Now he could see that he’d been saved the trouble of saving himself, by Brandi Gold herself.

“Thank you,” he said with a shyness that Agilitricks would never have portrayed of himself.

“I have to get back to work, but why don’t you take a couple of pictures close up, while I’m here, just quickly?” she said.

“That’s really kind,” said Wooss, and from this distance he had no trouble focussing the camera in record time and snapping his more pleasant memories of the whole experience.

He watched her return to the Hyde Park fountain, and took some more photos from a distance. Eventually the professional shoot was over, and the team began to pack up. He walked the short distance to Centerpoint Tower (which is worth googling by the readers, to save my attempts to describe it), and had lunch in the revolving restaurant at the top, looking out the window at the whole city from its highest vantage point. Well maybe I will describe it after all. The base and many floors of the building form a rectangular prism no different from most buildings, but the top is a long narrow tube with elevators and then a larger circular section at the top complete with tourist viewing telescopes and a revolving restaurant.

Just as he was finishing his meal, the waiter came to collect the bill. He paid the exact fee and waited for the waiter to depart.

“I don’t suppose you could give me a tip,” asked the waiter.

“I guess so. Maybe you could change the colour of the tablecloths,” said Wooss, “But then I think you meant a financial tip.”

He gave the laughing waiter a large banknote, feeling that Brandi’s kindness to him should be passed on in some way, since he now had no trouble affording the gesture anyway. He was about to get up and leave, when he saw a huge female face coming into view. It was Brandi Gold’s. She had begun growing in the street. She must have had the gts gene. Hiding that from a general public filled with fans all over the world must have taken some doing. So why was she suddenly showing it now? Was it a sudden bonus part of the publicity shoot?

She was fairly close to Centerpoint when she’d grown into view. He looked out the window and saw everyone scurrying into buildings below, as Brandi reached down trying to grab one of them. Then her eyes came upon Centerpoint. She stepped closer, and he could see that her face was level with the window.

“You have to open the windows,” she said, “I’ve just finished an exhausting shoot in Hyde Park and then suddenly started growing. It’s never happened to me before. I’m absolutely starving. If you’ll just let me eat one of you, it’ll tide me over until I can figure this thing out.”

The restaurant staff and the Centerpoint security officers quickly instructed people to use either the elevators or the stairs, which were not normally accessible by the public.