Will furrows his brow, frowns, and grits his teeth. He raises his foot as if to stamp it.

"It's just Wi—or, uh—"

His scowl gives way to a barely upturned smile, his foot returns to the ground gently and silently, and in a pleasant customer service voice he says "I mean, yes ma'am."

He unclenches his fist to reveal his ring of keys, which briefly assumes the form of a tommy gun before returning to its original position.

"Good boy, Willie."

Barely perceptible eyeroll.

The circles Raven is swirling her wand in have gradually grown larger throughout this display.

"Katie, tell me when."

"I thought you said he wasn't allowed to have a weapon. Will I be like, inhering that one when I take the job? Anyways, yeah, go ahead and levitate me."

"Men in general aren't. He got a special dispensation because of his job, it's one of the things HR was raising a stink about. And no, that one's his to take with him to his new job at Delphi Strawberries, though you'll be getting a selection from the Seattle armory and we do have another like it in there."

And then she waves the wand upward, and Katie feels herself gently rising into the air.

Katie gets a view of the world from twice her usual height.

She enjoys the view of the ladies's cleavage from above. "Whee! I can see Mexico from here! Okay, you can put me down now."

Raven notices her looking, and winks. Then she lowers her back to the ground.

"That was fun! Ready to get the paperwork out of the way and make a plan for moving?"

"Yeah. I uuh, live with my mom, so moving won't be hard. I'll just need to box up my PC and a couple other things and I'll be ready to go."

"A U-Haul rental's worth of stuff, or just a regular truck?"

"Probably just a regular truck, even including all the stuff that has purely sentimental value that I'd be basically fine leaving at my mom's."

"Great!"

Raven pulls out a clipboard and paper that really shouldn't have fit in her purse.

"Could you fill this out? It's just some basic personal and demographic info. And if you have proof of US citizenship—birth certificate, passport, ID card with the star on it—that would be helpful for getting your employment sorted at one of our front orgs, though we can fake papers if needed."

Katie inspects the paper very carefully to make sure she's not signing anything. "I have my ID at home. IDK if it has a star, it's a standard Texas non-driver ID card."

No signature required; the line for full legal name says to print.

Lauren, who's been texting away, looks up from her phone.

"My sister says we can borrow her truck for the trip back; she'll be down here in three hours. Is that enough time for you to pack your shit?"

"The practical stuff, definitely. I'd need boxes for the sentimental stuff."

"What kind of boxes, plastic or cardboard? I could get you some while you work on the practical stuff."

"Preferably plastic, but cardboard could work."

"Epic, I'll get an Uber to buy some and the rest of you can head with Katie to her place."

"That reminds me, I should tell you about our electronics policies! Most supernatural beings have a talent for tracing, intercepting, and sometimes even spoofing electronic communications. The mechanics are mysterious. Lauren once asked her brain passenger, Larala, how the ability worked; she reported back an answer of 'I don't know, how would you explain vision to a blind person?'. That said, anything that seems on a vague vibes-based understanding like it 'shouod' help probably will. End-to-end encryption messes with their ability to impersonate you or read the contents of a message, using a proxy or VPN confuses them about your location, and so on.

So we ask that you get a VPN app on your personal devices and set it to on by default. I recommend Proton, it doesn't slow down my browsing noticeably at all. We also prefer Signal or WhatsApp for texting rather than your default messaging app; we wanna make sure comms stay encrypted between iPhone and Android users."

Lauren nods at the quote.

"Ugggghhhh, do I have to use that for everything, or just work stuff? Like, do the monsters not know where you guys's HQ is?"

"Oh, when you're on base you can do whatever, the monsters aren't suicidal enough to come for us there. The VPN rule is just for phone use when you're out with us on missions, and advised when you're with family you don't wanna lead the monsters back to if you make enemies.

We are pretty serious about keeping work comms end-to-end encrypted though, we really don't want them to know all about our strategic capabilities."