+- Drunkard's Walk Forums (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums)
+-- Forum: General (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=1)
+--- Forum: My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=10)
+---- Forum: Stories (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=41)
+---- Thread: 2017-01-13: Exercising Agency (/showthread.php?tid=14846)
2017-01-13: Exercising Agency - Bob Schroeck - 03-02-2025
Exercising Agency
by Robert M. Schroeck
by Robert M. Schroeck
Private home somewhere in the Washington DC area
Friday, January 13, 2017
7:00 AM
William Carstairs, director of the Operations Department of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, came to full wakefulness when the phone at his bedside rang. As he sat up in bed and picked up the receiver, he glanced at the clock-radio. Seven A.M., just fifteen minutes before its alarm would have woken him.
"Carstairs here," he said into the receiver.
"Bill, thank god." He recognized the voice immediately, although the speaker was more agitated than he had ever been in Carstairs' recent memory. "I wasn't sure who I'd get. It's Bishop."
"Wasn't sure who you'd get?" Carstairs frowned. "What's wrong? You sound shaken."
"Bill, what's today's date?"
Well, that was an odd question. "October 20."
"The year, Bill?" Bishop pressed.
Carstairs frowned. "1993, of course."
"Bill, I just brought in my copy of the Post, and it's dated January 13, 2017."
"What?"
"There's a headline about the inauguration of President Trump a week from now. Donald Trump." Bishop took an audible breath. "Not only that, but most of the cars in the street below my apartment look like nothing I've ever seen before."
"Huh. Let me take a look." Phone still in hand, Carstairs stood up and crossed to the window which looked out at the street. He pulled aside the curtain and glanced out.
The familiar street greeted him, although after a moment he noticed that, apparently overnight the trees had completely lost their leaves, the Petersons' house had acquired new siding, and the Schwartzes had repainted. The few cars he could see, including one that drove by as he watched, were... different. More rounded, more aerodynamic than anything he'd seen before outside of a car show. They weren't quite as alien as Bishop's description had suggested, but were still unfamiliar. He brought the receiver back to his face. "I'm seeing the same, plus a couple houses on my street have changed, too." A thought struck him and he padded across the house to the door that led to the garage. He opened it and flipped the switch just inside to the right.
His '92 silver BMW 325i was gone. In its place was an unfamiliar vehicle, also silver, with the same smooth, rounded lines and a Lexus logo on the grille. "Hmm," he said.
"What is it?" Bishop demanded.
"I seem to have a new car," Carstairs declared. "Looks like quite a nice one, at that. Hold on." He stepped down into the garage and to the passenger side of the vehicle. He tugged experimentally on the handle and the door opened - not unexpected, he normally left his car unlocked in the garage - and reached in to open the glove compartment. He nodded to himself when he found the owner's manual by touch, then pulled it out and glanced at its cover. "All right. I am, apparently, the proud owner of a 2016 Lexus LS 460."
Bishop gave a low whistle. "LS? Not bad. And it confirms the year."
"That it does." Carstairs slid the manual back into the glove compartment and pulled out the paperwork. "Registration is in my name. Expires in July 2018."
"Hm," Bishop replied. "I just thought of something, give me a moment." As he climbed out of the car and left the garage, Carstairs heard footsteps and then rustling of some sort over the line. Then Bishop spoke again. "Bill, check your license and your Company ID. I just looked at mine, and they both give my birth year as '76 instead of '53."
"Really," he replied as he padded back to his bedroom. His wallet, ID and keys were atop the silent valet where he'd left them before going to bed... when? Last night? Twenty-three years ago? Carstairs suddenly suspected that he might know how Rip van Winkle felt after waking up. He flipped open his wallet and a glance confirmed Bishop's obvious suspicion. "Well. Month and day are right, but I seem to have been born in 1938 now." Another glance at his Agency card showed the same date.
"Bill..." Bishop began. "What's going on? This isn't time travel, or not just time travel. I mean, we still have our homes and our lives. It's almost as if it all just got ... transplanted into the future. Or a future."
Carstairs nodded to himself. "It does seem that way." He took a deep breath. "Look. Let's both head in to Langley. If we have future versions of our home lives, it only stands to reason that we will also have future versions of our jobs - especially since we have the IDs."
On the other end, Bishop laughed. "There is that, yeah."
