I particularly enjoy writing for Hans. Can you tell?

Hans

Hans studied his reflection in the mirror, the passive gaze of Anna raking over his back. He tightened the lime-colored tie up to the neck of his pressed white suit, smoothing wrinkles from his elbows. She made a noise in the back of her throat; he passed her a spare look.

"Remind me what this meeting is for?"

"Apparently quite a number of terrans have invested in your Arendelle stocks and are feeling uneasy that the primary shareholders are otherwise incapable of managing the company."

"Meaning dead."

"Verily. What they seek from me is reassurance that they can continue to invest in Arendelle and rely upon its already-prominent success to only grow larger."

She sighed. "Sucks having to run something you inherited, doesn't it?"

"It has its perks. I get to fly whenever, wherever, in whatever vessel I desire, complete with full in-flight service."

She snorted. "Somehow I don't think that makes up for being the inherent CEO of the largest spacecraft company on this side of the local group."

"Actually," he returned, facing her properly as his processor ticked, "my calculations would conclude that, judging by the amassment of raw material for Briar Heavy Industries and the annual quota of demanded ships by the Grand Councilwoman's account alone, I'd say the company controls more than half of the local group."

"Briar has that much influence?"

"Briar Heavy Industries controls seventy-five percent of the resources in this galaxy alone and has spread out to entreaty an additional thirty percent from Andromeda. What's more, the company's partnerships with Porter and Housen company and Caroll Commercial Tech have put it on the map as the second-largest conglomerate in the Milky Way, save for Arendelle as its business-managing figurehead. The family may be gone, but the company will not be lost."

Anna looked stunned. Hans breezed past her, gliding down the gravity well into the hangar below. She trailed after, watching as he selected the second-fastest of the luxury fleet, a sleek model christened Denali for the mountain ridge from earth's history books. He wished he could take Yukon, but Anna had insisted that the agility and far superior speed of the smaller craft were assets she would never relinquish to another. He had considered decommissioning the craft on multiple occasions to learn its internal architecture and replicate a fleet for commercial distribution, but the redhead's fierce claim to the starship left it to sit, gathering dust in the far corner of the hangar just beyond Everest, a lightweight high-powered tank craft with an ion cannon and a pair of hemispherical railguns.

He let the crew do as they needed to prepare the ship for launch, contenting himself to resume sifting through the mild disarray of files regarding terran customs and protocols as found on the servers. He slowly began the re-encryption process of converting binary to quanta, duplicating the information onto his own personal server installed a week prior in the basement at his behest. Anna had not initially been onboard with the idea, but gave in when he pointed out several security loopholes and null checksums in the code of the existing setup.

No more than an hour could have passed, but the pilot was nonetheless lowering the gleaming silver arrowhead onto a pad attached to the side of a skyscraper on a planet millions of miles away from the Arendelle manor.

He stepped onto the pristine tarmac, antigravity boots suctioning his feet to the pad as he scaled the vertical carbon-mesh platform toward the double doors. They dissolved at his approach, welcoming him into a well-lit room with a large table already polished to gleaming and seated with several expectant occupants.

"Lovely afternoon," he greeted. Only the blonde at the far end of the table, a stunning young lady with unnaturally-white teeth, received him with a smile and wave; the remainder of the figures offered him a glance at best or a glower at worst. He strode to the head of the table and offered the beaming blonde a hand to shake, which she accepted.

"Hans Westergaard, is it?"

"Well met, Aurora Thorne." He proceeded to kiss her knuckle, eliciting a light chuckle from her sculpted pink lips.

"Please, take a seat."

"Perhaps I should remain aloft for this meeting," he returned, slowly turning to face the crackling hearth behind her leather-backed chair. "The air seems tense enough as it is."

She giggled behind him. "As you wish. Now, as for why we've gathered here today-"

"Save it, Ro. We know why we're here."

"My family has placed many hopes upon the shoulders of the Arendelle name," a lilting voice quietly purred. "It would serve to dishonor us all should the name fail."

"Rest assured, Ms. Fa, that such a thing shall not happen," Hans returned. He tilted his head to catch a glimpse of her over his shoulder. "Not so long as I am in charge."

"How can we take your word?"

He turned fully. A young girl with red hair, tomato to Anna's apple, glared at him without shame. She held her head high and kept her cold blue eyes blazing. "Arendelle's family is dead, and now the company has fallen to some stranger to run? I call bluff."

"No bluff, Ms. Caroll. The Arendelle family had me set aside in the will penned by Agdar so that I might oversee the company and the family's assets in the event of an unforeseen tragedy."

"That sounds convenient, doesn't it? Some stranger with a pretty face and a horrible name suddenly pops up into existence after being listed in the family will, only to take over just because the family died of mysterious circumstances."

"The circumstances are hardly mysterious. As you well know, the Arendelle diplomats were mistakenly killed by their eldest daughter during an ambush, a double-homicide with a suicide to boot. Their distraught youngest, being a naïve teenager of questionable intelligence, then proceeded to launch a concentrated blast of reactive plasma at a volatile nitrile tree, inciting an explosive suicide for her as well. While I won't dispute the deaths as being unusual, they lack the air of mystery you seem to believe they possess."

