Here's Part Three. This time, it's told from Sandy's point of view.
The Institute, Part Three: Sandy
It's not surprising that Willa doesn't like Hacking Basics; from what I've seen of her, she's more the action type. Not that hacking isn't an action, but she needs to do something besides moving her fingers around.
But with what I have in mind, she won't need hacking. The Watchers are short on action types, and just as well Willa came along. And won't she learn a lesson or two when she joins!
Oh, Willa's a good girl, but too innocent, especially for someone in our line of work. Sure, she can beat Coach when they spar- and he's a ninth Dan, after all- and even if she thinks it's boring, she could hack into practically any system in a few hours if she wanted to, a day or two at the most. But skills are no use if you don't use them correctly.
Look at me, for example. Not too closely, of course- we Watchers are secretive, after all- but look at my background. Sure, it's the whole clichéd “Mom disappeared, turns out she was an intelligence agent, and surprisingly enough, I'm good at it too” story. But I had some real-world experience, what with three brothers and two sisters and fifteen cousins and their parents all jammed into one house because my aunts and uncles were too lazy to work, and of course the fact that my father and siblings and I had to take up the slack.
The fact that I helped out, too, didn't stop them from teasing or being angry with me; so what if I didn't buy arthritis medicine for Aunt Susie? Dad covered that, and besides, I like computers a lot better, and once I upgraded to a decent machine, I made more money off of Ebay and stuff like that; and a few games didn't go amiss as well.
And once they- that is, my cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles- broke my first good PC (I let them have the ones that were falling apart), when I forbid them to use my new, better, faster Internet box, some nasty arguments broke out between me and my elders; namely, everyone except Dad, because he understood. Being the youngest sucks.
I honestly don't mean to complain, but what does Willa have in the way of real-world experience? From what I know (Lorraillane is surprisingly knowledgeable about their clients, and it's easy to sift through the cover stories) she's an only child, and daughter of two prominent figures in the Underworld community.
Sure, she might have something I don't have, like stories from her parents of “When I was a lass...” and “In my day, things were better than...” and “What's with all the regulations in the Ring these days?”, and maybe a bit better knowledge in the laws of the Ring (the company her parents work for), but other than that, what does she have? She was practically born and raised at the Academy, and if that's not a sheltered life, I don't know what is.
Still, she'll be useful for the Watchers. Even if it is just a student group, we do some serious stuff. And like I said, we have a need for some more action types for what we have in mind....
