Who are you? Don’t answer. That’s Personnel business.

The general population believe that identity is a straightforward affair. They wake up each morning, look in the mirror and figure they are looking at the same cookie who went to bed the night before. Navigators don’t have that luxury. If you’ve been fooling around with the Agency’s Dream interface, you might wake up in a completely different timeline with a transcendental object stowed away in a briefcase under your pillow.

Transit can produce peculiar discontinuities such as these… Consequently, you may find yourself reading an orientation manual for a job you don’t remember applying for. Funny old world, isn’t it?

Which brings us to another very important point. YOUR AGENCY IDENTIFICATION. Agency identification may take forms you wouldn’t ordinarily recognize as identification, and that’s intentional. Conventional identification is designed to prove who you are to somebody. Agency identification is primarily designed to prove who you are to YOU. Therefore, identification proofs vary. Your credential may be a playing card, a key, a coin, a matchbook, a photograph, train ticket, a diner receipt, a gear, a library slip, an alchemical manuscript, you get the picture… You’ll know the proof object when you see it. Do not discard it even if you cannot remember why it matters.

The credential also functions as a proxy anchor. All of the archived information from your record lives inside the identification object. It helps maintain continuity when your accessible memories, surroundings, or chronology become unstable. You don’t have to understand how this works. In fact, sometimes trying to understand how it works prevents it from working.

Forced Re-cognition always mucks things up. So stay loose in the chassis! You’re doing great, kid.

The Travel Agency favors a more natural, freewheeling process which brings us, naturally, to pancakes. Pancakes are super important. No, this is not a joke.

Run-of-the-mill recollection is, “Where did I leave my keys?” Agency Re-Cognition is not like that. So certain experiences are meant to act as mnemonic catalysts. ENTER PANCAKES. For reasons which remain under investigation, pancakes have demonstrated unusually favorable mnemonic characteristics among field personnel. We therefore recommend that all recently displaced, reintegrated, reconstituted, temporally misled, or otherwise mixed-up Agents consume a piping hot stack before attempting anything strenuous. Copious amounts of butter and syrup are highly encouraged. Under no circumstances should an Agent attempt to parse the record on an empty stomach. That’s how you wind up founding a cult. Marvin heartily discourages that kind of thing.