Piper's ride home was very thoughtful. Not that she was doing something for someone else without them asking, but that she was thinking a lot. Yeng was a world leader in pharmaceutical chemicals, and a leader in world food production! They provided so much humanitarian aid across the world. There's no way they could be evil, and besides, they gave Piper a job. Piper glanced out the window as the bus left the metro area, she knew that was her own bias.
Once getting home, she went to her room and booted up her laptop, even if she had to get out the tinfoil, she was going to find out what Dakota was talking about. Piper wasn't good at geography, so first she had to learn where it was.
"Angola.." she pulled up the Wikipedia page for it, "Portuguese colony until 1975? Geez, unitary state? What does that even mean?" she mumbled to herself, as she kept skimming, learning that only until about a decade ago fighting stopped there, which is when Yeng stepped in with humanitarian aid. She smiled as the article listed how much Yeng did to help, but she new this was probably made by their PR team, but never even mentioned a scandal or any kind of incident.
Piper then decided to really try and dig, looking for news articles about Angola afterwards with Yeng involved. She dug through pages of google results until, on page twenty, she got her first lead. It was some website that had to be translated from, a language she didn't recognize (not that she knew many). She had to pause to remind herself she was smart, she just didn't know geopolitics and stuff, chemistry is her field. Anyway, she started reading.
It seemed that Yeng used the end of fighting and humanitarian aid to cut a deal with the government there to set up a cheap chemical processing facility. The article didn't say much else, so she went back to searching, using the date of that article to narrow her search for ones after 2010. A new set of searches brought her more pro-Yeng articles, which she had to slog through, though this time she found her next lead on page twelve. This article picked up a few years after the previous one, now that chemical plant was prospering and providing jobs and being used as a distribution center for food to the surrounding areas. However, it said there was a uptick in some military activity, which Yeng used as an excuse to bring in private contractors to keep the plant secure. This was accompanied by a picture of a group of workers moving through a check point into the factory. Piper peered at the pic, she thought it was odd that the workers were so... portly? Fat. They were fat.
"Why would plant workers be able to get so big?" she mumbled to herself. She paused and looked down, remembering that college stress hadn't been too kind to her. She closed the article, now looking for anything past 2013. "Getting closer to the present."
This round of searching took a bit longer, she had to start really working the search terms, using quotation marks and minuses and everything. After reaching page twelve of the results, she had her next article. The page was covered in ads, and she was pretty sure it gave her computer a virus. But, it had what she was looking for. The article talked about a spill at the plant, dumping thousands of liters of an unknown chemical into the watershed of the region. Then, it showed pictures. Not the kind of post-disaster aftermath you'd expect from a chemical spill. Everyone and everything was fat. Really fat. Oxen couldn't walk, dogs were like large round sausages, and people all over the region were struggling to stay mobile. Yeng was flying in water from other regions to help, but a lot of the damage had already been done.
"What chemical could do that?" Piper wracked her brain trying to think, but it had been her first day, and it's not like they had out full catalogues to everyone who gets a job there. Piper closed the window and turned off her laptop. She sat back in her chair and thought about what to do next. She glanced at the Yeng-brand snack bars on her desk, and quietly placed them in her trash can.
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