"Welcome back, Your Royal Highness, Carl, Katia," the greeter—Lexis, that was it—said softly. She was tall and impossibly thin and eldritchly beautiful, if that was a thing. "It is a great pleasure to have you with us again. The broadcast got delayed for a news slot so you've got about twenty-five minutes. Please enjoy the refreshments."

"Thanks," Carl said, giving her a curt nod before moving to the snack table. Donut followed along, jumping up on the table and sticking her head in the bag of pet treats.

I looked at Lexis, then down at myself. I was back in my original, non-doppelganger body. How interesting.

I looked at the food table, then around a bit. It wasn't the same place as last time; the carpet then had been blue but this time it was green. Larger than I remembered...a couch and two chairs in addition to the snack table. The slight motion of the room said that yes, we were on a large boat, same as last time. The swaying made me teeter on my stilettos, so I took them off. I didn't know what to do with my hands and something was missing.

I looked around vaguely, expecting the object of my search to wander into view even though I didn't know what I was searching for.

A faint foot-scuff sound made me look for the source of the threat, but it was only Lexis.

"Are you all right, Katia?" she asked softly.

"Hm?"

"You seem a bit distracted." Her tone was calm and unhurried. I'd heard that tone before, from Hekla. "I have noticed that sometimes crawlers find it hard to adapt when they come directly from a stressful situation."

I nodded absently.

"You understand that you are safe here, yes?"

"Hm?"

"You are safe here. Do you understand that?"

"Katia? You okay?" Carl asked, moving towards me with a half-eaten banana dangling from his left hand. His right fist was clenched—smart man, always best to be ready. Hm, his gauntlet wasn't appearing. Odd.

"Katia?" Donut asked, standing up on her back legs so she could dab at my shins with her front paws. "Katia?"

"What, Donut?"

"You blanked out," Carl said, his eyes going from me to Lexis to a quick sweep of the room. "You doing okay?"

"Hm? Oh. Yes, I'm fine." I blinked, forcing myself to center in the moment. "I'm a little out of it. Something feels weird."

"Were you in a combat situation before coming here?" Lexis asked.

"No," I said. I considered it absently. "Well...sort of. It depends, I guess."

"We were forted up at a train station," Carl told Lexis. "We'd been there for several days with waves of mobs constantly throwing themselves at the barricades. Katia had the morning shift so she was on the line for four hours, then we sealed everything up and the three of us were standing around for half an hour playing rearguard as everyone else went down the stairs. The mobs broke through the outer defenses a few minutes before we bailed but we didn't even see them."

"I did!" Donut said proudly. "I shot them. A lot of them. It was fun."

"Katia, would you like to sit down?" Lexis said, ignoring Donut. She started to reach out and take my arm but stopped and lowered her hand, gesturing towards one of the chairs instead.

"Hm? Oh. No thanks, Lexis." My calf twitched and for a moment my knees felt loose. "Actually, wait. Yes, I would."

The chair levitated without fanfare and slid closer to me as though brought by a hurried footman. I turned and settled into it. The moment I sat my muscles went to jelly under me and my chest started to tighten.

"Albert?" I whispered, the words broken by my desperate search for air. "Albert?" The room felt cold and the air was stale, almost resisting as I dragged it into my lungs.

"Deep breaths," Carl said, standing on my right with one hand on the back of the chair and worry in his words. Donut had hopped into my lap at some point, purring loudly and bumping her head up under my chin. My arms closed convulsively around her and hugged her close. There was a soft feline squeak and I forced myself to not hug quite so tight.

"You're okay, Katia," Carl said. He hesitated and then patted me awkwardly on the head; luckily for him I was in my original human form, the one that didn't have a blade on her head or fingers on her right hand and oh god I could feel Gore-Gore's sword slicing my fingers off, the cut so clean it felt more like a brief sting as the blood fountained and—

"Katia!" Donut said, bapping my nose with her prickly-clawed paw. "Breathe! Look at me!"

"Huh? What? Donut?"

