Life at the Head of the Cutting Edge, G. Allison.
Title: Life at the Head of the Cutting Edge
Author: sheepfairy
Rating: G
Warnings: N/A
Written For: havocthecat
Prompt: Allison. Being awesome. Plenty of Allison being herself and being uncompromising where she needs to be, with that dry sense of humor, and just showing everyone how completely awesome she is.
Summary: Sometimes Allison hates her job and sometimes she loves it.
Author's Notes: Thanks to elsajeni_fic for being an awesome friend and pointing out when I fail at writing! Also, I apologize for how incredibly late this story was; my life kind of blew up in my face, but I hope it was worth the wait.
Allison loves Eureka. She loves being in charge, she loves being on the cutting edge, and she loves living in a town filled with people who understand her son as much as he will ever be understood.
Sometimes, though, she misses her life before she got involved with the Department of Defense and the Eureka project. Even though she's a bureaucrat in charge of directing some of the most brilliant minds in the world, at the end of the day it's still her first responsibility to be a bureaucrat.
And being a bureaucrat can get old fast.
So, yes, her job does allow her access to some of the best medical labs known to man for her personal research, but being the head of GD doesn't really leave her much time to use them.
But every now and then she has to make time, because the ideas that first grabbed the Eureka scout's attention are still there bouncing around in her head whether she's got time for them or not. Halfway through the week she realizes that she hasn't bothered to make time in a while, and so she spends her lunch break delegating like crazy until she's managed to arrange a free evening for herself.
When she gets home she sits Kevin down on one side of the table with his chalkboard and his pure math so advanced she can barely follow it and settles on the other side with her computer tablet and all of her research articles on modern medicine and artificial organs.
They work long into the night in a companionable silence, and for a while it doesn't matter that her son rarely talks to her. They can connect here, quietly, over their shared love of science.
*****
She stays up so late working on her ideas for artificial spinal cords that she's a little bleary during work the next day, but she doesn't regret the time spent on herself. At least not until she starts flipping through the research proposals left on her desk, and then she realizes that she'll probably need all of her energy just to deal with today's line-up.
When Allison was growing up she'd been pretty popular. Not prom queen popular or anything like that, but she'd had friends and nobody had gone out of their way to make fun of her, and so she'd never quite understood where the stereotype about smart kids being socially backward freaks came from.
Then she'd discovered Eureka, and she'd started to understand it better.
Which isn't very kind of her, especially since so many of Eureka's residents are lovely people with very tight grips on their sanity. Allison likes those people, mostly because she never really has to deal with them in any official capacity. They send in their well thought-out research proposals, complete with clearly outlined real world applications and modest budget requests, and she approves them and that's the end of the matter until a few months or years later when everyone comes together to celebrate a new scientific breakthrough. And they also usually do her the professional courtesy of not accidentally threatening the entire planet with wide spread devastation.
Today's line-up, on the other hand, is a long list of the troublemakers that keep her away from her own labs and research and seem to be trying to make her just as crazy as they are.
Taggart is the first one she has to talk to, and fortunately he's not even that bad. He at least manages to keep his eccentricities within the budget most of the time. She only has to remind him that it's his responsibility to keep his research projects from eating the local pets.
"Sorry about that, ma'am," he says. "They just get a little over-excited when they're let outside."
"Yes, well, we're lucky Mrs. Adams didn't decide to sue us for emotional distress."
"You know, if she's interested, we still have parts of her little dog in the lab. We could take it down to cloning lab..."
"No thank you," interrupts Allison quickly, several of the more upsetting situations Eureka has had with regards to cloning flashing in front of her eyes. There'd been a general ban on human cloning in Eureka for years, but some of the things the cloning specialists had managed to do just to plants were rather alarming.
"Suit yourself. I guess we're just lucky there weren't any people around, right?"
"Wait. They eat people? I thought you said-"
"Just kidding, just kidding. Most carnivores don't actually care much for the taste of human flesh. So long as they don't mistake a human for something they do eat, there shouldn't be a problem."
"Right," says Allison. She makes a note to have more security added to Taggart's project or, better yet, just have it canceled altogether.
After Taggart comes Dr. Marret, who seems to be having a mental breakdown thanks to the fact that his research into dwarf starts has turned out to be a dead end. Allison understands how having several years worth of work proven useless can be traumatic, but it still doesn't excuse breaking one astronomically expensive telescope.
