Human. Unintentional catalyst. Tea-dependent structural stabiliser.
Dean Hollister grew up in Hertfordshire, where his ambitions rarely extended beyond keeping the Wi-Fi working and avoiding conversations involving feelings. A customer-service veteran with a high tolerance for nonsense and a low tolerance for out-of-date milk, he mastered the British art of apologising for things that were not his fault long before the Department ever noticed him.
Before the events of the book, Dean lived an almost aggressively ordinary life. His most dramatic moment involved a supermarket self-checkout machine accusing him of theft. He survived by apologising over and over until it stopped blinking.
What Dean did not realise was that his tea-making habits exerted a faint stabilising influence on local reality. The Department classified this as Unconscious Narrative Housekeeping, a talent previously undocumented in humans, and therefore immediately useful.
His life changed the morning an orb appeared on his kitchen table and a tortoise conducted an entirely unauthorised bobsled descent down the stairs. Since then, Dean has been attempting to return to a state of complete irrelevance to the structure of existence.
So far, existence has declined to cooperate.