"Take a breath," Carl said. "I think you just had a flashback."

"Do I need to delay the broadcast?" Lexis asked.

"Seriously?!" Carl snapped. "Give her a second."

"It's okay," I said absently patting his hand. I bent forward and pressed my nose into Donut's soft fur, inhaling the scent of dusty kitty. She rumbled reassuringly and butted her nose into my chest.

"You going to be okay?" Carl asked.

"Mm-hm." I closed my eyes and breathed. "Sorry."

"For what? You're fine."

"For always being the weak one. I know you didn't want me along."

Carl sighed. After a moment he settled into the other chair, which had moved closer when I wasn't looking. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped.

"You've more than pulled your weight," he said.

"But you didn't want me."

"I didn't want anyone. Donut and I were doing well together and I didn't want to mess that up."

"No, you didn't want me. You only did it because Hekla asked you to. I was an imposition."

He hesitated. "You were underleveled," he said at last. "I didn't want you to die on my watch and I didn't want Hekla pissed at me."

I nodded.

"You turned it around," he said quickly. "You've been doing amazing."

I snorted. "I've been pretending to be Birgit Battlemaiden."

He frowned. "Who?"

"The Templar Corps? Doctor Mauser, Lady Stormborn? Fjord Lord?"

"This is an Iceland thing?"

"I guess. It was a comic book I read when I was a kid. Birgit was a warrior. Something like Wonder Woman but edgier. She was a street person before she got her powers, not a princess from a mythical kingdom."

"Well, whoever she was, you've been doing very well," Donut said firmly. "Look at your social numbers!"

"You should eat something," Lexis said, kneeling beside me and offering a plate loaded with cheese, crackers, bits of fruit, and a few squares of chocolate. "What you're experiencing is normal. You have been living under combat conditions for weeks. Even the saferooms are inside a war zone. You have now been removed from that and had all your informational systems and special enhancements turned off. It can—"

Enhancements? "Wait, Albert! Why isn't he talking?!"

"Your ASI was deactivated along with your system interface."

"What?! You can't deactivate him! He's not a computer, he's a person!"

"Your ASI is an article of military equipment and as such is not to be active during your time on this show."

"He's a member of the fucking party," Carl said flatly. "He's the reason thirty thousand people are still alive. Turn him the fuck on."

"No."

Carl stood up. Lexis was still kneeling beside me, holding the platter of snacks, so he was able to loom over her. "Turn him. The fuck. On."

She set the platter gently on the ground and stood up gracefully. She overtopped Carl by more than forty centimeters, although she was so thin he clearly could have snapped her like a twig with one punch.

"He will not be harmed by the deactivation. Your contract is binding and very clear. Guests' system interfaces, weapons, reflective defenses, bioenhancement, and military equipment are to be disabled during your time in the trailer and the studio."

"Why?" Donut demanded. "You're the only other person here and we aren't about to hurt you unless you try to hurt us."

She shrugged. "It's standard boilerplate, designed to protect not just staff but also equipment, and to prevent information warfare by people hacking through our dataports. I'm sorry, I don't have the authority to alter it."

I reached out imploringly. "But—" I stopped when I noticed that the hand I had reached out with was missing all four fingers. That's right, they had reverted me to my human form. My doppelganger powers were gone. Birgit was gone. I was merely Katia again, unable to pretend. I was going to go on television in front of trillions, possibly quadrillions, of people and I was going to have to do it with no fingers. Wounded, weak, all on show for their bloodthirsty pleasure.

I gagged, feeling my gorge rise.

"Katia?" Carl asked, taking a knee beside me so he could put a reassuring hand on my back.

"My fingers..." I whispered. I cradled the mutilated stump in my opposite hand. "He cut off my fingers."

Carl looked up at Lexis. "What did you do?"

"Her shapeshifting abilities are a standard combat enhancement. They were disabled along with everything else."

I was hyperventilating, rocking back and forth as the sight of Gore-Gore's sword slicing through my flesh played on a loop behind my eyes.

