"You'll be back before three," Ms. Whittaker said, which was a station, not a question.
"I will," Penny said, giving her mom a kiss as they pulled up to the menacing white front doors. "Don't worry about it. It's Kenji! Kenji is a good kid." For some reason, Penny's mom was really hung up on the phrase 'good kid', which meant that Penny could definitely score brownie points by parroting it back to her. She kind of liked the cadence of it too. Good kid.

Kenji wasn't a 'good kid' by any stretch of the imagination, but he was rich and his parents kept him in line, and he had that smile that people who are barely being constrained by expectation have, the charismatic one that makes one believe that they really are doing their best, even though they play video games eight hours a day when they aren't failing classes they're being tutored on extensively.

Penny rang the doorbell. The help let her in. Aside from the staff they had on hand at all time, the Raiden family had a lot of people around who weren't part of the Raiden family, such as investors, consultants, and other people Penny and Kenji had taken to calling the PIS, which stood for People In Suits. Penny noticed the family was really taking the PIS today, and Kenji's older brother, Takeo, was among them. He leered at Penny, which was Takeo's way of saying welcome to my house, but don't push it.

Penny waved at him as she ran up the stairs. The whole house was furnished like no one lived there, which meant that it was nice, although the bannisters seemed to glower at Penny with light they'd nicked from the chandeliers up above. Said chandeliers might fall on Penny and crush her at any moment, which was why Penny moved a little more quickly while she was under them. She felt that if she died beneath them, the Raiden family might sue hers for getting her blood all over their expensive diamond chandeliers.

Up on the third floor of the house, overlooking the greens, was a door that deserved a Keep Out sign and had never received one, as it wouldn't be in keeping with the decor. Nonetheless, the humming from inside warned anyone passing by of the room's true sinister nature. Penny rapped on it nine times in quick motions she and Kenji had made up to imitate the Konami code.

"Oh, shoot!" Kenji almost opened the door on her face. He still had his headphones anchored around the neck, where they clung to him like a koala hanging onto its mother. The room behind him smelled violently of 'gamer grub', that is, Cheetos and Mountain Dew, as well as freshly laundered sheets. It was an odd juxtaposition, but Penny could respect that. "P-squared! What's the status?"

"First client. Lemme in," Penny said, pushing past him.

"I'm offended," Kenji said, feigning an expression of pure horror, and then pushed past her again, equally brusquely. He proceeded to shut off his numerous screens one at a time. He currently had several streams going at the same time he was playing video games-- Kenji had a habit of multitasking like a woman with two-year-old septuplets. It would have been an incredibly valuable skill if he used it for anything besides his Twitch stream. "I've been your client for years, and now that you have an actual writer on your payroll, I drop off the list."

"What? Kenji, you're not really a client. You don't even pay me! You just... endanger my life and make me sign stupid contracts," Penny said. "You know, if I die in the book--"

"If you die in the book, you die in real life," Kenji said, in the same drawn-out tone the two of them had used to prod fun at her predicament since they were kids. "So why do you do it?"

"Tradition," said Penny. "Okay, not tradition. It's cool, but also, books written with muse assistance are incredibly valuable. We're supposed to bring inspiration to the world or something like that. Some of the greatest works in the canon, the world over... all of them were written, drawn, or otherwise created with assistance from muses. They've shaped the course of history."

"I've gotten that speech," noted Kenji. "Nice to hear your grandmother's still indoctrinating you into the whole 'gift from the heavens' thing. Still, it's a wonder that someone in the middle of the city can afford you."

"She's paying me eighty dollars," Penny boasted.

"You know most people will literally pay thousands of dollars for a brush with a muse, right?" asked Kenji. "Alric's your age, and he's already making seven digits annually."

"Okay, but that's Alric," Penny argued.

"You were the one who told me Alric was a hack." Kenji swivelled around in his chair. Kenji owned no less than five black and red gamer chairs. He usually slept on them rather than in his bed.

"Just because he's a hack doesn't mean he's bad at his job!" Penny argued.

