CHAPTER I
"Blue Blooms The Gentian" -- Heino

Doujima crouched just below the crest of the too-green hill, peering cautiously through a stand of white flowers. She glanced back over her shoulder and gave a low wave to indicate that the man behind her should follow her lead. He slithered forward in the grass on his stomach. A little unpracticed, Doujima thought, but not bad for his first time out. He was a little older than the SPCFC's typical recruits -- nearly twice Doujima's age, which to her meant bordering on decrepit -- but he moved with the unconscious grace and strength of a dancer. He was pleasantly handsome, and had a face that could blend easily into the setting of almost any world. Doujima could see why the Directors had chosen him as Alfred's replacement. All he needed was a little polishing and training, and that's what she had been instructed to give him.

There wasn't much danger in this world, but as she was setting an example for the new recruit Doujima wanted to play it as safe as possible. New operatives were cocky and incautious enough without her contributing any of her characteristic recklessness.

"Miss Doujima," the new recruit whispered, a trifle loud. He was scanning the horizon intently. "What exactly are we looking for?"

She gave him a lopsided grin for his enthusiasm. "Nothing in particular. It's just always safer to be aware of your surroundings. See there?" Doujima pointed to a spot several hilltops distant, where there was a flash of motion. He followed her gesture and squinted at the dark spot in the grass. After a few seconds of closer examination, the shape resolved into the figure of a woman wearing a long dress.

"What about her? Is she an enemy?" The man asked, rising on his elbows to peer over the top of the flowers. Doujima rolled her eyes and jerked his head back down to the level of her own.

"No, she isn't. And keep your head down," she muttered reprovingly. "Never give them a bigger target to shoot at."

The man raised his fine, dark eyebrows. "She's going to shoot at us?"

Doujima had to chuckle. "No," she told him. Most recruits at this stage were still struggling with basic concepts, so she tried to choose small, non-technical terms to explain. "That woman lives here. She's a character from this world. She's probably totally harmless to us as individuals, but it can still be very dangerous for her to see us. If we meddle too much with the worlds we visit, it can affect the characters or interfere with the plot. In the worst case scenario, it could even cause the world to be unstable or fall apart."

The new recruit thought for a moment, then nodded. "Got it. So it would be like making a film set in the seventeenth century, and all of a sudden a character comes in driving a Studebaker instead of a carriage. The story would lose all credibility, and the movie would flop."

Doujima stared for a moment, surprised at his clear understanding. "That's an excellent metaphor, Mr. Lockwood," she said, truly impressed. "How did you happen to come up with that?"

The man smiled, showing perfectly even white teeth. "I used to be an actor," he said. "Well, I was a lot of things -- stunt man, Vaudeville ham, song and dance man -- but mostly an actor. And please, call me Don. Only the reporters from Variety ever call me Mr. Lockwood."

The woman in the long dress had moved closer to their hiding place, and Doujima ducked low to the ground as she saw her crest the next hill. Don followed her lead, and they silently squirmed back a few paces to stay out of sight. They could see now that the woman had short golden hair, and was carrying a basket over one arm. Now and again she would bend to pick a particularly lovely flower and arrange it in the basket, then spin in a graceful circle, arms out, and move on to the next rolling hill.

Doujima and Don watched this peculiar behavior for a few moments more, and when the blonde woman was safely out of earshot, Don revisited his earlier question. "So why are we here, exactly?"

Doujima sighed. "You know why the SPCFC exists," she began, and he nodded. "We right wrongs, correct plots, replace characters, and so on. Not because it benefits us, but because it needs to be done."

"We're the guys in the white hats," Don suggested pleasantly.

Doujima smiled. "If you like," she agreed. "But apparently there's another group of people out there who -- well, we don't know what color hats they wear, but we're pretty sure they're not white. They like to change things around for their own purpose, whatever that may be. They seem to enjoy causing trouble, and they have sufficiently advanced technology to do so without us being able to interfere."

"Sounds troublesome."

"More than that, it's dangerous. They've not only been interfering with the storylines, but they've targeted several of our agents, and once they actually broke into our headquarters and abducted a character, then burned down part of our building. It's escalating into a full-out war, and we don't even know our enemy's identity."

Don let out a low whistle. "That sounds very nasty," he agreed. "But what has it to do with this place?"

Doujima gestured around them to encompass the intense blue sky, the bright green hills, the picturesque mountains, the brilliantly white flowers. "We're not usually able to track them when they visit a world," she explained, "but a day or so ago in this world's timeline, there was some kind of unusual disturbance. It seems that a small group of them arrived, stayed for a few minutes, and then left again. It's possible they left something here, perhaps even one of their own operatives. We can't find anything in the canon that would correspond to this new signal, so the Director sent us down to check it out. Basically, we're looking for anything out of the ordinary..."

She paused, because something she considered quite out of the ordinary began to happen. A sound built around them, starting off low and distant, then swelling into a blinding crescendo of music that shook the very grass they lay in. The woman with the basket of flowers suddenly appeared on the hilltop, a few feet from them, and opened her mouth...