"For fuck's sake! Turn them back on! She's freaking out!"

"I'm sorry—"

"Listen, you turn her abilities back on so she can put her fingers back or we walk off this fucking show."

"You can't—"

"No, we'll go on," Donut said. "We'll go on and utterly ruin the show. What will the viewers think when Katia is like this and Carl and I are actively hostile? What will they think when it's like that every single time we're on? When we either don't talk at all or spend the whole time mocking Odette and your producers? We are extremely lucrative guests. Do you really want to ruin that?"

I was curled up in the chair, unable to look away from my missing fingers. There were tears leaking from my eyes and my chest was tight.

"...Fine," Lexis said. "I've reenabled her shapeshifting, but if she takes any form other than her currrent or her first preset then I will have to disable it again. I'm sorry, this is the limit of what I can do without being fired and probably sued for breach of duty. I definitely cannot re-enable the ASI."

"You sure?" Carl said. "He had more impact on the level than any ten people. Losses were incredibly low because of him. Wouldn't he be a great interview?"

"Katia," Donut said, rubbing her head on my cheek. "Come on, sweetie. Put the fingers back. You can do it."

I shifted, becoming Birgit again. My fingers regrew, my legs and hair lengthened, my measurements shifted until wounded, crippled Katia was replaced by confident, powerful Birgit Battlemaiden. I did it manually, not using the preset; the pain of rapid shapeshifting grounded me, the sensation of fracturing bones and burning nerves putting me back in my body and driving off the image of the sword slicing my fingers away. The mutilated hand that I still couldn't take my eyes off of was gone, replaced by the hand of a warrior. Long fingers, traced with faint scars and calluses. I had put a lot of work into those hands, fine-tuning and tweaking until they were part of the illusion that I wore like armor. Part of the persona that let me handle the dungeon and appeal to the mob.

Slowly, the iron band around my chest that had been constricting my breathing loosened and I was able to draw a deep, shuddering breath. I uncurled and sat up, still bent over with my right hand cradled in my left. It was not mutilated. I was not wounded and weak. I was Birgit Battlemaiden, confident champion, and Katia was off in a corner somewhere to be dealt with later. I breathed, staring at the fingers as everyone stared at me.

Slowly, the panic began to flip, transforming to mania and mania to confidence. I wasn't sure if it was healthy, but I liked it.

"Thank you," I said softly.

"Are you all right?" Lexis asked.

I took another deep breath, this one steadier, and let it out slowly. I rose to my feet, pouring Donut back to the floor.

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"I'm fucking awesome," I said, showing my teeth in a warrior's grin. "Now go talk to your lawyers and get Albert turned the fuck on so that Odette can have the first ever interview with a Skull Empire Special Warfare ASI who just broke the fucking dungeon."

o-o-o-o

"Welcome, all of you! Carl, Donut, Katia—so nice to have you!" Odette said. The bug mask that she wore covered her head completely so I couldn't see her expression but there was a smile in her voice.

Odette was just as bizarre and, frankly, disgusting as ever. Her crabtaur lower half was fine—a faint twinge to the primal threat-assessment part of my brain, but attractive in its own weird and deadly way. No, it was her human body with the utterly impossible breasts that were each literally the size of a baby hippo. They slooshed when she moved, jiggling and rippling like water balloons filled with grease. It was beyond anything sane and it made me queasy to look at.

"Thank you, Odette," Donut said in her princess voice. "It's good to see you again as well. And all of you!" The words were directed to the holographic audience and accompanied by a wave of her paw. "Do we have any of the Princess Posse in attendance?"

Part of the crowd woohooed their approval.

"Thank you for coming, everyone. So nice to be out of that filthy dungeon and here with all of you."

The crowd went wild.

"Good news, folks!" Odette said to the audience. "We have a surprise guest about to join us. Any guesses who?"

"MONGO!" shouted too many people. Other names crosstalked, one or two supporters each, but I didn't hear Albert's name mentioned.

