Beacon - 8.2
Author: Wildbow

Beacon - 8.2 - Parahumans 2

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Defiant walked over to the Dragon craft, knocking on the frame of the hangar door.  He wore power armor -armor heavy enough it needed engineering to move around- and the rap of metal gauntlet on metal frame turned more heads than necessary.

He wasn’t the kind of guy who cared.  That hadn’t changed any from when he’d been Armsmaster.  I knew most of what I knew of him from Dean, with a little from chance encounters.

There were tinkers who were barely restrained.  They were excited about what they did and they needed only the slightest excuse to go on at length in their attempts to explain their work.  Then there were tinkers who were drawn into themselves, the work and the inspiration all happening in their own little world.  Kid Win had been more the latter.  Chariot had been, but he’d been a special case, with reasons to keep secrets.  Armsmaster, obviously, but that had been what had set me on this train of thought.

Lookout was the explaining, excited sort, naturally.  Bakuda, from what I’d heard, had been the sort to go on at length, even while in captivity, but she took that to an extreme, like it applied to other things than her tinkering.  Bonesaw… yeah.

I shivered a little at that thought.  Bakuda had been able to make bombs that threatened hundreds, thousands, or even theoretical millions of lives.  Bonesaw worked on one subject at a time, but her ability to make actual monsters and set worse things in motion made her scarier, in my books.

I distracted myself from thinking too much about that, focusing instead on how that the names I was pulling up were so divided along the gender lines.  Chariot, Armsmaster and Kid Win on one side, Bakuda, Bonesaw and Lookout on the other.

If I thought about it harder, putting effort into finding exceptions to that gender rule, extending my line of thought to tinkers I didn’t know but could make guesses about… it was really hard to imagine Dragon talking about the minutiae of her work with anyone that she wasn’t very close to.  Past a certain point, professionalism had to take over.  She couldn’t risk revealing weaknesses, right?

Trainwreck from Brockton Bay had been both a Case-53 and a tinker, reportedly.  The guy had taken the oversized silicone testicles meant for hanging off the back of pickup trucks and incorporated them as an ‘easter egg’ in his power armor at one point, to be revealed if the heavy metal ‘kilt’ of his power armor moved the wrong way – usually when he vented enough steam.  No surprise that he’d ended up with the Merchants when everything had gone to hell.  I hadn’t interacted with him in any casual capacity, but I was on the fence about whether his demeanor meant he’d be less guarded about talking tech, or if the fact that he’d had to build his Case-53 body made it too personal.

Had I been able to go to college and study parahumans -it still stung that I hadn’t- even something as simple as the dispositions and presentations of tinkers could be something really, really interesting to look into for a paper.

I wanted to be able to do research and dig for answers.  We’d already unraveled some of the big mysteries, and by some tragedy, we couldn’t actually work on them.  We weren’t sharing information.

Either way, it tied back to my general observation: as Bakuda’s personality had been colored by the same traits that made her ramble and rave about tech to even her captors, Armsmaster had taken the taciturn tinker approach and extrapolated it to the rest of his personality.  He stayed by the door, silent, knuckles of one gauntlet still resting on the frame, and he volunteered no small talk.

In fairness, I’d given him something to think about.  The Leviathan attack had to be something that weighed heavily on him.

Unfair of me to confront him, but I’d felt I owed my family that- living and dead both.  I’d have asked about Dean, but Dean had been injured early enough that I couldn’t imagine that he’d been swept up in the setup or rendered a casualty that might have been avoided if someone like Kaiser or one of the giantess twins had lived.

Thinking about it and Defiant’s place in it was heavy, so loaded that I felt inarticulately guilty by association alone.

I thought about the information and how we might share it.  The old Parahumans Online was there, but it was bare bones, fractured, almost so messy that it was easier to restart than to fix.

“-if I wanted to make something like that, I’d have to make it a cube.  I think that would be awfully silly to have a cube flying around.”

“You could make one of several cubes.  Or a thousand cubes all strung together.”

“It’d look awful, and the connections between cubes would be weak points.”

“If you want to talk about artificial and abstract constraints, the person you should really talk to is Defiant.”

“Really?”  Lookout was coming down the ramp with Dragon beside her, Dragon offering a guiding hand at her shoulder.  Lookout looked at the cyborg in green and gold armor by the side of the ramp.  “You break constraints?”

“I could help work out ways to minimize the size, the scale of the weak points, limit energy loss, even the look of it.”

