Seemingly Average Day at HQ

[katsura]

Katsura grumbled as she slowly walked to HQ. She knew that the officer she was going to report to was going to be extremely angry at her, but she was already here and the longer she waited, the worse it would be, so she pushed her way through the gate and made her way up to the office of the general that was supposed to be in charge of her, but obviously wasn't doing a good job of it. She unhappily trudged towards the door, and peeked in.
"Come in, Aria, sit down. You have a lot to explain if you want to keep that silver watch of yours" the general said with a slight shake of his head
Katsura took a seat and sighed
"I know, I know, I messed up, but what you don't know is-"
"I don't want more excuses, I just want to know what possessed you to think that forcing oxygen onto a field of corn was a good idea"
"I was trying to help! It sh-"
"Aria, not another word!" the general yelled, standing up in his seat, slamming his hand down on his desk and staring at her, making her feel utterly small. "You are living proof that the state alchemy exam should be denied to kids like you. There should be age restrictions and now you see why"
Katsura could practically recite his entire speech. She had heard it at least five times before, whenever she did something even miniscule that cost him anything, he would repeat it. He went on for a few more minutes and then paused, a break which Katsura took advantage of
"okay, I'm too young to be a state alchemist, and I do stupid things and I'm such a pain in your neck, I know. So just tell me to leave and I will."
"I will not do that, not yet, but I'll tell you that if you do one more stupid thing, you will be out of here for good."
"Got it, can I leave, or was there something else you wanted to yell at me about?"
"Just get out of my office and follow whatever orders you get"
"From who?"
"Just wait in HQ until someone orders you to do something, you may leave now."
Not looking back twice, Katsura scrambled out of the office and made her way to a large window in the hallway. Sticking her head out, she scanned the ground and opened her palm, looking at one of the transmutation circles etched into her automail. Reaching her hand out the window, she did a small hand movement and a breeze of cool air rushed past her, playing with strands of her hair and caressing her face. She leaned on the window sill and watched the ground for a short while.

[mustang]

Roy Mustang should have never been placed in a desk job.

Quite simply, from the moment he had been promoted to a commander, and suddenly had to begin his days sorting through paperwork, answering the telephone, and being confined most days to an office, he would attest that it had been slowly driving him insane - though some of his other companions would attest that this was happening quicker than he would admit. Anyway, as Fuhrer now, he found himself more and more often confined to an office, however big it was, which was nothing like how he had imagined being the Fuhrer would be...but then, a lot of things were not how he had imagined them to be one day.

With that thought, Roy absently pulled a bit at the patch covering his missing eye, letting out a slightly over-dramatic sigh - no, nothing had turned out quite like he had imagined it when he first joined the state alchemists.

After a bit more absent pacing laps around the large office, burning a few pieces of paper he had deemed unimportant, and a couple of phone calls looking for a distraction that only resulted in his being assured that he didn't need to worry about anything, Roy decided he had had about enough of the office for a bit, and headed down the corridor with no particular destination in mind. If someone needed him that badly for the next couple of hours, they would just have to prove it was an emergency and use some energy to find him - he was the Fuhrer, after all, so that gave him the right to take distracting walks. Or so his own mind thought.

As Roy passed by one of the general's offices, he could hear the tail-end of some sort of argument going on behind the door, and he paused curiously, listening to the last few exchanges between a male and a female voice - one which certainly captured his interest more than the other. As he heard footsteps coming towards the doorway, he backed around a corner and out of a sight for a few minutes before reappearing to see just who it had been that had been being berated as harshly as it sounded, and his gaze fell on a figure standing hear one of the large windows at the end of the corridor. He remembered when she had passed the exam to become a state alchemist, but her name escaped him - however, what he picked up on again was that she was quite attractive, and though younger than him by several years...well, that had never stopped him much before.

"I wouldn't worry yourself too much about what he said," Roy spoke as he approached the girl, leaning on the wall rather casually beside her, his arms crossed over his chest. Really, he was glad it was the female voice that had been getting berated and not the male - this gave him more of an interesting opportunity for conversation, and perhaps his own special form of 'cheering up' - and sometimes, it felt good to just be a normal human again rather than the Fuhrer stuck up along in his office."You're not the first headstrong young alchemist that he has had to deal with - nor are you going to be the last, if I had to guess." One of the corners of his mouth twitched upwards in a bit of a smile, though his gaze remained on her, unblinking.

