Most of the time, patrolling is a dull, uneventful affair, somewhat akin to the Ankh-Morpork City Guard ringing their bells and calling "All's well!" at night.
Sometimes, it's not.
Dauntless was not expecting to run into two unpowered Asian gangs (Japanese and Korean? that's what it looks like at a distance) duking it out in the middle of the street. Granted, it's the evening, and it's not quite the most well-frequented of streets, but still.
He decides to call for backup, not because he wouldn't be able to take them on, but because he's supposed to do that whenever confronting another parahuman or a large number of non-capes, at least until he graduates. He turns the comm on and describes the situation—a bit over a dozen people on each side, arguing and brandishing blunt weapons and in some cases guns—then waits and watches.
Lorica's bulletproof, though she won't relish repairing panels afterwards if she has to prove it, and definitely knifeproof, and carries tranquilizers - well, her little drones carry tranquilizers. More than good enough to handle an unpowered gang and turn them over to the cops. She's blocks away, but gets to his position efficiently and quietly.
The gangs have started fighting.
Dauntless is equipped with his spear (slightly glowy), shield (with a soft aura), and boots (crackling with lightning), and hasn't engaged yet, as they have not started using guns. "Good to go?" he asks Lorica.
"Unless you want something more tactically complicated than a lot of unconscious guys and a call to the cops, yep."
"Awesome."
And he charges. His boots are pretty good at that. He runs faster than would be expected and can make sharper turns than one would naively suppose. He doesn't quite want to use the pointy end of his spear on anyone, though, so he mostly uses his shield to bump into people and throw them at hard things.
After the moment of surprise, the first bullet flies.
She hangs back for the time being.
A few conveniently placed rocks, soda cans, and other similar types of obstacles start appearing and making members of both gangs seem much clumsier than they'd otherwise be.
These obstacles become mysteriously absent when they might have inconvenienced Dauntless.
...That's concerning. It's helpful, but it means there's someone else on the scene and Lorica doesn't recognize the power or the tactics. She continues not to dive in; Dauntless could use the reserve force and it doesn't do to show all the cards immediately. She does sometimes loan drones to people without being personally along to direct them.
Dauntless is undaunted by the mysterious changes of the battlefield, though it's unclear whether that's because he doesn't notice them between bumping people and dodging bullets that are becoming increasingly scarce thanks to Lorica or because he deems it not-a-threat for now.
He is pretty surprised when he has to suddenly take a sharper turn than usual to dodge a person in a smiling demon mask carrying knives that appears in front of him all of a sudden.
Lorica comms it in: "One or more unexpected capes on Dauntless's scene. Appeared suddenly, I didn't see him before so call it Mover. Going in." Dauntless can handle knives - from the direction of his shield. Lorica's named after armor for a reason. She hops off the roof vantage point and wades in.
She is not the only one!
An energy bolt that looks like something out of a Tinker gun flies in the new cape's direction but misses, and flying away from its origin is another cape, in a featureless white bodysuit, their face covered by a white glassy pane with a drawing of a face that shifts and moves as if it were a real face. They also happen to be holding something that looks like a stun gun.
The demon mask cape's power starts becoming apparent when a clone of theirs appears behind one of the Korean gangbangers and stabs him before their original dissolves in a puff of white powder. The clone does that after a second as well, but no new one is immediately apparent.
Dauntless takes this in and decides that his priority is protecting the lives of the bangers being attacked by the mysterious new cape (well, one of the mysterious new capes) while they run for it.
"On my way," says Velocity over the comm. "Can you get a tracker on him?"
"I can try," Lorica says. "Confirm Mover, some kind of duplicating teleportation power, temporary clones?" She readies a tracking device; it'll spring out from under the plates of her armor at anyone suddenly appearing. "Plus unfamiliar rogue-or-something likely Tinker apparently engaging the Mover."
Rogue-or-something continues engaging the mover, trying to hit them with the laser gun thing and failing. They keep failing to hit for a while—not only is the Mover a teleporter, apparently they are also pretty agile—before deciding to change tacks. The gun disappears in a way somewhat reminiscent of Miss Militia but white and is replaced by another gun that looks slightly more advanced. When they shoot with that gun, the bolt actually curves some to follow its target.
The Mover is hit! ...and dissolves into a cloud of dust. They reappear on a rooftop and then teleport right behind the rogue.
Dauntless, meanwhile, seems to have decided that his boots aren't good enough for dealing with that and is going after the gangbangers again.
Velocity skids into view. "Which is which?"
"Demon's the Mover."
The rogue yelps then tries and fails to dodge, being scraped by the knife. Apparently their bodysuit is at least slightly resistant to that, though, no wound can be seen. The rogue flies away, twisting towards the teleporter and shooting them—
And there dust again. Where are them?
Right in front of Dauntless, that's where.
Two of the nearest robots hum in his direction, brandishing tranqs and in one case a stun gun. Velocity zips up to Dauntless and pulls him out of the way at accelerated speed before he gets knifed; Lorica's tracking device springs out to land on the Mover.
...and is duplicated, right behind Lorica, where the Mover seems to have gotten his hands on a small beeping explosive device.
It's duplicated again, before the original one has even crumbled to dust, this time behind the rogue, and leaving its copy of the small explosive device attached to the rogue's bodysuit.
