Tomash and Peregrin were in their RC, enjoying some downtime. Peregrin was reading a book with a stack of sticky notes nearby; as far as he was concerned, sticky notes were a massive improvement over notes in the margins or keeping a separate note leaf organized.
Tomash's fingers were running furiously over the keyboard on the console. He'd started trying to "fix" it about five minutes after he first used it and declared that "it just didn't feel right". The console didn't mind this, since it liked the attention.
There was a knock at the door. "Moment!" Tomash yelled towards the door. He took a moment to save and collect his thoughts, then made his way over to open the door, which was a bit tricky due to a half-finished remodeling effort Peregrin had started before Tomash had been partnered with.
When he opened the door, $someone was standing outside and looking somewhat nervous. "Hi," they said, "my parter and I are looking for people to help with a mass exorcism of the Everfree Forest?"
"Sorry, an exorcism of the what?" Tomash asked. He then added, "Oh yeah. I'm Tomash. Forgot to introduce myself."
"Hi as well. I'm $someone. $someone_else and I will need to exorcise the Everfree Forest. You know, from My Little Pony."
"I've never seen that show, but I heard it's pretty good. That not gonna be a problem, is it? Also, I'm pretty new, so maybe you should ask my partner Peregrin..."
"Nah. Don't worry. You'll be fine. All you really have to do is stand somewhere and ring a bell a bunch. Maybe shout something to expel the Stu."
"Cool. I can do that. Just mail me the details. I'm tom@rcfibs[0..5]!dms" Tomash said, somehow pronouncing the monospace. Then he had a sudden realization. "Wait. We should probably get my partner in on this." He turned around and yelled "Yo, Peregrin! There's someone here and they need people for a mass exorcism."
Peregrin closed his book, startled. "A mass exorcism? I've heard of such things, but I don't believe that one has been performed for many years. There was some well-known case involving a merger with a planet, but I don't remember the details. I should check those ..." He trailed off and started heading for the bookshelf.
"You can check the history later. I don't think this guy wants to wait all day for you to flip through old mission reports."
Peregrin then changed course and wandered over toward the door. "What canon did you say this was occurring in, again? I was rather distracted and didn't hear you."
"The Everfree Forest in My Little Pony", replied the agent at the door. They were rather relieved that no one was shouting at them or slamming the door in their face.
"I'm not familiar with that work," Peregrin began cautiously, "but I don't believe exorcism rituals require a familiarity. I haven't performed any yet, so I can't back that up with experiment. It might be good for me, er, for us, to do."
"You'll do great! Like I said to your partner, all you really need to do is stand somewhere, ring a bell a bunch, and yell something about banishing uncanon. There'll be enough people that we won't need to get it perfect."
Peregrin turned to his partner and asked "Tomash, could you get the bells from two-down-one-right?"
The agent quickly added "You don't need those right now. We're not starting for at least a few days since we need time to get everyone together. We'll ping your console when it's time."
Tomash, who was already near the bells, grabbed one of Peregrin's sticky notes and scrawled on "TODO: fix console ping." He then took the bells anyway, to save himself the bother of trying to find them later.
The agent had started to leave. Before she closed the door, Peregrin held up the set of exorcism bells an old inhabitant of 112358 has left behind and asked "Are these the right bells?".
"Yeah." said the retreating agent, who was copying "Peregrin and Tomash" from the sign by the door. "Those're the ones!"
After the door closed, Peregrin started to think out loud in a quiet mutter. "That's good. I think I'll need to modify the usual rituals to apply to uncanon influences instead of generally disruptive ones. But first I'm going to need to find the history of this sort of thing, so I can do it properly." This train of thought led Peregrin directly to a loose collection of pages titled "∑ M.R. Idx", which he scanned for an entry on mass exorcisms.
Followup research resulted in three requests that Tomash search the mission report database since he was already at the console and a trip to Supply because the printer ran out of paper. After Peregrin was eventually satisfied with his general understanding of exorcisms, he took several cracks at arranging an 'appropriate' tune for the exorcism. He wasn't much good as a composer, but he was working off of established material, so the final result came out sounding better than horrible, as far as Peregrin (and Tomash) could tell.
