"Finally!" Rhin exclaimed, reading her e-mail. She and Azami had at last qualified for permanent quarters here in the City. Most of their stuff was still in storage, and Rhin hated living out of a suitcase. She trilled a high coloratura and did front walkovers to the door. Azami was there as she opened the door.

"Let’s go see ‘em!" she said, grinning. Rhin locked her door behind her and skipped alongside her tall friend as they set out for Officer Country.

Their new quarters were on the third floor of the Officer’s complex for all the Island City RCF. This was a large, square, inverted-ziggurat-like structure set into the ground. Centrally was a 200-foot square "courtyard", and most of the standard quarters faced onto it, though a few at the junctions of the passages faced the corridors. The courtyard had originally been roofed over with steel and plexi, but when the Shields had gone up, such protection became unnecessary, and the dome had been salvaged for other uses.

"Third floor, West side, rooms 327 and 328. Just around the corner from 23’s place," said Azami, grinning. "Which do you want?"

"Does it matter? Which one did they put me in?"

"You’re in 327. And the wall tiles will be different colors."

"Oh, yes, we don’t get to pick. Well, let’s see, then." Rhin keyed in the code she’d been given, though she’d certainly change it as soon as possible, and walked into 327. "Green! Oh, goody!"

"Pretty," Azami agreed. She ducked back out to try her door. She stepped inside 328 and paused. Her wall tiles were rust-colored. Rhin came bouncing in and stopped. "Oh, yuck! Can’t you change them?"

Azami was tapping her upper lip with a forefinger. "Yeah," she said absently. "If I can find someone who wants to trade. I think they’re modular anyway. I’m thinking I could paint, though. It’s not a bad back color, really. I could highlight it with purple and gold…" She trailed off, wandering around, planning. Rhin was still glad she’d gotten nice green walls, but if anyone could make the best of rusty walls, Tes could.

"I’m going down to Storage to start getting my stuff," Rhin called out as she was leaving. "Are you coming?"

Azami stopped pacing and looked down at her. "Oh! Yes!" They had just come off-shift and had all evening to start getting their stuff moved.

"Hello, ladies," said 23, coming across them carrying boxes down the hall. "What are you…ahhh! Finally got your room assignments!" He walked along beside them, but didn’t offer to take anything for them. They probably didn’t want any of their things dropped.

"Yep," Rhin said. "We’re right around the corner from you. 327 and 328."

"She’s in 327," Azami clarified pointedly, smiling to show all her teeth. No sense having him get that mixed up…. Rhin managed to kick her lightly on the shin without dropping her box of plants. 23 chuckled.

"Thank you Azami, I’ll be sure to keep that straight," he said, putting a courtly bow into his voice. Rhin rolled her eyes, but gave him a wicked twinkle anyway.

"Here we are," Rhin said as they came up to their rooms. She and Azami shifted their burdens and opened their doors, so unconsciously in synch with each other that 23 had to laugh.

"What?" inquired Azami.

"Nothing," 23 replied. He followed Rhin inside her quarters to find that they’d already made several trips.

"You know, I could probably find a handful of people who’d be willing to help you two," he said. "I can carry stuff too, as long as it’s unbreakable."

Rhin set down her box and stood on tiptoe to give him a quick kiss. "That’d be lovely, thank you. Right now we’re retrieving our stuff from Temp quarters. We got so excited we started pulling things out of storage, but then we realized we’d better wait until we had more time." She took his arm and they strolled over to Azami’s room.

"What a bother, Tes!" Rhin exclaimed. "We’re gonna run a rut in the floor going back and forth like this all the time."

Azami nudged a box with her foot. "I suppose you want me to blast a hole in the connecting wall for a door?" 23 laughed.

"Why not?" Rhin said. "I’m sure you could do it without bringing the whole place down. It’s just solid rock."

Azami cocked her head, with a "why not?" expression on her face. 23 could see her calculating charge strengths already. He groaned inwardly.

"Uhh, just warn me when you do it, so I can be somewhere else, okay?" he said. "Right now I’m going to see if I can hunt up Michael and Telasner and some of the others who might help." He gave Rhin’s shoulders a squeeze, kissed the top of her head, and left, with a jaunty wave to Azami.

"Thank you!" they chorused after him.

When 23 returned, he nearly ran into Azami coming around the corner with what looked like her bedspread, full of something, slung over her shoulder. Mendi held him back from actually colliding with her, and she had a hand out to catch him as well, if need be. She and Mendi exchanged a quick look, then Azami unslung her burden and handed it to 23.

