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[[backdated to LET ME KNOW WHEN'S GOOD, no earlier than 5/25~]]

Quartz was, it should be said, hoping that this mission would go well. Other than the General Operatives -- a branch he was fairly sure Schörl would consider to be the "you need more skills training" branch, and not accept as a permanent solution -- there were three specialized branches of Negaverse operations.

He didn't want to join the Special Operations branch for about a million reasons. Quartz considered himself to have the proverbial ninety-nine problems, of which Schörl was a shitload of them. And Schörl was in the Special Operations branch. This was the branch that hunted people, killed people, policed their ranks as well as tactically eliminating their enemies. It was, in brief, more or less a long list of things that Quartz did not at all want to have to do as payment for his continued existence.

He didn't want to fight people, or kill people, or capture people, or torture people, or hand them over to Metallia for corruption. He didn't want to be in charge of telling other Negaverse agents to be more Negaversey. The special thing about the Special Operations division was that their operations were things Quartz especially did not want to do.

The other two branches weren't much better. Intelligence was basically all the SpecOps stuff, but hands off. It was facilitating everything the SpecOps branch did, or the Infiltration branch. No less culpable, just . . . less direct.

The Infiltration branch, then, had sort of the most appeal, of the three. Apparently Infiltration members could sometimes just get cushy government jobs and mostly use them to funnel money and resources to the Negaverse. That part sounded fairly plush.

The mission, though -- the starting mission, to see how well he might do -- involved the other thing the branch was supposed to be doing. It involved convincing knights and senshi -- or even just civilians -- to join the Negaverse.

He was out here to give it a shot, tonight. To see how well he did. Test mission #1, Infiltration: Recruit Somebody.

Quartz had been intending to pick out a civilian. It was unfortunate, then, that the streets turned out to mostly be empty. The first and only person he eventually came across was a Squire.

And her dog.

Quartz approached very slowly, stopping a good distance away. He put his hands up. "I come in peace," he called over, hoping she wouldn't attack or run. "I only want to talk with you. Is that okay?"

Quartz watched the knight and her dog carefully. As a Squire, she had him outranked -- and since she was a Squire with a dog, he considered himself wise to be pretty concerned. The dog rightly identified him as a threat: Quartz did his best not to do anything it might be construed in dog-psyche as an aggressive action. He was careful not to make eye contact with it, or move toward it face-on.

The Squire, too, he kept a space buffer from. That was her specific condition.

Well, good. He wasn't exactly eager to get into anyone's striking distance, himself. He still remembered Megiddo and her skull-breaker.

"Lieutenant Quartz," he said, lowering his hands, but keeping his open palms in view. "Don't worry, I'm not interested in getting into biting range. I'm pretty sure the two of you have me outgunned, frankly."

He waited till she'd seated herself before moving to follow -- sidestepping his way toward the seating area out of continued care for not riling up the dog. Quartz picked out a table two tables away from hers and perched at the edge of it.

I'm here to ask if you've heard the good news about Jesus, he considered. Metallia-as-Jesus.

"I want to talk to you about your employment options," he said. "Have you ever considered the Negaverse? Sorry, what's your name, by the way?"

Quartz smiled in vague approval of her introduction of the dog as 'Dog.' While the two humans present each had a glamour that protected them from being recognized as their other selves, he suspected there was nothing that protected a dog from being identified -- other than dogs generally looking the same. "Nice to meet you, Mistral. Dog," he said, careful not to give the dog too many glances. He didn't want to give the impression he was planning on killing anybody's beloved Fido or using it to track them to their home -- plus he really, really didn't want to agitate the dog any further.

Now, though, came the part where he had to convince someone to join the Negaverse. Like, willingly.

"Well, I mean," he said uneasily. "The main advantage is, if you go willingly, they probably treat you a lot better. If you don't, they'll get you anyway. Then if you're lucky, they kill you. If you're not lucky, you end up like me."

Quartz snorted irritably. "The Kool-Aid is these people have no souls. I mean, you've got plenty of people who'll tell you they were given the whole 'corrupt-or-I-kill-you-now' spiel, but the truth is they'd have been a-okay with the whole murder and suck the life out of people for power and profit thing anyway. They were forced, but -- I mean, if you forced me to eat an ice cream sandwich I might think 'okay, that's not cool, but I ******** love ice cream sandwiches. Those people don't . . . they're happy because they are totally down with Downtown Julie Brown, you get me?"

He peered at her for a moment, distracted with trying to estimate her age and the likelihood that she knew who was down with Downtown Julie Brown or not. It didn't matter. "Once they bring you over, you can either get on board with their program real fast, or they'll tie a rope to you and drag you along the asphalt behind them. There's no conscientious objection. If you come on board willingly they will probably not kill your dog. They will probably not make you eat out of your dog's dish. They will probably treat you somewhat like a person. You will probably not have to earn hands privileges, and speaking privileges, and outside privileges. Just think of yourself as making the best of a shitty situation."

The best case scenario.

Had she pulled a plug in his back and deactivated him, it would've been hard for Mistral to produce such a blankly lost expression as that question did. He stared at her for a while, shaking his head. "How should I know," he muttered quietly. "Hookers and blow. Snort it off a corpse. Money, opera tickets. Whatever. Tell me what would make it worth your while; I'll find out if you can have it."

He looked down at his hands picking at the skin beneath his fingernails. "It's a smart strategy, anyway -- setting a high price on yourself. Haggling. You could go far."

Quartz sighed and shook his head, looking up at Mistral through long eyelashes with a wan smile. She had no idea, he supposed, what she was so blithely suggesting. Perhaps she hadn't been listening to the world he'd been trying to describe to her, the world he lived in because he'd proved himself recalcitrant. Perhaps she just didn't believe it could happen to her.

So many of them believed themselves excepted from unhapppy endings. They believed, somehow, that horrible things happened to other people, not them. Poor people. People in third world countries. Drug addicts.

Their innocence -- their faith in the world -- was going to ******** them over. Mistral included -- and her little dog, Toto, too.

"No, I can't," he corrected her. "You don't lie to a commanding officer. Not to my commanding officer."

She was . . . flirting with him? Quartz felt some current in his mind run dry. The phantom echo of Schörl's voice rang close in his ear; the memory of Cinnabar's fingers trailing over his thigh made his skin prickle with gooseflesh. "Don't do that," he said. "If you want to sleep with me, make it a condition of your corruption. Otherwise, it's not happening."

He got to his feet slowly -- but only because of the dog. This whole mission had been a failure, which meant he had to try something else. The killing people division, probably -- following right in Schörl's footsteps.

"I should go," he said. "Thanks for your time."