I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi or Steve Jackson Games.

Jason Evans braced himself as he knocked on the door to Lieutenant Blake's apartment, preparing for at best suspicion, at worst outright hostility. He just hoped that he'd be able to keep the suspicion from growing worse by hiding how hasty and slapdash the prepared background was. he really would have liked more time to get ready for this meeting, but between the General's insistence on getting it done by the evening rather than the next morning and the Company-wide argument over jurisdiction, he'd been scrambling.

Well, to be fair it wasn't quite a Company-wide argument—all the grunts want is Toshiko's help blowing things up, and since her abilities seem to be innate the techies won't be interested until the geeks can turn those abilities into some toys they can play with. But the geeks and the spook! At least when the shouting ended the others had recognized that Security, as the most well-rounded of the departments (a quality not usually appreciated by the others, since it existed due to Security's remit of keeping the other departments' 'fun' from getting them all killed or blowing the conspiracy wide open), was the best to make 'first contact' here—and that perhaps it would be a good idea to recruit or develop some real diplomats. As a secret organization with some half-decent memory suppressants they hadn't really needed any until recently.

Then the door opened to reveal Lieutenant Blake, eyebrow rising at the clear civilian in the middle of the base. "Yes, can I help you?"

Evans held out a hand. "Jared Davidson, I'm here about the issues you talked to General Layton about, about your wife."

Blake tensed. "Oh, that was quick, I didn't expect you to visit for a few days." He shook the offered hand and stepped back to let Evans in (and perhaps just coincidentally to get out of the line of sight of anyone that might be hiding nearby), and Evans stepped into the apartment.

Glancing around the apartment, Evans saw Toshiko appear in the doorway to the kitchen and bowed. "Toshiko Tatsuno, I'm Jared Davidson. I've been sent to work out the details of your background."

Toshiko returned the bow, and Blake waved toward the couch across from the TV. "Have a seat. Toshiko, could you fetch another chair?"

The redhead disappeared back into the kitchen, and Evans sat and laid the folder he'd brought on the coffee table between the couch and TV while Blake sat in the recliner positioned at an angle. A moment later Toshiko reappeared, took in the scene with a glance, and positioned her own chair where she'd be out of Evans' immediate reach and facing both the window and front door. Evans approved, not that he let them see that he'd noticed. (Her, rather, as a fighter pilot Blake's situational awareness was trained to a different situation.)

"So," Evans started as Toshiko took her seat, "we were able to take care of the earliest foundation." He opened the folder to reveal a birth certificate and some print-outs of newspaper articles. "Toshiko, you were born to Rayner Lowe from Elk City, Idaho—there was a fire there that gutted much of the downtown a decade back, including the local newspaper office, but not before their records were uploaded to the Cloud. He was in the Air Force assigned to this base, maintaining the fighter jets. Your mother is Ayaka Hideyoshi, a girl he met while on vacation in Tokyo. You were born seven months after they married. Your disappearance here while your mother was out shopping was reported in the Elk City newspaper, but not here in Japan. Your parents died in a plane crash on a trip back home a year later. They actually existed, by the way, and married here. The plane crash was when they were returning from a vacation to introduce her to his parents. His parents died a few years ago in a car crash; her parents disowned her when she married a gaijin."

He pushed the open folder across to the pair and, as Blake picked up the newspaper articles and started thumbing through them, continued, "Toshiko, that makes you a U.S. citizen, while giving a reason why you've never been out of Japan and don't know anything about your family in the U.S. Now we need to fill in the details of what you've been doing since you were kidnapped as a baby."

"Oh, that's easy, I was kidnapped by a wandering martial artist that wanted an heir and didn't bother to check if the baby he was stealing was a boy, and decided to keep me when he found out his mistake. We spent the next almost two decades wandering all over Japan and China visiting a bunch of dojos and monasteries with me learning their Arts while disguised as a boy."

Evans stared for a moment, then cleared his throat. "Ah ... we do want it to be at least somewhat believable." Giving up on any possibility of delicacy, he waved at Toshiko's chest. "Besides, there's no way you'd be hiding those."

Blake choked as Toshiko began to laugh, laughter that to Evans' experienced ear definitely had a bitter edge. At his questioning look Toshiko got herself under control. "Yeah, that was pretty much the story of my life till about two years ago—though I really was a guy for all'a that, before my stupid father got us both cursed." She reached up to heft her breasts. "I got these by taking a swim in a pool at a place in China called Jusenkyo a couple years ago, but I was still a guy most'a the time for a year after that, before my curse got locked." Evans tried to hide his doubts behind a carefully blank expression, but apparently that wasn't enough ... at least, this time Toshiko's laughter lacked the previous bitter edge. "What, you're a super-secret group fighting the Things that Go Bump in the Night and you don't believe in magic?"

"We ... mostly deal with aliens, psionicists, and monsters that have a natural if alien heritage," Evans replied carefully. "We have had a few ... encounters ... that we couldn't explain, but put it down to variations of psionics that we can't replicate yet. Was 'magic' how you brought down a mountainside? Can you demonstrate it?"

