Sample:

Reggie Samson exhaled and smiled as he and Ben Handell passed the automatic sliding doors of the Kaiju Collaborative Response and Defense Agency, San Francisco branch office. Reggie waved to Nick at reception as they walked across the lobby toward the elevator.

“Is it weird I’ve been looking forward to coming back to the ol’ bunker after all that time in the great outdoors, Ben?”

“I don’t know.” Ben slapped the elevator call button. “If circumstances were different..? But I don’t need to see another redwood for a while, or dodge any more bullets. Or lightning bolts.” He managed a wan grin. “Ever. I think I’m more excited to finally go home and to bed.”

The elevator chimed. Reggie glanced at his friend as the doors opened and they boarded.

“I’m tired,” he said, “but you look a little green.”

Ben closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and sighed. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t sleep that well on the plane.”

“Or in the car,” Reggie said. “You were talking in your sleep.”

Ben frowned, more curious than embarrassed. “I was? What did I say?”

“Y’know. Sleepy stuff. Nonsense words.”

“Huh.”

The elevator stopped with a little lurch and the doors opened onto their floor, six levels below the surface.

Reggie clasped his partner’s shoulder as they disembarked. “Get out of here as soon as you can, buddy.”

“That’s the plan.”

“I’ll check in with you tomorrow before our formal debriefing. Seriously, man, get some rest.”

Ben was already shuffling down the hall. He raised his hand. “I really want to. I will.”

Reggie was nearly to his own office when Fred Harris popped his head out of his open doorway.

“Reggie! Heard you and Ben got back from British Columbia in one piece. How’s the big ape?”

Reggie grinned, but it felt loose on his face. He was pretty knackered, too. “Well, Fred, you know.” Fatigue had him a little prickly. “He was pissed off.”

Fred mellowed, apparently reading the room. “I bet. You guys all right? I hear you had a human problem, too.”

Reggie nodded. “Straight up eco-terrorists.”

“Jesus..!”

Reggie rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I’ll take King Shango — or just about any kaiju storm — over misguided nut jobs any day of the week. Almost all those idiots ended up dead, anyway. But… sure, we’re all right.” He thought about Ben and frowned. “Tired. Just dropped by to catch up a little, then I’m sleeping until…”

“‘Til it’s time to come back.”

They laughed.

“That.” Reggie agreed. “Anything on your desk?”

“Trash!”

Reggie peeked past him to get a look inside Fred’s office. “Seems neat enough in there to me.”

Fred snickered. “This trash is in the ocean. Ever hear of the garbage gyres?”

Reggie thought about it for a second. “Floating trash the ocean currents gather up, and stuff.”

“Close enough. Turns out they’re breaking up. Or, I guess, ‘reorganizing’ is a better way to put it. Flowing out of the North Atlantic and North Pacific and heading south. And, well… fast.”

Reggie frowned. “Currents don’t work that way.”

Fred touched his index finger to his nose. “That’s why it’s on my desk!”

It was weird, but it was also pretty much just another day at the office. “Crazy! Well, I guess if it’s anything, we’ll all know about it soon enough.”

“That’s how that works.” Fred saluted casually. “Glad you guys are home safe. I’ll let you get to your whatever.”

“Talk to ya!”

Reggie reached his office. His desk was piled with as much mail, reports, and other junk as he’d expected after being gone for over a week.

Not long after his first field assignment demonstrated getting beat up and tossed around was the essence of the gig, he’d made sure his desk chair was the best available. He fell into it with a sigh.

It was damn comfortable. Maybe the mail could wait. Maybe he could just close his eyes for fifteen minutes; turn on the massagers built into the thick, padded back, take a little catnap…

He managed to study the inside of his forehead for less than thirty seconds before a too-recent memory of King Shango popped up: two sloping, ram-horned simian heads looming above the redwoods, framed in a nimbus of lightning, sparks arcing to incisors as long as a man is tall…

“Ooooookay.” Reggie opened his eyes and leaned forward, both palms on his desk. “Maybe not.”

Humanity had dealt with the improbably huge, mysterious, natural-law-defying creatures since the late 19th Century. Society had adapted by necessity.

The human mind had a harder time of it, especially after a proximity event. PKST — Post Kaiju Storm Trauma — was an occupational hazard.

The assignment hadn’t been as bad as, say, Dana Cove, for Reggie — he was at his desk, not in a hospital bed — but he still knew to be extra nice to himself for a few days. His psyche would level off.

Ben, who was one of the Touched (technically so was Reggie, but, again, as Dana Cove showed him, in a way that was situationally specific), would probably recover faster, especially once the guy got some rest.

For now, though, it was probably a good thing Reggie had the pile on his desk to distract him, at least for a little while.

