Tiger glanced at his watch. It was precisely midnight. “Happy new year!” he announced, smiling as he looked round at his fellow boys. “May it bring many victories!”

“To victories!” echoed Tim, Andy and Seb. They all raised their plastic cups and took a swig of lemonade. The solemn note was rather ruined when Tiger coughed: the lemonade had been a little fizzier than he’d expected.

“Time to change watch,” Tiger added. Seb groaned but got to his feet, working his way past the blankets to the exit of the en-suite bathroom.

A couple of minutes later, the three remaining boys were joined by Robin.

“Fancy a round of cards?” asked Andy.

“You’re only saying that because you always win!” said Tiger. “I think we should go over the plan again.”

There was a collective groan.

“What’s the signal?” Tiger asked.

“A red flag dangling from the ceiling,” said Robin. “Seb’ll stick it out as soon as he sees the girls.”

“And what are you each going to do?” said Tiger, pointing at Andy first.

“I’m the emergency backup,” announced Andy. “I get to stay where I am!”

Tiger nodded. “Tim?”

“I go and sit out and twiddle my thumbs to lure the girls in,” said Tim.

“Robin?”

“I sneak round the right line of blankets to ambush.”

“And I’ll take the other side,” Tiger concluded. “The door should be unlocked, so what happens when the girls come in?”

There was a pause. Tim filled the silence. “Seb shuts the door with his lever up there once two of them are in. Then Robin and Tiger launch their ambush.”

Tiger nodded. “Now, there’s a high probability that Holly will try and blast the door in, which means we need to work quickly to avoid being overwhelmed. Aim to – “ he made quotation marks with his fingers – “kill them more or less straight away. If we’ve lost no more than one – ideally, we shouldn’t lose any – by the time we’re done, we attack. We’ll outnumber them and we can beat them easily. If we don’t win, everyone except me attacks. Aim to take out as many as possible no matter what. If you could leave Holly to me, that would be great, but don’t worry if not. Got all that?”

“We got it the first time you said it,” said Andy. “This is the fifth at least!”

They all glared at each other. Tiger kept waiting.

Amber waited. Jokes about going to some spaceship and being KILL BY DEMONS made her smile, even as reality proved the spaceships to be in limited quantities and the demons all too real and in disturbingly large numbers.

Being a Trainee, she found herself in a position most actual Agents would've envied: long periods of downtime without the Console BEEP!ing every time someone needed a break.
Amber would've switched in a heartbeat. She wanted to go out there and face the demons. She wanted her Console to finally, at oh so very long last, blare to life and assign her a Trainer, a partner, a mission, anything.
But instead her Console remained as silent as always, ever since she was first assigned her RC.

She sighed. Waiting was always the worst part.

Ce’rana of Borune hummed softly as she pulled another stitch through, flicking her eyes back to the cloak hung from her tree. Time to change colors again, she thought as she compared the crest on its back to the incomplete copy on the cloth in her lap. She reached for her tiny, bird-beaked scissors to snip the blue thread short, then reached for the red spool to re-thread her needle.

Alex probably wouldn’t be happy if he found out Ce’rana had borrowed his cloak; it would be unavoidable come Erastide, but for now, her tree would keep quiet and it wouldn’t be difficult to hang it back where it belonged. The thing had been sitting in there untouched since they’d moved in, unless Alex had been using it when she wasn’t paying attention; there wasn’t much call for formal attire around HQ, especially not when it came to garments of situational practicality. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t even notice she’d gone into his wardrobe at all.

But even if he wasn’t wearing it often, Ce’rana had grown up around the Imperial Court. She knew how much a family crest meant, and there was nothing else this could possibly have been. Heraldry was the end-all be-all for some; in all likelihood that wasn’t the case for him given how rarely he displayed it, but still, having a hanging for his half of the room bearing something of such significance would have to be a joy.

The Dryad dipped needle back into cloth, humming a half-remembered melody to herself as she worked. Even if it turned out Alex hated this present, it would still be a gift given, and… well, maybe she wouldn’t enter it into the logbook after all. Even he deserved a break for Erastide.