There's a woman standing in the hallway. She has shoulder-length dark brown hair, and is wearing a button-up shirt and pants that look professional but nondescript. A square cross pendant hangs just below her collarbones.

"Good morning," she says. She has a bit of an accent, thought what accent is anyone's guess. "May I come in? I have... some advice you might find helpful."

...uh.

"You... maybe don't wanna come in," says Naomi. "Unless you've got a carpet cleaner in your pocket and a couple hours to kill."

To demonstrate what she means, she lets the door swing wider. The living room is mostly intact, but a good third of it - including most of the area by the front door - is absolutely soaked in a mysterious dark red fluid. It looks like someone either committed a couple dozen very messy murders, or laid down fake blood with a fire hose. The walls and ceiling are dry, but the middle of the big patch on the floor still glistens unpleasantly.

The woman's mouth drops open. "Are you--" she starts to ask automatically, then recovers her composure a bit. "Well. I suppose so. Still, this is a conversation you might not want others to overhear."

"Fair enough. Come in if you want, I'm not gonna stop you."

The woman nods politely and steps through the doorway, closing it lightly behind her.

"Bee problem?" she says. "There's been a lot of that going around lately."

"Bee—?"

She thinks of the golden honeycomb tracery in her lifeforce, and the scatter of hexagons that marked the infuriating dream lady's departures. Huh.

"Maybe."

The woman looks like this does not surprise her at all. "I represent an organization headquartered in London. A very large organization with branches across the globe and connections in every government, although we see ourselves as a, mm, a silent partner." She waves a hand, as if this is just background information. "We pull strings. Big strings. Prime Ministers, Presidents... Kings." She steps closer to Naomi. "Dark days are coming. The world is in turmoil, and we're recruiting." She turns away. "Soldiers, agents, adventurers. Crusaders." There's a bit of a smirk in her voice on that last one. She turns back to Naomi to judge her reaction.

Skepticism. Skepticism is her reaction.

"We offer good terms," the woman continues, unfazed. Maybe she gets this kind of reaction a lot. "A fresh start. A network unlike any other. Unlimited resources, a fantastic medical plan, and a way to harness and use your incredible powers. It will be a big transition, but look at it this way: this is a unique opportunity. You have been chosen. You have been granted powers beyond what most can imagine." She shrugs. "So you can either be an outcast in a world that will never understand or accept what you've become - or you can join others like you. Take a stand against the rising darkness. Embark on a journey into the unknown. Into the hidden places. Into the secret world."

"The unknown has not been much fun so far," she says dryly, gesturing at the enormous puddle of ??blood?? on her living room floor.

The woman glances at it. "The choice, as we are so fond of saying, is entirely yours. But know this. Your emerging powers will attract plenty of attention, and not everyone is as, ah... as accommodating as we are. On your own, you'll be easy prey. You might not last the week."

She pulls out a small envelope from her back pocket. It's sealed with the same cross she's wearing around her neck, imprinted in red sealing wax. She hands it over to Naomi. "This will get you where you need to go. There are instructions inside. Use it, or don't use it, it's your prerogative. Either way, you won't see me again." She reaches for the door to let herself out.

—when she takes the envelope and the woman's fingers brush against hers, she has a flash of strange insight and then the number of pages in her metaphorical egg book goes up by one. Yep, she can now clone this person. What the fuck.

She blinks in startlement and lets the silence drag a little too long before she manages a distractedly sarcastic, "Thanks."

"I trust you'll make the right decisions." The woman pauses halfway out the door, just a little too smoothly for it to be genuine. "By the way - our organization is called the Templars. You may have heard of us? We've been around for a while. Good day." And she's gone, pulling the door shut behind her.

She looks down at the envelope, stifles an impulse to throw it in the puddle of slime blood, and instead goes and sets it on the kitchen counter.

(Her clones are in various stages of setting themselves up, some still on trains and buses, others finding likely-looking patches of land to start digging. Only three have made it all the way to constructing underground caverns. It's a little unpleasant to be tucked away underground in slimy darkness - too reminiscent of her fight with the alien slime - but it is less unpleasant than dying, so she will just have to suck it up. Maybe she can find something bioluminescent to grab, and light her caves with fireflies. She checks, and her clones are able to read off any organism they touch, although the Clay and the Tunnelers don't seem to have the trick of it.)

Nothing much else happens for the rest of the day, despite the Templar lady's dire predictions.

The next day, in the early afternoon, there is another knock on her door.

She does the open-it-a-crack-and-peer-out thing again. In a bathrobe, again, because she's been experimenting with using her dream bee magic to kill Imps and that means laying eggs a lot.

It's a man in a dark blue jacket and sunglasses. He looks her up and down and wolf-whistles. "Not too shabby for someone a few days out. Mind if I come in?"

...she snickers, and steps back and lets the door swing open.

His eyebrows go up when he sees the mess, but he strolls in anyway. "God damn. Somebody's been naughty." He flashes her a smile. "I approve. Time is ticking, so I'll cut straight to the chase. I work in talent acquisition, specializing in a highly unconventional sector for a very particular client. And they're particularly interested in your kind of talent: fucking stuff up."

"And here I was hoping you were here in search of a calligrapher," she jokes. "Go on."

He laughs at that. "My client is only interested in the best of the best, and that's where I come in. Your talent is raw but it's, uh, obvious." He gestures vaguely around the room. "My client has the means to refine that talent and make the most of what you've got and I'm not talking about money." He looks over his sunglasses at her. "Well. Not just money."

She snickers again.

"You are objectively way sleazier than the lady from the Templars, and yet, I like you much more."

"Oh, well look who's popular! They try to get you with that whole righteous stick-up-the-ass bit? Good on you for not biting, you seem smarter than that."

"That's me. Destructive and cynical."

He laughs again, but it's a little more abrupt than it was before. Possibly he wasn't expecting that answer. "We're prepared to give you a chance to prove you've got what it takes to hang with the big boys and girls - to rule the world." He exaggerates the last words, making them overdramatic. "It's up to you to grab that opportunity by the balls." He takes another look around her apartment. "Based on what I've seen so far, you might be what I'm looking for or... you might end up dead. Time will tell."

He pulls out a business card from the inside of his jacket. "You have an appointment tomorrow in Brooklyn that I'd recommend you keep. There's no address. Consider this the commencement of your official interview. Find us." He turns to the still-open door, stops, turns back. "Or we'll find you. My client has eyes everywhere. I'd tell you not to be stupid, but it looks like you've already got the hang of that."