"I know this is a fairly sensitive topic, but have you considered taking advantage of Global's expansive mental health benefits?"
"You want me to see a shrink?" asks Dr. Marret.
"Yes, that would be what I'm getting at."
"You seriously want me to see a shrink? After what happened with Barlowe?"
Allison chokes down a sigh. He's got a good point, but there's no way she's going to admit that Beverly Barlowe is the exact reason she's never going to see a therapist again. "The incident with Dr. Barlowe aside, Global still has a large team of highly experienced mental health professionals."
"No."
"Look, you can either go to the shrink or you can pay to repair the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage you did to the deep space telescope out of your own pocket."
She wins that argument, but after Dr. Marret she has to deal with Dr. Adelai and then Dr. Parkinson and then Dr. Yao. By the end of the day she starts to regret the fact that she's sworn of therapists altogether. She would go to Cafe Diem and self-medicate with some alcohol instead, but it's never a good idea to let yourself get drunk when one of your underlings could accidentally start the countdown to Armageddon at any moment.
She'll just have to settle for self-medicating with caffeine instead.
*****
"Oh, Allison, you know you shouldn't work and eat at the same time. That's bad for your health," says Vincent. "And, anyway, you should be giving your full attention to that omelet you're eating. I invented a totally new spice for it."
"I know, but this week has been just awful," says Allison. She flips through a stack of Fargo's research proposals and sighs. Fargo was obviously going to need the lecture about stealing scientific ideas from television again, even though he'd been getting it since Dr. King was running the place.
She takes a pen and scribbles out where he's written 'Project: Cylon' and replaces it with 'Research into Biological-Component Robotics'. If he's going to take ideas from TV shows he could at least stand to be a little subtler about it.
"Don't you ever get annoyed dealing with all of that business at Global?" asks Vincent.
"Sometimes," says Allison. She'd just spent all day having to deal with a bunch of petulant scientists who seemed to confuse her need to enforce Global's ethical and financial obligations with a personal desire on her part to oppress them just for the hell of it and it was, in fact, incredibly annoying. But then again, if she weren't the head of Global she'd never have seen the Chaotic-Inflation Device recreate the Big Bang, or any of the other revolutionary scientific advances she's watched over since she got to Eureka.
Granted, she also would have had a lot fewer near-death experiences, but in the end everything balances out.
Author: sheepfairy
Rating: G
Warnings: N/A
Written For: havocthecat
Prompt: Allison. Being awesome. Plenty of Allison being herself and being uncompromising where she needs to be, with that dry sense of humor, and just showing everyone how completely awesome she is.
Summary: Sometimes Allison hates her job and sometimes she loves it.
Author's Notes: Thanks to elsajeni_fic for being an awesome friend and pointing out when I fail at writing! Also, I apologize for how incredibly late this story was; my life kind of blew up in my face, but I hope it was worth the wait.
Allison loves Eureka. She loves being in charge, she loves being on the cutting edge, and she loves living in a town filled with people who understand her son as much as he will ever be understood.
Sometimes, though, she misses her life before she got involved with the Department of Defense and the Eureka project. Even though she's a bureaucrat in charge of directing some of the most brilliant minds in the world, at the end of the day it's still her first responsibility to be a bureaucrat.
And being a bureaucrat can get old fast.
So, yes, her job does allow her access to some of the best medical labs known to man for her personal research, but being the head of GD doesn't really leave her much time to use them.
But every now and then she has to make time, because the ideas that first grabbed the Eureka scout's attention are still there bouncing around in her head whether she's got time for them or not. Halfway through the week she realizes that she hasn't bothered to make time in a while, and so she spends her lunch break delegating like crazy until she's managed to arrange a free evening for herself.
When she gets home she sits Kevin down on one side of the table with his chalkboard and his pure math so advanced she can barely follow it and settles on the other side with her computer tablet and all of her research articles on modern medicine and artificial organs.
They work long into the night in a companionable silence, and for a while it doesn't matter that her son rarely talks to her. They can connect here, quietly, over their shared love of science.
*****
She stays up so late working on her ideas for artificial spinal cords that she's a little bleary during work the next day, but she doesn't regret the time spent on herself. At least not until she starts flipping through the research proposals left on her desk, and then she realizes that she'll probably need all of her energy just to deal with today's line-up.
When Allison was growing up she'd been pretty popular. Not prom queen popular or anything like that, but she'd had friends and nobody had gone out of their way to make fun of her, and so she'd never quite understood where the stereotype about smart kids being socially backward freaks came from.
