"Mr. Douglas, Mr. Smite will see you now." The secretary said in a most uncaring way to the little man gripping the black briefcase like a man going over the falls with nothing but an airline floatation device. When he didn't immediately stand, she sighed and glanced over at him, her short black hair and dark brown eyes matched her black suit perfectly. It was cut to be slimming, and was likely of Italian origin.<br/><br/>Mr. Douglas stood quickly and hustled into the room at the other end of the solid black door. Another waiting room of sorts, this one with two small black leather couches and a modern sculpture that looked suspiciously like something unpleasant and tentacled ripping the still beating heart out of a man. Mr. Douglas took a seat on one of the small leather couches and waited. A moment later the door opposite the one he had entered, also solid black, opened and four Asian businessmen departed, being followed by a stooped man wearing a leather mask. He had to be ancient by now, Johnathan Smite had begun his company even before Mr. Douglas had been born, and if anything was a test to age, and perhaps stress, the Mr. Douglas' hair was now stark white. The old man ushered his guests out the exit door with several salutations in Japanese, then turned on his heel and regarded Mr. Douglas through humanless glass lenses. The mask was simply that. A leather oval stretched across the mans face, without even holes for the nose or mouth. A pair of steel circles held a pair of glass lenses over the eyes,  but the lenses were mirrored, so instead of seeing the mans eyes, you simply saw the terror in your own reflected back at you. He had a shock of white hair that stuck straight up and was slicked back as if he had opened a box containing a bomb and had his hair blown back in an almost cartoonish way. On any other person the look would have been comical. Mr. Smite wore it with a certain alien malice. The fact that he wore a large robe of black cloth, a black suit also likely having originated within Italy, black shoes that would have cost Mr. Douglas his company to purchase, and perhaps most disturbingly, tight black gloves with metal bands at the joints. The gloves gripped a silver headed cane that the man used to aid in walking, but he did so in the manner or someone who walked with a cane so he would have something to beat people with should the mood strike him.<br/><br/>"Ah, Mr. Douglas." The soulless mirrored eyes seemed to tug at Mr. Douglas. His voices was soft and somewhat papery, but that could have been an effect of wearing a leather mask with no air holes. How did the man breath?<br/><br/>"Mr. Smite." Mr. Douglas replied and just managed to keep the tremble out of his voice. "I... I have brought the papers you requested."<br/><br/>"Ah, wonderful. Please, come into my office." What should have been a relatively small room, considering it was an office, was in fact a space so huge it could have been occupied by a small mansion. The roof soared thirty or so feet above them, and Mr. Douglas had a hard time imagining why the man had wasted three stories worth of office space on a single room. Or rather, he would have had he been a more architecturally inclined. As it was he was staring up at the titanic metal creation that occupied the central space of the office. It was a work of maddening beauty, several thousand consensual rings of various sizes and colors, slotted perfectly to fit within one another at varying chaotic angles. There was perhaps a metric ton of metal up there, brass and copper and steel and bronze. As he watched, the rings rotated slightly, each at a different speed, and intricate dance of varying impossibilities.<em>Some of them had to collide at some point surely?</em>Mr. Douglas thought as he watched the clockwork impossibility moving.<br/><br/>"Mr. Douglas." Came a dry voice from just under the massive mobile. "Oh, beg pardon sir, I was admiring your taste in decor." Mr. Douglas sat in the black leather chair, very modern, on the other side of Mr. Smite's desk. The desk itself was also very modern. Carved of black marble to resemble a glacier about to come crashing down on the unfortunate soul sitting in the chair in front of it, the whole thing gave one the impression of impending doom, like watching a tidal wave beginning to curve towards you.<br/><br/>"<em>Decor</em>Mr. Douglas?" Mr. Smite spent a moment settling into his own chair on the other side of the desk and rested his cane in a notch next to it.<br/><br/>"Um. yes... The papers!" Mr. Douglas dug the documents out of his briefcase and, quickly as he dared, set them on the black glacial desk. "Everything you requested." The man gave the featurless black leather face what he hoped was only just a pleading look.<br/><br/>"Very good." Mr. Smite slid the papers towards himself and began pawing through the pages. "Yes, this is what I requested. You may go Mr. Douglas, I can see your eyeballs beginning to sweat."