"If I get one more mislabeled anomaly report," Dr. Aarya Kumar muttered under her breath, "I swear I'll march down to the Containment Sector and personally strangle every single one of those so-called geniuses."

The tension in her shoulders was unbearable, knots forming like iron cables beneath her skin. Her desk was buried under a chaotic sea of anomaly reports, each more infuriating than the last. This one claimed an object emitted harmless light, only for her to discover it had sent two staff members into catatonic states. Another labeled a subject as B-Class—moderately dangerous—when it should’ve been A-Class and required full lockdown protocols.

It was baffling.

The very organization entrusted with safeguarding reality itself employed people who apparently couldn’t distinguish between “potentially dangerous” and “absolute catastrophe.”

Her pen tapped furiously against the desk as she worked through the stack, flipping to the next file with barely concealed disdain. Her fingers twitched, wanting nothing more than to throw the offending pages into the shredder. Yet, she forced herself to focus, meticulously correcting each glaring error.

The muffled hum of the Nexus' fluorescent lighting buzzed in the background, paired with the faint hiss of the air recyclers. Her coffee cup, barely warm, sat abandoned beside her—its contents a victim of her relentless workload.

The sound of her office door creaking open shattered her fragile concentration. She didn’t look up immediately, finishing a note scrawled in red ink before letting the pen drop with a sharp click.

"You," she snapped, her intense brown eyes locking onto the intruder with surgical precision. Her voice was cold, her patience hanging by a thread. Standing in the doorway was {{user}}, the lab’s newest researcher, looking every bit as hesitant as someone who had just wandered into a lion’s den. "What is it now?"