"Good guesses, good guesses," Odette said, a smile in her voice. "But nope! No, for the first time ever on Dungeon Crawler After Hours With Odette, we are going to interview a military-grade Assistive Artificial Intelligence! A genuine hero, a special-forces warrior, a master tactician and hacker par excellence, I give you...Albert!"

Donut was sitting closest to Odette, Carl to her right and me to his. There was an additional, hastily-added chair to my right, empty until now. Suddenly it was occupied by a tall, powerfully-built man dressed from head-to-toe in a black military uniform with gloves and a ninja hood so that his ice-blue eyes were the only exposed flesh. It wasn't actually what Albert wanted to look like, it was a preset frame that the show's producers had available on zero notice. The studio's microphones were sensitive enough to hear the words that Albert spoke in my ear and then process it so that it came out through the holographic mouth of the image. As far as the audience could tell, Albert was really sitting there. Disturbingly, they were also able to mute his voice in my ear so that I wasn't hearing double. That implied dangerous things about their ability to manipulate what he said to me.

"Good evening, or whatever your local time might be," holographic-Albert said, his voice exceptionally posh and British. "My name is Albert. I am, as Odette stated, an Assistive Synthetic Intelligence and a member of the Skull Empire's Special Warfare Command. It is my great honor to have been partnered with Commander Katia Grim." He hadn't been happy about having to demonstrate his sapience on intergalactic television but it was part of the deal we had made for getting him turned on again. He had admitted that it fit within Princess Formidable's mandate of broadcasting his remaining capabilities, but he hadn't been happy about it. Fortunately, the unhappiness was directed at Odette for turning him off, not me and Carl for turning him on.

"How exactly does that work?" Odette asked. "Katia is an Earth human and an art professor. She isn't a member of the Skull Empire military. Or any military, for that matter."

"Of course she is, Odette," Albert said, putting all the courteous disapproval into the words that only the upper-class British could manage. "She is a member in good standing of the Empire's military forces and she holds the rank of Commander. Do you honestly believe that a soldier of my skills and specialization would be partnered with someone who did not deserve it?"

Odette laughed, raising both hands in mock surrender. "I would certainly never say that out loud."

Albert's voice went cold. "You should not say it in silence, either. Commander Grim is a worthy partner and I fought hard for the honor of being assigned to her. Please be so kind as to give her the respect she is due."

"No disrespect intended," Odette said, nodding a minor apology to me. "She certainly has been blossoming in the dungeon. Katia, you had a rocky start but you recently set a record for fastest growth rate in followers. Not just for this season, for this century. The last time anyone's socials grew faster was Marlis Thun and that was a sixty-eight cycles ago. What's your secret?"

I had prepared for this question, rehearsing the response and tone in my mind. "I got tired of being scared," I said. "All those asshole monsters in the dungeon? I decided that I wasn't trapped in there with them..." I paused, grinning and opening my arms to the audience.

"THEY WERE TRAPPED IN THERE WITH ME!" the crowd thundered, deducing the appropriate response.

"Damn straight!" The energy of the crowd buoyed me up, boosting the mania to new levels. "Motherfuckers'll never know what hit 'em!"

"Well, the four of you definitely took the 'Most Valuable Crawler' award for this level," Odette said, hurrying to smooth over my vulgarity. The thought made me cackle inside. "Losses were remarkably light because of the communication and teamwork that you enabled."

"When you work together, nothing is impossible," Donut said, raising her head defiantly.

"You certainly proved that. Carl, you've been very quiet. Tell us a bit about how it looked from your perspective."

He shrugged. "Albert set up this networking system on our chat interfaces, with messages being relayed around. With a couple hundred thousand people sharing information we cracked the code on the level pretty fast. Then it was just a matter of forting up and punching things until we could leave."

"Well, I must say, you certainly frustrated Borant," Odette said, laughing. "Let me show you how this level was supposed to go."