“If you get a chance, on a day we’re not as busy, you should have a conversation with him.  He’s not as intimidating as he looks.”

“Hm,” Defiant grunted.

Lookout looked up at Defiant, then turned back to Dragon.  “But I want to keep talking to you.  I could talk to you forever.”

“Not forever when we have work to do,” Dragon said, giving Lookout a couple of pats on the shoulder.

“Thank you for showing me stuff,” Lookout said, turning around, talking while she walked backward.  I put out a hand as a just-in-case, because the ground was uneven, only recently covered in undergrowth, which had been uprooted and cut away to make this parkland accessible to humans.

Sure enough, Lookout tripped.  I caught her weight with one hand between her shoulderblades.  Cloaked tinkertech bounced against my wrist and forearm.

“It was my pleasure, Lookout,” Dragon said.  To Defiant, she said, “We got an alert from Valkyrie.”

“I saw.  No rest for the weary,” he said.  “Do you want to go?  Or should I call?”

“I’ll talk to her.  We might have to go, either way.  She doesn’t call often.”

“I’ll be out here until you’re ready to go.”

They were busy, so Lookout and I said our parting goodbyes then headed back in the direction of the others.

There was no reading Lookout’s expression, but there was a skip in her step.

“You happy?” I asked.

“Very.  Thank you for making me.”

“I didn’t make you,” I said.

“You’re welcome, though.”

“I really want to see them again soon,” Lookout said.

“Maybe,” I said.  My thoughts were on their admitted association with my sister.  That was a road fraught with hazards.

“Did you have a good talk, at least?  Or was it not a talk?  Did you both just stand there being all grim with you having your arms folded and him looming there with his spear in his hands?”

“We talked.  I don’t know if I’d call it ‘good’.  I got some answers on stuff.  My shoulders feel lighter, but I’m not sure if it’s genuine or if it’s because I transferred the burden over onto his shoulders instead.”

“He’s strong.  He can handle a lot, I think.”

I opened my mouth to retort, and then closed it.  It wasn’t worth arguing.

Besides, we were closer to people who could overhear and put pieces together.

Tempera and Fume Hood.  Tempera raised a white-painted hand in a wave, and they walked over in our direction, intercepting us.

“It’s been a little while,” I greeted them.  “Have you heard anything about Sam or Hunter?”

It had been so long ago- a scared boy and his friend with new and uncontrolled powers.  Too dangerous for me to intervene, apparently, but I’d been able to tap Tempera for help, and to ask Mrs. Yamada to look in.

“They headed over to the settlement across the ocean,” Tempera said.  “It’s smaller, with its own problems, but it has a place to hold parahumans.”

I nodded.  “And you guys?”

“We’ve been busy,” Tempera said.  “Trying to find places where help is needed, and where we won’t cause too much of a commotion.”

“We’re toxic,” Fume Hood said, with some irony.  “I see you got hurt.”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging one shoulder.  “Shot.”

“Stupid thing to do,” Fume Hood responded, with more irony.  “Don’t do that.”

“All the cool kids were doing it,” I replied, “A power nullifier knocked out my defenses, I figured I had one shot to get on board with the trend.”

She slouched forward a bit, head hanging so her hood covered most of her upper face.  Her thumbs were hooked into the belt of her outfit.  I saw the hint of a smile on her face.  “If you’re saying I’m cool, you might have other problems.  Any head injuries?”

“Ooh,” Lookout said.  “Or it could be the same thing.  Bullets have lead don’t they?  If you get traces of lead in your system, it can cause permanent brain damage.  Among other things.”

Tempera looked at me, eyebrow quirked- the eyebrow had white paint from her face-paint mask on it, making the fine hairs clump.  “Smart kid.”

“I’m not all that smart,” Lookout said.  “I just researched it a lot recently.”

“Oh.  Lookout, this is Fume Hood and Tempera.  They were at the community center attack.”

“I know.  I looked everything up and I found some of the surveillance camera footage, so I got glimpses of stuff.”

I wasn’t really sure what to say to that, so I put it in my back pocket for later.  I’d digest it and talk to her when we weren’t in front of others, if needed.

“That thing about it being cool to get shot- don’t take that as an actual example,” I told her.

“Ha ha,” she said.  “Give me some credit.”

That was part of the general problem- I had no idea how much credit to give her.

“It seems you’ve found your team,” Tempera observed.

My knee-jerk reaction was to say no.  That the team was breaking up, even though it wasn’t.  That it wasn’t my team, even though it clearly was, now.

