Chapter Text
“So, what do you actually do at your job?”
Diego Brando has, of course, only been waiting several months for his roommate to ask him this question. He resists the urge to jump on top of his chair (it’s a tiny-ass chair, but he can balance perfectly, he just verified that the other day!). Instead he sits back, clears his throat, and declares with languid pride and a toothy grin, “I’m the CFO.”
Johnny Joestar just stares at him. Not quite the reaction he was hoping for. “And that’s a what?”
“Chief Financial Officer. God! Don’t you even know that?”
“Someone actually trusts you with their money?” Johnny seems genuinely impressed by the stupidity of this decision. Diego has to wonder how they ended up sharing an apartment in the first place. Well, that’s an easy question to answer. They were both in the same city, both broke, and kind-of-sort-of knew each other from college. According to Johnny, they had an academic rivalry, which Diego doesn’t really remember. But in a town like this, it just makes sense to share living expenses with someone else. Jacaranda Point isn’t hip enough to be Silicon Valley, or cool enough to be L.A., or big enough to be…well, much of anything, really. But it’s just coastal enough to be Really. Frickin. Expensive.
Which makes getting that job even more of an accomplishment. “Yeah! I’m doing great things. I mean, we’re doing great things. We’re on the cutting edge of consumer gadget technology.” Okay, so that last part sounds like bullshit that’s been said a thousand times before, but it was what Valentine said word for word, so he can take the blame for it.
“How many people actually work at your company?” Johnny asks.
“Uh…” Diego takes a moment to do the mental calculations, except there isn’t much to calculate. “Thirteen.”
“Including you?”
“Yeah. Including me.”
“So you’re not the chief financial officer. You’re the only financial officer.”
“Johnny Joestar—”
“What’s your company called, anyway?”
“SBR.” Diego says this with considerably less pride than he started with. He is almost too deflated to finish the thought. “It stands for, uh, the names of the three main funders. Mr. Steel, Mr. Ball, and Mrs. Run.”
“That’s amazing!” Okay, when Johnny sounds like that, it definitely means the opposite of amazing. “Are you hiring?”
“Wait, what?”
It’s the perfect Southern California day in Jacaranda Point, which makes going indoors all the harder. The SBR office is situated on the second floor of a posh new building downtown, and the first floor is taken up by a bar. Or a gastropub, as the owner Tonio calls it, because apparently the word bar just isn’t cool enough for this town anymore. It takes all the discipline that Diego has to get himself directly to the office without a detour.
The interior of SBR is a pleasant place. Spacious and brand-spanking new, with plenty of sunlight streaming in from the windows, blonde hardwood floors, sleek and colorful furniture, plants that are actually alive, and…no private offices in sight. SBR’s ingrained ethos of open-plan seating means that anyone is supposed to be able to plop down their laptop and work from anywhere in the building. Which means zero privacy. No permanent desk on which Diego could put his personal items, god forbid. Well, he’d probably decorate it with tiny plastic dinosaurs, but that would have been cool, right?
“Diego!” Funny Valentine makes finger guns at him as he walks in, radiating enough enthusiasm to be classified as an occupational hazard. Great. So it’s going to be that kind of a day. Valentine is the founder, president, and CEO of their little startup. Like every other slightly deranged tech founder, he wears a signature outfit. His just happens to be Pepto-Bismol pink. Even though SBR has a culture of anti-elitism (it’s on all the posters), it still means he’s the only one with an actual office. From the moment he was hired, Diego has set his sights on getting that goddamn office, legally or not.
Everyone is already gathered around one of the long tables. They really don’t have a lot of people—and with Mike on vacation, and Axl locking himself in the R&D lab until he’s repaid his debt to society, whatever that means, the turnout for this alleged all-staff meeting is even more pitiful. Diego realizes he is a few minutes late, and everyone has been waiting for him. Like a true man of action, he ignores this fact. “What could it possibly be this time?” he asks drolly. He isn’t being paid to be nice, after all.
“I have a new product concept,” Valentine says. “Or, well, Dr. Ferdinand has a new concept. Hewlett Packard, did you print the slides?”
“My name is not fucking Hewlett Packard!” Hot Pants, Director (and only employee) of Marketing, slams a stack of papers down on the conference table. “How hard is it to just say H.P.? If you can’t bring yourself to say Hot Pants, because, I don’t know, maybe you have the maturity of a small child—”
“It’s a joke. About printers. Because you were printing. Get it?”