"So that's what we'll do," he continued. "We meet at the Agency in two hours, find our offices if they're not in the same place, and go to work on figuring out what happened."
"That sounds like an excellent plan." Bishop almost sounded relieved.
The Central Intelligence Agency
George Bush Center for Intelligence
Langley, Virginia
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Bill Carstairs studied the frame full of book covers which took up a not-too-small portion of an "I Love Me" wall that was only partially recognizable as a reflection of his career with the CIA. Whatever phenomenon had plucked Bishop and himself out of their native time and place and then inserted them in this strange future world had done an extensive and detailed job of translating their personal histories to match. His own World War II-era experience with the OSS had, in this time and place, instead become Cold War espionage along both sides of the Iron Curtain, for instance. And Bishop's early Cold War experience had become a hodge-podge history of operations in the Middle East and various Third World nations.
The truly disturbing thing was, if he concentrated, he could bring up memories of these experiences which had never been his. They had a strange gray flatness to them, almost as though they were simple reference copies for his convenience. It was enough to make him wonder if there had been a who behind their move to this time and place instead of an impersonal what.
That, and the contents of the frame in front of him. A brass plaque attached to its bottom edge read "The Great Coincidence". Under the glass, neatly arranged in a grey mat, were the covers of fourteen paperback books - books which all bore a familiar name that should be all but unknown to the rest of the CIA: Mrs. Pollifax.
Emily Pollifax (more recently, after her remarriage to retired judge Cyrus Reed, Pollifax-Reed), was an elderly grandmother whom he had been calling upon for certain special missions an average of once a year for the past decade. Originally an untrained amateur whom he had tapped by mistake for what was supposed to be a milk run courier mission (and which had turned out to be anything but), she had become his go-to choice when he needed someone completely off the books. After her first assignment, Emily had quickly grown into a surprisingly skilled agent with a track record of spectacular overachievement whenever dispatched on a mission, and although it drove his anxiety levels through the roof whenever he used her, he had to admit that she always delivered results beyond anything expected, even when accounting for her history.
In exchange for her services Bill paid her generously out of the "black" portion of his department's budget, classified her identity at the highest level and referred to her as little as possible in after-action reports (and then only by the codename "AUNTIE MAME"), while insulating her from the parts of the CIA that were unsavory, excessively political, or both. Besides Bishop and himself, only a few other members of the group with high enough clearance even knew she existed; no one but Bishop and he knew the full extent and impact of her activities.
To find her name plastered across a series of book covers on the wall of his office in this new time and place was a shock so powerful he was thankful he hadn't had a heart attack at the sight. Bishop had stopped short upon spying the frame for the first time and uttered an uncharacteristic obscenity when he saw its contents. Most disturbing to both of them - at least at first - had been the number of books. The first ten they could map to the missions he had given her, from the initial courier run to Mexico City which had gone so wrong, to the case only a few months earlier by their memories, which had taken her to Sicily and had resulted in the return of the assassin "Aristotle" to jail. But there were four more published between 1995 and 2004, and even now Bill was hesitant to learn their details.
The details they'd found in the first ten were disturbing enough as it was.
According to the first book, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, Emily had originally approached the CIA in or around 1966. Which would would make her birth date just past the turn of the century - the turn of the last century, he reminded himself. But Bill and Bishop both remembered first meeting her in 1983, a decade or so before the two of them had found themselves in this new time and world. The book implied that he had been at least ten and maybe as much as twenty years younger than her at their first meeting when to his recollection he'd never been anything but ten years older than his most unconventional agent, who'd been born in 1920.
The tenth book, Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief, matched his recollections far more closely. It recounted Emily's most recent job for Operations in Sicily; the book had been published in 1993 and its events presumably took place in that year, just as his own memories said they had. The plot summary he'd read matched the facts as he knew them, as well.
But the wide disparity between an Emily who'd started working for him in 1983 and the Emily whom a version of him first met in the mid-Sixties left him doubting his own memories and sense of identity. He was inclined to accept Bishop's suggestion that, since it was obvious that they were for whatever reason now in a different universe from their "native" one, perhaps each book described one of a set of slightly different universes, where a version of Emily (born later and later in the first third of the 20th century) came to the CIA in her early sixties.
