<div class="floatright">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/0/07/Dark_Sakura.jpg)</div><strong>Lucy F.</strong><br/><hr/>As expected, the password was accepted, and soon enough the doors slid open, admitting Lucy and her charge into the docking bay hangar that lay beyond.  They were met outside the entry hatch to the ship itself and escorted inside, and from there into a meeting room of sorts that was located aboard the ship.  Brief introductions were made, but since the other members of the team had apparently been at least somewhat briefed on her before her arrival, it was a little one-sided, consisting mostly of introducing everyone else to her.<br/><br/>Somewhat disappointingly, she also got to watch as they took Vercile off her hands, leading her off to some other, presumably secret, location to have a proper assessment made of her skills and talents and her suitability for use as a Firewall sentinel.  Lucy was definitely sad to see her go, and not just because she was losing what had swiftly become her favorite toy.  She had developed something of a genuine liking for the other woman, for her adorable combination of steadfast resolve and helpless obedience, if nothing else.  Still, she offered no complaints as one of the sentinels present led the young woman away, and while listening to Sentinel Tremor, who seemed to be acting as the group's leader at the moment, she took her time to look over her new companions and size them up a little.<br/><br/>Tremor almost looked like some sort of old-Earth anime character come to life, with the cosmetic alterations she had had done to her morph, but the enlarged head that was a part of that very clearly suggested that she was wearing a Menton.  The other girl, Rayearth, was in a Ghost, and of course Dio was clearly an Octomorph.  The final member of the team, Stoker, was a bit harder to pin down.  It was a morph that looked somewhat similar to a few male Sylph models she had seen, but since she herself was in a Sylph, she could tell that this wasn't one.  The morph had body fat in places that Sylphs had been genefixed to avoid, for one thing.  She had heard that there was a Sylph look-a-like morph that was commonly used in the Titanian Commonwealth, and if that was the case, then the extra fat would certainly work as an extra insulating layer against the cold climate of the planet where that particular nation was located...<br/><br/>Of course, she was only taking note of these things on more of a subconscious level, a result of the same highly-trained reflexes that also had her making threat assessments and plotting out escape routes from every room she walked into.  Consciously, she was paying attention to every word Tremor said, and thinking over the implications.<br/><br/>Officially, the only sort of hierarchy that an organization like Firewall had was the dividing line between those who worked for it part-time, and those who devoted their entire lives to it.  Sentinels such as herself were the subordinates in this organization, working part-time, but were given a great deal of leeway in how they chose to conduct their business because they were the ones who actually had their boots on the ground in most of the situations that they were sent into.  They were trusted, and given the freedom to make important judgement calls because there was usually not enough time when a disaster was developing to have the senior members, the Proxies, go over all the available data and come to an informed decision.  The Proxies, instead, devoted themselves almost entirely to operating in the background, making risk assessments on potential X-threat situations, covering the tracks of their Sentinel agents through manipulation of both the Mesh and the Media, and otherwise engaging in various forms of important analysis, assessment, and bureaucracy to keep the organization running.<br/><br/>That was how the organization was set up officially, with a deliberate emphasis on remaining decentralized in order to be much more difficult to subvert or destroy, but unofficially, there was a sort of ranking within each of the two layers, with different groups getting assigned to different tasks based on their overall level of skill and influence.  From the sounds of things, Lucy herself had apparently proven herself skilled enough to earn a sort of unofficial promotion, which was both good because it meant that her talents were being recognized and bad because it meant that she was going to be taking on more dangerous tasks.<br/><br/>And then there were the problems brought up by the fact that she had been working mostly as a solo agent for quite a while, up to this point...<br/><br/>"Questions?  Hmmm..."  When that question was put to her, the woman took a few seconds to think out her answer.  "Well, to start with, there is the fact that I'm something of a minor celebrity here in the inner system.  Do we have a cover set up for why I would suddenly start traveling around on a ship like this one?  Or with the other members of my cell, for that matter?  Also, most of the other servers I've worked with have liked to keep things a little more compartmentalized.  Is being aboard the same ship as two other cells going to cause any sort of security risk, or...?"<br/><br/>She let that last question trail off, but before Tremor could begin answering them, she was speaking again.<br/><br/>"Actually, let's leave those for the second, third and fourth questions.  We'll start off with the most important one: Is everyone in this room aware than I'm an async?  And if you're just learning about it now, is it going to be a problem?"<br/><br/>Asyncs.  People who had been infected with the Exsurgent Virus, but rather than being transformed into any number of horrible monsters or sociopathic madmen, they had been infected with a 'benign' strain that burned itself out before it could do more than make some simple changes to the brain.  There was debate within Firewall about whether or not these infectees were safe to use as agents, especially since they tended to be a bit psychologically unstable, but the changes to their brains did give them extraordinary psychic powers that had proved useful enough in the field that the risks were usually deemed acceptable, at least for now.  Lucy herself wouldn't be here with her new server if she hadn't proven herself to be reliable already, but she did know that asyncs still weren't trusted by certain parts of Firewall, and if her new teammates hadn't already been briefed on her 'gift', then it was better to get it out in the open now, rather than risk causing problems later by trying to keep it secret.<br/><br/>As such, she kept a close watch on the reactions of her new teammates while she revealed her little secret to them.