do you have any more plans to write together cos I like how this turned out.

Please let me know how useful this is. I want to do a better job critiquing/reviewing.

Overall, this was highly entertaining. Dann is very funny, Earwig is always entertaining, though in a bit different way. More like verbal jokes versus physical comedy (which you translate well in Earwig's interactions).

I felt bad for Derik when Gall made that gaff about his dragon, but he actually seemed to handle it better than I thought he would. Maybe he is coping?

Gall seems to be more typical of the attitudinal agents, but the addition of her total lack of technology understanding should be really interesting. She should meet Unger sometime. He could set something on fire for her, and then be totally shown up by the Monstrous Nightmare. I think he'd be in love...though with the fiery monster or it's master might be debatable. :)

The ending was sweet; even approaching genuinely poignant, which is not so easy to accomplish in a humor story.

Let's see how I do with the questions at the end. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and Agent Decima.

Okay, specific sentences that I liked or that I thought could use a bit of tweaking.

Perhaps slightly more practically than most, Agent Dann reached for a fire extinguisher. I liked this sentence. It established Dann as practical and funny, which set me up to expect to laugh with him the rest of the story. Very nice scene setting with the dragon popping in the paragraph before this sentence, as well.

a tough-looking young woman in a Viking helmet and armor menaced anyone who looked at her the wrong way with a sizable mace. This read to me like people were using a sizable mace to look at her, as opposed to her menacing people with a sizable mace

"The white emptiness of the hangar really had no clue how to handle a dragon." I think from reading the entire paragraph that the hangar is semi-sentient like most PPC tech, but to me, it seemed that "The white emptiness" is the subject of the sentence and the sentience.

The drama of this was sharply diminished when Snerri smacked snout-first into the opposing wall, but he recovered quickly and bore his rider dizzily away into the complex of Headquarters. I loved this one. Smack!

"Having followed the trail of scattered agents, claw marks, and one very traumatized petunia" Is that a Flower or a flower? (Unrelated note, but petunias are my favorite flowers.)

"It's like magic," Dann agreed, "but with more swearing. And slightly higher risk of burning yourself." BEST LINE EVER!

"...And the flashy-thingy? When do I get a flashy-thingy?"
"Now that's just dangerous," Dann said, picking up the Sharpie. "Wonder who left that lying around?"
Very nice mission. I look forward to your next one.

FAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I love it! Earwig's hilarious! And quite a good kender he is.

I would like to note that Sharpies, despite being useful for writing (a dangerous business), are also extremely good for interrogational purposes. Forcing captives to sniff a Mega-Sized Sharpie every three minutes ensures they're too loopy to tell a lie (though the hallucinations make it hard to tell anyways).

And--shrink collar! Epic!

It's always nice for Agent Dann to get some screen time beyond a short cameo. I also liked the scene with a certain desk at the end...

I always like to see debacles, especially with technology.

This was a nice weaving of the seriousness of Derik and his hangups and the zany antics of HQ and DoSAT. That line about the sharpie being dangerous killed me.

But the last line of the story made me D'aww. Very good handling of readers, you two.

Hm... in terms of constructive criticism... I would have to think about it some more. This is pretty good so I can't just suggest 'pacing' or 'transitions' off the top of my head...

And you gave me two different ideas about how my agents can keep the F-22s they steal in my current mission. They can leave it in the hangar or maybe shrink them and conceal them as scale models in a diorama.