Suddenly, all the agency representatives were giving the station manager their full attention. “Did you say Skill Sharer? Already??” The BoP woman swiped away her QuickyNote without a second glance and reactivated her proper note-taking app. “Tell us all about that!”

  “You are talking about one of the new Sent, right?” the TaIR representative asked excitedly, likewise swiping away her game and opening a notes app in its place. “Finally! I was starting to be afraid the whole quarter would be a dud!”

  Blanche chuckled. “Is this the first you’re hearing of it?” he asked. “ORAP’s been hearing about it every day for over a week.”

  The SA’s Insider logistics officer frowned at the TaIR woman in confusion. “I understand why Trade would be excited at the prospect of another Skill Sharer, considering how many of them we send off to embassies and trade centers, but the new one is still Sent, and level 1. She can’t possibly affect this fiscal quarter.”

  “She can and she has,” the Outstation One logistics officer informed her. “I admit I’m surprised that Trade and Resources would have anticipated that, though?”

  “I meant this quarter-century,” the TaIR woman clarified, shaking her head. She got some odd looks, but ignored them to ask, “How did a brand-new, under-aged, level 1 Skill Sharer manage to affect your fiscal quarter already?”

  “For starters, she’s level 2,” Flo said dryly.

  Healer Hart, Michael and Flo’s direct superior, jumped in to add, “And she already has some Skills that Skill Sharer Impera prefers to blackmail us over, rather than provide in a timely manner. At some risk of giving ORAP the vapors, the young lady has Combat Medic as a native unlock.”

  “What? How??” Blanche demanded in horror, rising to the bait. “Why is our newest VIP engaging in combat already?”

  “She decided to make Field Medic her identity-Class,” Flo said with a grin. “And for her age and lack of experience, she’s already shaping up as a darn good one, too. She’s got a good head for mana management and Healer/Medic synergy, and – ”

  “But why is she engaging in combat??” Blanche interrupted.

  Flo shrugged, while Juliette turned just slightly away and – tried to hide her face from that end of the table? What was the story with that? Michael had only heard Flo’s version of how Danielle had hit level 2, but he knew Juliette had been one of the beast-patrol officers that arrived first in response to the distress call. “She seems to be kind of a ‘jump in with both feet’ kind of person,” Flo said, ignoring Juliette. “So far, she’s been involved with a Healer call that re-erupted into a room fight, a healer call that re-engaged in a cougar fight, a vine thrasher, a thorn thrasher, and a couple rounds of self-defense against hostile Sent.

  “On the one hand, she’s maybe a smidge harder to keep safe than some of us would prefer. On the other hand, she’s never once gotten into a fight alone; she keeps close to friends and allies, and fights as part of a team.” Flo shrugged again. “What more can we ask of a Sent kid? We want her out there, prepping for winter, unlocking new Skills, keeping people’s morale up.”

  “Serving as an ambassador to paranoid kids that don’t trust us to come save them,” Michael added. “Standing up as an example to her peers, working together and building community.”

  Flo nodded. “It’s not like hiding in her room all the time while the rest of the Sending pushes past her in abilities and levels would actually make her safe,” she added. “Sendings don’t work that way.”

  “I can see the next few years are going to be hard on my blood pressure,” Blanche joked.

  Station Manager Apira sighed. “You and me both,” she said. “She’s been very reasonable about working with us so far, though. She’s put up with being asked to purchase full-price tokens just so she could make more copies of them for us twice now – once when Skill Sharer Impera refused to make Now Hear This tokens unless we gave her one, again, and of course at the beginning of the week when we realized that the younger Sent were requesting a very different ratio of the offered epidemic-response Skill tokens than we’re used to seeing with 18-year-old Sent.”

  There was a little fidgeting to Michael’s left; his fellow Healers still felt that they’d let Agent Apira push Danielle a little harder than was really a good idea. Flo, in particular, was convinced that Danielle had been within a hair’s breadth of going into a critical mana production spiral that could have actually killed her. There was no need to bring up that argument again in front of the politicians, though. Instead, Flo volunteered, “She made so many Boost Recovery tokens that she actually managed to get Manifest Token up to level 2, and she’s promised more of the usual epidemic-response Skill tokens to the special catalog effort.”

  “More Boost Recovery, do you mean?” Blanche asked. “Or did she choose one of the others as her Sending Authority gift token, and then buy Boost Recovery?”

  “She obtained all four of the usual SA epidemic-response Skills, and several other Skills we stock as tokens, when we required her to pursue the bulk Skill treatment for mana production diseases,” Healer Hart explained. “She took a surprising number out of her own unlocks, but still needed a handful of tokens to make up the maximum effective number of Skills added. I’m glad we got her all the way to the maximum effective number, because she had a rather severe case herself. Since she pulled through, however, we can now say of the Skill Sharer herself what we already said of the Sending as a whole: going through mana pox early has been very much to her benefit. She has quite a lot of native Skills for someone so recently advanced. After pushing herself to help with temperature checks during the week, she’s also obtained her first level of Improved Mana Generation, as have many of the Sending’s classed Healers.”