“Guess so,” I said.  “You?”

“Seeing where I’m needed.  I was with the Wardens on a trial basis until things-” Tempera stopped herself.  “It was probably for the best.”

“For the best?” I asked.

“I mean the Wardens and what they needed from me- the rest of it was definitely not for the best.  The work I was doing was heavy.  Tensions between worlds.  It’s not me.  I prefer community level things.  Hands on work where improvements are tangible.  After I moved on, I was checking in with Fume Hood before and after doing low-level cape stuff.  Mostly refereeing riots.”

“It went so well last time,” Fume Hood said.  “I ended up going with Tempe for a bunch more.”

“Oh yeah.  That’s me.  I exude common sense,” Fume Hood said.

Tempera looked back in the direction of the other members of Breakthrough.  “In an email a bit ago, you mentioned what you were doing at Cedar Point.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It didn’t go great.”

“Well, um,” Lookout cut in.  “We did scare off the villains there.  We more or less handled it.”

“When powers get involved, it’s always messy,” Lookout said.

“It’s true,” Tempera said.  She produced a glob of paint in her hands, then dropped it.  It splattered on the ground to her right.  A moment later, it reversed course, leaping up to her waiting hand.  “Messy.”

“Neat,” Lookout said.

“I asked, after your email.  People were positive about it,” Tempera said.  “Cedar Point, and what you were doing.  It got me thinking, we wanted to be community heroes, but- there wasn’t opposition.”

“So they created opposition,” I murmured.  I glanced at Fume Hood.  “Sorry.”

“The timing was wrong.”

“You guys are thinking about this stuff?” I asked.

“After dropping the ball in our inaugural event, I think we have to,” Fume Hood said.  She had a billiard-ball green sphere in one hand, that she tossed into the air as she said ‘ball’.

“We have opposition now,” Tempera said.  “It makes it easier to be active.  So long as people can believe we’re doing something about this disaster with the portals, they’re letting us be.”

“Maybe,” Fume Hood said.  “Seems too easy.”

“It does tempt us down the potential road of manufactured enemies,” I said.  “History’s told that story enough times.  But I don’t think we have a shortage of real ones.”

“No shortage, for sure,” Tempera said.  She drew in a deep breath, then looked down at Lookout.  “Sorry, kid, to be talking about stuff this heavy.”

“Heavy and messy.  I can handle both,” Lookout said.  “So long as I’ve got my team.  And my team has their own people.  We share the burdens.”

Her focus turned to Sveta, Capricorn in red armor, and Weld, who weren’t as under siege as they had been earlier.  No mob of questions or attention.  Weld bent down to kiss Sveta, and held the kiss.  Not a makeout session, but not a peck, either.

I looked away to give them their privacy, a smile finding its way to my face.

“I like that,” Tempera said.

“Hey, Breakthrough,” Fume Hood said.  “Are these guys enemies?”

My head snapped around to look at her, then followed her line of sight.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Fume Hood said.

To my left, Lookout stood up straighter.  If I hadn’t been watching for her body language in the absence of facial expressions, I might not have noticed.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt,” my mom said.

“Tempera, Fume Hood, Lookout, these are my parents.  Brandish and Flashbang.”

“You mentioned you grew up with capes,” Fume Hood said.

“I actually wanted to talk to Natalie,” my mom said.  “Check that she’s managing okay, with everything.  But it would be strange, I think, if we didn’t even say hello to each other.”

“We won’t bother you,” my dad said.  “It’s good to see you’re doing well.  I like the costume.”

“I wanted to ask,” my mom cut in.  “Have you heard from your cousin?”

I shook my head.  “Not since we parted ways.  Communication is usually sporadic to begin with, but the attackers have been knocking out the phones.”

“You’ll let us know if there’s any news?  I worry.”

So they were an ‘us’ again, now?

“And I hear you moved,” she said it in a way that left the question or follow-up there only in abstract, not in any tangible form.

“I don’t remember the address off the top of my head, but I’ll let you know the address at some point.”

It was the best dodge I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

“I know the address,” Lookout said.

“Remember, you never know if there are people with enhanced senses around,” I said.  “I might not have a secret identity, but it doesn’t mean I trust everyone here with the address of the place I live.”

“Oh, for sure,” Lookout said.

“Very sensible,” my mom said.

Yeah, well.  I gave her my best convincing smile and a small nod.

She totally knew why I’d just done that.

