Sun on the Rocks - The Emotion Scale Read online

  Chapter One

  Orange County, California

  Herbaline headquarters parking area

  Clarity parked her pink Chevette in the guest parking area of the Herbaline herbal, diet and weight prevention company building in Orange County. Across from her, the magnificent company building made of large glass panels reflecting morning sunshine showed the company logo, a large green clover encircled within a green circle.

  Herbaline was publicly quoted in the stock market, known for talking to analysts extensively and treating them particularly well, making the news quite often, as a result of a large spike in sales, amounting to several hundred million dollars. The good results apparently came from a well managed set of people, sales groups and departments, including the person heading the company, a man known as Lyle Matchett, the strategist of the company and the person behind its success. Clarity squinted while looking at the logo, noticing a smaller icon below the clover, something which looked like a small h letter. A woman overseeing the area wearing a security guard uniform, approached her. Her breasts filled her shirt prominently, and she looked attractive, despite the masculine outfit.

  "Do you work here?"

  "No," said Clarity, "just visiting."

  "Can't do that, this building is not open to the public, you have to go to one of the distributors if you're looking for something in particular."

  "Just waiting for a friend interviewing for the company."

  Clarity slid the keys off the car's contact and lifted her foot from the brake. Heather Camendale, the assistant of her friend Brock Cheevers, the head of human resources at Stevenson, where she worked as teleoperator, was planning to leave the garden equipment company, in order to work at Herbaline. And her interview was scheduled for that day. The security guard, whose name was Corinna, leaned against Clarity's door and she landed her forearm on the Chevette rooftop.

  "Can't do that, you have to take a course here, otherwise you'll have to leave."

  "A course?" Asked Clarity. Corinna pointed to the building entrance.

  "Go to the entrance, you'll see them. Company employees seeking new members to work, people call them missionaries here, they offer leaflets which you can read that will lead you to some of the courses offered."

  Intrigued, Clarity nodded and paid ten dollars to leave the car all day in the Herbaline parking lot. She stepped out of her Chevette and walked to the building entrance. The hallway was humming with people talking, busy with several groups of eight or nine people, gathered around a few company employees proselytizing the benefits of Herbaline's weight loss program and their herbal range of products. Herbaline sold nationwide, and was trying to make its way into Starbucks with its line of five herbal teas. One of the missionaries, a young woman wearing a name tag, walked towards Clarity.

  "I'm Ivy, would you like to join us?"

  The girl with dirty blond hair reaching past her shoulders was twenty two or twenty three at the most. She was wearing jeans and a peach color sweater, showing a gentle and sweet smile.

  "Join, for what?"

  "Our complimentary course on communication and reality tuning, you might end up working here with us."

  Clarity peeked behind Ivy, noticing a large sign to the left of reception, which said course conference area. A few people queued in front of the sign, waiting for one of the missionaries to provide them with a name tag and a booklet.

  "All right, sure," said Clarity.

  She followed Ivy to the conference area queuing line, letting the girl with the peach color sweater tag her with a label showing her name. Within minutes, she sat Clarity in a large amphitheatre, displaying a large projection screen that flashed images of the company building taken by the company's public relations and communications group, and showing the company motto, making the world healthy with herbal. The booklet material was based on the works of motivational guru Coleman Cartmel, a man who gave conferences nationwide, talking about notions like repetition conversations, which purportedly allowed one to gain control and full confidence when talking to someone by rehearsing several times what you wanted to say.

  Cartmel, the evangelist of the company, turned on the projector and began selling the company's great strength, the relevance it gave to communication. The guru, defined communication as the act of translating for someone else an idea, an object, a query, what Cartmel defined as the thing. The thing communicated sometimes flew somewhere else, instead of flying to its intended recipient, as a result of faulty attention from the recipient, or as a result of a distraction from the person communicating. As a rule of thumb, the thing could only fly to the recipient, things flying around elsewhere were to be avoided, because communication then would not happen as intended. The thing also had to include the content of the original message. Any confusion here could also delay communication.

  After a few minutes of watching Cartmel and several people from the crowd called to 'communicate' on stage, the lights came off, leaving only the front stage area lit and Cartmel on it. Clarity glanced to the right, seeing a sign which said, communications lab area. She looked around and behind her. The crowd area of the amphitheatre was dark, the ushers were staying outside the presentation, behind the closed double doors of the theatre. Clarity got up from her seat and walked slowly to the door under the sign. She pushed the door and it came open. She walked through it quietly and closed the door behind her. The door led to an elevator which offered three floors. She pressed the second floor, which was labeled emotician practical office. She'd never heard the word emotician before, was not sure of its meaning.

  She found no one in the second floor corridor, and found the door leading to the emotician office. Again, she turned the door knob, and the door opened. She walked inside a room that looked like a doctor's office, with several charts depicting the human body. Lying around sparsely were several comfortable lounge chairs, sound and light equipment. Facing her was a desk with a computer, and behind it, framed on the wall, a chart of the company's valuable employees and flagship products featured a group of eight people and their role. The roles included long range sales, marketing design, product quality and taste area, business affairs, course development, legal affairs and department matters, and food and lodge area. The last group added was the emotician group, and it featured a good looking woman wearing a white robe, whose name was Coley Manglove, displaying dirty blond hair and a disarming smile.

  Clarity walked closer past the desk and looked at the list of Herbaline products on the left, which had allowed the company to grow profitably over the years. One of them was the Elony beauty lotion, a lotion she'd come across in the Bahamas, sold illegally without FDA approval by Cassandra Scafarel inside the dismantled Hexas Style resort offering personal growth services. Herbaline manufactured Elony and was trying to get FDA approval for it. Glancing at the center of the chart on the wall, she noticed that the photo corresponding to the person at the top of the company, the person heading Herbaline, had been erased. She read the name of the label below: Lyle Matchett, Herbaline President and guiding executive.