"Building Maintenance," Nita Kerys muttered, "bloomin' Building Maintenance. 'Fix this wall, Nita'. 'Repair this door, Nita'. 'Make the tea, Nita'. 'Put back the tiles you blew up while making the tea, Nita'. Bloomin' Building Maintenance." She was adapting well to her new department and division, and had already learnt the most valuable non-tea-related rule: as soon as you go off shift, get away from your coworkers. So now she was wandering down the halls of HQ, looking for somewhere quiet to sit before returning to her quarters in New Caledonia.
"Bloomin' New Caledonia," Nita's muttering went on, seemingly with no intervention from her brain. "Bloomin' open spaces making me all shaky, bloomin' nasty weather, bloomin' people, bloomin' bloomin'... ah."
'Ah' was Nita's response to a door set into the wall, one that clearly didn't belong to a Response Centre or Flower's office: a quiet place, in other words. She pushed it open and stepped through into a dark space - well, not entirely dark, as there was a faint glow of silver writing hovering in the air in front of her. Nita reached out, but apparently it was further away than it looked. Still, dark beat daylight any day. She sat down against the wall by the door and tried not to think.
She might have dozed off; certainly she felt like she was startled into wakefulness when a voice said, very close to her ear, "Oh, it's you."
Nita shot to her feet, reaching for a weapon she was no longer allowed to carry. "Who's there?" she demanded. "I warn you, I know hundr- well, at least three forms of unarmed combat!"
"None of them will do you any good," said the spectral shape hovering to her right in an ominous tone. "I don't approve of what you've done."
"What I've done?" Nita repeated, hovering between terror and disbelief. "All I did was sit down!"
"Not that," the figure said irritably, swiping out with one hand as if to brush away her words. Nita recoiled from that glowing limb. "You were in the DIO."
"... he promised no one would be told," Nita said, but not in the despairing tone her words implied: this was a low, dangerous statement that promised retribution without being specific about who it would be visited upon. "Who are you, and how do you know about the DIO?"
The ghost raised its arms. "I know all," it declared, "I see all. I am the Spirit of the PPC, and what you have done does not agree with me!"
Nita stared, ready to flip back to being scared, and then a second spectral figure (she was starting to realise that all these metaphorical descriptions were probably quite literal) floated through the wall. "Hey, Blue," it said cheerfully. "Who's your friend?"
The first ghost dropped its arms, but made an effort to keep its voice in 'intone' mode. "Surely you mean, hail, mighty Spirit of the PPC, who knows all and judges-"
"No, I mean 'Hey, Blue,'" the second said. "Are we doing some sort of Christmas Carol ripoff? Ooh, can I be Marley?" Then it - she, Nita was pretty sure - turned to face Nita and started - of all things - to sing in an atrociously bad fake Jamaican accent. "You gonna be (dum dum) visited by (dum dum) three spiiiirits/They gonna talk at you/Talk at you/Talk at you all night..."
"You're ruining everything, Immy," the first ghost protested, but Nita had had enough. She stepped between them and folded her arms.
"I don't know who you are," she said, "and I honestly don't care. I'm just going to leave now, and you aren't going to stop me." She suited action to words, and the last thing she heard was the voice of the second spectre:
"The Spirit of (dum dum) the PPC/Is gonna tell you (dum dum) you're baaaaad..."
Nita stalked along the corridor in a distinctly bad mood. Every third door she passed seemed to be either the Department of Operations, the door to that dark room (she caught snippets of shouting voices as she passed), or an exit to New Caledonia. This being HQ, wanting them to go away inevitably made them more likely to appear, and finally Nita just gave in, pulled a door open, and stepped through.
She found herself on the Rue Jay Thorntree, the main street of HQ’s New Caledonia section, scowling at the sunlight as if it had offended her. Around her was a variety of hustle, bustle, and at least one rustle from an agent running past in an oversized Georgian skirt. None of this made Nita feel any better - her natural environment was a small set of rooms with an urple corridor outside - so she leant against the wall of the entrance to HQ (a building known, through the magic of PPC multilingual humour, as The Appetiser) and settled in for a good sulk.
This time she didn't fall asleep, she was sure of it, which meant that when she blinked and the street suddenly emptied, Something Weird was up. A quick process of deduction revealed that it probably had something to do with the spear-carrying woman in Greek clothes running towards her.
"Nita!" the woman gasped. "Thank the One I've found you! You have to help us. The Lone Power is seeking to gain control of the Kernel of the Multiverse again - you have to reach it first and stop It!" The woman paused for breath, then frowned at Nita's blank expression. "Don't you get what this means?" she demanded.
"As a matter of fact," Nita said, "no. Who are you, and what in the worlds are you on about?"
"I'm the One's Champion, of course," the woman said, brandishing her spear. "And I've... well, you..." She paused uncertainly, then sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Oh come on," she said to the world at large. "Her name's Nita - she's got to be a Young Wizards recruit."
"Still no clue over here," Nita said, stepping away from the wall. "Is this a repair job? Because that's all I do these days."
"I should have stuck with the Flower disguises," the woman complained. "It worked on that Tawaki character, it should work on-"
"Wait, Tawaki?" Nita exclaimed in disbelief. "That idiot we had to rescue? Hah, I say rescue - it was touch and go whether we brought him back or killed him. 'I get that he shows no signs of Stuvian physiology,' Peter told Justin, 'but you haven't met the guy. Please can we kill him? Just to make him stop talking like that?'" She shook her head, smiling at the memory, and then scowled at the figure in front of her, who was watching uncertainly. "Oh, what?" she snapped. "You're a goddess or delusion or something, you already know about my old job."
"I'm the Spirit of Imagination, actually," the woman corrected her, "and you really do have to help me. The Writer's Block is trying to capture the Source of Inspiration, and you have to-"
"Not buying it any more than that Lone Champion nonsense," Nita said firmly. "This is just like that Key to Canon thing Tawaki did, isn't it?" The woman gaped, and Nita snorted. "If you don't want to remind me of old case files, don't mention them by name," she suggested. "What's this all about?"
The woman sighed. "The Key to Canon - the Kernel - the Source - they're all different ways of saying the same thing," she said. "It's this... well... it's important, all right? And there's a bad thing trying to steal it, one with as many names as the Source."
"So?" Nita asked. "What's that got to do with me?"
"Well, the Source needs to be gathered up so the bad guy can't take it and-"
"Why not leave it where it is?"
"... what?"
Nita shook her head, smiling properly for the first time since Justin had called her in to ask about Peter's letter. "I mean, really. Ancient artefact in pieces, needs to be collected, Only You Can Save Mankind? It's the plot of every Tomb Raider ripoff everywhere." She walked around the woman into the middle of the street. "And you know what happens?" she said. "I go and put it together, the Big Bad appears, says I was the only one who could have assembled it, and tries to take it. Why not just leave the stupid thing in pieces?"
The woman was staring, her mouth hanging open. "Well, I... um... I... you're right?" she managed. "But it's, I mean, it's the only reason for my existence, this whole sending-people-to-fetch-it lark. What am I supposed to do if I stop?"
Nita shook her head, walked up to the woman, and put her arm around her companionably. "There are other things in life," she confided. "For instance, have you ever been to Club Aujourd'hui?"
"I don't... think so?" the woman said hesitantly. "What do you do there?"
"Mostly alcohol," Nita said candidly. "Me personally... well, I was told I'd meet three spirits today. You're the second, so I think I'm going to try some whiskey. Come on."
They walked off down the street, the disgraced agent and the Spirit of Something-or-other, arm in arm. It was going to be good to relax for once.
...
"... can you put the people back now?"