Board Room

[Karl Jak]

The boardroom of Syntech’s elaborate headquarters was a buzz.  All around the table, men and women in suits were scrambling with papers or exchanging frantic fragments of coherent sentences.  They’d all received the reports of the recent ‘incident’, and the fact that the largest chair at the head of the room was yet to be occupied told them that the situation wasn’t farce.  Of the eleven board members, nine of them had thought the idea to send a recon team to investigate the strange anomaly had been a wonderful plan.  The two that had attempted to veto the concept were even more white-faced as they stared at each other from across the heavy wooden table.
 
Every single one of them knew what had happened to the previous board members when they had made a poor decision and attempted to overrule the chief executive officer.  While Karl Jak had always denied any role in the massacre, the crime scene photos had nevertheless managed to leak to nearly every single employee at Syntech.  With Chairman/CEO Jak’s energies recently placed into trying to plan for a ‘new event.’  The board members all knew that their leader was being ambiguous in his efforts to create a new and exciting version of his beloved Dante’s Abyss.
 
What would happen if this incident derailed his time table?  After all, they couldn’t just ignore the fact that a helicopter with some of their best and ablest employees had vanished somewhere in their home verse.  If the story leaked to the rest of the company, there could be mass panic.  The last transmissions had been far from pleasant.  The pilot’s screams were still engrained in the heads of the eleven board members.
 
From the far side of the room, the heavy oak doors of the boardroom opened.  All of the hushed conversations stopped immediately as Karl Jak casually strode into the room.  For someone who certainly had to have a lot on his mind, the man in the purple suit seemed utterly nonchalant as he made his way around to the end of the table and dropped into his large seat.
 
“Good morning, Everyone,” he replied with a warm smile.  After receiving a ‘good morning, Karl’ that would make any elementary school teacher blush, the man adjusted his tie and leaned forward.  With his elbows on the table and his chin in his palms, he smiled brightly at his ‘associates’ on Syntech’s board of directors.  “How long will it take to get the gate functional at Facility C?”
 
The question was literally the last thing that anyone expected to hear, and when all the people offered were confused expressions, Karl glanced to the man at his right.
 
“Simmons?”
 
The middle-aged man stuttered a little bit as he adjusted his glass, grabbed up the papers spread out in front of him, and looked over at Karl.  “Facility C?”  He asked rhetorically, eliciting a polite nod from the chairman.  “A few days?  That’s the one that spits out in the… the…”
 
“Tangled Green,” someone whispered a few chairs down the line.
 
“Thank you, Ms. Callahan.”  Karl Jak replied with a smile as he turned to look at the other individuals in the boardroom.  “Someone get in touch with the social media people.  I want a rundown of every interesting individual that this multiverse has to offer.”
 
A brave soul offered the obvious question.  “What for?”
 
Karl Jak grinned and glanced at the woman seated near the far corner of the table.  “We need to get a team together to go find our crew, don’t we?  What better way than to invite some more capable individuals to go investigate for us.  Certainly we don’t want to risk an entire Syntech crew for a second time, and we most definitely can’t leave an unknown out there.”
 
“What about the event?”
 
“We’ll figure something out,” Karl smiled.  “Now someone get me those lists.  And I need legal to draft up some waivers or something… I don’t need any more armor-plated sociopaths trying to cut my throat.”