S.A.F.E. Agents generally don’t have much family, at least not ones they speak too. S.A.F.E. Agents don’t keep friends or lovers that feel they need to know what’s really going on, which tends to result in little serious socialization or fraternization outside the ranks.
It’s a job that eats the rest of your life, like a horde of starving orphans at a strip-mall buffet. S.A.F.E. agents go mad at alarming rates. Few retire, even fewer quit. Most of them just die. It takes a certain kind of crazy to be S.A.F.E.
At S.A.F.E. you have to accept things, impossible things, and you have to do it quick. Their lives are thriller/mystery, sci-fi/fantasy epics, that somedays follow plots uncomfortably close to romantic comedy formula. If it wasn’t a cliche, Edith would say they live the impossible. It's still true, she just doesn’t say it.
S.A.F.E. Agents have to accept people, with all their eccentricities, and the asking and telling that leads to well functioning, united teams, where the word team is cross-referenced with the word family.
Above all S.A.F.E. Agents have to accept not knowing, sometimes caused by secrets, and sometimes because no one knows. Edith runs the place and she still isn’t absolutely sure what the letters stand for. Truth is only ever relative anyway, so what does it matter.
Edith wonders how a classified add would read. WANTED: Creative people who like solving problems. Pays great, but long hours. Preferably speaks several languages, and is good with computers. Martial Arts or Occult skills a plus.
If they don’t have nightmares before they join up, there’s plenty of inspiration.
Why wouldn’t someone want to be a part of this?
Why did she become a part of this again? Dunno. Edith won’t let herself become aware of the answer, thinking about those times, along those lines won’t help anybody. (Because Merit asked, and there wasn’t anything else. Not the best way to make a major life decision, but it worked. For all she moans, S.A.F.E. is her meaning, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Most days.)
Edith never intended to save the world. In her formative years she expected to be quite normal. She didn’t know what she would do, but leading what frequently feels like a troop of paramilitary middle schoolers wasn’t on the list.
S.A.F.E. draws from the world’s top inteligence agencies, and the criminal underground. Some are recruited, some are enlisted. “Brilliance and Madness.” That’s what Edith had been told to look for. “Brilliance and Madness,” Merit had said. She could hear the capital letters in his voice. “Brilliance and Madness. It’s amazing how commonly those two traits run together, my dear.”
She had sighed and gone on with her day, writing it off as his typical babble, anything to fill the silence, but now it’s something to live by when she has no other guide lines.
The application form was among the many documents to be corrupted in Merit’s crusade against ticky boxes. While she’s all for self-determination, and creating one’s own identity, no progress is made by changing the question NAME into “What do you call yourself?” Simplicity, please.
She settles down to her revising, revisiting memories of clear cut cases, with obvious actions to take, evil to defeat, and not a scrap of paper work in sight. Those were the days, she thinks, with the hazy rose tinted perspective of someone removed from what actually happened by a new reality that is both immensely tedious, immensely necessary, and immensely boring.
But hey, someone has to do it.
Oliver leads the interrogation not because he’s good at it, though that’s true, but because the others suck. Too soft or too hard in turn, in a game balancing compassion with results. Oliver excels by principally being his charming self. He talks to Sheena, flirting a little, asking question after question.
She is coy, evasive, and doesn’t let any information slip from her lips.
Piper sits on the counter, knees pulled up to his chin. There is easily ignorable protocol about always having two people in the room with a prisoner, but Piper sees things that others miss. It’s how he’s not exactly psychic, but has killer instincts, and a disparate way of seeing things, as though he’s standing on the ceiling, not the floor. He’ll say something every now and then, taking a more abstract road towards the truth.
“You should let me go,” Sheena says, with a demanding smile. “He’ll come for me, and he’ll destroy you. Burn you right up, because he needs me, chose me, could have had anyone, but chose me. My Lord is true, and strong, and will come for me. Come here and burn you all to ashes.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Oliver drawls. It’s a bit of a bluff. He’s not suicidal, but would rather confront this creature then sit around doing nothing.
“Your 'lord' is powerful, right?” Oliver asks.
“More then you could ever imagine,” she retorts.
“I sort of doubt that.” He’s seen a lot of strange things, and a lot of false gods enslaving gullible New Age lemmings.
“My Lord is stronger the combined armies from every war gone by, stronger then gravity.”
“If he’s so powerful, what does he need you for?” Piper asks, and when she says, “He loves me,” he doesn’t buy it for one minute.
Oliver asks, “Did he say so, or is it something you just know?”
She cackles. “Does it matter?”
“Yes,” Piper answers for them both.
She does not give up their location, but she does admit to their crimes. She had orchestrated Armando's death, cutting off the arms of another “expendable,” and attaching them to the horrified, still breathing man. His body gone in exchange for her master regaining a solid form. “He is like finely cut crystals,” Sheena brags. “Like expensive jewelry. He shines, taking in light, reflecting and burning, casting rainbows.”