"You wanted something unbreakable? All this is is sheets and clothes and stuff." 23 took it from her and laboriously turned it over his own shoulder.

"Geeze, Azami, what do you wear off duty? Chainmail?" He grinned to show her he made no bones of the fact that she was definitely stronger than he, and it didn’t bother him. He knew through the grapevine she’d gotten a bit of mild harassment in the gym, and her clear implant didn’t help any. But she and Rhin seemed to have things well in hand, and he wasn’t worried. He walked off toward room 328, while Mendi and the others, -- Sulamith Telasner, Mike M’Kinzie, and Dr. Lisa Price from Medlab 2, -- followed Azami back to the Temp quarters.

"Just grab whatever," Rhin said. "Everything but the ‘neo-mid-late classic-ugly dorm’ furniture goes!"

"You guys’re quick, to have everything packed up already," commented M’Kinzie.

"Yeah," said Telasner, gingerly hefting a box Azami had told her to be ‘rather careful" with. "When you moved into Perm Q’s, M’Kinzie, it took you a week just to move your CD collection."

"I wanted to keep them in order," M’Kinzie explained defensively. Azami looked down at the box holding her own music collection; she’d just thrown them all in there, figuring on sorting them later. Her booktapes were more organized, though; there were too many to just toss about haphazardly, even with most of them still in storage.

"What’s this?" Dr. Price asked Rhin, holding up a weird arrangement of gourds and other organic things.

"Hm? Oh that’s a quentliba," Rhin answered. "Musical instrument from South America."

Dr. Price stared at it for another moment, trying to figure out how the thing might be played, then shrugged and put it back in its box.

"Look out, 23," Telasner warned, narrowly avoiding a collision. "I don’t know what Azami has in here, but she said not to drop it, and it’s ticking!" 23 stepped aside, biting his lips in amusement. The contents of the box were more likely to be a clock than a bomb timer, but with Azami, one was better safe than sorry.

M’Kinzie did drop a box of Rhin’s, and it made a horrible noise. "Oh god, I think I killed it!"

Rhin, who was carrying a batch of plants behind him, just laughed, half in amusement, half in worry for her bagpipes.

With the added help, they got all their things out of Temp Quarters in a couple of hours, and opened up Storage to get as much of that as they could. They stopped at 20:30 or so, and Rhin and Azami treated everyone to the perennial pizza and beer.

"How goes the settling in?" Colonel Valdoon asked the next morning as they reported in.

"Still have a ways to go, but our Temp quarters are cleared out for the next vict-, uh, I mean recruits." Rhin said. Valdoon grinned and nodded, and gave them the run-down on their search pattern for that day.

"What doin’?" Rhin asked, peering over Azami’s shoulder. Azami was at her desk, engrossed in something on her computer. At Rhin’s question, she yawned and stretched back over her chair.

"Going over schematics for this place," she replied casually.

"Oh cool! Did you talk to that friend of yours, whatsis, Sealander, in the Corps of Engineers?"

"Mm-hmm. He said he thinks he can get me the permits, if I can give him a thorough enough plan, and we agree in writing to brick the thing up again before we move, if we do."

Rhin grinned. "That’s no problem; not like we haven’t laid bricks before." Azami laughed, remembering, as Rhin had intended, the time when they’d helped Rhin’s Uncle Riordan lay the brick fireplace in his new house. His old house had burned down due to a lightning strike while Riordan and his family were away, and most of the local clan had gotten together to build him a new one. The two girls had been fascinated by the mortar; mixing and setting the brick. But they’d been more enthusiastic than skillful at age twelve, and Riordan had finally threatened to brick them up if they didn’t find someone else to ‘help’ and leave him alone.

"Uncle Rory always had a rotten temper," Rhin mused.

"Like about half the Clan." Azami added, adjusting the view the computer was showing her so that she could see the placement of the interior wiring and plumbing more clearly. "Okay, it looks like we’re clear right here," she pointed, "and the rock is solid through here, so we shouldn’t disturb any serious cracks. Won’t be a very big door, but then you don’t care about that. I’ll just have to duck some."

"Or you could have Tamlynn cut your feet off, then you’d clear it."

Azami gave her a raspberry. "D’you think you could sweet-talk 23 into letting me borrow his pico-scanner? I want to double-check all this before I start blowing anything up. I don’t want to find out too late that someone routed a power cable through there and neglected to note the change on the schematics."