Turnabout was fair play, though.  I knew why she’d done this, pressing me for information I might have been reluctant to provide on my own.  Telling her where I lived meant I had to deal with that slim chance that there might be a knock on my door, with my mom, my sister, or both on the other side.

“Oh, Natalie brought Tony, I’ll introduce you,” my mom told my dad.  She laid a hand on my arm in passing.  “Take care of yourself, Victoria.  You too, Looksee.”

“I’m Lookout, now.”

“Oh, did you change?  Be careful,” my mom said.  “Rebranding is a useful tool, but not if done in excess.”

My dad gave me what I decided to read as an apologetic smile, before following my mom.

I sighed.  I glanced at Tempera and Fume Hood, and I could see Fume Hood’s annoyance.

Wrong thing to comment on, mom.

“Is it a problem?” Lookout asked.  “That I changed it?  I used to be Optics and then Looksee, and now I’m Lookout-”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “You were never officially Looksee, really.  Even if you were, it really doesn’t matter.  I think the mentality only really applies if it’s twenty-twelve, you’re in the Protectorate or an up-and-coming team, and you really want to rise in the ranks.”

“Was that you?” Fume Hood asked.

“A bit,” I said.  “Yeah.”

“Is it you now?” Tempera asked.  A change of wording and tense, and Tempera had a good way of sounding thoughtful, serious, and kind all at the same time.  I could really believe that prior to Gold Morning, if her aspirations were different, she could have been great.

And in that little observation, I was already snapping over to my mom’s kind of mindset.

“Hard to say sometimes,” I said.  “You grow up with that drive, your parent’s ambitions in line with your own interests.  It can be hard to separate them from your own.  But I think so.  Yeah.”

“You want fame?” Tempera asked.  “No judgment here.  I’m curious.”

“Sure,” I replied, taking my time with the word, feeling less sure in the two-Missisipi seconds it took me to utter it.  “Maybe fame is the wrong word.  Prestige has a power to it.”

I glanced at my mom as I said it.  Was that her idea, too, rather than my own?

“Me too,” Lookout said. “Fame for me.  I want lots of people to cheer for me and think I’m awesome.  Does that make me shallow?”

That thought brought me to the edge of what felt like an existential cliff- the wobbly, spooked feeling that hit when at a high ledge and the brain and body momentarily forgot that flight was a thing.  I’d had similar wonderings when I’d been in the hospital.  I’d wondered if my thoughts were my own, and it had been terrifying and maddening, because they’d been all I’d had.  My heart had been my sister’s, because of the hormones, dopamine, connections and whatever else that had resulted from the changes-

-even just thinking about that made me feel nauseous-

-and my body had belonged to… nobody.  Nobody and nothing.  Not a single fucking soul had wanted it.  Not me, not my family, not the hospital, not my sister-

“I think Capricorn would be down for it, but I’m not sure about the others.”

Maybe my sister had.  Maybe it hadn’t been an accident.

“Ah,” I said, trying to bring myself back to coherence.  “The others and fame?”

“Swansong yes, for sure,” I said.  “Tress.  I don’t know about our multi-trigger or Cryptid.”

“We need to bug our multi-trigger to come up with a name,” Lookout said.

“Yeah,” I said.  I felt distinctly out of place, with the memories and the existential brink such a short distance behind me.  “I think there’s potential.  For rising in the ranks.  I think I’d be happy with it.”

“I have no interest in that, so if we get too much attention, we’ll send the people your way,” Fume Hood said.

I smiled.  “I don’t think it works that way.”

She was cut off as Dragon’s craft started up.  Narwhal and Cinereal joined Dragon and Defiant on board.  Weld, I saw, remained behind.

Another crisis, of the sort that wasn’t announced or explained.  Some of our best were out there now, trying to handle it.

And this- this series of attacks by Cheit.  We had to handle it ourselves.

There was a rush of wind as the air blew downward and out, with the dragoncraft navigating a route through the foliage so it wouldn’t knock too many branches down.  In the midst of it, it was hard to be heard, so I just signaled a goodbye to Tempera and Fume Hood.

“You’re pretty deep in thought,” Lookout said.

“Sorry.  Talk with Defiant, then my parents, thinking about our goals.”

“It’s okay.  I am too.  I saw stuff on Dragon’s ship that got me thinking.  Aren’t Weld and Sveta cute?”

