I didn't get Permission the first time I tried, either. My first attempt had more problems in it than just paragraphing. Come to that, I want start writing my first mission when I finish this week's homework. I just have some questions to answer for World History and an English project which I should have started on Monday, so we'll see.

On most counts, you do very well. I know who you are, I like your characters (and not because I'm low-key promoting a Hobbit takeover of HQ, ignore Maly and Dagger, they don't know what they're talking about), and I like the humour in your writing. The Mirror of the Sue, the 'getting nowhere faster' line, Jesse's 'eloquence' - it's good!

But there is something askew with your pacing, and I think the reason I'm having trouble is because there's two effects overlapping each other.

1/ Your paragraphs are breaking up in strange places. Example:

It was a hobbit. To be precise, a harmless-looking female hobbit with curly reddish brown hair, warm chocolatey eyes, and an excited expression. She yelled out, "You’re my partner!". Jess nodded, not really sure what to say in response. The hobbit had an Irish accent, a really strong Irish accent, so she was probably a rescue from a Sue story, because that was not canon as far as they remembered. Wasn’t dazzlingly beautiful enough to be an ex-Sue, so a side character? Eh. Right, introduction.

"Hi. I’m Jess. Or Jesse. Sometimes Pikachu, but I prefer to be called Jess. My gender’s confusing. I am more so. Nice to meet you," Jess said. The hobbit nodded in reply, waving slightly, a smile still on her face.

As a rule, a paragraph should be about a single thing, or should only have a single person acting in it. Your large paragraph there switches from Mya talking to Jess nodding, which should definitely be a paragraph break; but your second paragraph is the same "thing" as 'Right, introduction." Then you've got Jess speaking and Mya nodding clumped together again. There's a little subjectivity involved, but I would break it up like this:

It was a hobbit. To be precise, a harmless-looking female hobbit with curly reddish brown hair, warm chocolatey eyes, and an excited expression. She yelled out, "You’re my partner!".

Jess nodded, not really sure what to say in response. The hobbit had an Irish accent, a really strong Irish accent, so she was probably a rescue from a Sue story, because that was not canon as far as they remembered. Wasn’t dazzlingly beautiful enough to be an ex-Sue, so a side character?

Eh. Right, introduction. "Hi. I’m Jess. Or Jesse. Sometimes Pikachu, but I prefer to be called Jess. My gender’s confusing. I am more so. Nice to meet you," Jess said.

The hobbit nodded in reply, waving slightly, a smile still on her face.

One side-benefit is that it kills the big paragraph. I don't know about you, but my eyes skip off that sort of thing; I didn't notice Mya had spoken in the middle of it until I went back and checked why Jesse was introducing themself (er, themselves? Theirself? You use both of the 'them' versions once each, so...) rather than asking why she was there.

2/ Pacing. This is almost two effects in itself, but I'll be good and link them. Check out Jesse's speech up there - as a single block of text, it comes across as them staring at Mya and either babbling or reciting. People move while they talk! Does Jess smile when saying "my gender's confusing"? Do they shrug? Do they wave a hand to dismiss the growing list of names, before stating their preference? Something like that would help make them feel more like a person, and less like a required line of speech to get the narrative moving.

Similarly, you've got a number of lines which can be paraphrased as "An interesting thing happened, but I'm not showing you". After a random agent passing by had been enlisted to distract them is one example. We don't need to see the whole thing, but the 'after' means we just skip over it - we go from 'didn't have a distraction' straight to 'distracted'. Consider something like the following:

Eventually, running flat out having achieved nothing more than aching thigh muscles, Jess had to resort to picking a fight with a passing Floater. It was sheer bad luck that said Floater's Klingon partner happened to pass by a minute in, but at least the threat of a bat'leth'ing was enough of a distraction that they wound up outside their RC at last.

It feels (hopefully) like something's happening - like Jess is interacting with the world, rather than brushing through it to get to the next scene.

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The thing is, I think you could fix this! It's not a deep issue like turning your characters into a pair of talking heads. So I'm going to hold off on making a decision, and instead ask you to rework your second prompt (the Mirror) to be better paragraphed, and - if you find any opportunities - to work on the pacing a bit. I've ticked the box so that hopefully the Board will ping me when you reply to this thread, and I'll take a look at it then.

hS