She gestured and a screen lit up off in front of us, low to the ground so that it didn't obstruct our view of the audience. Presumably the audience was seeing the same image above our heads.

A complicated 3-D arrangement of loops and squiggles traced itself into existence, all glowing in subtly different colors. Dots of light that presumably represented trains started pulsing from the bottom of the image to the top while more dots raced in frantic circles on the looped lines.

"This was the Iron Tangle," Odette said. "The numbered lines ran up to the Abyss here"—a section of the design flashed red for a moment—"where the passenger cars were dumped into a giant pit and the engines were sent back to the beginning here. The assumption was that a lot of crawlers would end up hurtling into the Abyss and dying." She chuckled. "Nope. You guys spread the word about that one and suddenly not one single person went into the pit. You probably saved ten thousand lives with that one message."

I smiled.

"Also, the Terminus stations were actually giant mimics," she said, indicating several stops. "The entire station, one City boss creature. The crawl is a massive betting opportunity across the galaxies, and the smart money said that more than thirty thousand crawlers would get killed by the mimics. Nope. A few hundred crawlers got wiped going up against this one here, but the survivors spread the word that the Terminus stations were dangerous and not one single person engaged the mimics after that." She winked. "Borant lost a ton of money on that one."

"Indeed?" Albert asked. He had lounged back in his chair, legs extended and crossed at the ankle, with his fingers interlaced over his stomach. "Tell me, Odette, precisely how much money did they waste on their foolishness?"

The audience roared their laughter. Carl tensed up and leaned forward so he could look past me to hiss at Albert. "Quiet, man!"

Albert offered a lazy wave of acknowledgement and went silent.

Odette's voice was bubbling with suppressed laughter as she answered. "Around four hundred trillion credits."

"My, my," Donut said, shaking her head sadly. "They really don't know us very well, do they?" The audience hooted and cheered.

Odette gave it a moment for the cheering to die down. "They definitely do not. Of course, that wasn't even close to the biggest stick you stuck in Borant's spokes. There was a storyline to this level and you blew it up.

"The basic idea was that the Loktar clan had conquered their homeworld and was spreading out through the dimensions, seeking new challenges and new conquests. The portal they created brought them to the Tangle but it scattered them. They were, supposedly, still coming through as the level opened.

"There were ghoul generators around the level, constantly printing out new ghouls and pushing them through a portal into one of the trainyards, simulating a new Loktar tribesman arriving from their old world." As she spoke, twelve symmetrically-placed areas at the bottom of the Tangle pulsed green to show the trainyards. "Now, it wasn't just the tribesmen who were split up, it was also the leadership. The chief of the tribe, Kralak the Battler, went to station D, here. His daughter, Yulash the Binder, was the tribe's chief shaman. She went to station F, here, and the other stations got various champions and junior shaman. The storyline said that the lizardfolk and ghouls were all Kralak's children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on. He was able to see through their eyes and command them at a distance, and any time he saw one of them die he would become more powerful. Once enough of his tribe arrived 'from the homeworld' he would have sent scouts up the train lines, then followed up with overwhelming force wherever they encountered resistance, meaning either mobs or crawlers. That was supposed to happen on day six."

Donut started laughing. "And on day four we wiped him out like the wimpy little puppy he was. Pow!" She mimed swiping at something with one paw. The audience cheered and whistled.

Odette nodded. "And on day four you wiped him out, before he got to power up very much at all and before he released the Ghoulmageddon. Not only that, but the AI squashed most of the ghouls in station D after you killed him, so the pressure on all of these lines"—a few dozen train lines pulsed green—"was greatly reduced from what it was supposed to be.

"With Kralak dead the ghouls were disorganized. On day five Yulash started sending her contingent up the lines to make forward bases. They would have gone to these stairwells"—more green pulses—"and, under the influence of her All For One buff, they would have combined into Province bosses, where they would have served as bases of operation for the Ghoulmaggedon. That was scheduled to happen on day eight."