"Right. No problem. Be back shortly!"

"Not if you start cuddling while you’re over there, you won’t be!"

"True. You’re not in any big hurry are you?"

Azami laughed, and stretched again. "Not really. Don’t want to rush this stuff. And I still have unpacking and arranging to do anyway."

"Have fun!" Rhin caroled as she skipped out the door.

"You too!" Azami called lasciviously after her.

Rhin got back rather late that night, so she just keyed in the code to Azami’s door and left the pico-scanner on her desk with a saucy note, and went back to her own rooms. Azami apparently never woke up, or she’d have commented on the time.

Azami checked the area where the lintel would be again. The odd little anomaly was still there. A threadlike structure, possibly organic, running through the rock. It was too small to be an ordinary wire, and there were no obvious signs of how it had gotten there. She traced it along the top of the wall until it turned away from the plane of the wall and disappeared into Rhin’s side of the wall. The other end she traced to one corner of the main room of her quarters, where it thickened slightly, and she found a little hole, hardly visible unless one was looking for it. How odd. She scanned the thickening thoroughly, then downloaded the images to her computer, to get a better look.

Cylindrical, with various microscopic things inside. What is it? Well, what does it look like? Looks sort of like a tiny telephoto camera lens with stuff inside. A camera…Oh, cute. So someone could’ve been watching her find the thing…but the scanner hadn’t indicated any power use, so maybe not. But they might at any time. They? Who would bother? Azami had no idea. But people who spent a lot of time surreptitiously watching other people through little remote cameras got weird after a while, and it suddenly occurred to Azami what she could do about it.

She met Rhin at the gym, and after their workout, they jumped into the jacuzzi, wearing masks and snorkels. This amused some of the other users of the gym, and vaguely alarmed others. Under the swirling, bubbling water, a conversation was taking place, mostly in fingerspelling, for both had forgotten a lot of the signs they’d been taught in school, and they didn’t know if there were signs for some of the things they were talking about anyway. When they couldn’t stand the heat any longer, they surfaced and ran for the cool showers.

Later, Rhin and Azami were hanging out in 23’s quarters. Azami browsed through 23’s stack of booktapes and selected a couple. "Mind if I borrow these?" she asked him. 23 looked up from the game he and Rhin were playing.

"Yeah, sure." He returned his attention to the chessboard. Rhin was going to beat the pants off him, but he was trying not to make it too easy for her. Azami grinned and took the tapes. She’d read them in the Library. The rest of her and Rhin’s plan would have to wait until she’d actually blown the hole for the door.

Three days later.

Biddy-beep! Azami’s wristcom bleeped at her. She held it up and pushed the ‘reply’ button.

"You’re permits are ready, ‘Zam," came Sealander’s voice, slightly tinny over the link. "Want me to transmit them over the line to your computer?"

"Yeah, go ahead," she replied. "I’ll go over them when I get off duty. Thanks a lot, Sealander, Rhin and I really appreciate all your help on this."

"No problem. Now you owe me one!"

Azami laughed, and they broke the connection.

"What was all that about?" Mendi asked. He and Azami were rechecking some of the trank power-packs; some had been going bad on them, and they hadn’t been able to find the initial cause yet.

"Hing? Oh. Rhin and I are making a door between our quarters."

Mendi blinked. "You’re what?"

"We’re making a door. More convenient."

"But you’re just next door to each other."

"Yes, but we still have to go out into the hallway. What if one of us is just out of the shower or something and has a really brilliant idea? And this way we can lock the outer doors and still go back and forth easily."

"But you already know each other’s codes."

Azami sighed. "This way is more fun."

"Ah." That definitely explained it better than anything else she’d said. Mendi shook his head, but he smiled to himself nonetheless.

Something occurred to Azami suddenly. "Oh! Hey, Mendi, we’ll let you know when we’ll be doing the blasting, in case you want to stay out of the area."

"You’ll be evacuating the surrounding area anyway, won’t you?"

"Yes, but I thought maybe you’d, um, be sensitive to all the noise?" She wasn’t sure, yet, quite how sensitive he was, both senses-wise, and feelings-wise. Though he’d taken her mistaking his higher body temperature for a fever well enough.

