I am attending a joint conference between two normally-rival spy agencies. Dinner is provided. A man from one agency and a woman from the other both attempt to take the same seat at the table. After some back and forth they wind up sitting to either side of the mutually desired chair.

  Everyone else here is dressed in impeccable formalwear. My bck suit jacket is crumpled and my tie is undone. As always. It’s kind of my thing. I work at both agencies at once. I still don’t know how no one’s caught on yet, especially since all I ever seem to do is wander the halls and chat people up.

  I walk up and ask if that seat is avaible. They both gre daggers at me in unison and I take the seat across from it instead. The whole dinner I watch as the two of them try to discreetly examine and run hands over the chair, searching for secret compartments and dead-drop messages. The two of them blush every time their hands brush against one another. It’s obvious that they’re into one another but trying not to show it. I’d say it’s adorable but I value my life enough to refrain from commenting aloud.

  They find each other's messages with their mutual orders. The “president’s men” will be arriving ter by helicopter. His mission is to pick them up and discreetly get them to safety. Her mission is to kill them.

  Don’t ask me how I found out.

  After the dinner I spend some time with the man before he leaves for the night. Afterwards I find the woman, who has changed from an evening gown into workout clothes and is drilling simirly-dressed new recruits on a balcony patio. Her aggressive training instruction has earned her the nickname “Queen Mean” amongst certain (mostly newer and younger) members of her agency. It’s not an epithet that I would ever apply to her, but I still fail to make the observation on how interesting it is just how differently a person’s voice can sound under different circumstances.

  She is not best pleased by my commentary. The new recruits are best pleased to have a distraction so that they might slip away.

  More barbs are exchanged. Mine id back and mostly joking; hers not so much. I have a reputation for being something of an eccentric, which most everyone at the agencies either finds endearing or infuriating. She’s in the tter category. It doesn’t help her opinion of me that I might have alluded to how she was around the man.

  Her support staff (they think I’m hirious most nights) arrive and I point out that as fun as this is, doesn’t she have an assassination to get to?

  She is annoyed that both I know about that and that I’m right.

  Later, we run into one another once again, this time near the restrooms. She is surprised at my choice of facilities, saying she didn’t realize I was also a woman. I ask her what she thought I was and she admits that she’s never actually been sure. I ugh at that answer and tell her that’s correct.

  Later still, the colliding rescue and assassination missions happen. As it turns out, the “president’s men” was a coded euphemism for the president’s children. The woman’s done a lot of unsavory things in her career, but she draws the line at killing kids, letting the man take them to safety.

  When she gets back she chews her superiors out, saying that they’re supposed to be better than this as an organization. Due to her spotless record of performance up until now, she’s able to get away with that sort of thing.

  Eventually, the next assignments arrive for the man and the woman. His mission is to rescue a genetically engineered catgirl being held in a flying tower base. Her mission is to kill the people in charge of the program that made the catgirl. The two of them run into one another on the job and are pleased to find that for once their missions are compatible. I’m there too, unbeknownst to both of them or their support staff. I’m keeping an eye on them while also attending to my own convoluted gambits.

  The two of them break the catgirl out of confinement, but as they are running through the tower’s spiraling halls the bck cat whose genetic material was spliced to create the catgirl crosses their path. It is hard to keep a cat such as this one contained. The collision of the catgirl’s luck-altering powers and the bck cat’s causes an improbable warp in reality resulting in a white cat spontaneously popping into existence. The spies take both cats with them in their rescue.

  I then see myself running by carrying a bck-and-white kitten. Realizing that there must be a time loop going on, I approach myself, who passes the kitten off to me and tells me to get it to the spies. I then run off, leaving myself alone holding a kitten that I presume is the future offspring of the previous two cats.

  The spies, the catgirl, and the cats find themselves trapped in a room with a rge circur opening showing the ground passing by far below. I arrive at around the same time as the armed facility guards. I toss the kitten to the group just in time for it to amplify the catgirl’s powers so that the hail of bullets all miss them. The group jumps, trusting in the combined cat luck powers to save them from the fall.

  I jump after them, muttering “I hate time travel” over and over again the whole way down.

  We do, in fact, manage to nd unharmed.