Big Corp Inc. (G/T)

Part 1: Call to Adventure

Candy Caramello urgently needed a job. She was getting desperate. One more missing rent payment, and she'd probably be evicted and living out on the street. Her landlord was an understanding guy, but she hadn't paid any rent in months, and she was running out of money.

Unfortunately, Candy didn't have any marketable skills. She wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed either. She had dropped out of high school and toiled in low-wage retail jobs for most of her working life. Candy was cute and sweet, as her name suggested, but also incompetent and clumsy. Somehow, she managed to get herself fired from every job she worked at. Her last job was at a restaurant. In the few months she worked there, she managed to mix together the bags of salt and sugar, spilled drinks and food on several customers, and broke enough plates and glasses to make a full dining set. The manager liked her for her bubbly personality, but eventually got fed up with her costly mistakes and had to let her go.

The story was similar at her other jobs too. For a short time, she had worked at a warehouse where she had to pick orders, pack them up in boxes, and sort them. She could never get the orders right. She'd always forget an item, or put an extra item in, or count the wrong number, or confuse the invoices. She'd make a mess out of the packing materials, tear up the boxes, and get her long blonde hair caught in the packing tape. A plethora of customer complaints regarding incorrect orders and hair everywhere led to termination of her employment.

Needless to say, the more jobs she got fired from, the less anyone wanted to hire her. The situation had deteriorated to the point where she was notorious, blackballed from several industries in her city. Her references all warned against hiring her to new potential employers. Candy was in trouble.

She did have one option left, but she was very hesitant to pursue it. See, Candy lived on the small side of the city, with all the other humans like her. Her city was split into two sections, the small side and the large side, which were kept strictly separate for safety reasons. The large side of the city housed the Giants, a race of people who were just like humans except hundreds of feet tall. Like most humans, Candy was scared of Giants. She had never met one personally, since she avoided crossing the barrier to the large side of the city, but in the instances where she was close by she had felt the tremors of their tremendous footsteps in the ground and seen their towering silhouettes from afar.

Of course, the TV programs and the government propaganda flyers posted all over town proclaimed that Giants were perfectly safe to humans, and the two species could effortlessly live together in harmony. The human and Giant governments had been slowly working towards integration for years, despite the resistance of the majority of the human constituents involved. The Giant parliament had appropriated millions upon millions of Big Bucks (BB), the Giant currency, to building infrastructure suitable for humans in the large sector. Despite the sizable investment, few if any humans were brave or stupid enough to venture forth to the large side. Oftentimes, those who left were never seen or heard from again.

This incontrovertible fact was a great embarrassment to the Giant government that had invested so much money into a failed project. Therefore, they decided to pass an affirmative action plan to encourage Giant businesses to hire human workers, in order to lure humans over to the large side of the city. This program was relatively new, and would grant substantial subsidies to private businesses to upgrade their offices to accommodate and employ humans. While businesses were more than happy to receive easy money from the government and spare the bare minimum expense to "upgrade," finding humans willing to work with Giants was harder.

In their glossy advertisement campaigns, painting rosy pictures of humans and Giants happily working together, these businesses targeted naïve, impressionable humans that were desperate for work—humans like Candy. Despite her reservations, Candy was easy prey. The idea of working with Giants made her exceedingly nervous, but after filling out hundreds of job applications with no response, she decided to shoot her shot and apply—after all, she had nothing to lose. She wasn't familiar with too many Giant businesses, but she saw a promotional campaign from an establishment called Big Corp Inc. and decided to send in her resume.