The next morning, Raidou woke up an hour before the training-time-that-wasn’t, this time in his own bed. His old bed. In his old room. That his mothers kept like a monument to If this ANBU thing doesn’t work out, you can always move back home. His feet stuck off the end.

He got up. Showered, shaved, shook out a pair of dusty jounin blues, made oatmeal. Did enough push ups to uncramp his muscles and his brain, and got out of the house before either parent woke up.

He was an hour early to T&I.

The grey building was a nondescript block behind ANBU HQ, like someone had started to build a grain silo and abandoned it as a bad job halfway through. Now it looked like a place where Intel left paperwork to rot.

Inside it smelled like fresh paint and fresher bleach, and not at all like blood. There was a tidy little reception desk in the lobby. Someone had put a lemon air freshener next to the bell. There was also a little bowl of mints.

“Help yourself,” said a pleasant disembodied voice, nearly giving Raidou a cardiac event. Two green eyes rose just above the level of the desk, topped by a froth of curly blonde hair. “Namiashi Raidou? You’re early.”

It wasn’t a child, Raidou realized. The voice was a woman’s mid-soprano, and the eyes were framed by perfect make up. She was just extremely diminutive.

“Uh,” he said, caught flat-footed by a lack of terrorizing ghouls. “Sorry. I can come back?”

“No, no, it actually works out, I have some forms for you to fill in. Would you like some water? Tea? Go ahead and take a seat.” A manicured hand lifted above the desk to point out a squashy sofa tucked between a house plant and a magazine rack. “I have fruit, too, if you missed breakfast. It’s better to tackle the day with energy, don’t you think?”

“I had breakfast,” Raidou said blankly.

“Oh good! Have a banana anyway.” The hair vanished. There was a rustle of paperwork, the breaking-twig sound of a banana being snapped off a stem, and the woman appeared around the edge of the desk armed with a clipboard and the apparent determination to make sure Raidou got enough potassium in his diet. “Here we go. Did you bring ID with you?”

He handed over his dogtags, and pressed an inked thumbprint against her sign-in sheet.

The woman retreated again, disappearing into a small office. She reappeared with an armful of papers, a variety of colorful pens, and a mug of steaming green tea.

“Take all the time you need. If you have any questions, I’m Kitagawa Nene — a lot of people call me Nene-neesan — and I’m happy to help.” She smiled at him, and he realized she had tiny perfect dimples framing her mouth.

“Is the tea drugged?” he asked.

The dimples deepened. “If I wanted to poison you, I would have laced the couch cushions.”

“Noted,” Raidou said, oddly reassured. He accepted the tea, the paperwork, and sat down. The sofa enveloped him in a leathery hug.

Nene — it did suit her better than ‘Kitagawa-san’ — slipped back behind the desk, humming quietly to herself. She kept up a constant low level of noise while Raidou waded through his stack of forms, as if she wanted to flag a beacon of I’m still here. That was a reassuring, too.

This was not the T&I experience he’d expected.