Then she'd discovered Eureka, and she'd started to understand it better.
Which isn't very kind of her, especially since so many of Eureka's residents are lovely people with very tight grips on their sanity. Allison likes those people, mostly because she never really has to deal with them in any official capacity. They send in their well thought-out research proposals, complete with clearly outlined real world applications and modest budget requests, and she approves them and that's the end of the matter until a few months or years later when everyone comes together to celebrate a new scientific breakthrough. And they also usually do her the professional courtesy of not accidentally threatening the entire planet with wide spread devastation.
Today's line-up, on the other hand, is a long list of the troublemakers that keep her away from her own labs and research and seem to be trying to make her just as crazy as they are.
Taggart is the first one she has to talk to, and fortunately he's not even that bad. He at least manages to keep his eccentricities within the budget most of the time. She only has to remind him that it's his responsibility to keep his research projects from eating the local pets.
"Sorry about that, ma'am," he says. "They just get a little over-excited when they're let outside."
"Yes, well, we're lucky Mrs. Adams didn't decide to sue us for emotional distress."
"You know, if she's interested, we still have parts of her little dog in the lab. We could take it down to cloning lab..."
"No thank you," interrupts Allison quickly, several of the more upsetting situations Eureka has had with regards to cloning flashing in front of her eyes. There'd been a general ban on human cloning in Eureka for years, but some of the things the cloning specialists had managed to do just to plants were rather alarming.
"Suit yourself. I guess we're just lucky there weren't any people around, right?"
"Wait. They eat people? I thought you said-"
"Just kidding, just kidding. Most carnivores don't actually care much for the taste of human flesh. So long as they don't mistake a human for something they do eat, there shouldn't be a problem."
"Right," says Allison. She makes a note to have more security added to Taggart's project or, better yet, just have it canceled altogether.
After Taggart comes Dr. Marret, who seems to be having a mental breakdown thanks to the fact that his research into dwarf starts has turned out to be a dead end. Allison understands how having several years worth of work proven useless can be traumatic, but it still doesn't excuse breaking one astronomically expensive telescope.
"I know this is a fairly sensitive topic, but have you considered taking advantage of Global's expansive mental health benefits?"
"You want me to see a shrink?" asks Dr. Marret.
"Yes, that would be what I'm getting at."
"You seriously want me to see a shrink? After what happened with Barlowe?"
Allison chokes down a sigh. He's got a good point, but there's no way she's going to admit that Beverly Barlowe is the exact reason she's never going to see a therapist again. "The incident with Dr. Barlowe aside, Global still has a large team of highly experienced mental health professionals."
"No."
"Look, you can either go to the shrink or you can pay to repair the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage you did to the deep space telescope out of your own pocket."
She wins that argument, but after Dr. Marret she has to deal with Dr. Adelai and then Dr. Parkinson and then Dr. Yao. By the end of the day she starts to regret the fact that she's sworn of therapists altogether. She would go to Cafe Diem and self-medicate with some alcohol instead, but it's never a good idea to let yourself get drunk when one of your underlings could accidentally start the countdown to Armageddon at any moment.
She'll just have to settle for self-medicating with caffeine instead.
*****
"Oh, Allison, you know you shouldn't work and eat at the same time. That's bad for your health," says Vincent. "And, anyway, you should be giving your full attention to that omelet you're eating. I invented a totally new spice for it."
"I know, but this week has been just awful," says Allison. She flips through a stack of Fargo's research proposals and sighs. Fargo was obviously going to need the lecture about stealing scientific ideas from television again, even though he'd been getting it since Dr. King was running the place.
She takes a pen and scribbles out where he's written 'Project: Cylon' and replaces it with 'Research into Biological-Component Robotics'. If he's going to take ideas from TV shows he could at least stand to be a little subtler about it.
"Don't you ever get annoyed dealing with all of that business at Global?" asks Vincent.
"Sometimes," says Allison. She'd just spent all day having to deal with a bunch of petulant scientists who seemed to confuse her need to enforce Global's ethical and financial obligations with a personal desire on her part to oppress them just for the hell of it and it was, in fact, incredibly annoying. But then again, if she weren't the head of Global she'd never have seen the Chaotic-Inflation Device recreate the Big Bang, or any of the other revolutionary scientific advances she's watched over since she got to Eureka.
Granted, she also would have had a lot fewer near-death experiences, but in the end everything balances out.