The first time she stepped foot in it, the entrance lobby of the Apple Valley, Minnesota Frinet facility looked exactly like Silicia had expected it would. The modest minimalism of smooth off-white walls and a carpet so unobtrusively patterned that your eyes just slid right past if you weren't looking directly at it created an almost eerily familiar effect, like she should have known her way around already, because the picture before her was made up of individual elements she'd seen a million times before in too many tech jobs.

Silicia walked confidently up to the floor plan overview map next to the elevator to study it. The eyes of the security guards followed her. That would take some getting used to.

She pressed the button for floor 8, overthinking how shady tapping her foot would make her look. Silicia didn't typically consider herself a nervous person, but this job was the opportunity of a lifetime.

The music in the elevator was better than the lobby, but not good, and the thing was carpeted. It rumbled to life under her feet and Silicia wondered how old the building was, anyway. She knew that Frinet was a rather old company; she'd read up on it when Mira got a position here a few years ago. During her meteoric rise through the company's ranks she'd trodden on quite a few feet and smugly shared with her girlfriend quite a few details of its internal conflicts, but that had never included architectural fun facts.

That had always been the thing with Mira; she was zoomed out and good at holding the larger picture in her mind, and so she became a professional in focussing on large goals and ignoring the small inconveniences. A good chunk of the decor they'd bought for her newest office still sat untouched in a box under her desk at home. The only thing that had made it into her workspace was a framed photo of the two of them at Mira's graduation.

Silicia figured she might change that, now that she'd have access to the building for most of the week. She'd been daydreaming about buying stupid little holiday ornaments to put up ever since she'd gotten the formal confirmation they would hire her. Improving Mira's image via strategically placed humanizing thingamabobs was a long standing conversation topic between the two of them, and Mira always called her 'such a psych student' when she tried to argue for anything but success via cold hard merit.

Not that she could really claim it hadn't worked for Mira - after all, it was her promotion which finally rescued Silicia from the twenty-something-trying-to-make-it-in-the-big-city hamster wheel. Like any good morally driven idealist, she'd had doubts about being pushed into a wall and having 'I got you a job, babe' whispered in her ear seductively. She'd argued, lied about liking her previous pencil-pusher job, even.
Mira had run a hand through her hair and told her she'd have gotten the job without her help had she'd just applied, and that had been that.

The elevator announced her floor in a hollowly cheerful female voice, and Silicia checked her watch to see that she was almost 20 minutes early.

The senior employee waiting for her arrival in the small 8th floor lobby was a soft spoken beanstalk of a man named Frederick who kept wringing his hands and smoothing down the front of his thick wool jumper like he didn't know what to do with his spindly limbs while he wasn't gesturing at things around them. Her initial impression of him was positive; he didn't comment on her choice of haircut or attire, nor on how she'd gotten the position. Fred led her through multiple ecru corridors, pointing out rooms to either side.

Up here, the flooring was linoleum, and the rooms were labelled with little hand written slips of paper in transparent plastic casings on the wall like they did in hospitals. Overall it was quite charming, and the elevation meant a lot more sunlight reached floor 8 than did the ground floor.

Fred's tour ended on what was to be her office, although at the moment it was still cluttered with the remnants of its previous occupant. He apologized - they were in the process of clearing the place out but scheduling conflicts had intervened. For now, she put down her bag on the broad office chair and pinned the fancy name tag he handed her to the front of her shirt, then she followed him two doors down to his first appointment of the day.

---

She could smell Mira was home and cooking from the stairway. The flat they shared was technically hers, but in reality Mira slept and spent most of her free time there. It was wonderful, not living alone after college, especially when she occasionally enjoyed the truly decadent luxury of coming home and having someone there already waiting for her with food.

She cracked the door open and it smelled even better inside.

In the kitchen Mira was lazily stirring a pot, her eyes glued to the little hedgehog shaped timer that sat on the counter. Silicia came up to her to wrap her arms around Mira's waist and she sank back against her like she'd been born to do it, turning down the stove absent-mindedly.

"How was it?"

"Oh, terrible," Silicia said with a grin. "Madhouse up in there. I'm not the kind of psychologist they need."

Mira huffed a laugh, jostling her. "I suppose you do have to be a little bit sick in the head to voluntarily work with children."

"How's it going four floors above me, then?"

"Oh, terrible! Half the floor is gaudy luxury furnishings we're invited to use, the other is so tightly packed with machinery and research equipment you can't walk over to the coffee machine without stepping on a cable-" Mira laughed and tapped the wooden spoon she was still holding against the rim of the pot.

"Where am I going to put down my coffee!"

---

Frinet had only recently started venturing into the field of education more seriously, a direction they'd been considering for a while, and from the way Mira talked about it one she had been personally encouraging. The company had been offering a selection of individual courses for adults for years, but more recently this facility's middle floors had been torn out and rebuilt to create a sort of in-house boarding school.

Their first group of students had arrived less than a month ago, bringing life to brand new corridors and classrooms full of chairs that didn't creak yet. It was only about 30 children, the exact number to hit that middle ground between a surely uncountable amount of overlapping business calculations. "Lest they risk having children breach containment and wreak havoc in the main lab above them," she'd joked, and Fred had grimaced like he was imagining 30 children set loose in his office.

All this to say, the psychologists' offices on floor eight were numbered one through fifteen and all practically identical, though most were not in use. Fred had hauled one of the chairs from the copious small seating areas that were strewn about the building's halls to make it seem less clinical over for her, so she sat at the back of the room, smiled at the children, and listened.

Fred's method was very by the book, and she surmised that like her he was likely pretty green as well. The questions and encouragement were rehearsed, but not met with much pushback from the children. It was clear they were used to things like this. Aside from the standard evaluation questions he knew off the top of his head, Fred kept referencing a stapled together document; it was just a few pages, formatted very plainly from what she could spy.

After all the children had completed the mandated half hour of personal evaluation and support (of which there was conveniently very little needed), he finally addressed the way she'd been subtly trying to lean over to catch a closer look at the print out. Apparently the document was the real crux of their jobs: it contained both very specific as well as rather intentionally vague sounding instructions on what information he should collect for his weekly reports.
It stuck out to her how normal most of the questions were, but maybe they just didn't trust them enough to live up to the company's standards without hand holding yet.

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