Cosmic Companions Are Put to the Test

Guest Author: Steve Shepherd and Samantha Meghawry 

Book four, The Cosmic Companions, is our online gaming story. Fizz and Seth are playing together when a stranger in the game starts asking questions that feel wrong. Pixel doesn't tell them to panic. He gives them three steps: stop, block, tell. Stop playing. Block the person. Tell a trusted adult straight away. 

It's about as short as an incident response plan can get, and that's exactly why it works on a young child. No flowchart, no jargon, just a fixed sequence they can follow even when they're rattled. Trusted connection sits behind it: knowing that escalating isn't failure, it's the correct next step, and that a trusted adult exists to be asked, not to be avoided out of embarrassment.

Most of you will recognise the shape of this from somewhere else. Every incident response programme worth having depends on the same instinct: notice something's wrong, stop what you're doing, contain it, then report it, without the person who spotted it worrying they'll get in trouble for raising a false alarm. Organisations spend years and real budget trying to build that reflex into staff who are supposedly old enough to know better.

Fizz and Seth get there in three words. Partly because children haven't yet learned to second-guess themselves out of asking for help, which is a habit worth protecting for as long as possible, in a game and everywhere else. If we can keep that reflex intact through the teenage years and into adulthood, we suspect a good many of the incidents you deal with professionally would be caught a great deal sooner.