If only some of the later books didn't have sly and disturbingly aware comments shared between the characters how everyone seemed so much younger than they should be. Bill shook his head. He needed to just let the problem lie. Worrying at it... that way lay madness.
And the world was mad enough already.
Bill shook his head as he mentally reviewed the summaries of the international scene he had consumed since (re)discovering his office. The Middle East was an even worse mess than it had been in 1993; he was honestly shocked it hadn't exploded into a region-wide war yet. And the Commonwealth of Independent States, which had been so promising in its first years, was now little more than a tail wagged by a Russia that was a dictatorship in all but name, ruled by a former KGB agent with blatantly imperial aspirations.
And the United States - something had happened since the 1990s, or at least their version of the 1990s, that had begun to change the nation into something almost unrecognizable. One political party was all but in open warfare against the other, which manfully strove to keep the nation running in the face of what amounted to constant, deliberate sabotage. And the election of Donald Trump of all people as president just two months before their arrival only suggested things were poised to get worse rather than better, judging by his rhetoric.
If he didn't take the Company's mandate to stay out of domestic affairs as seriously as he did, Bill would have been tempted to take some kind of action. Just what kind of action he had no idea, and he refused to allow himself to speculate, lest he find himself yielding to that temptation.
Better to focus on finding out if Emily had somehow been brought to this madhouse of a future as well.
As he continued to study the frame and its book covers, he heard the door of his office open behind him. "Bill?" Bishop asked.
"Come in," Carstairs replied, turning away from the wall to sit on the edge of his desk. "What have you got?"
Bishop carefully shut the door behind him and waited for Carstairs to activate the room's various anti-eavesdropping measures before responding. "I've finished going through the personnel records for the department like you asked," he said, brandishing the olive-green folder in his hand.
"And?"
Bishop grimaced. "Just as we suspected, we're the only ones who got transplanted. There's no one else in Operations who shows any sign of being from, well, before."
"Pity, that," Carstairs said, shaking his head. "Still, if there had been, I suspect we'd have found out by now."
"I'm not so sure about that," Bishop replied. "I mean, if it were just me, I'd sure as hell be staying quiet about it, just to keep myself out of the rubber room. But since there are no familiar names or faces in the staff I think we can probably eliminate the chance that someone else is hiding that they've been shifted with us."
Carstairs nodded. "Perfectly reasonable deduction." He stood and crossed back to the "I love me" wall. "All right. Expand your checks to as much of the Company as you can look at while avoiding tripwires or raising any questions. I don't expect you to recognize every name or face, but if you come across anyone whose history even suggests they've been plugged into this world like we have, I want to know. In the meantime..." He raised a hand and waved at the frame full of book covers. "This is not a coincidence. This is a message. Emily has to have been transplanted with us." He turned back to Bishop. "We're going to find her."
Washington, DC, USA
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Over the next few days, Carstairs and Bishop performed a quiet, circumspect investigation, keeping as much of their efforts as possible separate from the Agency. It wasn't hard for a "civilian" to search a complete list of the faculty at Yale at will, for instance, especially in this almost obsessively networked future. Unfortunately, Cyrus Reed didn't appear on the University's "online" faculty guide as they had hoped he might, given his position as a part-time lecturer in their original time.
Other searches made with resources available to the average citizen were just as fruitless, and just as frustrating, so they had finally resorted to old-fashioned legwork. "You and I both have complete histories here," Bishop had pointed out, "and however false they are to us, they're 100% genuine as far as this world is concerned. If Emily and Cyrus are here, it only stands to reason that they're going to have legends as thoroughly backstopped as ours. We just have to look in the right places to find them."
Carstairs nodded. "Judging by our experience, they should still be in their house in Connecticut."
"Reasonable," Bishop said. "So that's where I'll start. Give me the authorization, and I'll use the Company cut-out to search the Connecticut DMV records for them. Cyrus definitely had a license." He chuckled. "God knows how many vehicles Emily has commandeered at one time or another on her missions, but I don't actually know if she ever had a license of her own."
"And if that turns up nothing?"
Bishop's amusement vanished and he grimaced. "Fall back to New Jersey, I suppose. I know New Brunswick is Emily's old home town, but I honestly can't imagine why they would end up there instead of Connecticut. Still, it's the only other lead we have."