"Oh. Yes." Such consideration was unusual in outsiders. It was rather nice, actually. Tamlynn showed such caring, too, now that he thought of it. Though he couldn’t help but wonder if her motivations weren’t more along the lines of trying to get his trust so she could do research easier.

"Oh, blast," said Azami. "Here’s another one." She sighed and set the power pack aside.

"Last one!" Azami shouted as she drilled the last of the carefully angled holes for the charges.

"You could just about cut the thing out, couldn’t you?" 23 commented to Rhin.

"Yeah," she replied, projecting easily over the sound of the drill. "But what would we do with the slab, then? We already have an idea for the rubble the blasting will create."

"Ah."

Azami finished and set the drill aside. She blew the dust away and carefully inspected her work with 23’s scanner. "So far so good." She went into her bedroom, where she had the specially-prepared and pre-wired charges laid out on her bed. She checked them over again, then coiled them up over her arm. Bringing them back into the main room, she placed each carefully in sequence. The charges were spaced evenly throughout the section of rock, taking into consideration the varying thickness and density. They would be fired in a rapid sequence that would break the stone slab free in mid-sized pieces and collapse them downward. They had both rooms thoroughly draped and taped to ward off the worst of the resulting dust, and they had the surrounding apartments evacuated on all five sides.

23 watched all this with a mixture of amusement, dubiousness and genuine interest. He already knew Azami was very good at what she did, but this was a slightly different application from the old bunker.

"Now," said Azami, reeling the trigger wire out to where she had the control board set up in the emptied and barricaded-off hallway, "the trick is to blow this down, not up! Well, and not too far down, either." She tested the board again and connected the wire. "Ready?"

Rhin was practically vibrating with excitement, and 23 nodded. They all put their helmets, goggles and masks on, and Rhin and 23 put their ear protection in place.

Azami keyed her wristcom to let the Corps of Engineers know she was blasting. "Okay, Sealander, I’m a go. You ready for some noise?"

"Fire away," came the cheerful reply.

Azami put her earplugs in and uncovered the switch. "Fire in the hold!" she bellowed. She held up her left hand, with three fingers raised. Then two. Then one. Then she thumbed the switch.

K-K-K-RRRACKK-RRRRRUUMMBLE!!!!!!!!!!

As the noise died away, reverberating down the stone halls of the complex, they waited for the dust to clear. Then Rhin and 23 stayed put and removed their earplugs, while Azami went in to check her handiwork.

"All clear! Come on in!" she called after a few moments. Rhin bounced in, 23 carefully picking his way through the haze behind her.

"Oh, Brava! Well done!" Rhin said, clapping her hands and gazing at the neat opening and pile of rubble.

"Not bad," 23 agreed, stepping over to more closely inspect the edges. They weren’t planed and polished, but they weren’t as ragged as he’d thought they’d be, either.

"Those new micro-charges work wonderfully," Azami said, grinning. "Not so much cleanup carving to be done."

23 tapped the thickness of the right-hand wall. "I thought you were going to put in a standard sliding door."

"Well," said Rhin. "It’ll be a slider, all right, but not entirely standard. A bit smaller than standard is all. But we have to use cutters to make the pocket and track for that. For now, we just have to clean this up!"

"Right," 23 said, surveying the jumbled pile of stone and the dust-covered drapings. "I’ll go tell Mendi it’s safe to come back down here, and start letting people get back to their quarters. You’re sure it’s safe, right?"

Azami knocked on the lintel with a wrench from her toolbelt. "It didn’t come down during the blast, and I can’t find any new faults with the pico-scanner; it should be fine."

"’Should be’," 23 repeated.

Azami stuck her fists on her hips.

23 laughed. "Okay, okay! I’ll be right back to help with the cleanup."

A couple of days later, they had the pocket and track cut, and were awaiting delivery of the door mechanism itself. Tamlynn was back from the Symposium on ______(tech______ and dropped by to check out what they were up to.

"Hey, Tamlynn. Come to see our hole-in-the-wall?" Rhin said, bringing her into the room.

"Yes, I have," Tamlynn replied. "Very nice. Are you going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony?"

"Abso-floggin-lutely. And yes, you’re invited."

"I’ll bring the Romulan Ale."

"Ooo!" Tamlynn had worked out both a near-lethal version and a milder version for people, like Azami, who had little tolerance for alcohol. Rhin favored the lethal version herself.

"Is it ready?"

"It’s ready."

"Very well then, shall we begin?"

"Indeed. You may go first."

"Oh, no, dear, I insist, you may have the honor."