He dug in. The floor coordinator had sorted things in three piles: reports from the field, updates and memos from research / forecasting / monitoring, and outside mail Reggie had arranged to be delivered to the office since he was here or in the field more than he was home.

Happily for humanity, other than the King Shango manifestation in the Pacific Northwest, there had been no other verified recent kaiju storms. Reggie could skip the thin manila folders full of discredited reports and false alarms.

He reached for the second stack of binders, but stopped himself. Dry reports and data analyses were probably best reserved for tomorrow, after he’d hopefully had a good night’s sleep. Fred would have told him if there was anything critical to know, and he’d probably learned everything there was to learn about the ocean trash phenomenon from their brief conversation in the hall.

That left the personal mail, which would require just the right amount of attention and focus: nearly none.

Obvious junk mail went directly into the trash. Bills, he quickly shuffled out and stacked for later. That left a single, thick, padded envelope.

Reggie didn’t remember ordering anything. The postmark was from just before he and Ben had left, and sent from San Diego.

The return address, printed by hand directly on the package, made Reggie chuckle.

“Madame Manakuna? Seriously..?”

He tore it open and removed a bunch of paper-clipped newspaper cuttings, a beat up, photocopied and stapled handmade booklet, and a paperback book, New Spirits For A New Age, by the television psychic herself.

Reggie set aside everything but the book, shook his head, and laughed again. He remembered when “Madame Manakuna” had been a storefront palm reader in Laguna Beach, back in the eighties.

He read the back cover, which brought him up to date: she’d managed to parlay her skills into a daytime television show, lectures, and several books beside this one.

“It’s a living..?” Reggie muttered.

His skepticism was professional. Certainly, psychic phenomena were as real as kaiju, but only in the sense that they were linked in a way not yet understood. Some people, like Ben and, in a frustratingly specific and nearly deadly way, Reggie himself, developed what could only be called a psychic entanglement with, or awareness of, kaiju after a proximity event.

Classic psychic powers, like spoon bending or predicting the future and the rest? Either science fiction, or, in the case of opportunists like Madame Manakuna, surely carnival hucksterism.

A knock on Reggie’s open office door made him look up to see Ben in the doorway. His partner looked even worse than before: his skin was pale, and there was a lot of red in the whites of his eyes.

“Hey.” Reggie waved him in. “You headed out?”

Ben stepped into the office. He held a closed cardboard shoe box in both hands. “Not yet. I—”

“You really, really should, man. Hey, did I ever tell you about that fake psychic Gwen and I went to back in the day? She’s actually some kind of celebrity now! She sent me a book and a bunch of other stuff; haven’t looked at it yet, but I bet it’s gonna be perfect reading for the bathroom…”

“Reggie…”

“Anything going on for you? Or can you get some rest? Seriously, Ben, I’m a little worried about you—”

“Reggie..!”

The box Ben held rattled with such violence, Reggie wondered if it was making Ben’s hands shake, not the other way around.

Reggie stood up. “I think you should maybe sit down, Ben. You look like you might keel over. I—”

The lid of the shoe box popped off. Two buzzing blurs shot out and careened around the office.

Reggie flinched, yelping, and held an arm before his face. He fell back into his chair.

“What the hell, Ben!”

The buzzing things — they had to be dragonflies, or big beetles or horseflies — made a few more busy circuits around the office before alighting on the double-barred brushed steel arm of Reggie’s desk lamp.

Reggie very much preferred that the things weren’t in flight. He hated when a grasshopper or something landed on him; it was gross.

Slowly, cautiously, he lowered his arm and got a look at them.

At first, he thought he was seeing two large, green praying mantises, perched side by side.

He looked again.

Blinked.

They were only praying mantises from the abdomen down.

At the point where their bodies bent from horizontal to vertical (from the waist up, in a way) they appeared to be very tiny, perfectly formed, delicately proportioned women.

“Ben..?”

“Yeah. I know.”

Fighting his squeamish fear the… insectaurs… would launch themselves into the air again, Reggie leaned in for a closer look.

They had straight black hair that hung just over their shoulders. Severe bangs stopped short of delicate, arching eyebrows.

Their eyes were as mantis-like as everything below their waists.

Their “human” skin had a hint of greenish iridescence.

Reggie thought the fact that they had nipples a little ridiculous, followed with the realization that his noticing was just as absurd.

Both insectaurs folded thin arms across those tiny bosoms and cocked their heads to the left.

In unison, they said, “Yes, all right? We are real! You are seeing us! We do not have time for you to gawk!”

Reggie glanced at Ben, who looked even more lost at sea than Reggie felt.

“They talk,” Ben said.