Growing Up Everywhere

Penny Popper never had a hometown.

Ask her where she’s from and you’ll get a list.

Germany. Okinawa. California. Virginia. England. Back to California. Somewhere else after that.

Her father was career military, and Penny grew up as the classic military brat, knowing that every three or four years the same ritual would begin. Boxes appeared. Furniture disappeared. Orders were quietly discussed at the dinner table. Eventually another moving truck arrived, and whatever place had finally started feeling like home suddenly wasn’t anymore.

To Penny, three or four years was about as permanent as anything got.

She became very good at making friends quickly.

Unfortunately, she also became very good at saying goodbye.

Every move meant a new school, a new bedroom, a new group of kids and another attempt to figure out where she fit. Just when friendships became close enough to feel permanent, another set of orders would arrive.

This was before keeping friendships alive across continents was as simple as opening an app. Letters took weeks. International telephone calls were expensive and carefully timed. Most childhood friendships simply faded after the next move.

Penny hated that.

So she found another way.

The Radio

Her first shortwave radio was an old tabletop set somebody had left behind during one of the family’s moves.

It wasn’t particularly impressive.

But late one night, Penny discovered something magical hiding inside it.

Voices.

She would slowly turn the tuning dial through the static and suddenly hear someone speaking from somewhere impossibly far away.

She learned about antennas. Frequencies. Atmospheric conditions. Morse code. Repeaters. Vacuum tubes. Transistors. Signal propagation.

Eventually she earned her amateur radio license.

Then she began convincing friends she’d left behind to do the same.

Soon Penny wasn’t just listening to the world.

She was talking back.

The Penny Network

Everywhere the family moved, Penny left behind another antenna.

Another radio.

Another friend who knew when to listen.

She kept notebooks filled with frequencies, call signs, time zones and propagation conditions. She learned which bands worked best after sunset and which signals could bounce thousands of miles through the ionosphere.

Her bedroom looked less like a teenager’s room and more like a communications bunker.

Her parents tolerated the wires.

Mostly.

Finding Signals Others Miss

By adulthood, Penny could repair radios almost as easily as she could operate them.

She became fascinated with electronics, eventually drifting into communications engineering, radio repair and signal work.

But conventional jobs never quite fit her.

Penny liked problems.

Broken equipment.

Impossible signals.

Things nobody else could explain.

Give her a perfectly functioning communications system and she’d be bored before lunch.

Give her a damaged transmitter, half a schematic and twelve minutes before everything goes sideways?

Now she’s having fun.

That talent eventually put Penny in places where people began noticing her.

Including people who weren’t supposed to exist.

The Signal

Her path to the Flavor Crew begins with a transmission.

Penny is working late one evening, experimenting with an old receiver she’d rebuilt from spare components.

While sweeping through frequencies, she catches something strange.

A transmission lasting only a few seconds.

Encrypted.

Then another.

Different frequency.

Same pattern.

Most people would have dismissed it as interference.

Penny doesn’t.

She starts recording.

Mapping.

Listening.

Over the following weeks, she realizes the transmissions are frequency-hopping according to a pattern.

And once Penny recognizes a pattern, she has an unfortunate inability to leave it alone.

She begins predicting where the signal will appear next.

Eventually she isolates enough of the transmission to identify something buried inside it.

A name.

Dark Kernal.

She has absolutely no idea what that means.

But somebody else knows she heard it.

First Contact

Several nights later, Penny is sitting at her workbench when every radio in the room suddenly erupts with static.

One after another.

Shortwave.

VHF.

UHF.

Even a receiver that isn’t supposed to be powered on.

Then everything goes silent.

A voice comes through.

“Penny Popper?”

Penny freezes.

“Depends who’s asking.”

“This frequency isn’t secure.”

Penny looks around her workshop.

“Actually, it’s extremely secure.”

A pause.

“No. It isn’t.”

Penny frowns.

She hates this person already.

The voice continues.

“You’ve been listening to transmissions you shouldn’t be listening to.”

“Then you shouldn’t transmit them.”

Another pause.

Penny smiles.

She’s definitely won that round.

The voice belongs to Missy Mayhem.

Joining the Flavor Crew

Missy doesn’t initially come to recruit Penny.

She comes to determine exactly how much Penny knows.

The answer turns out to be considerably more than anyone expected.

Penny has already mapped several Dark Kernal communication routes, identified their frequency-hopping sequence and built a crude directional system capable of locating their transmitters.

“I needed parts.”

Missy looks toward the coffee maker again.

“Does it still make coffee?”

Penny hesitates.

“Define coffee.”

Not long afterward, Penny receives an invitation to visit an undisclosed airfield.

She arrives expecting some kind of intelligence operation.

Instead she finds an aging aircraft, an improbable collection of women, crates of experimental popcorn and a communications room desperately in need of modernization.

Penny walks into the radio room.

Stops.

Looks around.

And smiles.

“Oh, we’re going to have some fun.”

She never really leaves.

Frequency Shift

Like every member of the Flavor Crew, Penny eventually needed a flavor she could call her own.

Naturally, she approached creating one exactly the way she approached everything else.

She started experimenting.

Penny didn’t think about ingredients individually. She thought about them as signals.

Some came through too strong. Some disappeared completely.

Others only became noticeable when everything else was tuned correctly.

The process reminded her of sitting in front of that first shortwave radio as a kid—slowly turning the dial through noise, searching for that tiny spot where static suddenly became a voice.

Eventually she found it.

Frequency Shift — Parmesan, Roasted Garlic & Thyme.

She developed Frequency Shift the same way she would isolate a stubborn transmission:

Tune. Listen. Adjust. Repeat.

A little more garlic.

Shift the Parmesan.

Pull the thyme back.

Bring it forward again.

Try another batch.

Penny never believed the best things were sitting perfectly in the middle of the dial waiting to be found.

You had to search for them.

That’s why Frequency Shift became more than simply Penny’s assigned Flavor Crew popcorn.

It’s her life in a bag.

Different notes coming from different places, brought together until everything lands on exactly the right frequency.

Penny describes the recipe much more simply:

“A little static is fine. You just keep turning the dial until something good comes through.”

Why Penny Stays

For Penny, the Flavor Crew eventually becomes something she never really had growing up.

People who don’t disappear every three years.

Her radios began as a way to hold onto friendships across oceans.

Now they serve almost the opposite purpose.

They keep her friends close.

Wherever the Flavor Crew happens to be in the world, Penny is the voice in their headset.

When they’re lost, she finds them.

When they’re cut off, she reconnects them.

When a signal disappears, she keeps searching.

And when everyone else hears nothing but static, Penny keeps listening.

Because Penny Popper learned something a long time ago:

Distance doesn’t have to mean goodbye.

Somewhere inside the static, there’s always a signal waiting to be found.

You just have to know how to listen.