I couldn't help but think, after seeing Wilson's backstory trailer and noting Webber's comments about Maxwell, that Wilson wasn't the only one who was offered assistance.

So have a series of one-shots, about promises that keep the to the letter of the offer without really giving people what they wanted at all. At this point, I definitely have ideas for Willow, Wendy, Wes, and Webber, so expect those four, at least.

Chapter 1: Wickerbottom

Eleanor Wickerbottom would turn seventy-six this March.

She'd outlived both of her children – little Mary, who died in her cradle of the croup, and rambunctious Alexander, only four years old, who'd drowned in the creek behind their house.

She'd outlived her husband John, a brilliant botanist who'd shared both his thoughts and his notes, and who'd thought it not at all strange to keep his wife as his assistant. She'd learned from him the proper definition of a conifer – noun, any of various cone-bearing gymnospermous trees or shrubs of the order Coniferales. She'd learned how to differentiate types of fern: Microsorum pteropus versus Asplenium scolopendrium versusAthyrium filix-femina. She'd learned the objectivity of a scientist, and the proper format for research papers, and the acceptable style for ink illustrations of flora and fauna.

God rest his soul, it had been an accident on an icy night, back when carts had been drawn by horses and not powered by motor.

And in one brief, cruel moment, Eleanor had become a widow at twenty-five, and her in the great state of New York, which had seen fit to repeal certain relevant portions of the Married Women's Earnings Act.

She'd answered the door one day to a fresh young face with slicked back hair and an insufferable smirk. She'd answered the door to a shark in a well-pressed suit, and signed all of the papers he set before her, because she hadn't had a choice. They'd taken John's house, with the cradle and the creek, and she'd been left on her own.

It had been 1875, then – back before women bobbed their hair and wore daring beaded dresses and flocked to the city for jobs as typists.

She'd penned her own applications by hand, in neat script. She'd attached her experience – volunteer work at New York University, where John had done his research – along with research papers of her own. She'd signed her name "E. Wickerbottom," and waited for a response.

She'd gone to Columbia, and to Harvard, and to St. John's. She'd walked into plush offices with men in silk hats, and they'd taken one look at her modest black skirt and neatly pinned-back hair and barked out startled laughter.

At Yale, she'd marched straight up to this newest silk-hatted old man, and she'd sat herself down in a chair of polished chestnut. She'd said, "Take me on for five days. If you think you can find a better candidate by the end of the day on Friday, I'll never set foot on this campus again."

By the end of the day on Friday, she had turned the shabby stacks of chaos in Yale's library into something a military sergeant would have admired for its efficiency. She had acquainted herself at least passingly with every topic and where it could be found, and she'd helped two young physicists choose and embark upon a topic for their thesis.

A year before Melvil Dewey first published the Dewey Decimal System, Eleanor Wickerbottom laid out plans for a library classification system based not on the date of book receipt but on topic and author name, with careful numbers to log each location.

She got the job.

She had been there ever since, running the shelves like a much-beloved machine – oiling and changing parts, tinkering with proverbial wrenches when something squeaked even slightly.

They had been good years, full of pages that whispered like the dry leaves of Acer saccharu. She'd spent long, sleepless nights reading not just botany texts, but everything else her library held besides. She had consumed tomes of astronomy, chemistry, and genetics. She'd crammed her head full of medicine, and history, and law. She doodled mathematic equations in her library ledgers. She practiced the proper fauna illustration techniques that her husband had taught her so long ago.

And she wrote. Copiously.

She wrote treatises and dissertations. She wrote research papers, and historical studies and once, even, an analysis of the political situation in the country. (Verdict: disgraceful.)

She spent her days among aisles of books, and she watched the confident young men of Yale plan their lives.

She helped them find what they wanted to study; she chastised them when their hypotheses were obtuse, or poorly conceived, or when they had been proposed and disproven years before.

They called her old lady Wickerbottom. She could not help but think that, had she been a man – had she attended Yale instead of tending its library – it ought to have been Doctor Wickerbottom by now.

Still. They had been good years.

She had her books to keep her company, and she penned books of her own to keep her mind sharp in the dark of the night. And if there were regrets, well. Eleanor supposed that one did not reach the age of seventy-five without some misgivings.

It would have carried on that way, she suspected. Perhaps she would have died at eighty-two, curled up in an armchair by her fire, with an unpublished manuscript in her lap, had she not chanced to drop the Encyclopedia of Animal Anatomy one day while restocking a shelf.

The book had fallen to the floor with a solid thump, pages fluttering open to a place in the middle where blank white space stared up at her like the milky eyes of certain fish in the family Anoplogastridae.

And there, in that blank white space, writing had appeared.

"Say, pal," said the script, flowing and lively. "Guess what? I know a place where you can publish all the books you want."