"No, that wasn't magic ... well, it was kinda magic. I can do this—" She lifted a hand, and for a moment a ball of shining blue light appeared above her palm, growing to the size of a baseball. "—but it isn't magic, it's ki. And on my best day I couldn't bring down a mountain. For that matter neither could Herb, as ridiculous as his ki reserves were. But the kettle he accidentally blew up was magic, and it was powerful enough ta do that, not that it was supposed to. It just couldn't handle Herb's ki blast and ... overloaded, I guess. Nearly killed me while it was at it."

From how tight the expression on her face had gotten Evans suspected that she wished, at least a little, that it had killed her, and he hastily changed the subject. "Well, even if someone actually carted you around for years like that, the story needs to be believable."

Toshiko shrugged. "Why wouldn't it be believable? I've actually been to all those places, can tell ya who else was there, what they look like, what styles I learned. We don't need ta invent anything."

"That's actually a fair point," Blake added. He glanced at his wife out of the corner of his eye, and Evans suspected that he'd caught her dark thoughts as well. "Was it Lincoln that said that no one has a good enough memory to be a really good liar? This way she can answer any questions. Toshiko, do you think if we contact any of the people at some of those dojos and monasteries and let them know what's going on they'll play along if anyone comes asking?"

Frowning thoughtfully, Toshiko started counting off on her fingers. "Let's see ... Hiro Yuuta at Kawasaki, Yunokawa Minoru at Hedono ... Tanaka-sensei is probably dead by now, he was dying when me and ... when Genma and me visited, but his heir should play along. They all said I could drop by again, so long as Genma wasn't with me. For the rest ..." She shrugged. "We can just say I was dyeing my hair and pretending ta be a boy with a fake name a' Saotome Ranma—Ranma Saotome ta you guys, I guess—kept that up until I ballooned up top a couple years ago—" She hefted her breasts again. "—how could any of 'em say different?"

As Blake winced Evans coughed into his fist—he couldn't tell if she was doing that deliberately to get a rise out of him, or just that oblivious to female modesty. Certainly she didn't hesitate or have so much as a hint of a blush. "Um, yes, I like how you think. So why don't you make a list of all the places in Japan you've been to that you can remember—nobody's going to be able to check anywhere you might have gone in China, I have no idea how Genma managed to pull that off what with how angry China's been with us since the Hong Kong Exodus—which ones will play along and which won't, which ones you'll need to speak to personally to get their cooperation and which we can contact instead—"

Toshiko broke in. "I'll need ta talk ta all'a them, but there's a problem. Genma knows about 'em too, and Shwei has people watchin' 'em. When I went to Nakadan-sensei for help when it started gettin' cold his men showed up, and we ended up trashin' his home when I escaped."

"Did they?" Evans asked, eyebrow rising. "How do you know they worked for this Shwei?"

Toshiko shrugged. "Who else is there?"

Definitely not spook material. "Anyone wanting to grab a valuable asset when someone else will take the blame."

It took a moment for her to get it; Evans couldn't decide whether that was because of low self-esteem (temporary or long-running) or that she was just so accustomed to what she could do and hyper-focused on her Art that she couldn't see the larger ramifications. Her husband had understood immediately, however, and the obvious corollary. "And what about you people? I don't mean that you had anything to do with the attempts to kidnap her," he hastily added, waving a hand as if to brush away the thought, "it's obvious you didn't know who Toshiko was, much less where or how to find her, but what exactly do you want? There's no way you whipped up this cover story in a few hours, and covers this perfect have to be few and far between—you're burning a really valuable asset."

Evans laughed softly. "Yeah, you're right, it's perfect ... too perfect. It's too good to waste on just any common in-and-out mission, but we just don't have much real need for a permanent false background. And it has an expiration date, each year we don't use it makes it less and less plausible. Plus, it isn't perfect enough, the fact that Ayaka is Japanese complicates things." He shrugged again. "Use it or lose it, and this is the perfect situation to use it, so why not? Not that we don't want to at least have you demonstrate what you can do, where the geeks—the science department, that is—can set up their instruments and try to figure out how you do it."

"That'd be great!" Toshiko enthused, her face lighting up. "It's been way too long since I could really cut loose when practicin' my techniques. No way ta do that without letting my hunters know where I am, and I guess ya don't want me doing that publicly here, too."

Her husband wasn't as enthusiastic, Evans could tell. The man was a fighter pilot, after all, he didn't think like a spook ... or even a sec-op. But he'd get there, and start wondering just how badly the Company wanted Toshiko's cooperation, and so just who owed whom. Which was all to the good, he'd be more comfortable thinking he and his 'wife' were operating from a position of equality.

"So," Evans said, pulling a copy of the incomplete marriage license and certificate out of the folder he'd brought, "why don't you get the original and let's get this filled in so you can have your priest sign it."

Author's Note: Elk City, Idaho is a real place, with some 2,000 residents, but I pretty much picked the name at random and know nothing of what it's like or anyone that lives there.