"Not to argue with the writing muse, but words have meanings, Penny." Kenji patted her back.

Penny brushed him off. "Shut up. One, you know Alric is the worst on principle, and two, it's eighty dollars more than you're making, so you can just stop talking now."

"Actually, it's thirty-seven dollars and eight cents less than I'm making streaming video games," Kenji said. He gave her a quick wink. "So much for being an inferior art form incapable of merit, huh?"
"If it was art, there would be a muse. Is there a gaming muse?"

"There is not a gaming muse," Kenji said, in a drawling, practiced tone. He swung his chair around again, which was beginning to make Penny dizzy. "Anyways, I don't know why you're over here if you have a job now. I'm sure whatever your new client's come up with has to be a thousand times better."

"Oh, it was a thousand times better! It's so weird to be in a world where someone puts in considerable effort!" Penny said, and noting the glare this elicited from Kenji, she added, "But you know you'll always be my best friend."

Kenji swung past her in his gamer chair, which was spinning like a top right up until the point where he neatly stopped it against her chair, grinning smugly. "You don't have many options, P-squared."

Penny pushed him out of his gaming chair and onto the floor.

Kenji dragged himself up with a faked groan, as if he were in considerable pain. "Alright, I think I get the message. So, are you going to tell me about the client, or what?"

Penny started from the beginning. The story was getting longer with each telling, but it was hard to leave out any details when everything felt so vivid and oh so important. She could feel it now-- it was hard to imagine she'd be waiting another three days before she was on her next assignment. Kenji was always good about not interrupting, which they called 'suppressing his snark meter'. His snark was through the floor right now. Penny could see the gears turning inside his head.

When she finished, Kenji looked more thoughtful than impressed. He had his hands steepled together, and when he brought them apart, he said, "We've never done any training for character creation, have we? Or bleed. There's nothing to bleed into in most of the environments I've been testing you with, so it makes sense that it never would have come up, but now that feels like a serious oversight."

"Oh, yeah, um..." Penny paused. She looked down at her feet. "That's really what you got out of it?"
"Congratulations?" said Kenji, hesitantly. "No, but seriously, I would love to work on bleed with you. What if I made some sort of deliberately ambiguous landscape which you would then start filling in naturally, and then you'd have to figure out how to restrain your bleed that way? Or maybe we should work on capacity? Can you increase capacity by just adding more canisters, or what?"

"Yeah, I can add more canisters, but then it's more dilute. The universe won't let me cheat," Penny said.

"Okay, so that's out. Are we sure capacity is just raw practice? Do you get more out of training sessions where you scrape the bottom of the barrel? I don't want to push you to capacity every time, because that's dangerous, but you can always give me the three capital 'P's and I'll pull you out. Wait, how much does that take? How close would we be cutting it?"

Penny abhorred directly altering text. It was, as Guinevere would say, unprofessional at the best of times and silly at the worst. "I don't get any of this stuff any more than you do," Penny admitted. "I think it would be nice to get some work done with bleed, because I'm worried about my longevity in the setting, and I almost got killed last time."

Kenji's eyes lit up.

"We are not doing offensive missions again! My job isn't to go in there and solve the plot."
"You have the singular ability to enter fictional worlds and you won't even wield a laser sword. For such a cool person, you're about as dull as a brick. You know that?" Kenji shook his head, which caused his headphones to fall to the floor.

Penny handed him the headphones back. "I respect the integrity of the setting," she said. "You wouldn't understand, because you're a civilian."

Kenji rolled his eyes. "I can draw you up something for bleed. It should take me a few days, 'cause the streaming business is relentless, but when I'm done, I'll call you-- I'll call your home phone. Are you guys, you know, the legendary writing muse family, too broke to get you a cell phone, or is it a religious thing?"
"I don't want to get a cell phone," Penny said. "Guinevere always says--"

"So it's religious," Kenji said. "Got it. Don't hit your head on the door on the way out, P-squared."

Penny, as always, hit the door frame as hard as she could with her hand on the way out.