Campanella's kinder than that, thankfully. Honestly, I'd rather have people who wanted to be there, as it's going to challenging enough to coordinate without people being half-hearted. Does mean it's mostly people I don't know, which has its own challenges.

On the stories - yes. Delilah passed on a few more she'd heard at St. Mungo's. Gilly had stories of her own from work, about other people. (And a couple of quite clever suggestions on handling things - most of them won't suit dealing with Stint at this point, but might be handy elsewhere.)

Made me think a good bit more about some of the conversations you and I've had about Defence work: that whole question of passive or concealed response versus aggressive response, and the assumptions other people make about those choices.