"I couldn’t hear of it, my darling, it was your idea."

"Oh, no, I insist…"

"No no no, I insist…"

"Let us do it together, then!"

"Oh, yes, let’s!"

Far away, though not so far as they might have guessed, deep in a super-secure bunker, hidden from electronic eyes, a man watched the above goings-on with a rather bemused expression. The short, red-haired one was holding a cloth-covered tray, while the tall black-haired one held a pair of wires that had been stripped at the ends, and led back under the cloth on the tray. At the end of their nonsensical dialog, the two commenced to making outlandish faces, directly into the camera. At one point, the red-head set down the tray and disappeared from view for a moment, only to reappear, upside down, somehow suspended above her friend’s head.

The man couldn’t help but wonder how she’d managed it, and while he was working that out, she went right-side-up again and retrieved the tray. The black-haired one then reached up with the two wires.

"Nighty-night, you pervos!" they chorused, and the camera went dead.

The man stared at the screen for a moment, then burst out laughing. He called in his supervisor. He explained to her what he’d seen. "They seemed to think the camera was placed by simple voyeurs, so they just put a stop to the ‘peep-show’."

The supervisor snorted. "Waste of materiel. Don’t bother to reinstall. Not yet, anyway. If they move out, or something else we need to keep track of happens, otherwise, just file this sequence."

"Yes, sir."

The camera made a very satisfying POP-fssss! when it went. Azami fanned at the minute amount of smoke coming from the tiny opening and scanned the area. "Bit it," she confirmed. Rhin scampered over to her rooms to see a puff dissipating from the hole left by the camera on her side, too. She returned, cheerfully maligning the ancestry of whoever put the cameras in.

"That’s that," she said, once her litany was done.

"More or less," said Azami. "Hopefully whoever had the things installed won’t come back."

"Better not," said Rhin. And she decided right then to see if she could find out who was responsible. Later. Right now they had a party to provision for…

Later, in Rhin’s suite, provisioning done:

"All right," said Tamlynn. "You promised you’d explain what you’re going to do with all the rubble."

"Oh yeah," Azami said, getting up from the table. She ducked through the door and disappeared into her bedroom for a moment.

She came back waving a sheet of paper.

"The sketch," explained Rhin. Azami handed it to Tamlynn. 23 stood and regarded the design over her shoulder.

Tamlynn looked it over, absently wondering why Azami hadn’t done it on a CAD program, then deciding Azami must like the feel of pen on paper. Typical artist. The sketch was of a pair of small pool/waterfalls, complete with bromeliads and a circulating pump. They’d be installed, one in each main room, in corners, to provide both soothing sound and moisture in the air. "I don’t suppose you’d have enough rock left over to build one of these for my greenhouse," she said wistfully.

Rhin and Azami exchanged glances. "I don’t know," Azami said. "We might. We can give it a try anyway."

"Maybe swipe some extra rocks from the Wastelands on our next long run out there," offered Rhin. 23 grinned, imagining the look on Valdoon’s face…

"Ah, well, don’t use any of those on mine, then," Tamlynn said, uncomfortably. She knew it was irrational, that they’d put such rocks through thorough decontam; but she couldn’t abide the thought of objects from the Wasteland residing permanently in her home.

"Uh, okay," Azami said.

"Maybe we can find some with O-Storm blast patterns on them," Rhin added. Sometimes the O-Storm lightning strikes left weird, coruscating, iridescent patterns on rocks it struck but didn’t shatter. She and Azami had long agreed they were uncommonly pretty. But she and Azami had grown up outside Shields; and Tamlynn had not. Out on the West Coast, the Storms weren’t as fierce, so they regarded the ones they’d encountered out here in their service to Island City with respect, but wonder rather than hatred or fear.

"Sure," said Azami. "We can build Tamlynn’s first, then see what we have left over…"

"Oh, I didn’t mean for you to do that," Tamlynn protested. "It’s your rock!"

Rhin and Azami shrugged in unison. "We don’t mind," they said.

"That’ll give them a chance to try the idea out," 23 put in. "To see if it works and get the kinks out." He grinned as Rhin stuck her tongue out at him.

"Ah, I see," Tamlynn said. "Well, that’s all right. You two have done so much work in the greenhouse already; I think you’re entitled to experiment."

Rhin scuffed her toe. "Aw, all we’ve done so far is weed!"

