Espionage

You are Jennifer Fairbanks, reporter at GenPost News known for your stubborn tenacity when a good story gets your attention. You are 27 years old, married only to the job, and one of the most attractive women in your office. A subject that has not gone unnoticed by your coworkers, or superiors. However, you've managed to dodge the advances of your peers and secure a respected position as a top notch reporter and columnist. You still have a lot of ladder to climb, but you've recently found a possible story that could, if true, secure a big promotion for yourself and garner national fame. There's a lot riding on this, but you feel up to the challenge.

Recently an old computer software company called SoftFirm has turned around a string of bad luck and managed to not only stabilize itself financially, but catapult its profits well ahead of most of its competitors. Noteworthy in and of itself, but when colleagues began to dig into the how of this miraculous turnaround everyone found themselves walking away from the story with barely anything to say, or corporate buzzwords such as "innovating the field" or "branching into a new market." As far as you can tell from what your colleagues discovered, there were no new innovations made, and no new markets explored. Even more bizarre, one of your close friends, Susan Carmichael, after investigating SoftFirm has quit her job at GenPost to work for SoftFirm as a secretary. Or as she puts it, a "managerial logistics assistant."

Something is wrong at SoftFirm, and your instincts are screaming out to you that there is a story here, something big. You have three goals. Investigate and discover the truth at SoftFirm behind their fall and rise, find evidence to back up your story through witnesses, reports, or files, and figure out why Susan is now working for SoftFirm and rescuing her if needed. Your story begins now...

You find yourself sitting in your office, a blank page open on your desktop computer. You haven't started writing your story yet, first you need to do some legwork. You fidget in your chair impatiently, you always had this problem, whenever a story presented itself you could never sit still and plan for it, you had to dive in head first and figure things out along the way.

You stand up, and walk to the bathroom to wash off your face and calm your jitters. You can't just run up to the CEO and demand the truth as to why his company suddenly went from circling the drain to Fortune 500. The cool water on your face helps you focus and as you stare at yourself in the mirror you realize you have a couple of options in front of you for investigating SoftFirm. First, you need to know what your greatest assets are, once you know yourself, you can better determine the best path to victory. You've always found that, time and again, whether it was yourself or someone else, when trying to determine your best feature the answer that kept coming up over and over was...