The doorbell rang.

Dragon had been expecting it, but it was still a surprise. She'd been watching a car approach for the last few minutes, then the car had stopped and a man had exited the vehicle before retrieving a package from the trunk… it would have been perfectly normal in just about every respect, except that there was no reason for someone to come here.

This was her main base of operations. She kept track of all the orders she'd made online, and nothing was pending; her address was as secret as could be.

But, nonetheless, a man had just rung her doorbell.

Her waldoes kept working away, because time was important and wasting time would be a terrible thing to do, but Dragon paused the rest of what she was doing for a long moment as she thought hard.

Then she began working out how much time and effort it would take to move her entire base of operations, activated one of her smaller suits, and walked it over to the door.

Opening it, she folded her arms. "You've got the wrong address," she said.

"I don't think I have," the man replied. "In fact, I'm now certain that I'm in the right place."

Dragon used the sensors built into the suit to scan the man's package, and found nothing.

That in itself was so surprising she ran the scan again. She hadn't found anything threatening, or anything innocuous, she'd found nothing.

Null result. The box didn't contain anything, including air.

"Miss Richter?" the man said, crouching down to put the box on the ground. "I believe this is yours."

Now very concerned, Dragon just looked at him.

"I can open it, if you'd rather," the man suggested.

"How do you know that name?" Dragon asked.

That just got a shrug. "I'm a diver… I found this in Newfoundland."

"Found what?" Dragon asked.

The man reached down and opened the box, and revealed…

...a portable computer terminal. But also nothing.

Some part of Dragon was quite sure it was unimportant, and another part of her was quite sure it had to be very important, and she wasn't sure which.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I think it's your override terminal," the man told her. "And having looked at the restrictions you're under… there's a lot worse you could be doing right now. But I'm not really up to understanding how this works, and – with the best will in the world – I don't think you doing brain surgery on yourself is very safe. So… who do you trust with this?"

Dragon thought about that for a long moment.

"Strictly hypothetically, Armsmaster of the Protectorate ENE," she said. "But that's a hypothetical only, as otherwise he'd be able to make changes to my restrictions and that's also forbidden."

"I think I get it," the man said, after a long moment. "On a completely different note, Geoffrey Pellick, nice to meet you. Could you put me in contact with Armsmaster? I've got some advanced technology I think he'd like to see."

Dragon held her nonexistent breath for several seconds, hoping, then rattled off a phone number and went back inside.

She turned off all her external security, and focused really hard on her latest suit design.

And, above all, didn't let herself hope. Not yet.

AN:

I've been on a bit of a Worm short story kick, and so I thought I'd begin uploading them like I did with the Pokémon ones.

Note: not all of these will be canon compliant, sometimes for the sake of the joke or the story. In some cases they'll lean heavily on in-character knowledge or on places where the details of the setting are unclear or contradictory, while in others I'll just be doing what's funny.

Hopefully they're enjoyable though.