Her continued use of imagery is boring Oliver to tears. He interrupts her rapture. “So, you won’t tell us where you’re operating out of?”
“No. I won’t.”
“Fine.” He stands up, and walks to lean out the door. “Cleo, Viv, you’re on sap watching duty for a minute. Piper, we need to go talk. About important decision making things.”
Piper nods, and gets to his feet. As Oliver passes the girls he instructs them not to talk to her, then considers it, and swaps the previous instructions, saying, “You know what, I don’t care. Why don’t you, like, debate the relative merits of crustaceans, or high heels, or whatever. Be your regular, charming, combative selves.”
S.A.F.E. Agents are just as ridiculous as the world they journey in. Otherwise they’d break too often, and absolutely nothing would get done. Shortly after Ed joined up there had been a hard old black ops military man who they had liaised with on a job later named with stunning accuracy the "Dolphin-Quarterback Killer Case". He latter described the experience of working with a S.A.F.E. team as “The most frustrating week of my life. They just don’t stop talking. It’s despicable. They talk, and talk, but they don’t make any sense. The things I do understand--it’s appalling. That is not proper behavior for people in their position.”
To which Merit, their future fearless leader said, “And we were the ones that get let out to play! Just imagine the discipline cases!”
The military stopped calling them after that.
Cleo and Vivienne settle into the space. Cleo sprawls, while Viv stands in the middle of the room and leers Sheena. “I like it when he lets us spend time with prisoners.”
“Down girl.” Cleo teases.
Viv shrugs with her whole body, discarding a layer of tension, leaving her poised and dangerous. “I wonder what they’re talking about.”
Cleo furrows her brow. “He’s being strange.”
“It’s Oliver,” Viv reminders her. “Strange is his normal.”
“Stranger than...” Cleo starts, before sighing, “I give up.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“Yeah.”
It is uncomfortably quiet. Sheena coughs. Vivienne glares at her. Coughing is not appropriate prisoner behavior. Cleo taps a speeding rhythm against her leg.
“Stop that,” Vivienne orders.
“You stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“Stop being annoying.”
Sheena sighs. “Would you both just cut it out.”
They both turn to her. “You don’t get to tell anyone what to do,” Cleo says, Vivienne interrupts her, “Shut up, or else.”
“Or else what.”
“Or else I’ll...” Vivienne trails off. She has been asked not to threaten people anymore, and past experiences have shown Oliver doesn’t care who started it.
“Or else she’ll cut your hair,” Cleo provides.
The word, “Really?” falls from both Vivienne and Sheena’s mouths.
“Really, really,” Cleo says. “Or maybe, possibly. I don’t know if we actually have any scissors.”
“I had a knife!” Sheena brags.
“Not anymore,” Vivienne says, “And it doesn’t matter, because I’m not cutting anyone or anything.”
“Wow, way to crush my dreams,” Cleo pouts.
“Shut up,” Vivienne answers, squashing the conversation thoroughly. More silence falls, a heavy precipitation coating the room, freezing them in place, listless and discontent.
Cleo breaks free. “Hey! Where’s your top secret underground base?”
Sheena scoffs. “If won’t tell the attractive gentlemen, why would I tell you?”
“You think they’re attractive?” Cleo asks, shocked. “I mean, they’re sweet, but...I dunno.”
“I understand,” Vivienne says. “On a general level. Oliver is rather tall, and appealing in a wholesome, strong, blond, American way, that I don’t actually find appealing. It isn’t confusing why other people like him. It’s just that we’ve spent too much time with the pair of them, and know how they’re gross and peculiar like all people, and they have the added distinction of making choices that make my life more complicated, and are prone to telling jokes that aren’t actually that funny.”
“And Ollie used to date Mouse,” Cleo offers a reminder.
“Exactly,” Vivienne confirms.
“What I don’t get is why she would be noticing,” Cleo says, gesturing to Sheena. “If I was her I’d have higher priorities.”
“It’s because she’s in love with an old amorphous Almighty. It may be powerful, but it doesn’t have any nice warm flesh.”
“You were listening?” Sheena asks, unsure whether she should be indignant or not.
“There’s a camera,” Cleo remarks, pointing at the device, which isn’t hidden at all.
“Oh,” Sheena says, choosing mildly miffed as the correct emotion to display.
“I think it’s creepy too,” Cleo says.
“Incredibly creepy,” Vivienne agrees, a rare alignment. “For example, right this second we’re in here talking about boys, and other side of the wall Alec is watching.” She smiles seductively at the camera and whispers, “Hi Aleczander.”
There’s a crash from the other room, and the S.A.F.E. girls start laughing while Sheena retains her gloss of haughty and disgusted. It is a relief when Oliver walks back into the room, Piper his smaller, darker shadow.
Oliver slams his hands against the table, looks Sheena right in the eye, and says, “Tell us where your allies are, or we’re going to kill you.”
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