It all started when…

Wow, you know what? This is good stuff. Really good stuff. Is it different to Els’s normal stuff? No? Well, it feels it. It feels… hmm? What?

Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that. What could anyone possibly do with that information? You’ve got to realise, I never set out to join the Legion. But when someone offers to pay you that much money… well, there isn’t much you wouldn’t do for unimaginable riches, right? Yeah, you two know what I mean; you’re dealers, after all. Plenty of money in that, and I suspect it’s not exactly fulfilling, as a career, is it?

No answer. Fair enough. I…

Gods, this is good stuff. Very good stuff. I—

Alright, alright! How I became an officer. I suppose I can tell you that.

Lew Sawyer had always lived alone.

It had stemmed from his schooldays, really. He’d never been the strongest, the tallest, or the best-looking kid. He’d told himself he’d been the smartest, but that was probably a lie, too, he would later realise. He’d tried working out—even got himself a Common grade Vigour skill—but it just wasn’t enough. All he wanted was a partner, someone to spend his life with, but all the prettiest girls went after all the prettiest guys.

That didn’t change after school was over, not like he’d been told it would. Lydia, the woman he’d maintained a friendship with and always thought he might end up with, married a man from Harbourage and disappeared from his life forever. He was left alone, with but a few friends from his schooldays left, but even then he only saw them sporadically.

Lew retreated into himself, focusing on his work, and was rewarded, eventually, by a promotion. His accounting firm made him a team leader, and Lew found that he learned to enjoy holding power over people. His first taste of management ended poorly, but that didn’t stop him; he’d got a taste for it, now.

He soon landed a role at Haven’s largest accounting firm, based on the border between the Dripcanal and the Commercial District, and Lew was handed a team of over a dozen to manage. This position, however, he decided he would hang on to. He would continue to play his vicious games with his employees, of course—otherwise what was the point?—but he would schmooze those he reported into to get them on his side.

His Magnetism skill was the same as it had been at school—that is to say, non-existent—but that wouldn’t stop him. He was on good money, now—money enough to buy a vial or two of this boono that he’d heard so much about. He worked late, one night, making sure that he was seen by his boss, and then took the tram a few stops north, alighting as close to the Great Allotments as the tram lines made possible. From here he travelled north by foot, to visit a woman named Els who an old schoolfriend—or, rather, a friend of a friend of an old schoolfriend—had put him in touch with.

He held his tongue as he travelled down the Dirt Highway, keenly aware of the eyes of its residents landing upon him and his comparatively fine suit, and very conscious that his now Uncommon grade Vigour would do little to fight most of them off. He pulled his gold pocketwatch from its usual position and pushed it out of sight; perhaps this would be the clincher in terms of whether a potential assailant thought him worth the trouble.

Lew made it to his destination without issue, thankfully, and the woman on the cabbage farm seemed very keen to help him with his purchase—even going so far as to throw in a few more Charm vials free of charge.

The moment Lew took his first sip, his whole world changed. People responded to him in ways they hadn’t responded before. No more was he “strange” or “creepy” but instead most everything he said seemed to result in a smile. People at work—both more senior and more junior—wanted to speak with him, to ask him about work or even just about his day. In the local tea room, a pretty girl behind the counter smiled at him, and he had the courage, for the first time in his life, to ask her out on a date.

But then the effects of the boono faded. In a near-instant, people switched from responding positively to him back to the way they’d looked at him before. Worse, even. The contempt and disgust was visible, now, on their faces. So Lew turned back to the vials, and swallowed another. And another. And soon he found his supply completely dwindling, even with the extras that Els in the Great Allotments had been so kind to throw in.

It was more than he’d intended to spend—at least so soon—but he returned to the cabbage farm not three days later. He bought more, and with the boono now flooding again through his veins, people around him blessed him with smiles once more. The date went well. So well, in fact, that Lew had cause to regret not cleaning his apartment—though the young woman didn’t seem to mind. She asked to see Lew again, even, but Lew was now all too keenly aware of the power of Charm.

Now, the world was his oyster. He could do better that this woman, whose beauty had seemed to fade before his eyes. He could load himself full of Charm, and near enough take his pick. In a post-boono world, Lew Sawyer was a whole new man.

He continued much the same for a while, loading himself with boono and trying his luck with any woman who caught his eyes. His odds of securing a date, he soon found, was about one in four. But even if the majority still spurned his advances, this remained a significantly higher rate of success than he’d achieved previously—which was more like zero in four.

Women came, and women went, and few did he meet up with again. He was happy; happier than he’d been ever before.

At least, until he met Ros Kestle.

She was not the most beautiful of the women he’d pursued, though for him that was part of the appeal—with her sort, his advances tended to yield a positive outcome a higher proportion of the time. On this particular occasion, however, the winds of destiny worked against him, and the women responded not with a smile, but a narrowing of her eyes.