“I’ll print your face,” Hot Pants says, giving everyone in the room a withering glare in turn. Diego can’t help but feel caught in the crossfire. It’s kind of terrifyingly attractive.
“Anyway,” Valentine says, “we had incredible success with our flagship product, but it’s time for a pivot.” Diego silently grits his teeth. If I had a dollar for every time he said the word pivot, I’d have something like a salary I could actually tell Johnny Joestar. Although, considering that the SBR flagship product is old news, and kind of stupid in his opinion, it is about time for a change.
“I hope it’s an actual new product, and not like, a firmware upgrade for the fucking smart napkin holder,” Diego says.
“Smart napkin dispenser! You don’t understand the symbolism. Ferdinand, could you show them?”
Dr. Ferdinand does not respond, absorbed in a battle to connect his laptop to the countless cords emanating like the tentacles of an eldritch creature from a port in the middle of the table. Diego cannot remember a single meeting where they got a laptop connected to the projector on the first try. “Hmm,” Dr. Ferdinand says, as if pondering the finer points of quantum mechanics. “That’s curious. I could have sworn…” Come to think of it, Ferdinand and his minions have the whole R&D lab to themselves. That’s better than a private office. Diego is kind of jealous.
“Dr. Ferdinand,” Valentine says with an aspartame-sweet smile, “we hired you because you’re a brain with a PhD. Why can’t you get the projector to work?”
“I just need another minute…where’s Mike? Mike can fix this.”
Aaand come to think of it, Mike O. from IT has the server room to himself, too. That’s almost like a private office. Diego Brando, CFO, is feeling kind of pissed off.
“Mike is on vacation. Blackmore, can you just pass around the printed slides? Everyone take a copy.”
“And once again,” Hot Pants says under her breath, “I am the only person here who made a useful contribution.” Diego is probably the only one who heard that, so he gives her a furtive thumbs up. She flips him the bird. Well, it’s something.
The slides show a toothbrush. It’s aesthetically pleasing, but it’s still a toothbrush. “It’s a fuckin’ toothbrush,” Diego says.
“It’s a smart toothbrush,” Dr. Ferdinand says. “It will adjust to your grip and tell you if your brushing time or technique is inadequate. It will also track your progress and play a happy tune when you meet your goals.”
“This is literally the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever heard,” Diego says.
“Do we need another product that yells at people?” Wekapipo, as usual, also raises a reasonable dissent. It’s a good point. The napkin dispenser had also yelled—correction, gently reminded users when it was nearly empty. And sent messages to their phones. It was kind of horrifying. Diego has no idea how it sold so well.
“People like to be given specific goals,” Valentine says. “It incentivizes good oral hygiene. There’s nothing more American than a beautiful smile.”
“You’re being facetious, right? Please tell me you’re being facetious,” Hot Pants says.
“It’s, I don’t know, sorta disturbing to have a passive-aggressive A.I. in your mouth,” Magenta Magenta points out.
“Do you even brush your teeth?” Dr. Ferdinand asks, with perfect seriousness.
“Hey, that’s uncalled for!”
“Anyway,” Ferdinand says, ignoring him, “look at this prototype!” He takes out an example of the toothbrush and passes it around. “Isn’t it cute? It spins!” It takes only five seconds for Magenta to start attacking Wekapipo with it.
“It’s fucking stupid,” Johnny Joestar says.
“For once we agree,” Diego replies. He wasn’t supposed to take the prototype home, but Magenta had nearly destroyed the bristles anyway, and Ferdinand didn’t want it back. So he had given it to Johnny, as proof that they produced something recently. In truth, he’s bounced SBR’s concepts off Johnny on a pretty regular basis. It’s amusing to hear his sarcasm and precision in shooting down all the ideas, if nothing else.
Now Johnny is scrutinizing the poor toothbrush with such an intimidating blue glare that even its rudimentary A.I. could probably feel terror. “I thought you’d like it, though,” Diego says. “It spins, doesn’t it?”
“It doesn’t spin well.” Johnny has this uncanny ability to make everything he touches spin in one way or another, so maybe he does know what sets a good spin apart from a bad one. It’s something he learned from his physical therapist a while back. And then they’d started dating, so there’s that. “Anyway, does the world need another toothbrush that spins? Don’t a ton of them already do that?”
“See, but this is a smart toothbrush.”
