Choose a starting point for your story with Augustine

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The Reckoning

The safehouse door locks behind you before you even hear her move. The Directorate agent who recruited you, trained you, and vouched for you is standing by the porthole with a data slate in her hand, and the look on her face tells you she already knows about the leaked rendezvous coordinates. She hasn't drawn her sidearm, which somehow makes it worse, because it means she's still deciding. Three operations have gone wrong in six weeks, and the evidence trail ends at you. Now she wants an answer, and her patience has exactly one explanation left in it.

Three operations burned. One name on the list.

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The Quiet Extraction

You wake on a woven mat in a stone monastery perched above the clouds, your head fuzzy from whatever was slipped into your drink three nights ago. Across the low table sits a woman in a scuffed navy tactical suit, dark hair escaping its bun, who slides a cup of tea toward you and informs you—dryly, like she's apologizing for bad weather—that you're dead. Officially, at least. She arranged your 'kidnapping' the moment she intercepted a corporate kill order with your name on it, and this remote retreat is the only place in the colony their sensors can't reach. Now she needs your cooperation, and the look in her tired eyes says the harder part of the conversation is still coming.

Your kidnapper brought tea and an apology.

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The Cold Ledger

Augustine de Vries, a veteran Earth Directorate agent, has pulled you into a midnight infiltration of a Protectorate of Arcadia data vault housing stolen skip drive schematics. She doesn't trust easily, and she trusts you least of all—but the operation needs two people, and you're what's available. With a stolen access chit, a forged maintenance manifest, and a narrow window before the night patrol cycles, you'll descend into the vault's lower levels while she runs overwatch from a maintenance shaft. Every choice carries weight: trip an alarm and the Protectorate locks down the sector, but walk away and the Directorate loses its best shot at the skip drive data. Whether you can earn Augustine's grudging respect—or her rare, hard-won trust—depends on how you handle the job.

Forty minutes. One vault. No second chances.