<br/><br/>"Th-Thank you Sir. Good day to you." Mr. Douglas stood, and with inhuman effort managed to cross the room without breaking into a run. Well almost. There was a splash, a scream, and a moment later the floor was lit from below. Mr. Smite leaned over his chair and watched as the glass plates that covered the piranha pit slid noiselessly into place. Everyone spent so much time looking up, they never thought to look down. Nearly half of the room was occupied by a massive fish tank just below the floor. Thick glass panes separated the occupants of the office from the occupants of the fish tank, a massive swarm of piranha that were used to regular, solid meals. Granted, you couldn't really tell the tank was there when the pool lights weren't on, but a more clever observer would see shapes darting along behind them through the floor.<br/><br/>"Hur, hur, I like it when you use the fish." Mr. Smite glanced up from his papers and rolled his eyes behind his mask as a man that could only be described as a shaved mountain gorilla stuffed in a suit walked over to the place where Mr. Douglas was soundlessly hammering on the glass. The tank was specially designed to remove the air as quickly as possible, this meant a death that could take the piranha hours usually occurred in a matter of minutes.<br/><br/>"Doble." Mr. Smite said from his desk and switched off the tank lights. The floor returned to looking like black glass with just a few fleeting images of movement below it. "Do have the piranha tank cleaned out at some point, I think between the late Mr. Douglas and that girl scout troop that managed to bluff their way past Ms. Hellen last week, it's probably getting a little full."<br/><br/>"You... you fed the girl scouts to the piranhas? I bought cookies from them..."  Mr. Smite smirked under his make, lies were so much more amusing when told through leather.<br/><br/>"No Doble, even I have my limits, but get it done none the less."<br/><br/>"Yes boss." The man nodded and left through the only door into the office. Mr. Smite sighed and rubbed his face, or tried. After a moment of frustration he pulled off the mask and set it next to the papers on the desk. He was not in fact an ancient entity of corporate evil, but only Ms. Hellen, the secretary, knew this. He was in fact a relatively young embodiment of corporate evil. He had short black hair that was slicked back from his face by the mask, and sharp blue eyes in which sparkled a certain brilliant intelligence. His face was sharp and hansom, with just a touch of something that put one in the mind of a bird of prey. He pulled off the black robe and stood with a stretch twirling the cane in one hand as he walked across the room, the late Mr. Douglas having been all ready forgotten, and at any rate, reduced to a set of 206 cleanly picked bones by a family of very well bred piranha. It was amazing the meticulousness with which super villains bred piranha like champion dogs. Alexander's father had taken a rather deep affection for the flesh ripping fish in his old age, and despite the fact that Alexander felt the fish were a tad theatrical, he kept them well fed in honor of his late father. He also kept the outfit and the mask with the shock of white hair, mainly because it was far easier to ride his father's reputation than it was to build one of his own.<br/><br/>Alexander Smite crossed to the tinted windows of his office and looked out from the top floor of the tallest building in the city, out over the landscape that he more or less controlled. He had done nothing really productive that day, save secure the zoning rights for a building that would have been taller than his, an evil genius had to have his principles, and done away with the civil servant who had made the mistake of letting the plans get as far as they did in the first place.<br/><br/>A plan should have been bubbling in his mind just then, as they always did when he had removed one more useless, spineless, slug like man from the world, but for some reason the pleasure at seeing such a sloppy individual wiped from the world didn't spark him to thought. Mr. Douglas had been useful simply because no one liked him, and he always believed everyone was out to get him anyway. Well in the end someone simply had. He had been a worm, a parasite on what might actually be a serviceable council, his leaking of plans to Alexander had only been his most recent crime. Alexander held human life in high regard, but those individuals who chose to waste theirs made him want to show them just what they had missed.<br/><br/>He felt good for having eliminated the lout, but at the same time the action hadn't got the gears turning. Instead he felt restless, and just a little bit.... what was this feeling? A feeling that made him want to call Ms. Hellen into his office and tell her to take off her clothes. Alexander dropped the cane when he realized what it was. He felt lonely. With a sigh he called Ms. Hellen to hold his calls and stripped off the black leather gloves, more of his father's theatrics. He slipped out the little known side passage, naturally every evil genius had to have a secret exit, and stepped out onto the street in the same way any young man pumping corporate america to make ends meet would. He rubbed the sweat from his brow where the mask usually left a mark, and headed for a local bar, wondering just why it was he was craving the company of other intelligent, attractive individuals.