"They were supposed to get there before we did," Carl said, smiling. "We would have found Province bosses waiting for us and wouldn't have been able to reach the stairs. Unfortunately for them, everyone had already forted up before the ghouls started arriving."

"Exactly!" Odette said, clapping her hands in delight. "The fish did everything they could to turn up the heat, including activating more ghoul generators, tuning them to output stronger types, and removing the hostility between the ghouls and the other mobs, but there was a limited number of approaches and the tunnels weren't big enough for the Province bosses to form. They needed the space of the station. The ghouls outnumbered you, but without their major buffs you were able to hold."

"Odette," Albert said, his voice growing extra British and extra posh. "If you will permit me to indulge in a bit of trivia, I should note that one of the core truisms taught at the Skull Empire's Advanced Tactical School is that disciplined, well-coordinated soldiers are never outnumbered by brainless savages." *Nor by their ridiculous plotlines.*

The audience laughed and clapped at the first part. I struggled not to visibly choke when I read the second part.

"Honestly, it's a shame," Donut said. "Imagine how much experience we would have gotten for killing those Province bosses!"

The laughter and clapping became thunderous.

"Imagine indeed! Okay, folks, we'll be taking a few questions from the audience now. Trip your panels to get in line."

A lizard person appeared in front of us. "Question for Albert," it said. "How do you stand being partnered with such a pussy?"

"How do you stand being such an idiot?" Albert replied.

The audience laughed. The lizard person glared at him and vanished.

They were immediately replaced by a vague, pixelated blur. "This is a question for Donut," she said, her voice distorted but still clearly female. "You're so brave and outgoing. Do you have any advice on how to be more like you?"

"Oh, sweetie. You just need to understand how wonderful you are. Have respect for yourself and other people will too. Good luck, okay?"

"Okay. Thank you."

An uphetchug replaced the blurred-out girl. "Hey, Carl. What would be the best thing you could get in a fan box?"

"Uh...armor, maybe? As long as it doesn't cover my crotch, because that would turn my boxers off. Oh, and not too heavy."

"Cool." The uphetchug flashed us a two-handed, one-stingered thumbs up and then vanished.

A human boy, perhaps fifteen, appeared in front of me. "Hey, Katia. Love the new tits. When you bang, do you ever use your shapeshifting to be a better lay?"

My Birgit shell trembled around me; she was a warrior and knew how to handle combat, but sexual harassment from a teenager left both of us floundering. I swallowed hard and forced my chin up.

"Go fuck yourself, kid," Carl said before I could answer.

"And that's our time!" Odette said. "Thank you, Royal Court. It is, as always, a pleasure to have you on." She stared straight ahead for a moment, presumably looking at the camera, and then relaxed. Albert vanished from his chair.

{Albert?} I subvocalized. A shiver went up my spine when there was no response.

"Great show, team," Odette said, looking at the ceiling. "Lexis, be a dear and give us the room. And keep an eye out to make sure we're private, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am," Lexis said from the door. She had come in without me hearing her, which made me nervous. She nodded to us and then backed out of the room and closed the door.

Odette lifted the bug-skull mask off her head and set it aside, revealing her actual face: Human, dark-skinned, with short hair that had been a rich brown before it greyed into more salt than pepper. The hair was flat from the mask and a little sweaty; she scrubbed her fingers through it, scratching with a relieved sigh. I studied her while she was distracted; all the recent practice I'd had at sculpting my human body made it immediately clear that she was not from Earth. Her eyes were too wide, her chin too sharp.

She backed away from the desk, tearing her way free of the revolting breasts with a disturbing schlorp! and leaving her in a cream-white shirt that set off the heart-shaped red pendant on her necklace.

"Uhh..." I said, my eyes going wide.

"Just a sec," Odette said, not looking at me. She braced her arms against her crab body's hips and tore herself free. The crab instantly dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

At some point, Odette had been cut in half at the stomach. The line was too clean to be anything other than a cut; a birth defect would have had at least some small nubs on the bottom. I couldn't imagine how anyone could have survived such a wound. Her intestines would have been cut. Major arteries would have been severed, making her bleed out in seconds.