I looked.  They were leaning against a pair of trees that had grown together- or one tree that had grown apart, with a seam running through it.  Weld had his arm around Sveta, who leaned against him, and the wind from the craft had blown her hair around.  Some had blown into his face and around his chest and shoulders- some, it looked like, had gotten snagged.  He didn’t react or brush it away like someone else might, if they had hair across their face.

“I want to find someone like that one day,” she said.

Capricorn sat on a slab of stone that looked Tristan-created.  Red armored, so it was Tristan in the armor right now, Byron as the observer.  Cryptid was a few feet away, sitting on a seat that was much the same, but smaller.  The coloring of the stone and the veins running through it made Cryptid easier to spot, as the camouflage extrapolated from the image of what he was sitting on and painted it up into his body, in fragments.

It was camouflage that would primarily work against someone who wasn’t actively looking for trouble, and primarily in static, dull environments.  In the city or the immediate vicinity of strange textures, it wasn’t nearly as effective.

“And there they are,” Cryptid said.  “Did you steal Dragon’s notes?”

“No!” Lookout said.  “And I wouldn’t.  She’s nice.”

“She gives me a vibe like Legend and Valkyrie do,” Sveta said.

“Good vibe or bad vibe?” Capricorn asked.

“Bad.  Sorry,” Sveta said.

“So powerful they’re scary?” Capricorn asked.

“No.  I think if it was that, I could deal with it.  I’m scary,” Sveta’s voice was quiet as she said it.  “But they give me this feeling, like they descend from the heavens and deign to deal with us mortals, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I could see that.”

“But also… Legend was tied into the Cauldron thing.  I had to get the full story from Weld, but it’s why he left the Protectorate.  He got caught.”

“He seemed remorseful, but I don’t know if that’s good enough.”  Weld was as serious as I’d ever seen him.

“Where I get paranoid is that I have to wonder if Valkyrie, Dragon and some of those others are for real.  Why are they that strong?  What happened, and… if they’re on that level, are they tied into it, like some of the other powerful people were?  Did they ignore stuff?”

“It makes for an uncomfortable feeling,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.  “Sorry if I offended anyone, saying stuff about their favorite people.”

There were a few heads that shook across our group.

“I like them,” Lookout said, “But I’m not offended either.”

“I think if I had a chance to get to know her and reassure myself on things, it wouldn’t be so bad.  But she’s kind of… distant.”

“Less distant for me, I think, because she’s apparently dating the Protectorate team leader from back when I was in Brockton Bay,” I said.

“Prettty much the same for me,” Weld said.

“Yeah,” Sveta said.  She smiled.  “I get that.”

“I don’t like her,” Cryptid’s voice was almost a mumble but not quite.  It wasn’t until I saw him lower his hand that I realized he’d had his fingers in his mouth- maybe adjusting his braces.  “But I think I’m different from you, Svet.  I get the vibe that the more we knew about her, the less we’d like her.”

“Well,” Lookout said.  “That’s screwed up, but that’s okay, because you’re screwed up.”

Chris scoffed.  “Thank you for respecting my opinions.”

“I might respect them if you justified them, except Dragon is cool and there’s no justification for thinking otherwise,” Lookout said.

“No infighting,” Capricorn said.

“Okay,” Lookout said.

“Let’s change the topic.  Before Antares and Lookout arrived, we were talking jurisdictions,” Capricorn said.  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.  “Remember when you were talking about your rationale for making Cedar Point our focus, Victoria?”

“I remember,” I said.  “High villain population, not covered in any existing jurisdictions, it slipped the net.  Plus they flaunted their villainous independence from things.  That kind of pissed me off.”

“Cedar Point is mostly okay now though,” Lookout said.  “I peek in now and again using cameras I set up a good while back.”

“Mostly okay,” Capricorn said.  “But there were other places that were up for consideration, and I get the feeling some more have sprung up since.”

“They have,” Weld said.

“Teams have other focuses,” I said.  “The gaps are getting wider.  It doesn’t help that the portals blew up like they did.  A lot of key sites fell apart.  Places where a team like Foresight might have headquartered are gone or hard to use.  It means crime is up, there’s more distractions, and there’s a lot more places for people like Cheit’s groups to hide without leaving the megalopolis.”

“What are you thinking?” Capricorn asked.  “An agreement?  That we all take territory and commit to keeping the streets clean of crime there?”

“No,” I said.  “I’m thinking… more comprehensive than that.”

“Comprehensive how?” Weld asked in a voice that was deep, the tone serious to the point of concern.