Frowning, Carstairs turned to the computer that occupied the corner of his desk to his left. "I agree. I'm not happy about it, but I agree." He fell silent as he moused and typed for a minute or so. "All right. I've set you up with authorization to access the Connecticut DMV and New Jersey's MVS." He sighed. "Let's hope this pans out."
Connecticut, as it had turned out, had been a wash. The DMV had no records, current or expired, for anyone named Cyrus Reed anywhere close to the right age. There was a Cyrus Reed to be found in Pomfret, but he was only 25 years old. Bishop immediately dismissed him as a possibility. A little research with Google Maps and a couple of phone calls later to satisfy his curiosity had confirmed that the house in Orange that he had known as the Reed-Pollifax home did exist in this future world, but had never been owned by anyone named Reed, at least in the last four decades.
Disconsolate, Bishop turned to New Jersey, which he expected to be an equally fruitless search, only to be stunned with the almost instantaneous appearance of Cyrus Reed, age 74, 462 Hamilton Street in Somerset. He opened a new browser window and typed the address into Google Maps. Somerset was the town next door to New Brunswick. And the address - identified on the map as Douglass Gardens Apartments - was only a mile from the Hemlock Apartments. For the first time in weeks, he felt a surge of hope.
"You're sure about this?" Carstairs demanded.
Smiling, Bishop nodded. "Absolutely. Once I got the MVS hit on Cyrus, I started searching for confirmatory info. He passed the bar in New Jersey in 1968, and he's been a member of the New Jersey state bar association since then. Beyond that, his history in this world matches the one we know in broad strokes - becoming a judge, serving on the bench until his retirement. And!" His smile grew into an almost manic grin. "I also found all the records for his marriage to one Emily Pollifax, widowed, five years ago!"
"You have?" Carstairs asked. "Excellent!"
"I've got their phone number," Bishop added, "but I think it'd be better if one of us drove up there and contacted them in person."
Carstairs smiled, for the first time in weeks, it felt like. "And by 'one of us' you mean you."
"Well, yes," Bishop confirmed, still grinning.
Carstairs slapped the top of his desk with his right hand. "Do it. Head up there tomorrow."
"You better believe I will," Bishop affirmed.
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Just in case it took longer than he expected, Bishop booked a room at the Heldrich hotel on Monument Square in New Brunswick. It was, not coincidentally, the closest hotel to both Emily's former home in the Hemlock Apartments and the Douglass Gardens Apartments - the latter was just a mile and a few minutes' drive away, while the former was was only four blocks. Bishop had arrived and checked in around mid-afternoon, still mostly fresh after the drive from Langley, and decided that, while he was certain that if Emily were anywhere to be found she would be with Cyrus at Douglass Gardens, taking the short walk to Emily's old apartment building would do him good.
Fortunately, it was warm for February in New Jersey, almost 50 degrees, and if it hadn't been overcast it would have felt almost Spring-like. As it was, his overcoat was sufficient to the task as he stepped out. Bishop chuckled to himself as he glanced around Monument Square - to him, it hadn't been all that long since he'd last visited Emily in her apartment - five years, if that. But the difference between the late-1980s New Brunswick he recalled and the mid-2010s version he was now in was very noticeable. New buildings everywhere, including a few for Rutgers - and his own hotel, which had replaced a dreary 1920s-vintage building that he recalled with some distaste. Despite the gray sky everything looked brighter and cleaner than he remembered. He was impressed with the transformation thirty years had wrought to the area.
Bishop turned left onto Livingston and began his walk, past the Elks lodge and the library, taking in the Victorian homes on the broad avenue, most of which had long ago been turned into professional offices of one kind or another. To the best of his recollection, this part of the city hadn't changed, although to be fair, he had only ever driven the route before. Looking ahead just a couple blocks Bishop could spy the red brick silhouette not quite towering over nearby buildings on the other side of the street. He smiled to himself at the sight.
To be honest with himself, this little side excursion was completely unnecessary. They were already certain that Emily and Cyrus would be found together at Douglass Gardens - although Bishop had to admit a certain curiosity as to why and how. After all, he and Carstairs had arrived in their own homes with most of their possessions - Bill in his house and himself in his apartment. It was laughable to call anything about their situation "typical", but if he and Bill were "typical" - whatever that meant - then surely Emily and Cyrus should have been found safely ensconced in the former farmhouse in Orange. Failing that, then in Emily's old apartment in the Hemlock.