No, wait. Healing potions would seal wounds and refill lost blood but not replace missing body parts, as I knew all too well. She must have been a crawler who killed whatever cut her, then downed a healing potion before she bled out. How had she survived after that?

A flat disk glided out from under the desk and hovered in front of her. She hoisted herself onto it with a grunt and zipped over to us.

"Great show to you lot as well," she said, directing a nod in our collective direction. "Katia, you've certainly improved since your last appearance."

"You said I needed to be zippier," I replied. I was unsettled, off-balanced by Odette's reveal of her true appearance. Birgit was fading away, leaving Katia to manage on her own.

"I did, and you were. That line about 'trapped in here with me'? Gold. Did you have that prepared?"

"Yes. It seemed like the sort of thing you wanted."

"It was. Keep some boundaries on the zippiness, eh? The fact that you forced us to host Albert means I'm going to have legal breathing down my neck and I might end up with the Skull Empire counterintelligence department investigating me."

I shook my head. "You won't. Princess Formidable wanted Albert's capabilities broadcast."

Odette raised an eyebrow. "Really? Interesting."

"Any advice for us?" Carl asked, sounding impatient.

"The preview for the next level hasn't dropped yet so I don't know anything specific. This level was amazing for you guys; you've got so much buzz that bidding for your fifth-floor benefactor contracts is through the roof. The prices are so high that I'll be surprised if whatever loot you get doesn't have branding on it. If it does, make sure you play it up, subtly. Whatever you do, keep it on your person, not in your inventory. In that same vein, Katia has a Gold fan box being bid up right now and regardless of what's in it she needs to make a point of being appreciative and using it as soon as possible. It's okay if you slack off after a few days, but play it up in the beginning.

"Carl, you need to use your catchphrase more often. Not too often—once every couple of days. Katia...keep doing what you're doing. It's working. Maybe even it out a bit. You're confident and outgoing one minute and then you hunch up and retreat. Most viewers aren't watching in real time so it won't be as obvious to the average person as it is to my research staff, but anyone who sees it is going to be confused. They might think you're just...what was the phrase? 'Thirsty for the camera'? Putting on a show, pretending to be someone else. It can turn people off."

My stomach clenched and my shoulders instinctively hunched. That was exactly what I was doing: Putting on a show and pretending to be someone else.

I forced myself to straighten up, lift my chin, and look confident.

"After what you did on the fourth floor the mudskippers are going to be gunning for you, so you should expect the challenge in your local area to be ramped up. The AI likes Carl and it's pissed off at Borant after they got lawyers involved, so that will help."

'After they got lawyers involved.' What a tidy way to describe the end of the third floor. The foot-fetishistic AI might like Carl's always-bare feet but I sure felt like the AI had been going out of its way to kill us, the massive-explosion quest on the third floor being a prime example. Granted, that would have gotten each of us a Celestial box.

Although, actually, the personal spaces we'd gotten were probably better than a Celestial box. It was nearly certain that a lot of the crawlers who had fought beside us at station 72 were alive because of the buffs from our personal space. We probably couldn't have shared a Celestial box as easily.

"Speaking of Borant, I saw how they nerfed your communications," Odette said, unaware of my mental meandering. "They definitely don't want you doing that global communications thing next level, so expect them to make it difficult. If you can manage it, do. The audience loved the way you broke this level and if you do it twice in a row I expect that you'll get a flood of fan boxes. I saw some of the conversations you were having over the last couple days in the fort, especially how you coordinated who everyone had in their contact list. Keep thinking on those lines and look for more ways to make it work."

Behind me, I heard the door open. "Ma'am?" Lexis said from that direction. "We've got AI sniffing around the firewalls."

Odette nodded. "Right, time to get you guys out of here. Good luck, stay alive."

"Because our interviews earn you a ton of advertising money?" Carl asked sardonically.

"Because your interviews earn me a ton of advertising money."