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"Morning!" someone said, the voice arriving before the speaker did. Maybe he'd have to look down from eye level, slapstick style, to finally find her: she was a tiny little thing, and there were kittens printed all over the sweatshirt visible underneath a sweeping white coat, and bears printed on her kneesocks, and a pair of wire-frame cat-ears resting atop a halo of fluffy golden curls. In short, she looked about twelve, if twelve-year-olds were in the habit of wearing entirely too much eyeliner and red lipstick applied with an expert hand, or walking around with a clipboard in one hand and a cheery, secretarial mien.

To be fair, she, too, had to adjust her eye level to meet his, having gazed at some point over his head out of island-bred instinct already. And then she paused, and grinned, half-nervous, half-s**t-eating.

"Hi," she said, somewhat redundantly.

It would be nice to say that she took on a certain moe flush, a delicate little pink of the ears and the bridge of the nose underneath the clustered freckles. It would be nice, but it wouldn't be accurate: she went bright red right up to the hairline, and for a second looked like she might cry.

"I am eighteen," she said, in the way that only eighteen-year-olds can: as if being eighteen is an age of great wisdom and authority. "I've also been here for months," she added witheringly, although a bit tremulously. "You've been here for five minutes." Jerk. She didn't say it. She didn't need to. "Not even. Who spells Lucas with a K, anyway."

At this she gave him another pissy little stare--truly, she was not making herself seem any older--and rifled through the pages on the clipboard to find a little packet of papers, which she first fanned open to check for something and then thrust at him unceremoniously.

"No, because freshman orientation is next week," she told him loftily. "But I think Trailer Park's sick or something so maybe they'll postpone it, I don't know." You could actually hear the words come out as a glorified IDK. "I have to just like, give you the rundown and get you your weapon, or whatever. Like, as soon as you're not woozy. Do you remember anything? I guess I'm supposed to tell you why you're here. I never done this," she confessed. "They bundled me off to some base in the middle east and there's no pods there."

"Well," she said, returning to cheerfulness once more (as nothing is quite so bolstering as knowing more than someone who just made fun of you), "it'll come back. Real quick, probably. Anyway: you're on an island in the Bermuda Triangle, in a place called Deus Ex Machina. You signed up for it--voluntarily. You're here to like, fight the forces of darkness." This, delivered in a slightly sarcastic fillip. "So yeah, you'll need a weapon for that. After that I'll give you a little run-down on the basics, and you got the like--pamphlet, or whatever. There's a map and stuff in there. And we'll get you a room, and a cellphone and all your stuff you brought, and a uniform, which'll be white so I'm sorry if that doesn't jive with your wardrobe. And then you get thrown to the wolves, or possibly to the Middle East. Or Senegal, or Antarctica, or something. But probably not, I think I was a special case."

As tended to be the case with small girls in bright clothes, she liked to talk, albeit in a quiet, nervous, chattery kind of way that suggested unease more than social forwardness. But she abruptly flushed again, realizing she was doing it, and attempted to hide it by engaging in mindless busywork with the clipboard.

Incredulous, a little mocking, she laughed (fig. A). She didn't know it, but it was the first time she'd seemed vaguely adult during the entire exchange. "Oh man," she said. "It says here you've been sorted into Death division, so the answer is: yes. Always, in triplicate, in your best handwriting. But right now, no. You already signed your life away," she added brightly. "There's a sort of weird--what's the word?--I don't know. But sometimes you're gonna have to do reams of paperwork over stupid stuff, and other times they're gonna hand you the deadliest weapon you ever handled and you ain't even gonna have to sign nothing."

She did, in fact, quail somewhat in the face of that grin. Between the blush and the pout and the rambling she seemed like someone who probably quailed often.

"Well, get you started at least," she conceded, flustered again and trying to hide it behind the same cheer. "Probably someone better than me will teach you the important stuff. But if you're like, conscious and awake and ready and not gonna faint or something, we can go down there--" she pointed towards a somewhat ominous-looking path at the end of the row of pods, a strange juxtaposition of ancient and futuristic, arrows on the floor marking the way "--or rather, you can go down there." And at this, the flush returned in full force, violently. "Down into the cove." Well, not much better. "To get your weapon. It's a little weird down there." Oh, goddammit. "But I'm sure," she finished, resigned to it, now, "that you'll know what to do."

It caused her enormous shame to do it, but it would have been too great a blow to her pride not to, so she plunged ahead, bright red and all.

"I hope that's not your usual method, but I guess you don't have nothing better going to a place you've never been."