Dick Johnson couldn’t believe he’d been fired some ten seconds into this meeting.

“What… do you mean…”

The person in charge of this meeting smiled at him. “I mean we do a thorough sweep of all your communications, you turn over all your credentials, and we start combing the internet to erase every trace of you that can be found.”

In the meantime the office assistant brought him the coffee he’d asked for, though not the donut. She had a blueberry muffin, so these people could clearly go to hell. Colleen Summers had been right about the bear claw being the best in the world, or at least the places in the world he’d been to.

Dick squinted at the nondescript white man with the SNORC badge and the suit, still standing there with overwhelming overconfidence. “You do know how the internet works, don’t you?”

“Don’t be stupid, we’re the government. We can do anything.”

Tell that to Barbara Streisand, he decided not to say.

“Regardless of my employment status,” Dick said, “this is a serious problem. We can’t just—”

“We can,” he said, “and if it comes to that, we will.”

Dick took that to mean they were considering just killing Colleen Summers, important Washington Post editor and operator of a strange network of information and disinformation. She ran people at all those places, and he hadn’t known about any of them before she’d divulged that information.

They really didn’t know how the internet worked.

Dick Johnson stood up. “I need to see your supervisor,” he said.

The man squinted in confusion. “What?”

“You’re not taking me seriously, so I need to talk with someone who understands the gravity of the situation.” He was having trouble summoning up even a shred of sympathy for SNORC in the first place. He didn’t know why O’Malley, Kondrat and the others had been put in cells. They were good kids. He did know why the Fletcher boy had taken his mother through the portal, though the kid probably should have contacted the proper authorities to get her cleared to travel through.

The bigger concern was that Fletcher—and now Colleen Summers at WaPo—believed that the other world could be the cure for cancer. Dick hadn’t known that Rus Inman looked some twenty or thirty years younger. He hadn’t known a lot of things, apparently.

The knowledge of the health benefits of the other world was going to spread, with or without Colleen Summers going nuclear with what she knew upon her untimely death.

“I don’t think we need to be rash,” the man said. Dick Johnson snorted in derision, got his name from his badge: Wyncott, and took a calm sip of his coffee.

“You fired me for just showing up. I didn’t even get to the part about telling you what had been brought to me. No, I want to talk to your boss.”

He left the room, and made his way back toward the obliging secretary lady. She had been nice enough.

“Ilene, right?” he asked.

“Sir?” Ilene asked. Her face brightened, and he could instantly tell she liked that he remembered her name.

“Your Mr. Wyncott isn’t the person I need to speak to—”

“You hold it right there!”

“—I need Mr. Wyncott’s superior. It’s critically important for the survival of the Agency, Ms. Shanahan.”

And just like that he had both an ally and a meeting with Wyncott’s superior.

***

Wyncott followed him all the way to Redford’s office. Ilene Shanahan accompanied him as well, and eventually took him by the elbow as the awkwardness and tension grew. Dick rather enjoyed the strange way Wyncott wouldn’t let this go, and kept insisting that he didn’t need to see Redford at all.

Finally Ilene got in his face. “Look, sir, Redford has reviewed the interactions and looked into the information provided by Mister Johnson here, and she has agreed to meet with him. You’ll have to wait outside.”

Wyncott clearly thought himself above the secretary, but also beneath Redford’s authority. Dick wasn’t about to speculate what else was going on, but instead shook his head and hoped Wyncott was about to get his arse canned.

He entered a truly expansive office that looked out over Central Park and New York City from high, high above. Several more suits were seated at a smaller conference table, tablets and laptops open before them, juggling devices like consummate professionals.

Only Supervisor Redford wasn’t seated. The tall and perfectly proportioned woman with the red brown hair turned and strode toward Dick, smiling grimly. She was wearing a suit skirt, cashmere and only reaching mid-thigh. They were powerful thighs indeed, and he had to blink away to draw his eyes to her knowing face. Extending a hand, she took his and pumped it up and down once with crushing force.

“Mr. Wyncott will see himself to Human Resources,” she said loudly, and received frigid silence after Shanahan gave an affirmative.

“Mr. Johnson? Do you prefer Richard?”