  “Her take on the extra need for Boost Recovery was that it meant the camp was short of Sterilize Object and Local Antihistamine, so she offered them to the catalog,” Agent Apira added. “We didn’t even have to ask her for that, she volunteered!”

  “Sounds like she has a strong sense of civic duty,” the president’s man observed.

  Agent Apira rocked her hand back and forth. “She has a strong sense of duty to her community, at least. She might not be particularly happy with the Inside government right now, though, so it’s probably best not to bring up duty to state and sanctuary too soon.” The Insider end of the table frowned. Michael suspected it was as much at the term ‘Inside government’ as anything else, though; Insiders didn’t like it when people talked about the state government as if its authority stopped at the tunnel gates. Agent Apira continued, “For now, it’s enough that working with us on tokens is to her own benefit; she can use the mana to develop her Skill catalog. She currently feels motivated to unlock defensive Skills and make them available to her friends and allies; we’ve had a talk about selling at market price already. I think we all know we need a better solution for supplying reliable Skills to our police and military. If we’re lucky, Miss Falconer will unlock a solid selection of red-tier shields without our even needing to drop hints.”

  Blanche grimaced. “I’d still rather she not get into situations that stimulate a lot of unique shield unlocks. Any chance you can hint her in the direction of taking better care of herself?”

  “We try, but so far it doesn’t seem to have sunk in,” Healer Hart said with a matching grimace. “She pulled a classic teenage rebellion maneuver last time, and went straight into the most dangerous place in Camp Constanza.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “By which he means, she went to visit a friend’s room in building seven, and med-check his roommates who wouldn’t give us Rangers the time of day,” Michael put in. “One of them actually did turn out to need some time in the clinic and a couple units of fluids, too.”

  “And the next day she went back to the same building, and ended up in a sword fight with a lunatic,” Healer Hart challenged him.

  Juliette unexpectedly jumped in to say, “Um, as a point of detail, her friends did all the fighting; she hung back and made sure she didn’t pick up any extra mana.”

  “Well, true,” Healer Hart admitted.

  “The point is, she went to a building that has a known issue with mana murderers, because she has a strong sense of duty to her community,” Agent Apira summarized. “She probably even got a bystander Skill, not that a Skill makes up for the trauma of being attacked.”

  “Also true – in fact, she picked up Medical Mana Diagnostics, and her version of Detect Internal Temperature has the convenient numeric readout, so I have some hope that her Mana Diagnostics will have improved detail, too.” Healer Hart sighed. “I wouldn’t trade the life for it, if I had the choice, but it will probably be good for the medical and Healer communities, long term.”

  The mood in the room dropped at the allusion to a Sent death. Everyone knew Sendings were going to have casualties; it was inevitable. It was never pleasant to deal with, speak of, or even contemplate. Whatever their age, Sent were people who hadn’t asked for this. By level 10, a lot of them would be saying they wouldn’t trade their time Outside for anything; but they hadn’t volunteered, they were rarely anything that deserved to be called ‘prepared,’ and a number of them always died, one way or another. Keeping that number low was one of the Sending Authority’s primary concerns, and everyone in the room knew that this one was really not going well.

  The ORAP officer shook his head. "I guess we better keep a close eye on her." Michael had to drag his thoughts back to the present. Who were they keeping an eye – oh, right, the Skill Sharer.

  "About that," the Outstation One scryer replied unhappily. "Someone in Tree of Knowledge's character formation department – or whatever they call it there - needs to answer some serious questions about what's been going on in there these last few years, because our new Skill Sharer has one of the difficult Skill resistance Traits, and according to the Healers there," she gestured vaguely at Michael and his coworkers, "It's an academic Career Skill for her. Which is just wrong."

  Several people around the table frowned in different ways and degrees. Agent Apira looked sort of unhappily resigned, the SA's Insider crew looked worried, and the senator looked like he was getting a headache. The president's man mumbled something half-articulated that Michael didn't bother trying to parse - from tone of voice and job description alone, he could guess it would work out to something along the lines of 'not the kind of encouraging spin I'm looking for.'

  Blanche looked concerned and maybe a little pained, the face of someone who suspected a can of worms was about to be made his responsibility. "Do you recommend ORAP open a formal investigation?" he asked the scryer.

  The woman looked Blanche in the eye and - did not immediately walk it back. Wow, she really was concerned, wasn't she? After a moment's thought, she finally said, "I'm not sure. I think it'll probably be best to let me tell you my concern, and you can decide if it warrants official investigation, or a little extra monitoring with no official explanation, or just an off-the-books word in the right ears, OK?"

  Blanche nodded. "ORAP can handle any of those, and I appreciate your sensitivity on the issue. Obviously we don't want to let a bad actor continue in a position to harm children, but we also don't want to kick the affected middle schools while they're down."

  "Right. Here's what I'm seeing, and how it affects our job right now," the scryer said seriously. "At some point after getting her electronics-themed Youth Trait and before Advancing - "

  "Did you say electronics themed Trait?" the TaIR representative interrupted. "How does that work?"

