The Cupid Reconciliation Genrenauts Episode Three Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Season One Collection-1

  Copyright notice

  Dedication

  Previously, on Genrenauts…

  Chapter One - The Comedienne Returns

  Chapter Two - Meddling for Fun and Profit

  Chapter Three - Learning on the Job

  Chapter Four - Did You Get The Number of that Martini?

  Chapter Five - Meet Bachelorette Number One

  Chapter Six - The Glamour. The Marvel. The Paperwork.

  Chapter Seven - Only Tourists Look Up

  Chapter Eight - The Hail Mary

  Epilogue - An Extended Denoument

  Season One Collection

  Acknowledgments

  THE CUPID RECONCILIATION

  Genrenauts Episode 3

  ——————

  Michael R. Underwood

  The Cupid Reconciliation: Genrenauts Episode 3

  Copyright (C) 2016 by Michael R. Underwood. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below:

  [email protected]

  For Meg White Underwood, the finest leading lady a romantic geek could ask for.

  Previously, on Genrenauts…

  Struggling stand-up comic Leah Tang is recruited to join the Genrenauts, a group of storytellers that travel across dimensions to find and fix broken stories. Each other dimension is the home of a narrative genre, from Western to Romance to Science Fiction and more. If they fail in their mission to put broken stories back on track, entropy from the destabilized worlds will ripple over to their home Earth to disastrous effects.

  Stories have been breaking more often and going off course faster than normal. In her first mission, Leah helps the team find the real white hat hero in the Western World and bring a bandit posse to justice. And then in Science Fiction World, part of the team rescues a kidnapped ambassador while Leah helps senior Genrenaut Shirin Tehrani hold a nascent alliance together using diplomatic wheeling and dealing.

  Every mission promises a new adventure...and new threats. And sometimes the danger comes from the place you would least expect…

  Chapter One

  The Comedienne Returns

  Leah Tang hustled into Genrenauts HQ at nine-o-eight AM and snuck her way to the ready room, exhaling in relief at having escaped King’s anal-retentive time-cop powers.

  Strangely, no one else was there. This time of day at the team’s ready room in Genrenauts HQ, the team would be in morning relaxing mode. The ever-multitasking Roman de Jager should be kicked up one table over, leaning back in his chair to an audiobook or leaning forward over a comic. Team lead Angstrom King would be pacing, a tablet in hand as he pored over reports. And Senior Genrenaut Shirin Tehrani would be reclining in the book nook, speed-reading a biography or history text.

  Instead, the room was empty.

  Leah left her bag and tablet on the table and stalked the halls. They weren’t in Ops. Preeti and the other operators whiled away on their multi-screen displays, the big wall showing data feeds from all around Earth and from beyond, data recorded on various trips and sent back by scouting missions. The team wasn’t where they usually would be, but she’d only been on the job for a few weeks, and maybe there was a monthly meeting or something that she was missing? Something she’d forgotten when she collapsed after swordplay night?

  Leah froze, struck by a thought. She checked her work email and saw nothing about a meeting, just the same assortment of forecasting and scouting reports.

  However, she did have a text message, from Shirin. Shirin was older, basically the mom of the team, but in practice, she was more like the cool aunt who always had good stories.

  “Come to Medical.”

  Continuing, Leah rounded the corner and saw a crowd. The whole team—Shirin, dashing badass Roman, and King, the alternatingly stern and thoughtful Team Lead—clustered around their injured teammate Mallery York, freshly out of a medical gown and back in skinny jeans and a gauzy top, one arm in a cast. Leah had only seen the woman in her recovery room, wearing a gown, looking far less stylish than she did in the team dossiers.

  All together, they looked like a totally odd but comfortable family of choice. Which made Leah the new foster kid—not yet adopted, still feeling out her place in everything.

  Shirin noticed Leah come around the bend and waved her over. The team parted to give Mallery a clean view.

  Mallery was just a hair taller than Leah, taller still with heels. She had bleach-blond hair in a progressive bob, and the kind of skin that looked like it would burn in the shade. Heels already? Leah thought, shuddering. One of the things that was not in the regs was a requirement to wear heels (unlike some jobs she’d had). Leah wore flats to work. And at home. Everywhere. But no, Mallery went straight from infirmary socks to three-inch heels.

  Shirin made the introduction. “Mallery, I don’t think you’ve properly met our new probationary agent, Leah Tang.”

  Mallery’s face went from bright to incandescent. She threw open her arms, adjusting for the awkwardness of the cast. “Probie! Welcome to the team. Sorry I wasn’t in any condition to give you a proper welcome earlier, what with the being shot and all.”

  So, if she’s back on-duty, do I still have a job? Leah asked herself, even though King and all of the paperwork said that the position was ongoing, pending review after six months. Leah had been hired partially to sub for Mallery, and she was just settling into the role, but here Mallery was…

  “I’m glad you’re on your feet again,” Leah said, politeness winning out. “How are you feeling?”

