Nika slipped out of her eemee in front of a building its occupants called the Corkscrew.  Designed like a long stainless-steel drill blade with windows, it nestled at its base the photon lab where she and her team toiled. She briefly glanced at the eccentric tower of slopes and spirals, then told the eemee to fly back to its docking bay and watched it vanish into the sky. Realizing she was late for her first appointment, she dashed through the front entrance and hurtled into the foyer. She swerved around several startled people and squeezed into the first available downward-plunging lift.

The people jammed beside her were mainly blank-looking research wonks. She counted herself one of them. The pressure of the development program was grinding her down, but she still considered her work research. Flushed and harried, she steeled herself for the first item of the day--a confrontation with her most troublesome student.

She gazed at her fellow passengers. A woman who was dressed in silken whorls of red and crimson caught her eye. She was clearly trying to embody a rose, right down to her brown boots studded with thorns. An intense-looking, shaven-headed postdoc was clad in chain mail and the red-and-white tunic of a medieval crusader. Wriggling to avoid the longsword dangling from his leather belt, she glanced down at her own yellow-hued garments. She was a chromer, and she chose the color yellow to boost the power of her inquiring, analytic mind. It reflected the influence of the third chakra. Her fellow chromers were into chakra-dosing and were clothed in the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet of the chakra they identified with.

The lift reached the basement and emptied out. Stepping into the long corridor, she spied her cubbyhole office and the lanky, bored-looking youth lounging beside its door and gazing at his green fingernails. He wore a frilled shirt, a silk Regency waistcoat, ultra-tight breeches, and shiny riding boots. All in dramatic shades of green. They harmonized with the jade ajna pressed against his forehead. His blond hair was tugged back and green-ribboned in a queue that matched his retro clothes. She recalled him saying he would adopt the color green in deference to her devotion to yellow--the color of the scientist. He claimed it would imbue him with the power of the heart chakra and hence "the color of the scientist with a heart."

What a poseur. It's a pity his daddy owns the Department. 

Seething with irritation as she strode down the corridor, she tried to compose herself. She aimed to persuade him to stop plagiarizing other students' work, but didn't want to come across as a brow-beating bitch. She walked past him to the door, nodded, and tapped the touchpad. The door swung open and she scuttled inside. The youth straightened up, stepped aside, and made an elaborate bow.

Yuke Corrigan the Second closed the door behind him while she scooted around her desk and squeezed herself into its plastic chair. 

"Gentle lady, the honor is mine." He waved his hand with a Regency-era flourish. The smirk on his face as he appraised her undignified squirm into the narrow gap between desk and wall stoked her irritation.

"Good morning, Yuke. You can drop the chivalry bullshit, by the way. It makes it harder for me to turn you into a scientist." 

Her irritation flared into exasperation and she was aware of her ajna pulsing soothing vibrations into her brain to bathe its neurons. The vibes did little to soften her mood. She thought of confronting him with his sexual harassment complaint, but decided it would flatter his vanity to believe she cared about it. Instead, she scrutinized his features as he rested his hands on the back of the chair in front of her desk.

Okay, he's kind of good-looking, but don't most boys of twenty look good, unless they're schlubs? And what's with this "gentle lady" stuff? I'm his tutor, not some retro-obsessed role player. 

"I fear, gentle lady, that your efforts are quite wasted, unless by scientist  you mean a practitioner of the dark arts of alchemy and the mysterious conjuring of electro-magnetic energy, so recently discovered by the redoubtable Mr James Clerk Maxwell." 

"Listen, Yuke, James Clerk Maxwell died over two hundred years ago and, redoubtable as he was, he wouldn't have put up with your shenanigans for more than a Scottish minute. Turning in papers a week late, screwing up half the data, and plagiarizing the rest would have earned you the grand order of the boot, laddie."

His cockiness turned to annoyance at her blazing words. He spun the chair around and straddled it with his legs outspread. Glaring at her, he folded his arms on the chair back.

"First off, I didn't plagiarize any data. Vishnu, Dong and I worked on that project together and we agreed to share a third of the findings each. Second off--"

"--their data is clean, Yuke. I checked it myself. Yours, however, stinks."

He gave her a hard, unblinking stare. She almost lowered her eyes, before deciding to meet him with a fierce glare of her own. It made her teeth grate to be insulted with mock-indignation by a foppish, out-of-time dandy. She knew he only did it because his father, Yuke Corrigan the First, was the principal financial backer of the ELU Physics Department.

"And you were a week late, probably because you were partied out and hung over." Her exasperation made her launch a dig at his vanity.

"I put in my time the same as everybody else on the team. Yes, I like to party when the day is done--but please don't accuse me of slacking, Doctor Talbot."

His protestation didn't move her. She knew it was fake. He sat watching her, his face bone-hard, and she started feeling intense discomfort. There was something erotic in his stare, and she shifted from irritation to awkwardness. His features were vigorous and sharp and his yellow frizzy hair fairly crackled above his bronzed temples. She experienced something stir that she wanted to squelch with more harsh words. 

"How can you invoke the name of the man who theorized and discovered the electro-magnetic field and stands between Newton and Einstein, and then lie through your teeth?"

She reddened, and idly stroked the console of the holorecorder on her desk that recorded student-tutor interactions. Going off on him is really embarrassing, but what can I do?  She leaned forward and looked him in his green contact-lensed eyes. 

" Yuke, I have six other students on my program and they all want to be research scientists--which is why they're working their arses off."

"Right. And with me on the team you have the Magnificent Seven. Or would you prefer the Seven Samurai?"

She was acutely aware of being a twenty-five-year-old woman in a tiny room with a tall handsome youth. All his features were sharp and definite and his lean, sturdy body was fit and limber. He wasn't really her type, but--apart from his annoying attempts at charming her--he was impressive and more than a little disturbing.

She threw up her hands.

"Okay, Yuke, there's nothing more I can say. Needless to add, I'm up to my eyeballs in work all this week, so I don't suppose we'll be meeting till Team Game Monday. But I beg of you--at least think of handing in your reports on time, will you? And please try to keep your work clean. At ELU we have to maintain standards."

Yuke unstraddled himself from the chair as if he were dismounting a horse--or a woman--and gave her a sly grin.

"I shall return, gentle lady, and as for keeping it clean...I fear, with my proud flesh much aroused, I'm hard pressed to oblige you."

"You know what I meant by clean." Her anger blazed, and she glared as she watched him saunter out of her office and close the door.

Something tells me he's going to be a whole bunch of trouble.