+1 to confidence. +1 to giving a crap. Debuff: Run home and hide has been dispelled. Stef stared at the intersecting halls, then made a left turn. Are you ready to admit you’re lost yet? Not quite. Curt’s text had given her the room number of the meeting room, but navigating by door numbers alone wasn’t working. She’d seen the gym twice, the hall with the dorm rooms once, two separate common rooms, and the mess hall. She’d found a large board room, but so far, the small meeting room had eluded detection. She held her hands out in front of her, fingers on the home row of an imaginary…

Stef stared at him. ‘Lol. Wut.’ ‘I’d appreciate some help,’ he said, ‘since you don’t seem too bothered by corpses.’ Thick rubber gloves appeared on his hands. ‘But take precautions first.’ ‘What precisely are we–’ She waved her hands in front of her. ‘Wait. Wait. Wait. This is a training scenario, right? To prepare us for regular work, right?’ ‘Right.’ She required gloves that matched the ones he’d required. ‘Do you routinely play with dead bodies? Isn’t that a tech’s job? Or a medical recruit or something?’ ‘Ding, ding, ding, the newbie wins a prize.’ ‘Ooh.’ He knelt beside the body. ‘So if you can just-’ He looked up. ‘You…

Require: cookie. Stef nommed on the cookie as she stared at the treasures that surrounded her. Her bed had quickly become a tiny nerdy dragon’s hoard. A stack of first-issue comics sat to her right, topped with six copies of Amazing Fantasy #15, each shiny and new and all hers. Spider-Man for Spyder, it was just appropriate. Beneath the wall-crawling menace sat the first outings of Batman, the X-Men, and a dozen more heroes. And it was fun to require copies of Giant-Size X-Men #1, and slowly require it to be bigger and bigger, until the size had felt right – maybe not giant, but definitely, pleasingly oversized. A hardcover…

The car ride wasn’t long enough to dig through all the phone’s features and native apps – it was, however, long enough to discover “Vox”. The app seemed to the Agency’s own version of Slack or Discord – and invites to a dozen servers waited for her. Along with the invites, there were several long PMs from Jones, pointing her to several “n00b guides” and places on the Agency intranet she should check out. Curt pulled the car over next to the mansion’s impressive wrought iron gates and turned off the engine. ‘Gray knows we’re coming, so we don’t need to be discreet, but I wanted to go over a…

It took twenty minutes for Curt to return – enough time to return twice more to the buffet bar, and get some more fluffin flavours. And three more of the bacon fluffins. Curt returned after she’d finished all fluffins and had started on the egg. The white sauce was something like hollandaise but far sweeter; the orange was coconut-almond – a strange choice for eggs, but not one she’d argue with. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said as he put his jacket back on. ‘Most newbies stick with very human foods.’ Nothing seemed like it would shrink me down or turn me into a cat. She stared at her plate, uncomfortable with…