So why were they living a mile away in a garden apartment complex that had never figured into either of their histories? Bishop supposed that simple curiosity about that question drove his walk to the Hemlock as much as anything else, as though standing in front of the building and looking at it would reveal the secret reason for their new home.
And then again, he realized as he came to a stop in front of his destination, it just might. The red brick apartment building before him was an unfamiliar design, and the sign next to which he stood proclaimed it the "Brunswick Arms".
He glanced around. The other buildings at this intersection were at least vaguely familiar. This one, however... it was not, nor had it ever been, the Hemlock Apartments.
That was probably why Emily and Cyrus weren't there.
As he stood there staring blankly at the entry to the building, he was surprised to hear a girl's voice call out, in an achingly authentic Estuary British accent, "Crikey! It's the Bishop!"[1] He sighed to himself. He enjoyed Monty Python as much as the next man, but there were only so many times he could hear that line around the office before...
He froze.
Other than Emily and Cyrus, no one within two hundred miles should have had any idea who he was.
As he stood there, a girl stepped out of a shadow that was far too small to have concealed her as thoroughly as it had. She was a very pretty girl with long blonde hair and longer legs, with a bright red bow perched on the back of her head, wearing a belted woolen coat that managed to reveal more of her figure than by all rights it should have. Her blue eyes seemed out of place amidst her otherwise Asian features. She would have been exactly to his tastes, he noted, had she been a decade older. As it was she couldn't have been more that sixteen or so, if he were any judge.
"I beg your pardon?" he said carefully.
"William Bishop, right?" she chirped as she stepped close enough to hold out a hand to shake. "I'm Minako Aino. I'm here to take you to Emily and Cyrus."
Bishop moaned, eyes closed, as he savored the chocolate éclair. "You remembered," he said once he'd swallowed and opened his eyes again.
Minako giggled from where she sat sprawled in an armchair, petting the extraordinarily well-behaved white cat sitting in her lap. "He's as bad as Usagi." The cat, Bishop noticed, had an odd marking above and between its eyes, an upward-pointing crescent that seemed almost metallic gold in color.
"Now you know better than to think I would forget," Emily Pollifax chided him gently, a smile on her lips, as her husband Cyrus chuckled in a seismic rumble. "You are one of my dearest friends, after all." She glanced over at the girl. "And you, dear, are exaggerating."
Minako giggled again. "Just a little. But I've never seen a man react to a pastry like that before, Mr. Bishop." Like so many other details about her, her so-very-British accent seemed both out of place and inarguably authentic.
"Just 'Bishop' is okay, Ms. Aino," he said as he resisted the urge to lick chocolate off his fingertips and instead wiped them carefully on the one of the paper napkins a smiling Cyrus handed to him. "And it was quite a good éclair."
"Bishop it is, then. And Minako, please," she said with a cheerful nod. "And yes, Scala makes wonderful éclairs."[2]
He returned the nod, then focused on Emily and Cyrus again. "So... you clearly knew I was coming. How?"
"Well," Emily began, with a sheepish look crossing her face. "When Cyrus and I arrived three months ago, we tried to find you and Mr. Carstairs, but there was no sign that you'd been displaced with us - the usual contacts and drops, including the law office in Baltimore, simply didn't work or weren't there at all."
"Drove Em fair to distraction," Cyrus noted.
She nodded. "It did, yes. We didn't give up hope, though, and when our... hosts made it known to us they had ways to keep an eye out for you, we took them up on the offer." She glanced over at the girl and the cat, then back to him. "They detected your first searches for us, but it wasn't until just a few days ago that they confirmed it was actually you and Mr. Carstairs."
He shook his head. "Whoever your hosts are, their methods are disturbingly effective."
Minako erupted in a peal of musical laughter, disturbing the cat in her lap, who gave her a glare of feline displeasure. "You have no idea."
"So," Bishop frowned slightly. "Who are these hosts of yours?"
"That," a new, male, voice said, and Bishop spun in shock to face the cat, who continued, "is one of the things we wanted to talk to you about."
"You..." Bishop stammered, then turned back to stare at Emily and Cyrus, "That cat..."