“Everyone calls me Dick,” he said with a grin, “regardless of how much I try any alternatives.”

She laughed. “Well, Dick, we wouldn’t want to mess with decades of precedent, would we?” Then she turned, and he was treated to her powerful behind flexing as she strode back over to the window she’d been using to survey the city beyond the office.

“We were discussing your allegations and looking into Ms. Colleen Summers. It turns out you’re right, she has slippery connections to almost a dozen different websites and platforms outside of Washington Post. And when we hacked her people, we found they’d been running almost a dozen workstations on you for the last two weeks… ever since the footage you mentioned was copied and leaked.”

“Holy moly,” he breathed.

“Unholy moly is more like it,” she said curtly. “We don’t like how far this got, and how fast. We’re considering options and moves against Ms. Summers, but people with inoperable cancer, and reporters in general, are very unpredictable. Often fearless. We’re worried she’ll have already put together a package to disseminate online should she suddenly disappear or die.”

“Ma’am,” Dick said, “I hate to say this, but have you considered giving her what she wants?”

The look on Redford’s beautiful face was stormy, to say the least, when she whirled on him. Her eyes flicked down his body and then back up again. “What are you implying, Dick Johnson?”

“Imagine this: you tell her that she’s getting to go to another world, one that has no cell service and no communication with her people here. Before she heads through, you allow her to contact someone to shut down all her contingencies once she’s seen the portal itself. Then she heads through. All problems solved. She just needs to know that on the other side, her safety is not guaranteed by the Agency. She can even sign a waiver.”

“I hate that I’m considering this,” she said, and looked him up and down once more. “Agency records indicate you’ve been through the portal, correct?”

He manifested an Affinity Token. “That’s correct.”

She took it and absorbed it, then breathed out as the concentrated mana seeped into her body. “Gosh I’ve missed that. It’s so nice on the other side.”

“So nice, right?” he asked.

“Our files indicate you’re the last recruiter on our payroll. And yet, all of the kids who pulled off this heist were yours. Why do you think that is?”

He frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t square the two things,” he said. “I was told that before the incident, one of the recruits not from me actually transformed into a Nakamamon. A new aspect we’ve never seen before.”

She nodded. “True. But that one directly involved your last recruit, Fletcher. And his team of vigilantes is exclusively your recruits. They triggered Ragnarok Protocol and torched the entire portal, and they are thus responsible for relocating the HQ on the other side.”

“I can’t speak to any of that,” he said, but he knew.

“You want to know what I think?” she asked, drawing close. He was, at six foot four, only about five inches taller than her, and she had to look up slightly. “I think we made a mistake in choosing recruits for the other world. I think the adventure seekers and thrill seekers took the world and saw it as Las fracking Vegas, where there were no consequences. They used it as a pit of debauchery. And then when we turned to your suggestion of the down-and-out, traumatized, but high-moral-compass individuals, this sort of situation became inevitable.”

“I…” he faltered, not knowing what to say. He did want to keep his job, but with the current portal problems they’d put recruiting on hiatus.

“The founders originally advocated for results-oriented career people, but they were too attached to this world. I would have preferred mercenaries. All your people spent their ludicrously high salaries propping up their friends and family, and one boy even turned into Wayne Bruce.”

“What are your options?” he asked.

“Silencing her entire web will be messy and lead to a whole lot of questions. Plus, these are American citizens. We can’t simply disappear them… nor do we want to. The second option is employment. It worked for Leonardo DiCaprio in that check forgery film. We offer them jobs digitally scrubbing all trace of you and the other recruiters.” She paused, frowning. “Your third option seems the tidiest, and the most likely to lead to preferred outcomes. Unfortunately it goes against the basic Agency protocols. I’d prefer to have a fourth option.”

“Unless we recruit her,” Dick said.

She frowned in thought. “There is one further hurdle to jump… for some reason the portal is inoperable for the moment.”

“What? It can’t be opened?”

“I misspoke,” she said. “The portal is continuously open.”

This time his ‘What?’ had a note of panic attached.

“Imenez?” she asked.

One of her other people explained that the portal was stuck open somehow. There was no way they understood to shut it down. Mana was seeping through the portal.