“Comprehensive… like jurisdiction.  Why do we fight over it?  We don’t want to be crowded out or to let others take credit for our successes.  Very often our territories are close to home, so there’s a personal element.  If there’s crime and we want our people to stay safe, we want to rid that area of crime.  Financially, it’s easier to hero in some areas than others.”

“Sure,” Capricorn said.

“I think so long as those issues exist, no matter what we do, there’ll be pushing, shoving, and trying to get people to take some cases or to get others for ourselves.  If we can address those issues… say we all get a special allotment, we put funds into a pot and apportion it out, and we organize, with communication and sharing of information.”

“I can do the getting and sharing information parts,” Lookout said.

“And,” I said.  “Keeping in mind this whole Cheit thing is demanding attention and resources while they’re doing other things in the background- it potentially addresses some of the other heroing issues we run into.  Like how hard it can be to go run off and do something where we’re needed when things can be going to pieces on the home front.”

“Meaning we can go investigate this group that attacked the portals while still maintaining a territory,” Capricorn said.

“Or investigate whatever.  Yes, for sure,” I said.  “And then a week later, we might babysit another territory while simultaneously giving the team in charge there a new, fresh set of eyes for any ongoing problems, while they do their thing.”

“Have you been thinking about this for a while?” Weld asked.

“Only since talking to Defiant.  I’m talking out loud as I think about it.”

“And you want to take over where the Wardens left off?” he asked.

“Not taking over, and not doing what they did,” I said.  “They’re- you’re, if you want, you’re still a fixture.  But the Wardens were always focused on the top-level threats.  Distant wars.  Class-S stuff.”

“Ogun,” Weld said.  “Sleeper.  Machine Army.  And a bunch of other things I can’t even namedrop, because they’re classified.”

I nodded, my arms folded.

“I’d have to ask,” Capricorn ventured.  “Let’s say we did this, and magically everyone was on board.”

“We wouldn’t need everyone,” I said.

“Even so.  We’d need enough, since it’s…” he struggled for a moment.

“The more you have, the more effective it works in aggregate,” Weld said.

“Yeah,” Capricorn said.  His mouth moved with a smile, barely visible with the gaps in his mask.  “Thanks.”

I tilted my head.  “What are you asking?”

“What’s our role in it?”

“Nothing too special,” I said.  “Except that people were already talking to us and communicating about collaborating.  They wanted a chance at doing their part in Hollow Point.  Let’s… I don’t know.  We’d coordinate until things were coordinated.  Let’s learn from our mistakes, and make every territory into a Hollow Point.  Make it so the bad guys don’t know who’s going to show up on a given day.  And because we have other focuses and bigger priorities, we offer leniency if they help us with the things that matter.”

“The Fallen,” Capricorn said.  “They’re not all gone, Defiant said.”

“Or any other big group that’s a problem,” I said.

“It’s a tall order,” Capricorn said.

My motivations weren’t pure.  My mom and the conversation with Tempera and Fume Hood had me thinking about why I did this stuff.  Why I did the hero thing.  She was a little ways away, having a conversation with Natalie at the very edge of the parkland clearing.

There were other things too.  I wanted information.  I missed having resources and we couldn’t lean wholly on an eleven year old girl with a bad family situation to tackle it.

“I know someone from the library who might know how to set up a database,” I said.

“A mundane one, that doesn’t require tinker maintenance.  It’ll last longer.  You- you’ve got something amazing with the time camera, and you wanted to be more frontline.”

“Yeah,” she said.  She gave me a frenetic nod, helmet bobbing.

“I don’t think we can or should chuck you into a fistfight with a cape, but… we can get you closer to what’s going on, test the waters, and we can only do that if you’re not maintaining databases.  Breakthrough has something solid with a pretty strong set of powers, and good group cohesion in a fight.  Let’s start building an infrastructure that we can lean on.”

“It would need refining,” Capricorn said.

“For sure.  We can sleep on it – but we can’t wait for too long,” I said.

“No, you’re right.  I don’t think we can afford to wait too long before doing something big to try to fix these big problems,” Capricorn said.

“And,” I said.  I paused for effect.  “Defiant gave the a-ok.  They’ll talk to the prison-”

“Yes!” Lookout shouted.

“We can go in as a group-”

A cloaked Cryptid covered her mouth.  “Let her finish.”

“We can see our people, see what we can figure out about what’s going on.  Let’s make sure our asses are covered and that we’re not neglecting anything back in the city.  There’s a chance that if we start poking our noses in, we might scare the people who are trying to pull something there.”

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