Alice awoke with a start. There had been a ping, she looked up blearily to see that the seatbelt sign had flicked on above her head. Arching her back in her seat, she stretched as best she could, then folded her laptop. She had been studying since they’d taken off, or had intended to. Obviously she had fallen asleep at some point during the flight. She packed the compact computer back into it’s bag, before fastening her seat belt once more over her lap.

It was one of the perks of being a member of the IFJ, transport tended to be easily dealt with, for high priority transport there was usually a teleporter available to transport you across the globe in an eyeblink, for less vital operations there was a not insignificant fund in place to make sure you could travel in relative privacy. Or as close to it as the airline offered. True, other people could see her, but in the slightly angled first-class seat, no-one could see her computer screen without sitting on her lap, and it was set to lock if it registered her eye movements had halted. It was a fairly simple security system, but on top of that the laptop was encrypted, GPS chipped, and required a facial and retinal scan simply to turn on, if she fell asleep with it on her lap it was unlikely to fall into the wrong hands.

The plane set down a little less than fifteen minutes after the captain’s announcement, and she stood with the rest of the passengers, slinging her bag over her shoulder. She was almost completely clothed, the only bare skin being her face and neck, the hoodie was zipped up, and her hands and fingers were covered by expensive looking gloves, about the only expensive looking things she was wearing. When you were resigned to living most of your life wearing gloves, it helped to shell out for ones that wouldn’t prove too awkward.

She stepped off the plane and rubbed her eyes. Greenfield didn’t seem to be an important place. It was no centre of occult power, no space where the world rubbed thin between realities, and yet all of her research had been pointing here for months, worse than that, some of the most powerful and infamous villains in the world had come here already, it had to mean something, but all her simulations, all her calculations, all her analysis had yielded her nothing. It made her feel useless, powerless. It was worse that she had little in the way of abilities that really helped in a fight, sure she could memorise the entirety of a martial arts system in the time it took to pluck the information from its masters head, but all the things that made someone a good fighter, the instinctual reactions, the muscle memory, that she had to learn again. And that was only so much use when your opponent was so strong they could throw a tank without breaking a sweat.

And she’d survived, she’d survived, and she’d prospered, she might not be among the most powerful of the IFJ, but she knew for a fact she was the most hard-working, what else did she have?