She huffed. "Maybe you did it."

"What purpose would that serve?"

"Enough of this pissing contest!"

Hans looked further. Just beyond the shoulder of the agitated redhead sat an agitated blonde, pretty in a devilish sort of way, with a low-cut green blouse covering only the barest of skin on her torso.

"Something the matter, Ms. Bell?"

"You two keep fucking with each other, we'll never get done here! I have other things to do with my fucking time, damn it, and I won't waste my breath sitting here listening to this shit. We all came here for one fucking reason, Westergaard: should we still trust in Arendelle?"

He resisted the desire to smirk, his HUD indicating that Katarina Bell was short in stature and temper despite her fierce loyalty to a man who had tolerance for neither trait. "Very well, then we shall proceed. The simple answer is that Arendelle will be fine. The complicated answer is, as you might presume, complicated; while I have been included in the will and am the sole, rightful owner and executive of Arendelle, I do require time to learn the ins and outs of the company and its employees, not to mention its benefactors." At this he cast a meaningful gaze at the cluster of terrans around the table. "Regardless, we shall persevere; I am confident in my own abilities and knowledge of business, and as a result I have no doubt that Arendelle will continue to prosper and flourish. Rest assured, your stocks will not diminish in value for the foreseeable future, nor should you have to worry about any other investments or donations made in the past."

"You talk a lot, but don't offer much in the way of evidence," the redhead ground out.

"Need I remind you all of the Bailout of '52?"

Year 3052, every major corporation on their half of the Milky Way had invested stocks into a company known only as Mirage Entertainment. The company had turned out to be a smokescreen for a handful of clever Undras who had effectively forced back-door entry into the investors' banks, leaving the companies financially ruined. Every major corporation had invested, save for Arendelle, and when the scam finally revealed itself and all the money amassed by the Undras fled with them to parts unknown, it had been Arendelle left behind to shell out vast sums of money to cover the others' debts and poor financial decisions. The undying devotion Agdar had shown his fellow businesses strengthened Arendelle's position as a galactic figurehead for business, commerce, and trade, and as a result had left every single major company in debt to the super-corporation.

All heads at the table bowed in silent respect for the light reprimand they'd received. "I'm sure she meant no harm," Aurora mumbled.

"She would do well to respect her tongue a bit more than to push it into my ear," Hans chided. "In any case, that is before. Here, now, we have concern about the company's future as a reliable portion of this conglomerate, and I as its spokesperson and willed owner have said there is no need for concern. Problem satisfied?"

Nods around the table. "Now, with that settled, let us get down to some real business, shall we? I believe every one of us has some issues to bring forth."

So, I think I have some science stuff to clear up.

-Local Group is a term used by astrophysicists to describe our location in the universe. Basically, our galaxy (the Milky Way) and Andromeda occupy a "small" local group of about ten million lightyears wide. Don't try and imagine something that large, just go with it. These Groups then come together to form Clusters, which form Superclusters, which form the Observable Universe. Our Local Group accounts for one billionth of the universe's size and matter, which means the universe is so impossibly large we can never hope to explore anything beyond our Group. Sad, sure, but at least now we have an idea for limitations.
-Science fiction frequently deals with the idea of a railgun or an ion cannon, sometimes both. A railgun is an electromagnetic propulsion device used to throw ammunition at the foe. Basically, think of a bullet. Instead of using an explosion to throw it at 200mph (360 meters per second), put a big fucking magnet behind it and ramp that speed up to 2000+mph (3600+ meters per second). An ion cannon, then, is simply a cannon which bombards foes with ions at high concentration and speed. The idea is that ions are technically polarized atoms/molecules and thus are unstable; by firing these unstable particles at stable particles, the stable ones degenerate and disassemble. So, the Everest in this context would either be able to completely dissociate a ship, or it would throw a projectile the size of a train at the foe. Take your pick.
-Encryption on data of any form is a slow, tedious process; converting that data from binary to quanta by today's technology standards would take millenia. As of the year for this story, more than 1000 years in the future, I'm almost certain we'll have quantum computing and, if calculation stands, that such conversion could be done as quickly as copying files from a computer to a flash drive.
-Antigravity (or artificial gravity) does not exist at current time. The problem with gravitational attraction is that it's relatively weak at small scales, thus making it difficult to replicate for the purposes of, say, becoming Spiderman. The closest we've come as humans is some form of magnetic repulsion using a superconductor cooled in liquid nitrogen to almost -200C in temperature suspended in a magnetic field. Effective but impractical. Given that gravity is currently only viable in examples of large bodies (planets) within a massive space (solar system), my suspicion is that antigravity or any artificial derivative thereof will require some form of repulsion/attraction between materials the likes of which we currently do not possess. Electromagnetic projection seems to be the closest we've come, but the heat produced by such is extreme by current measures.

Again, I love science. This is the nitty-gritty behind it. All the bureaucratic talk should be relatively easy to follow, but don't expect me to give everything away at once. The chapter's yours, kids.

-Canis