[katsura]

Katsura immediately took a step backwards, taking her hands off the window as she heard a voice. She hadn't heard any footsteps coming down the hallway, which was weird because other than her and whoever it was standing beside her, there were no other people in the hallway. It seemed they weren't kidding when they said they would watch her every move.
"I've had half a mind to change the air around his head into helium and see his reaction for a while now. He always says the exact same thing. Sometimes I wonder if he's got it all written down."
Katsura turned towards him and looked up at his face. He was staring at her with a smug little smile on his face. Her first reaction was to slap his annoying little smile off his face, but she had had to remember to restrain her temper more times that she cared to admit, and this was one of those times. Her gaze rested on the eyepatch covered by his long black hair. He seemed so familiar, but she couldn't quite remember who...
oh crap!
Quickly straightening herself, she saluted him
"Fuhrer Mustang!" she squeaked. But what was he doing here talking to a low ranking alchemist like her? He certainly had much more important things to do, but then she remembered a certain nurse telling her about Mustang when she had gotten into trouble a few months ago by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the place being on the outskirts of town near a few small stores, and the wrong time being when a group of thugs decided to rob them. She stopped them, which wasn't very hard since they weren't alchemists and weren't very smart, but she had managed to get her arm cut pretty badly, hence her meeting the nurse. She had said that she knew Roy (as she called him) since he was just another officer and that he was very charming. She also mentioned that he had quite a reputation for being a huge flirt.
Now that couldn't have put Katsura into a more awkward position. What was next, something even more ridiculous? She couldn't even imagine what could possibly be more ridiculous than this.

[mustang]

Roy raised his only visible eyebrow at the young alchemist's threat about the air - ah, that was right, she was the one that had been dubbed the 'Air Alchemist' by the state. Roy knew that he could remember her pretty, young face, but until she said that he had been unable to remember her proper title. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he needed to work on being better with names, at least of the other alchemists, but it really did seem like a lot more work than he felt like dealing with - at least for now. At the moment, he had more important things to think about, such as the situation at hand.

Roy was almost startled when the girl suddenly snapped to attention and saluted him, but after the action he let a slight chuckle escape his lips. "At ease, soldier," he stated, his tone something between sarcasm and just teasing her - although he did demand respect when it was due, he had not been expecting her to react like that so...suddenly. However, at the moment he had been trying to escape his duties that seemed to follow him everywhere for just a few minutes, and her action had simply reminded him of them. "Save it for a time when there's an audience," he then added, nodding slightly at the empty corridor for emphasis.

"So, Air Alchemist, just what did you do to get into trouble this time?" Roy then asked her curiously, throwing her title in there as an attempt to show that he did know who she was, even if he really didn't - she had seemed surprised to see his face even after he spoke, which amused him that she did not recognize his voice, but only made him step into the challenge of being the one that knew who the other was right from the start, whether that be a lie or not. And he was honestly curious about what had happened to her to make such a stir - after all, he could do little 'consoling' if he didn't know what had happened. And it might make the paperwork he just knew would appear on his desk about the situation later that evening a little less painful - but only a little.

[katsura]

Katsura was more surprised than offended at the Fuhrer's reaction to what she had just said. What she wanted to do right now was jump out of the window right next to her. Heck, then she wouldn't have to deal with the general again... but that would be even stupider than what she had just done. She merely tilted her head down and nodded. But she still wondered what in the world he was doing talking to a novice alchemist like her, and why he was in the hall in the first place and... well how he knew her name. She had only been a state alchemist for about a year and there were probably a hundred others that she knew of. That made her wonder exactly how much of the conversation he had actually heard.

It was the question aimed at her though that caught her off guard. She could, one launch into a long rant about it, which would probably stop his other questions or make him 'suddenly realize' that he had a lot of paperwork to do, two tell him and then jump out the window, three, just jump out the window right now, or four try to find something which she had forgotten to do and had to do right at this moment, none of which wouldn't work because well... she was talking to the Fuhrer.