“Listen to you. You’re not even convincing yourself. I bet someone else is already selling one exactly like this. And besides, would you use this? You have, like, dinosaur teeth, you’d chew through it in a few days.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” Diego takes good care of his teeth, that’s all. They’re normal human teeth, they just tend to be…visible. His mom had told him many years ago that his smile was his best attribute, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, he can’t help but be proud of it still. Maybe that’s why he grins too much.
“It totally is! Who doesn’t want an unforgettable face?” Johnny looks like he’s having a great time. Unlike Gyro, Johnny’s ex-physical-therapist and current boyfriend, Diego at least knows not to take his enthusiasm at face value.
“Yeah, sure. So, what’s the verdict from Focus Group Joestar? On a scale of 1 to 10?” Diego holds up the toothbrush again.
“Negative zero.”
“That’s not even a number!”
“It sucks. Tell your boss that. It might just save your career.”
“It sucks,” Diego says, hands folded in front of him on the table.
“Diego,” Valentine says, “that’s not the kind of energy we want to bring to SBR.”
“Exactly. See, my uhh—contract consultant, he’s a really smart dude, he’s like a living fidget spinner or something. Expert in rotational dynamics.” Oh god, he is bullshitting at the speed of light. “He says this is not a viable product. The market competition is too fierce.”
“Actually, he has a point,” Ferdinand says. “We’d be entering the personal care space with this product. When you get into medical stuff, you have all these extra safety regulations. We don’t have enough people to deal with that.”
“I thought you were supposed to deal with that?”
“I’m here for inspiration.” Ferdinand makes a dramatic gesture toward the room. “I don’t have time to make sure people don’t get killed.”
“Wow, um, okay,” Diego says. “I’m so glad I didn’t join R&D.”
“It’s never too late! My door is always open. Except that one time we had a noxious gas leak.”
“So basically,” Valentine says, “what you two are saying is, if we take this toothbrush to market, not only do we risk losing money, but we all might go to jail because Ferdinand can’t be arsed to guarantee that it won’t explode and kill anyone.”
“Oh, please. Explosions are boring. There are lots of other potential failure modes that are way more interesting—”
“Okay, say no more. We’re not doing this. The concept is scrapped. Our next product needs to be something that does not go near anyone’s face. Got it?”
Diego returns to the office on Monday morning in an uncommonly good mood. That dumbass toothbrush project is finally behind them, so they might be able to move on to something actually good. His cousin Dio had been in town over the weekend, and in spite of Dio’s aversion to the California sun, Diego had a decent time showing him around. The Brando family’s definition of decent does not involve going to bed until the wee hours of the morning. Most of the weekend is now a drunken blur in Diego’s memory, but he’s pretty sure Dio mentioned something about having a kid…does that make him an uncle? No, wait, second cousin once removed? He just has to thank the stars and his genes for not having a hangover.
The energy in the office seems uncommonly bubbly, too. This would usually raise his inner alarm, but maybe he’s hungover after all, and he doesn’t notice until finally the sirens go off in his head. Everyone seems to be looking at him and—smiling? Smirking? Wait, is he getting shitcanned?
“Diego,” Hot Pants says, and he inwardly curses at her ability to make the world’s most powerful pokerface when she wants to. “I have some great news.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to take that. Are you being sarcastic?”
“No, it’s really great news! We have a new hire. It was about time, don’t you think?”
“Okay, then why is everyone acting kinda weird?”
“We’ve heard a lot about this person. In fact, he was rather mysterious for a long time, but his…snap judgments and pro bono consulting have saved us a lot of grief in the past.” Now Hot Pants looks like she’s trying to suppress a smile. “After last week, we just had to meet him. The interview went pretty well. Actually, we were so impressed with him that we had to hire him on the spot.”
“Aren’t you Marketing? Why do you get to decide who gets hired?”
“I mean, DI-S-CO is technically HR, but I’ve never seen him have any actual opinions. Anyway, here’s the new guy. I think you might know each other.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone like—” Wait. Waiiiit.
“Diego, meet our new Senior Innovation Specialist.”
“Is that even a real title?”
“It is now,” another voice says.
Before Diego can say anything more, the new guy is already spinning his chair around to greet him. The reason he hadn’t picked up on there being a new person before is because the back of his head looked so familiar, so natural, that it just wasn’t out of place at all.
“Good morning, Diego,” Johnny Joestar says, the lower half of his face a breezy smile, the upper half a point-blank infusion of pure organic Dark Determination™.
“Hi!” Diego says, grinning so vehemently that his face hurts. “Welcome to SBR!”