  “Ready to climb the Great Wall, if it means getting back to doing something useful. I love reading and all, but we didn’t join the team to become literature professors, right?”

  Mallery talked fast, accentuating speech with one hand, the other arm held in a fixed position by her cast.

  “I hope Roman hasn’t been giving you too much trouble,” Mallery said, placing a friendly hand on Leah’s elbow. “He loves to play with the newbies. I remember when I was new, he stole the batteries out of everything I brought into the office and replaced all of the romance novels on my eReader with spiritual self-help books. Serves him right that I spent the next month boring him to death with love languages.”

  Leah let the woman plow ahead, slightly awed. Some people were animated. Mallery was Pixar 3D IMAX.

  “Fair’s fair,” Roman said.

  King cleared his throat. “That’s enough reunion. Let’s get back to work.”

  Mallery chattered at Leah every inch of the way.

  “How are you liking the job so far? I was so overwhelmed my first year. The reading lists, the training, and the missions. My first one, we went to the Noir region, and I was so excited to get to dig into the wardrobe. But newbies never get to dress themselves, so I got the stodgy spinster outfit. It was a gag, though, since I needed to be the Femme Fatale; we were getting a detective out of the bottle so he could solve the case, you see…”

  And on she went. It was like she’d been storing up all of the words from several weeks of inactivity, and had to get them all out now.

  Or maybe
this was how she was all the time.

  Leah took the conversational backseat, happy to let Mallery drive, sharing experiences from her days as a probationary Genrenaut. Leah tried to commit the pranks to memory, hoping to avoid or maybe turn the tables if Shirin or Roman tried to pull them out again.

  Being the butt of every joke as the low woman on the org chart wasn’t the most fun part of the job. On the other hand, it was a damn sight better than getting the side-eye from lifers at her last job, who suspected her of being an affirmative action hire. All for a reception job. Thanks, Simmons & Sains!

  “So, tell me about your missions. I saw the reports, of course, but it was always so exciting for me to talk about my first missions. Did you really distract a gunslinger with a totally improvised bit on your first trip out? I was such a bundle of nerves my first mission. You should have seen me in that dress.”

  Mallery counted with her fingers, accentuated by a playful wink. “One, because it fit like a glove—Shirin is a miracle-worker—and two, I was so struck with stage fright, I might as well have been a freshman auditioning for a top ten theater program.”

  Mallery took a breath, and Leah jumped right in like it was a game of double Dutch, taking her turn.

  “It was the only thing I could think of, really. The baddie had a hostage, right; I peeked through the kitchen door and saw Maribel, our heroine, all stalemated with the Black Hat, and I knew I wasn’t a good enough shot to be sure not to hit his hostage, so I remembered that her brother had been using the stairs by the kitchen and made my way around.”

  Leah caught herself matching Mallery’s speed, talking like someone was pumping the oxygen out of the room and she had to talk fast while there was still time. She stopped herself, then resumed at a slower pace. “I took the carafe of lemonade with me. I knew I was going to do something with it. I didn’t want to just toss the thing at him; he’d probably flinch and shoot someone. I needed him distracted, so I just reached into my improv quiver.”

  “Improv quiver, I love it!” Mallery said, slapping her uninjured hand on her hip.

  The rest of the team settled into their places in the rec room, and Mallery joined Leah at her table.

  “Are you a coffee drinker?” Mallery asked.

  “Only always.”

  “Great. Make us some coffee, and I’ll think up some more tips for you before King whisks us away to some meeting about the socio-narrative implications of declining crop yields in Fantasyland or whatever.”

  Leah chuckled to herself as she made the coffee. Making coffee had fallen to her at her last job, and the one bit of continuity was both reassuring and disappointing. The last time she’d been anywhere near the top of an org chart was college, as captain of her improv comedy troupe. Of course, senior year was marred by the epic drama from when JD dumped Karen, then proceeded to try to sleep his way through the rest of the troupe. She’d had to boot him after he made a handsy pass at her after a Saturday performance.

  So, that was a bonus to being on the bottom of the heap—other people had to do the firing, make the choices on behalf of the whole team, take the flak for a split-second decision.

  King, however, came off as flak-proof, stainless steel in a pressed suit.

  Leah was practicing the art of watching coffee brew when King walked into the room, holding his tablet like a conductor’s baton.

  “Eyes up, folks. We’ve got a breach in Romance. Scouting report is in your email; we’re scheduled for lift-off in thirty minutes. Roman, pre-flight. Shirin, wardrobe. Leah, you help Shirin. Mallery, you’re with me.”

  Somehow, Mallery got even more energetic, punching the air. “You’re going to love this world, Leah. It’s like an endless Love, Actually, only the queer characters actually get a place at the table. And women get to decide things for themselves. It’s got problems, to be sure, just like romance here on our world.” Mallery walked over and poured herself a cup of coffee from the freshly brewed pot as she continued.

  Shirin beckoned, waiting by the door. “Come on, newbie. It’s time to get ourselves some gorgeous Hollywood outfits.”

  King said, “T minus thirty, people,” as the group disbanded.