  The scryer gave her a blank look. "Beats me, lady, I went to the Sending camps with a pet care Skill and a wind-element resistance Trait, came back Inside just long enough to get two kids into the schools, and went straight back to Outside living. I have my work-issued tablet, and my pocket comm, which I actually use mostly for communications, and that’s it. I'm not exactly an electronics expert."

  "It's a sensorium Trait," Michael supplied. "She probably won't be using it much for the next year or five."

  "I'm sure it will be of interest to Internal Resources if and when she manages to pick up any related Skills she can share. That said, can we please let the scryer return to her original topic?" Blanche asked, exasperation leaking through his attempt to be polite about the interruption.

  "Thank you, ORAP," the scryer said, nodding to Blanche. "The point I was making is, during the time when her only source of abilities was Career: Academy Student, and in spite of the fact that her Youth abilities were both information-adjacent, Miss Falconer picked up an unusually tough and flexible indirect resistance Trait. Mana Deflector is the kind of thing you see out of people who are dealing with hostile complex-interaction Skills like disruptions, certain element demonstration Skills, and of course, some of the more common forms of scrying. Whatever it was, it hit her so often and in such an academically disruptive fashion, that the System finally gave her a means of resisting it so that she could study."

  Blanche groaned. "Skill resistance abilities showing up in Academic Careers are a classic sign of abuse. We really are going to have to do a formal investigation - a records check to see if the school has other examples at the very least."

  "Actually, that and a good look at Miss Falconer's full record might be enough to settle it," Bernard piped up. "She's got an old, let’s call her an acquaintance, on the town council with her. This acquaintance was very determinedly trying to use a disruption Skill on her illusionary projection screen; they obviously have history. It might be that the 'abuser' in this scenario was another student, not a parent or school staffer."

  "That's a relief to hear, and I'll be sure to check disciplinary records for corroborating evidence," Blanche said, tapping notes into his data pad. "Do you have the other student's name?"

  "Ah, yes, that was councilor - ah, Vandere, I believe."

  "Vanessa Vandere, now of Camp Constanza building five," Michael supplied. "She's not a Healer (or at least, didn't show up for the Sent Healers meeting we ran during the epidemic), but she really didn't like Medic Falconer showing up near her room to help with a clinic patient we found a few doors down."

  "Yes, her," Bernard agreed. "Miss Falconer seemed exasperated with her little disruptor Skill, but not even slightly surprised. I'm guessing you'll find they both have some disciplinary history related to their Youth Skills, and especially to using said Youth Skills on each other. Incidentally, she's also someone to watch - we're only three weeks in, and she's already picked up Career: Spy."

  "Lovely." Blanche added more notes. The meeting paused with him a moment, then he swiped a gesture into the tablet and asked, "All right, consider investigation into possible Skill abuse to be in progress. How does this affect our ability to keep an eye on Miss Falconer now?"

  "Well, she also picked up Mana Sense at some point since her Sending, and the long and short of it is, she can detect and resist scrying already, and if we keep trying to scry her, she is very likely to become entirely immune in short order," the scryer reported. "At the Rangers' request, I checked up on her the Monday after we delivered the epidemic supplies. She was sleeping but woke up almost immediately, and after a few minutes of looking around, started trying to swat my Skill-sensor with her hands, and explained to her roommates that she could hear an eyeball spying on her."

  A wave of half-suppressed laughter rippled through the meeting. The scryer favored the assembled with an ironic smile. "It was rather amusing, in a way. The thing is, though, she was actually hitting the scrying sensor. It didn't do anything, because the sensor doesn't interact with purely physical phenomena. It does, however, prove that she really was perceiving it. Worse, it evidently signaled her System to start treating it as hostile. That evening, when I tried to check on her again, I hit resistance that actually took effort to push through, even at my level. That's when I pulled her file and confirmed it was Mana Deflector I was dealing with. Frankly, it's a surprisingly strong resistance even for a Skill that is known to be disproportionately strong for its tier at all levels.

  “I stayed away from her and her room while the Ranger Healers were out doing their rounds anyway. I managed to push through yesterday night while she was asleep, and at least that time she stayed asleep, but I can't make any guarantees. Worse, since she can detect the Skill, either she'll figure out we're scrying on her or she'll be worrying about who is scrying on her. She could easily develop specific anti-scry Skills or Traits if she perceives it as an ongoing threat."

  "And her old school-slash-political rival is a Spy, and could very well end up contributing to the frequency of exposure," Bernard added. "So even if she wasn't noticing the check-ins, she could still end up with hostile-Skill response abilities."

  The scryer nodded. "And there's only so much I can learn from scrying her primarily when she's asleep. My point, therefore, is that we need to be careful and not overuse scrying as a way of keeping track of her."

  Blanche sighed. "So to recap, our new Skill Sharer is a little hot-headed and already has a few enemies, but if we try to watch her too closely, we will almost certainly lose the ability to watch her at all."

  The scryer nodded seriously.

  ? BoP - Bureau of Personnel

  ? TAIR - Trade and Internal Resources

  https://www.patreon.com/c/NarrowRuled

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2