Lew hadn’t known he was talking to an officer of the Legion, of course; he wouldn’t have made this attempt if he had. Even members of the prime minister’s personal police force had off-hours, and during these periods they rarely wore that telltale black-grey uniform. If she’d worn that, Lew would have avoided her like a plague, and perhaps even fled the entire establishment.

As Lew walked away, dejected, he caught site of the women’s narrowed eyes looking him up and down. Such attention he wasn’t used to—Charm was all well and good but it didn’t exactly make physical changes—and so the sight of it made him hesitate. ‘Is there… Do you need anything?’ he asked.

‘You got Magnetism, yeah?’ the woman who’d introduced herself as Ros Kestle, officer of Legion, responded.

‘I…’ Lew hesitated on the answer; the officer had made an assumption that meant he would either have to correct her, or lie through his teeth.

‘What level is it?’

Lew gulped, checking his Skill List to make sure he wasn’t yet in withdrawal—he’d need the Charm to get away with what he was about to say. ‘Near enough to Legendary,’ he lied. Perhaps the mention of such ability would change the woman’s mind about him; he’d never been with an officer before.

The officer nodded. ‘Good. Good.’ She stared at him, her eyes piercing into his as though she was looking for something in them. ‘You free now? I—’

‘I’m free,’ Lew blubbed, making assumptions as to what the woman wanted from him.

Ros Kestle’s eyes narrowed again, an ounce of hesitation apparently staying her tongue for a moment. ‘I… We, I guess I should say, reckon we need someone like you.’

‘We? The…’

‘Come with me to the Tower,’ the woman said in answer. ‘Come meet my boss. I think he’d be interested to meet you.’

Though Lew’s initial reaction to learning that this woman was an officer of Legion had been to run, he felt a strange compulsion to do as Ros was asking. As though she’d passed some kind of skill check, the universe inflicting its will upon him.

And so he did. Gone were the plans of spending this evening in the company of a woman, and instead… well, now he was spending it in the company of a woman with entirely different expectations. Ros Kestle ushered him into a brass elevator at the rear of the Tower’s great atrium, and with a yank of a lever to its most extreme position, the mechanical platform ushered them up to the building’s very top floor.

The government was not in session—they so rarely were, by this point—and so Ros could lead Lew at a rapid pace across the debating parlour, towards one last flight of stairs at the rear of the building.

‘The prime minister…’ Lew started.

‘...is out with some new bird,’ Ros replied. ‘It ain’t him you’re seeing.’

‘Then who—’

As if in answer, a man appeared at the top of the flight of stairs. He wasn’t the tallest man that Lew had ever seen, nor the most muscular, but he carried himself with an air of command unlike any Lew had ever before witnessed. Perhaps the three filled holsters—one on each sip of his hip, and another hanging from his right shoulder—went some way to explaining it.

‘Kitty caught a mouse?’ the stranger asked Ros.

‘Hunt’s replacement,’ she said. ‘If you think he’s up to it.’

Only then did the man turn to look at Lew properly, his eyes scanning him from head to toe. ‘Him? The scrawny little fucker?’

‘Got more Magnetism than he knows what to do with,’ Ros said. ‘Seen him pick up all kinda skirt down at the Diamond Tearoom.’

‘He have a go at you, did he?’ the other officer asked. The silence that came over the three of them seemed answer enough. The man turned back to Lew. ‘Alright. Come with me. Name’s Josiah. Got a few questions for you—you answer them, then you get yourself a nice cushy job with a nice cushy paycheque to match.’

Josiah led Lew and Ros into a room at the back of the top floor, past a great study line with mahogany panelling and a grand desk to match. Josiah held out a small chair for Lew to sit on, and then the other two officers of Legion didn’t themselves sit, instead looming over him.

‘Here’s the deal,’ Josiah said. ‘We lost one of our team recently. Hunt. A nice bloke. Real nice. But that’s what Magnetism does, isn’t it? Point is, we had a team with nice rounded abilities. And then he goes and disappears, and suddenly we have a big Magnetism-sized hole in our squad. One that needs filling, preferably from someone who won’t go off on a mission with Vince and never come back.’

‘All you gotta do,’ Ros said. ‘Is answer some questions.’

‘I have Magnetism!’ Lew squeaked, finding his voice all of a sudden.

‘I know. I can vouch for that. These questions aren’t about your ability so much as your, like, loyalties.’

‘Loyalties? I—’

Josiah stepped forward, standing so close to Lew now that his crotch was almost in the boono-fuelled accountant’s face. ‘You’re past the looking glass, now. You get found out as being a spy at this point, and it isn’t gonna end well for you.’

‘Yeah,’ Ros added. ‘We got a mate named Warren who’d love to get his teeth into you. And I ain’t know that isn’t him being literal.’

‘So I’ll say this once, and only once,’ Josiah continued. ‘Who are you loyal to?’

In the hours that followed, across the brutal interrogation that Lew seemed to pass by the skin of his teeth, Josiah did not, in the end, only ask it once.