"Spoke, yes," said the cat. "I am Artemis." It leapt off Minako's lap, and halfway to the floor, it transformed into a tall human man with waist-length platinum hair, dressed in an all-white outfit that looked vaguely Sixties, with heeled boots, tight slacks and a top that seemed like a cross between a turtleneck sweater and a Nehru jacket. Unlike any man's top Bishop had ever seen before, it had a cutout, crescent-shaped, in the center of his chest, and another round one at his navel. A golden crescent moon pendant hung from his neck. When Bishop finally tore his eyes from the eccentric ensemble, he realized the man was the kind of handsome that verged on effeminately pretty — and he had yet another golden crescent on his brow, just as the cat had had.
"Wha...?" he managed to get out.
"Artemis! Was that absolutely necessary?" Emily snapped. "Poor Bishop was already off-balance enough simply from you speaking." She rushed to Bishop's side and led him to a chair, into which he shakily lowered himself.
"Emily..." he rasped. "What the hell is going on here?"
"I think," she said as she turned and picked up a slender volume from the end table next to him, "that maybe you should read this, first."
Numbly, he took the booklet and stared at cartoonish image on its cover before reading its title aloud. "So You Just Arrived from a Parallel Universe."
Private Home
Washington, DC area
Friday, February 3, 2017
8:12 PM
William Carstairs had settled himself down after a good dinner in his favorite armchair (brown leather, dime-sized bronze nail heads, slightly overstuffed) and, bathed in the warm yellow light of the floor lamp positioned behind his right shoulder, spent an hour going over the small book that Bishop had given him on his return from New Jersey. So You Just Arrived from a Parallel Universe was not quite as comprehensive as he would have liked, but it certainly answered many, if not most, of the questions he and Bishop had come up with over the past few weeks.
Of course, if he had read it before their arrival in this world, he would have dismissed it as fantasy or self-delusion, but there was something about being transported nearly a quarter-century into the future that made even the wildest speculation palatable. Not to mention it gave him some hope that their native world, should it survive whatever cataclysm was going on out there, wouldn't necessarily descend into the political shambles that plagued this one. In fact, should they be able to return to their home world, Carstairs thought he just might take it on himself to do what he could to make sure events would take a different course there.
He had gone over the book twice, the second time through jotting notes in the margins — more notes in the margins, he mentally amended with a smile at the recollection of some of the comments by other displacees that had been dutifully reproduced. Whoever Baroness Tomo Takino was, she seemed to have taken it upon herself to help her fellow refugees keep their spirits up. Carstairs could respect that.
He was double-underlining a casual mention of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey when his attention was seized by an out-of-place rustling noise. He closed the book, set it on the end table and stood, turning to face the hallway at the far end of his living room; it had been from that direction which the sound had come. Defying stereotype, he didn't have a gun, but he was still fit enough to engage an intruder in hand-to-hand combat if he needed to. "Who's there?" he demanded.
To his surprise a girl appeared out of the hallway. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but she appeared to be a teenager, blonde, in a tight minidress, knee-high boots, and a leather trench coat, all in midnight black. She had an equally black eyepatch over her left eye.
"William Carstairs," she said in a British accent. "You've discovered that you're not the only displacee in the world." She paused a moment, a smile playing across her lips. "Mr. Carstairs, you've just become part of a bigger universe."
Carstairs frowned. "Who the hell are you?"
"Minako Aino. Sailor Venus. I'm here to talk to you about the Bells and Whistles Initiative."
Aino? He recognized that name from Bishop's report, which would mean...
"Mina!" The white cat — the talking white cat — that Bishop had also mentioned stepped out of the shadowed hallway, padding silently between the girl's legs and sitting down before her. "Please forgive my associate, Mr. Carstairs. Her sense of dramatic whimsy frequently gets the better of her." Carstairs was amused to see the cat shoot a dirty look over its shoulder at the girl. She ignored it as she pulled off the eyepatch, revealing a perfectly intact eye. The cat sighed, then turned its — his — attention back to him. "My name is Artemis, and I represent the Crystal Millennium Naval Office of Bells, Charts and Buoys." Somehow Artemis managed a narrow little smile on his feline face. "We're somewhat more than our name would indicate."
- RMS: Yes, we know it's a misquote.
- RMS: One wonders if they have a Sweets Spirit in residence...