The hills are alive, she sang, with the sound of music...

Doujima clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the sound and all but ran down the hill. Don, startled at her reaction, followed her at a brisk jog. When they had reached a distance at which normal conversation was possible, she took her hands from her ears and tried to catch her breath.

Don came up beside her. "What's wrong?" he asked with sincere concern.

She shook her head. "It gets me every time," she muttered. "You can never be prepared for that."

Don blinked at her. "Prepared for what?"

Doujima just stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. Then understanding smoothed the confusion from her face. "You came from a musical world, didn't you. I should have known."

"We had music, if that's what you mean," he said with a shrug. "We sang quite a bit, too. And danced. That's what I do, you know, song and dance..."

Doujima interrupted him with a nod. "It's all right. It just startled me. Where I'm from, there's not a whole lot of, um, spontaneous singing and dancing. None at all, actually."

Don looked stricken. "No singing at all? Oh, how tragic. I'm so sorry..." he began, but she cut him off again.

"I said it's all right. In the meantime, we need to be looking for anything out of the ordinary here."

They heard another sound -- something like a key change, perhaps -- and Doujima turned to see the young woman with the basket kneeling beside a bunch of white flowers.

Edelweiss, she crooned, Edelweiss...

Don was listening with a smile on his face, obviously enjoying the lilting melody. Doujima suppressed a shudder and scanned the other hilltops for something to divert her attention until the musical moment was over. She saw nothing but green hills, purple mountains, and an unending sea of white flowers. Edelweiss, indeed... Only one one slope was there was anything of a different color. Amid the waving white blossoms, she spotted a cluster of tiny bluish-violet blooms competing for the sunlight. Banzai for nonconformity, she thought, grinning wryly at the blue flowers.

Beside her, Don's face tightened, and he gripped her arm suddenly. "Do you hear that?" he asked in a harsh whisper.

Doujima strained her ears, but all she could hear was Edelweiss, Edelweiss. She shook her head. "What is it?"

"It's something different," he murmured. "A different song, I think. But it's all wrong. Wrong key, wrong tempo. Wrong voice."

Doujima listened again, and this time she heard something just faintly discordant... She whirled and searched the area around them, the new melody growing with every second. Something different, something different... She turned to where she'd seen the bunch of blue flowers growing on the hill, and jumped back in surprise as another figure appeared on the green slope.

"There!" she shouted, not caring if she drew the attention of the resident characters. She took off for the blond figure, who -- she was reasonably certain -- did NOT belong in this setting.

The man was tall and angular. His bright yellow hair swept back from his square, stern-looking face in a garish pompadour, and his eyes were concealed behind dark glasses. He wore a leather blazer with broad, square shoulders. As Doujima dashed up the hill toward the newcomer, he knelt beside the blue flower, touching it almost tenderly, and began to sing:

Ja, ja, so blau... Blau, blau blüht der Enzian...

The new song struck Doujima hard, but she pushed forward up the hill anyway. Behind her, she heard the golden-haired girl start in again on her own song -- Edelweiss, Edelweiss -- but now it had a harder edge, as if she were trying to drown out the encroaching music. Oh, please, begged Doujima, don't let them start dueling.

The music behind her faded off abruptly, and in almost the same moment she reached the out-of-place vocalist on the hill. Without overture she tackled him, clamping a hand over his mouth and kicking his knees out from under him as she fished desperately in her pocket. After a frantic moment, she pulled out the item she'd been looking for: a roll of heavy duty silver-colored adhesive tape. Ignoring the square-jawed man's grunts and protests, she strapped the thick tape across his mouth, and then wound the roll around his head a few more times for good measure.

When she had forced him to the ground and taped his hands behind his back, she palmed a button on the communicator hooked to her belt. "We've got the anomaly under wraps," she called, flashing a wry grin at her own weak pun. "Give us a portal, please." The radio croaked an affirmative, and she turned to call to the new recruit.

Suddenly she realized why the other singing had stopped so abruptly: The golden-haired woman was gazing up at Don, starry-eyed, as he crooned a quiet ballad to her. Doujima made a frantic gesture to him, and with a flick of an eye that the dreaming girl could not possibly have noticed, Don acknowledged Doujima's order. A moment later, he had wrapped up the last hypnotic refrain and left the girl standing, dazed but happy, gazing at an armload of flowers. He jogged up the hill to help Doujima with her burden.

Doujima couldn't disguise her own slack-jawed astonishment. She didn't say a word as Don joined her and helped her carry their unhappy burden through the portal.

They emerged into the familiar white hallway of the transportal room, and were met by Amon, Priss, and a handful of security personnel who were waiting to take the blond singer to a safe holding room until his identity could be verified.

When the squirming blond baritone had been handed off, Priss tugged Doujima aside. "So," she asked quietly, "how's the new recruit working out?"

Doujima glanced over at Don, who was giving a brief report to the Third Director. She watched him for a moment, then smiled. "I think he'll do just fine," she said finally. "In fact, I think he might just turn out to be one of our most... useful operatives."