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"The course of true love never did run smooth"

Lying on a bed of silky, red rose petals the woman beckons to the silhouette of a tall stranger. From the moment he enters the room, it is clear to see he is breathtakingly beautiful.  Achingly so.  Thrilling-bodice-ripping-erotica beautiful.  Tall, lithe, and toned with icy blue eyes and a smattering of fresh stubble across a chiselled jaw line.  The woman, dressed only in a simple, yet sheer, cotton toga, smiles seductively as she reaches up to mesh those perfect lips with hers, his hands tugging through her hair, his body hard and hot...

Penny rolled over, her dream already melting into the cold, empty room and grunted in response to her irritatingly chirpy alarm who was all but dancing a merry jig announcing the most dreaded time of the morning.  

Blearily, she reached out to smack the snooze button, managed to misjudge the distance, and promptly fell out of bed.  Being into omens, portents and signs, this was not a good start to the day.  Today, Penny had not only her annual review, but a disciplinary, too.  The annual review itself would have only provided reasoning and proof in which she was a failure, with no realistic expectations of any sort of pay rise.  The disciplinary, well...  

The previous day, in her bone-aching, totally rubbish job, Penny, trying to do as little work as possible without getting noticed, happened to ‘accidentally’ visit one of her many horoscope sites, ‘accidentally’ clicked on a pop up that looked rather interesting, and sent a virus to every single computer in her workplace. 

Those now infected computers had then forwarded on its not so friendly virus to her entire client database, which in turn had repeated its actions, so on and so forth, causing utter mayhem, and rather a lot of angry men in suits.  Without very much effort, Penny had crashed thousands of computers before anyone could even say, ‘idiot.’  

Had she actually read the ‘Very Important’ titled memo that had been sent to all employees with a big red flag, then Penny would probably have read about the latest IT security guidelines and probably realised that because the IT department were unable to block all such sites, going to anything other than approved and work related websites would result in complete chaos.  Penny, being Penny had either spilt coffee over it, doodled on it or simply just binned it.

Penny Turner was 25 (just) and lived by herself in a rather grotty little flat above a chip shop. Handy for late night munchies, or when the tempestuous oven played up, but not so good when the smell of grease and fat lingered in the air, along with the hordes of acne ridden teenagers that hung around creating noise pollution and litter. When she had first moved in, after three hours of listening to whooping, yells, catcalls, and how "Johnny had shagged Chantelle who had said that Johnny had a small cock!", she’d begun to question her entire life, wondering how she’d ended up in such a dive.  But, then, she’d dug a dusty bottle of red out and promptly drunk it, banishing such thoughts from her head.

She’d once made the mistake of yelling down at the ASBO wannabes that if they didn't shut the hell up, she'd make their small and insignificant lives as miserable as possible. In return she had ‘Frigid Bitch’ scrawled outside the front door, with a used condom hanging off the knocker.

As for work, well that was just dull; she was a Senior Customer Advisor for an Insurance firm.  In reality it was just a tedious as any other advisor for any other company; all she did was listen to people moan and bitch and threaten to sue her, and all she did was pass them on to Martin, the Senior Customer Advisor Executive, who then passed things on to his boss.  Each day seemed to merge into the previous, nothing particularly happened or changed. Penny hadn't deigned for it to be that way, it was just the way things were and there appeared there was nothing she could do about it.