Tamlynn laughed. "But, Rhin, some of those weeds were bigger than you are!" Not that that had stopped her from attacking them. Tamlynn had come into the greenhouse in alarm on hearing some rather unearthly screams, only to find Rhin taking a machete to some of the berserk tansy that had gotten out of hand in one of the planting beds. Azami had been tugging another one out, when it suddenly gave way and sent her sprawling. Or rolling, rather. Tamlynn had to admit she’d never seen anyone fall on their rear so gracefully before.

"Were you planning to have these done before the party?" 23 asked.

"Oh no," Rhin said. "We still have some parts to scavenge."

"Got the plants, though," Azami said, pointing a toe at the box with green and bronze leaves peeking over the top, over in a corner.

"Tim still gets her anything she asks for," Rhin said, grinning. Tamlynn and 23 exchanged looks and raised eyebrows.

"Not everything!" Azami countered, blushing furiously nevertheless. "He’s married, you know."

"All right, you have to explain this now," said Tamlynn.

Azami, still blushing, chuckled. "Just an old friend from Hydroponics."

Rhin made a choking noise. "’Friend’?!? Tes!"

Azami rolled her eyes. "Yes, ‘friend’. He was a great comfort after Billy-Bear died, but really we were always mostly just friends. He’s very happily married now, and obviously not to me. Rhin has always been under the romantic illusion that he was much more enchanted with me than that. It’s very dear of her, but she’s wrong."

"Am not," Rhin muttered, still amazed at her friend’s stubbornness on the subject. Tamlynn and 23 glanced at each other again; neither of them wanted to touch that one.

"Well." 23 cleared his throat, stepping in before the silence could get too awkward. "It looks like you’ve invited the entire HL-1 field team and most of the support crew. Pretty cozy in here; good thing you have that door after all."

The "door-warming" party was in full swing. All the HL-1 officers had come, and quite a few of the support staff as well. Rhin and Azami had gone out of their way to make friends with their new unit. Valdoon even took the evening off for once to relax and stopped by to check the alterations out, not to mention sampling a few of Tamlynn’s excellent cookies. He’d already determined they’d gotten all the proper permits, and there weren’t actually any regulations that specifically forbade the thing, though such a reg might make its way into the books in future…

Azami and Mendi were easy to spot; and where they were, Shea, Tamlynn and 23 were likely to be as well. Valdoon made his way through the crowd toward them, but was intercepted by Dr. Helding, who wanted to ask him what he thought of the new "Cascades" view-disk.

"I haven’t seen it, actually," he deferred. "Pardon me, but I have a medical need for a cookie right now, Doctor."

Dr. Helding smiled – a bit too knowingly, he thought – and let him go. Valdoon growled. Tam just makes very good cookies, that’s all, he told himself. But just as he reached the refreshment table, a wave of silence suddenly engulfed the room, starting and focusing on the main entryway behind him. He had half a cookie stuffed in his mouth, but turned around anyway.

General MJdJ stood in the center of the silence, in uniform, calmly surveying the gathering. Was she invited? Valdoon thought, again wondering if it had been such a good idea to accept Shea and Azami into his unit after all. Had they pulled major strings (pun unintended) or had the General just gotten wind of this some other way?

MJdJ stepped into the corridor that appeared before her, leading straight to the Twins. Rhin and Azami jumped in front of their new door almost protectively, assuming full attention stance, their eyes very wide.

Cecelia inspected the door thoroughly, and then surveyed the Twins. Goodness, do I have even these rascals cowed? The thought almost pleased her for a moment. Then she took a closer look at their expressions. Their mouths were too still, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say the little redhead was giving off sparks of barely suppressed laughter. Not cowed, then, just surprised at my being here. She felt better about that. These two were mostly harmless and even did a lot for the morale of the people they associated with. She gazed around at the rest of the decor. Not as extreme as some she’d seen, but creative and colorful. Azami’s side was perhaps a touch more garish than Cecelia would like for herself, but to each their own.

"Does it work?" she asked them, indicating the new door.

"Yes, sir!" the Twins chorused gleefully, standing aside to demonstrate. The door, if noticeably smaller than standard, moved and sounded just like the front entry. Cecelia nodded in approval. "Carry on, then." She turned to go.

"Have a cookie!" Rhin chirped, dashing forward with a proffered chocolate chip one. The General gravely took it, thanked her and walked out.

Once out in the hallway, she took a bite and sighed. "My compliments to Dr. McLendon!"