on, and big overhauls to make. We've got a lot of space - and big shoes - to fill. Carry on with your day-to-day, and we'll have smaller, more focused meetings going forward. Thank you."
She doesn't miss Ashlie coming in and politely standing back towards the latter part of the meeting. She smiles, but furrows her brow, tilts her head a little, a sign of confusion - one of her last sober memories of last night was Ashlie saying she'd be in her workshop all day today, and it's only barely eleven o'clock. Maybe she was having a tough time with her own, very first, hangover. She stands up, and approaches her boss, wearing a simple, clean suit - not expensive, not flashy, but clearly fitted to Lisette's correct sizing. She cleans up quite nicely, though she does put the sunglasses back on as the staff file out of the room to return to the small block of the building they still occupy. Natural sunlight, after all, filters through the whole building. "I didn't really register how incredible this whole place is, though my staff is quite small compared to the size of the building," Lisette observes, by way of greeting. "Is this some kind of futureproofing, or do you expect me to start hiring aggressively?"