Young Writers Society

She nodded.

"Good idea," she agreed. "If you're ready to say yes, I am, too."

She gestured towards Abigor, giving Noah the chance to walk over first if he wanted to. She could have gone over without waiting for him to follow, but she felt like being polite.

Abigor was engaged in conversation with a strange humanoid creature with scaley skin and roughly medieval garb.

Noah takes the lead, straightening his back as much as he can and mustering up all the confidence in his body. He strides accross the room, then waits patiently for Abigor to finish his conversation, looking back to see if Kay has followed him.

Abigor directed the person he was speaking to a very fancy door with a nearly unreadable name posted on its sign, and turned to Noah once the person had vanished through it.

"Hello," he said smoothly, "Have you come to accept my offer?"

Kayden followed Noah over to Abigor. The person that Abigor was talking to seemed interesting—she couldn't remember ever seeing someone like that before.

But she put aside her curiosity so she could focus on the reason they had walked over in the first place, since that was the more pressing of the two.

"We did," Kayden said. She glanced over at the door the person had just gone through. "Are they our new coworker, or did you just send them back home?"

"Xey'll be joining one of the teams once I've had time to sort them out. Xer specialty is very particular so I'll have to be careful about putting them on a balanced team. I take it you choose to accept then?"

"Yes. We do. Where should we go next, Lord Abigor?"

Abigor clapped once and gestured to their doors, which had turned a vibrant shade of red with gold embellishments. "Right through there you'll find a.. training room, of sorts. Be sure to go through the one with your name on it and wait for the rest of your potential teammates to join you."

Kayden glanced at Noah before turning to the row of doors. Theirs looked fancy—the paint job was bright, and the embellishments shone gold.

"See you in a bit, then," Kayden said to Noah, and then she was off towards her door. She opened the door and found the kind of room she would have only dreamed of, once. Her training room was filled with every kind of tech she could possibly imagine using. All top notch, of course, and probably with some of the modifications she would have made.

Eyeing a desk in the corner of the room, she sat down on its neighboring spinning chair and gave it a whirl. If the tech wasn't up to her speed, she could also do a few updates of her own.

Harper was in her corner - a workshop - making a mess. She had no idea what most of this stuff was, let alone how to use it.

When Kayden entered, Harper was hidden under the desk, fiddling with something vaguely tool-shaped and covered in grease. Harper didn't notice the intrusion.

Noah walked through his own door. He found a workstation with plenty of tools and bits and bobs and a small bookshelf filled to thr brim with reading material. He wasn't honestly sure what it was for until he read the spines of the books. Visual Guide to Lockpicking, The CIA Lockpicking Manual, and Advanced Lockpicking Secrets, were just a few of the names dotted about. He supposed the lockpicking idea came from that time he tried to break into Ollie's apartment to retrieve his favorite sweater. He was following a youtube tutorial on how to pick a lock with a bobby pin and hadn't brought earbuds. Not one of his finest moments.

He sat down at the chair in his station and looked over the trinkets on the desk in front of him. Several detached locks and some tools with various kinds of ends sat semi-neatly organized. He looked through the bookshelf again, pulling out Lockpicking for Beginners and picked up the lock that most closely resembled the first one he found.

Even though the doors all appeared to go to different areas, Kayden soon heard another set of footsteps in the room. She looked up to see Noah going to his own corner. With silent footsteps of her own, she walked over to his station and peered down at the assortment of locks, tools, and books.

"I didn't know you could lockpick," she commented, head tilted ever so slightly to the side.

Harper looked up at the sound of voices, peering over the piles of junk that surrounded her.

"Ha! Looks like we're a team!"

"To be honest, neither did I." Noah replies, looking up at Kayden after the lock in his hand opens with a soft click. His expression sours when he looks to Harper, though he can barely see her he recognizes her voice. "Appears we are."

Harper hopped over the pile of scrap, a roundish contraption in her hands, and sat back on top of it, eyeing both of the others. "So we have an escape artist, a computer geek, and a...demolitions technician, I think," she said. "Not the most well-rounded of teams."