Scape provided the shirt, and I just photoshopped the rest.

Shallot.

And a Flower so obnoxious that even the other ones can't bear its presence. Not that the sympathy for them go much further than that, they're still inflicting it on other Agents to get it out of their way. These ones get all my sympathy.

Now, I wonder where that bogus Department will go from there...

In no particular order, as my brain feels scattered today:

I like how you've presented the Shallot as one of those by-the-book, micromanaging Office Space bosses. I mean, I hate him, and the wheedling way he talks, and his self importance, but I like the way you've presented him. It's well done. I also love the very defining moment when he interrupts his agents bonding naturally to oversee some regimented bonding instead. I also also loved seeing the reactions of the Board of Department Heads, noticeably put off from their usual calmness.

I like that you've taken a Sue-tracking bracelet, something usually used as a source of at least light drama pertaining to a character's core personality and identity, and applied it in a way that turns the bracelet into pure slapstick comedy, and which ultimately isn't a judgment on the character it's a attached to, but only there due to a bureaucratic misinterpretation. It's a fun change. You also kept the times Bogbrush had to appease the tracker infrequent enough that I never quite knew when his dialogue was going to degenerate into advertisement, which gives all such instances the sense of interruption they need.

I like the way you handled the Cube. From the scene that introduced it, I didn't expect it to turn out to be such a problem. Heck, I was outright amused by the conversation between it and Karen. But then, even after Karen moved to the new division, it kept getting mentioned, and kept getting mentioned, and I starting growing uneasy as I realized this wasn't more of the irreverent sort of comedy as the rest of the story, but an actual, serious problem that would need to be addressed eventually. But I'm also glad you dealt with it, at least part of the way, right here in this story, and also that the first step towards eradicating the Cube's mental effects from Karen was also the catalyst for the true bond-forming of the non-Flower portions of the team.

—doctorlit, drawing lots of uncomfortable connections between the Cube and the Tommyknockers right now

Right! I really liked this. The characters were fun, and the juxtaposition of comedy and serious drama was pretty solid (and if you weren't expecting it... have you ever READ Scape's stuff? :-P).

Also, The Shallot is wonderfully hateable. Maybe just because I'm a programmer, and the majority of programmers, IME, have a loathing of those sorts.

Fairly irreverent, at any rate - which I'm not saying is a bad thing. I second Nesh in asking whether the NPCs will ever actually publish anything - if they do, we'd be up to four different in-universe print publications that actually exist (five, if you include the Manual). Goodness, that's practically a library!

Mortic is very sad that people see him as stuck-up. He was grumpy around the WhatThe newbies, but that was a special case...

Anyway: fun, but really weird.

hS

Because all I can think is that flash patch probably means something extremely rude in Heptapod. ^~ (And not to knock KittyEden, but if you can find a vector-ish tea stain you like in a solid color, I'll doctor up a higher-res version like the others on the wiki.)

But seriously, I enjoyed this story a lot. I was skeptical about a new division just on principle, but I love the idea of the SO and the Board making up some nonsense just to placate an annoying Plant and have somewhere to chuck people they don't know what else to do with. I believe there is precedent for this being exactly how they handle problems like this. ^^

The (sub?)plot about Karen and the Cube kinda threw me, it being a very serious element in an otherwise very silly story, but in a way that makes me want to know more about it, not less. What is the Cube, really? Where does it come from? How real is it? Why Karen? Where is it now? Should we be worried? 'Cause we've got people who can deal with that pudendum if necessary, just sayin'.

If only our friendlier psychics weren't so well-behaved with their powers that they didn't notice the problem... or maybe the background psychic noise of HQ interfered, or the Cube is just good enough to mask itself from casual notice. Any number of possible explanations. ... Sorry, I digress.

The SEP field was a nice (temporary) solution to the problem, though, and the moment of everyone coming together as a team was just plain nice. {= )

Other things I liked... Caroline. The acronym NPC. Bogbrush and his Sue-tracker problem. The Shallot and his terrible personality. The fact that the NPCs are basically Buzzfeed.

Is there going to be an actual publication associated with this, by the way? Such things are a lot of work and difficult to sustain, history tells us, but even one or two issues as an example would be awesome. ^_^

~Neshomeh

And that is indeed an excellent walrus.

And tea stain badge. Yes, that's what I meant!

Also, clever trick with the SEP field, there.