“I’m sorry, what?” Dick blurted.

“Yes, this is a very serious problem,” Redford said, nodding.

“What you have is a gold mine,” he said. Looking over at their shocked expressions, he continued. “You have a functional fountain of youth. Anyone who spends any amount of time bathing in mana is going to, sure, need to limit that exposure or face over saturation, but they’re going to start reverse aging. Have you had anything strange happen in the facility so far?”

They shared a whole lot of glances.

The concrete behind the portal changed color. It sprouted mushrooms that had never been seen before, there was a rash of crystals that were slowly growing and changing colors, and there was… a goop.

“A goop?”

“A goop,” Redford confirmed, now with arms folded beneath her prodigious breasts.

“What does that mean?” He asked.

“No one wants to touch it. It’s a sludge of some kind. Blue purple… the technicians keep using the word periwinkle. The single test we’ve done on it says that it’s alive.”

There were also ghosts: specters that were almost entirely transparent kept appearing and disappearing, just wavering in the air. Some of them appeared to have faces, while others simply disturbed the air like the aurora.

“So what you’re saying is this facility is the epicenter for the introduction of magic to this entire world.”

She pursed her lips in consternation again. “That is correct.”

“And the Agency has just gone public.”

“We no longer go by the Agency. We are the Strategic Nexus Operations and Resource Command.”

He nodded. “SNORC. It rolls right off the tongue.”

“Command,” she said. “Instead of the Agency.”

“I preferred BOOF,” he said.

“I’m sure you did.”

They discussed the latest developments for another half hour, with Redford’s committee of fact finders and assistants chiming in here or there. Dick grew to like Redford. She was no nonsense, but she had a wry way of speaking he liked. She would slip in a joke here or there.

They discussed what it would mean for earth to get magic. They’d need scientists to get down to the facility—she refused to divulge the location of said facility—and set up tests that could help them understand the saturation levels, where the magic might be going, how long it was going to take to spread beyond the facility, and what they were presently trying to do about the situation.

Dick wasn’t going to mention aloud that he really wanted the portal open. For good. Magic was preferable in almost all ways to technology and the problems it brought along. He really wanted to use his Tokens, and then have a free Token refill using his Meditation skill in proximity to the portal. It would make him one of about a dozen super powered beings on the planet.

That topic was breached as well, but just as quickly shut down. Dick was only level 15, and bringing soldiers to the portal wasn’t going to give them the sorts of Tokens a level 30 or 50 would have at their disposal. No, they’d have to travel through, train up using experience points, and come back to earth some months or years later in order to be a viable super soldier.

On the other hand, he had 6 Likability Tokens at his disposal. He could literally light up a room with his presence… once.

“There is also the problem of there not being a soldier class on the other side,” Redford said. “Guardian is not Fighter, no matter how much we would like it to be.”

Dick shrugged. “I think the Ranger class is the most combat oriented of them. You’d just have to have them explore new areas in Ranger teams in order to level quickly. They get ranged and combat abilities… I’m sure you wouldn’t have to do much convincing for them to ignore the wilderness and beast mastery abilities, and focus on the ranged and melee.”

“They’d get mowed down by any idiot with an AK-47,” Redford replied, unimpressed. “I had considered using Rogues, but the brass only like open warfare. And there’s no Sneakability Token.”

There was now, though Dick and Redford didn’t know it.

“Wait,” he said. “I was told Kondrat used Ingenuity Tokens and became some insane genius prodigy.”

She froze. “You’re suggesting…”

“Either I give all mine to you, or you give all yours to me.” He had gone for a Bard, which didn’t give him an amazing Ingenuity. Bards specialized in Likability, obviously. He had thought Ingenuity was the second best option though, and had 4 Tokens there. There was no way they were going to match what Kondrat had done, but even a brief window of genius-level intelligence would allow one of them to think through the problem and perhaps get it handled.

She smiled at him for the first time, and he melted a little inside. She was beautiful. It had been obvious before, but the smile really blasted you in the feels with it.

“And you think if we go to the portal we can refill out Tokens there?”

He nodded. “Do you have the Meditation skill?”

This is Dick about to find out where the portal facility resides.