Instead of thinking up a devious plot right there which would backfire immediately, she forced a fake smile and looked back up, out the window
"oh nothing, just a stupid little experiment that I shouldn't have done and backfired" Talk about an understatement. She was trying to use alchemy to make a small weed on the edge of a corn field grow quickly, which ended up blowing up the entire field and then trying to fix it which didn't work either. She had been experimenting with plants a little over the past year, but didn't really tell anyone about it. Wow. What a mistake that turned out to be.

[mustang]

Roy snorted a bit at the girl's short, evasive answer, but turned the snort into a cough rather quickly - and he thought, rather smoothly - considering a snort was not exactly the sort of action he wanted to have attached to his character. It was painfully obvious that there was more to the story than what the Air Alchemist had cared to share with him, and though it was most likely her silence was because she just didn't want to relive the experience once again by talking about it, he still wasn't pleased. "You know I'm just going to learn the details later," Roy then said pointedly, before adding in a feigned thoughtful manner, "Or I could force them from you now, I suppose..."

As his voice trailed off a bit suspiciously, Roy rubbed his chin slowly to add to the thoughtful persona he was trying to give off, feeling that it made him look a bit more official, before his lopsided grin suddenly returned. "But I'm certain that you would rather tell me voluntarily," he then replied more brightly, but he held her gaze with his own unblinking one at the same time, "After all, it must have been interesting to elicit the sort of response that you did."

In all honesty, Roy was not certain why he was even asking - he didn't care that much what the girl had done, considering if it had been that serious he would have been notified immediately. Rather, this was giving him something to keep him from doing his paperwork - a chance to tease the attractive young girl, and at least attempt to, dare he admit it, flirt a bit, which had become considerably harder with his new title seeming to blaze above his head at all times turning most of the female species away from him when they used to turn to him.

[katsura]

The Fuhrer's response startled Katsura a bit, actually more than a bit, considering that he had actually just threatened her. The Fuhrer had just threatened her because she wasn't telling him about her stupid experiment. Apparently she was wrong. Things could get more ridiculous. What she really wanted to say was something like 'at least when it's raining I'm not completely useless' or 'I'm guessing you don't get to blow things up when you're sitting behind a desk all day' but there were times she knew to keep her mouth shut and this was one of those times. She simply softened her expression into a mockingly calm one.
"Shouldn't you get back to your desk? I'm sure you have a lot of paperwork to do, I wouldn't want to keep you from it." She was about to turn around and trot down the hall, but nearly did what she was a second from doing to the general to Mustang. She probably would be killed for that though so she decided against it and kept walking down the hall where she opened the doorway to the stairs, taking one last glance back at the Fuhrer before continuing down the stairs. She always imagined the Fuhrer as someone old and wizened, and much older than herself, nothing like the man she met today.

[mustang]

Roy narrowed his gaze slightly at the Air Alchemist's second aversion to his question - it seemed that even with a heavy title like 'Fuhrer' behind him he could still do little to get people to answer him. Not everything was that different from his days as a Colonel. However, her particular choice of words in which to avert his attention were not ones that he wanted to hear - of course he had paperwork to do, but when didn't he? Just when he thought he had a moment to himself, a chance to escape the piles of work that seemed to materialize out of nowhere and capture him in his office...his one 'escape,' which happened to be this girl, was trying to push him back into everything.

Before he could say anything - not that there was really a response he could give to that reminder that would make him happy, considering he would probably have to admit the girl was right, and that would force him back to his work - she was already leaving him stranded in the corridor. He could run after her, he supposed, but that was not his style - those of the female species ran after him, not the other way around, and he was not going to make an exception now - that would be a flashback to his younger days, when he had only just signed up for the military. But what had driven her away so suddenly?

With that thought, Roy looked towards the window the girl had been staring out, glancing at his own reflection - maybe she had been unresponsive because of their age difference, but then, did he really look that old? He frowned at the Roy staring back at him in the glass as he realized he would probably have to come to grips eventually with the fact that he was almost thirty years old - and no matter how much he didn't want to admit it, perhaps there were people that were out of his grasp at this point, despite his charm. Roy shook his head at the thoughts, displeased, before turning and heading back towards his office, feeling defeated more than anything else.

Roy has left the thread.