  ———

  The wardrobe was, by itself, the size of a small warehouse, with divided sections by genre.

  “Is Mallery always like that?” Leah asked Shirin as the women unzipped roller-bag suitcases.

  “She was on high-transmitting mode. She’s just excited by new people. Don’t worry; the shiny wears off after a couple of missions. Though I think she likes you.”

  Following Shirin, Leah carted the tied-together roller-bags past the SF, Noir, and Horror sections to the warehouse within a warehouse that was the Romance section.

  Making their way past cotehardies and corsets, kilts and puffy shirts, they stopped at last among racks of clothing in the Contemporary Romance section.

  “It seems like she likes everybody.”

  “She reads people at the speed King reads books. If she thinks you’re good people, it takes a lot to change her mind.”

  Shirin punched in a key code, and a garage-door gate rolled up, revealing even more wardrobe options—two twenty-foot-long hangars filled with freshly pressed clothes. Tops, pants, dresses, suits, and more.

  “She’s ex-Broadway, right?”

  “Born and bred, as she says. She comes on a bit strong, but it’s reassuring. Like how you want cars to make sounds even when they’re electric, just so other people can hear them coming?”

  Leah nodded.

  “Who curates these collections?” Leah asked, trying not to drool at the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes in this one subsection of the room.

  “Logistics tracks trends and styles, and takes our measurements to make sure HQ is constantly stocked with a selection to prepare us for a range of covers and scenarios off-world.”

  “They ordered ten worlds’ worth of clothes to fit me in a week?” Leah asked, looking at the section with her name on it.

  Shirin brought an armful of clothes on lines, stylish casual outfits for King—broad at the shoulder, long in the torso, in bold colors that went well with his brown skin, several shades darker than Shirin’s. “They ordered them in a week, and then Logistics tailored them so that they looked custom, store-bought, and/or poorly fitting, depending on the type of covers needed. In the post-apocalyptic region, everyone’s clothes are weirdly well-fitting, but in a way that looks ill-fitting.” The senior Genrenaut racked the clothes on the hangars that flanked each room.

  Leah took the clothes and started packing, remembering her days on the stand-up comedy circuit, fitting two weeks’ worth of clothes into a single roller-bag.

  “How often do these worlds, trends, or whatever change? It seems like Sci-Fi world pretty much stayed the way you know it, and has been like that for a while, alliance aside.”

  Shirin slid hangars along the line, picking through acid-washed men’s jeans. “No faster or slower than the average feeling of a genre changes. Get a flashpoint story, and things change quick.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t mean the DC Flashpoint,” Leah said.

  “No. Those hard resets haven’t happened since I’ve been on the job. Plenty of landmark works, though. Rapid change, but not all at once.”

  “So, there have been hard reboots?”

  “King just barely escaped a region-wide continuity wipe not long after he got started. Doesn’t talk about it, though. Every contact we’d developed there forgot us; all of the missions we’d logged had been written out of existence.”

  Shirin handed a set of jeans directly to Leah. They had the cultivated mussy look, so there was no need for hangers. “These go in Roman’s bag.” Leah opened another roller-bag and started packing the jeans. “Written out of existence? That’s not ominous at all.”

  “It’s been decades since a world has reset like that during a mission, so if we’re lucky, if it happens again, it won’t be on our watch.”

&nbs
p; “Can I ask for flats again?” Leah asked as Shirin moved to pick through some smaller clothes. Seeing as she was three inches shorter than Mallery, she figured her odds were good of picking the timing.

  “You can have flats, but we have to bring these, too.” Shirin handed Leah a pair of sunflower-yellow four-inch heels.

  “Just as long as I’m not expected to walk around the street in these things.”

  “Don’t worry, dear. Heels only get caught in subway grates when it’s dramatically appropriate,” Shirin said.

  “How long did it take before you always knew how to think in the right genre?”

  “We already do it, every day. We tell ourselves what kind of story we’re in, and we’re often wrong, because life is mostly every genre, sometimes at once. These worlds, they make sense. Now, for a ball gown, would you rather go with black or something more daring?”

  Leah sighed at Shirin’s latest selection. “Ball gown?”

  “Genrenauts’ motto: be prepared, and expect drama.”

  “So, we’re a TV network now?”

  “Hush, newbie. Keep packing.”

  ———

  This was Leah’s third time traveling to another dimension, and it was almost becoming familiar. Or would, if it didn’t involve getting to travel in a freaking rocket ship. That would never get old. Or, at least, she hoped it never would. They sat strapped into the ship, which stood straight up like a NASA rocket. But instead of blasting off, the ship rattled, then slipped side-ways between dimensions, the view of the hangar roof replaced by technicolor strobes and the wiggly designs that she came to associate with their cross-dimensional travel. There was blissfully little turbulence, unlike some of the earlier trips.

  Minutes later, they slipped from the in-between into a new world. Gravity was still down, the rocket point-up. The front viewscreen revealed the inside of what looked like the roof of a warehouse.