And it's duplicated a third time elsewhere. The first of the four starts crumbling to dust about now.
The rogue notices this, and the part of their bodysuit the explosive device got attached to seems to rip itself from the rest of the suit, and the rogue flies away from the device.
Lorica gets airborne too; a robot tases the copy of the Mover that was going to explode her. Robots zero in on the most recent instance of the tracking device at her murmuring.
The rogue examines the battlefield, where most of the gangbangers are unconscious and the remaining are either fleeing (in the case of the Koreans) or trying to take Dauntless out (in the case of the Japanese). They decide to go help the Ward, zigzagging in flight to evade the Mover and shooting the remaining bangers with the stun gun.
As for Lorica's tracking device, well, it is now five different tracking devices, one of which belongs to a Mover trying to stab Dauntless, one to a Mover trying to stab Velocity, two to Movers trying to stab (the first) and explode (the second) Lorica, and the last one on a rooftop pausing for a second to look at the battlefield.
Robots converge on the rooftop copy, firing tranqs.
They're fast! The copy that's on the rooftop has been tranquilized but there's another one down on the floor level spending a second to localize themself and oop they're behind the rogue again, who is currently paranoid enough to notice this and attempt a kick before being stabbed.
Gangbangers have all been dealt with by now, so Dauntless mostly tries to predict where the Mover will appear to stab them with the glowing spear.
Robots go and short out streetlights.
The rogue gets the idea and flies close to Dauntless. "Your stuff's too bright, stop moving," they say, an androgynous voice making assumed pronouns unclear.
Dauntless blinks and stops moving for long enough for the rogue to make a small spheric device that produces thick but quickly dissipating smoke around them, covering their body from about shoulder down. Dauntless gets the hint and lowers his spear so it's also hidden by the smoke, while keeping his shield (which doesn't emit light yet) up to protect against potential stabbing.
Streetlights start going out one by one,
The Mover attempts to stab them once, forcing Dauntless to swat them away with his spear, but then they're ashes again.
Lorica and her robots can see in the dark. Where is he?
He—
—seems to be gone.
The darkness makes Dauntless uncomfortable, but he doesn't move. No new copies of the Mover appear.
"Sprayers fall apart when I run them," Velocity says ruefully. "We can call in the PRT; they'll take a few minutes, though."
"Rogue?"
"I can make a foam sprayer appear, or pretty much anything. It's getting him to be in a single body for long enough to count that's the problem."
"Don't have to illuminate much space. He may've already run off, though."
"If we illuminate anything again he might just think—correctly—it's a trap, though, and not come back anyway."
"Yeah. Might be a lost cause. Worth a try?"
"I don't have a finite supply of whatever, I could try setting an automatic trap around any illuminated areas that automatically foams them."
"...Sounds good. You want to handle the light on your own too or should I fix a streetlight?"
"Uh, sure."
"Great, don't squeeze it too hard, though." They leave the smoke thingy with the Ward and start setting up a strange device out of pieces that appear out of thin air—or were they there all the time? The effect's confusing.
Sort of Miss-Militia-and-then-some. Lorica watches the proceedings with interest. A robot is poised to repair a light. "Say when."
Assembling, assembling, looking very convincing and believable, "When."
Bzzt, goes the robot. The light flickers on.
No teleporter.
"Damn. Worth a shot. I'm going to fix the other lights unless that seems like a bad idea."
"Well, he could be waiting for you to do that to appear and go all stabby-stabby again, if he expected this was in fact a trap."
"Can you set up sprayers under all the lights?"
They start doing that.
Dauntless fidgets.
"When I'm reporting in," Velocity says, "what should we call you, new cape?"
There, all done.
Lights: up.
Still no teleporter.
"Guess he's gone."
No one can see Lorica roll her eyes as her robots resume their normal flocking behavior.
The smoke device as well as the trap thingies start disappearing. Dauntless goes check on the unconscious gang members.
"I highly recommend it," says Velocity. "Gets you training and backup and support you can't get operating solo."
"That it does."
"You could come back to HQ with us, sign on tonight if you like," Velocity says encouragingly.
Glam makes a show of considering it, but shakes their head. "I think I'm fine for now."
A PRT truck rolls up to collect the gang members while being slightly more prepared than average police for the possible return of the Mover villain. "Right kids, that's our cue to head back in and debrief," Velocity says.
"I'll think about it," they say. "Good luck with debriefing!"
Lorica waves over her shoulder. "Thanks for the assist!" she calls as she lopes after Velocity.
Ah, yes, good old fun, a teleporter-copier trying to stab you and blow you up while two gangs fight below you. Yes, indeed.
Lorica continues to keep her patrol schedule. It's usually pretty uneventful. Her flock of robots includes a ninth, in a new model, now.
There is someone approaching!
"Hi, Glam."
"Hullo. What-all do they do?"
"The robots? Lots of things, why?"
"Curiosity. Robots are cool, I have a hard time making those."
"You're not actually a tinker per se, are you? So that makes sense."
"I'm not," they agree. "Though I can make stuff that's pretty tinker." And lo, a small device that makes holograms is on their right palm, showing a still shot of the teleporter they fought the other day.
"Lot faster than building it would be."
"Yeah. But I can't really give it to other people or sell it and become really rich so."
"If you can't figure out how to get rich off cape powers - legally, even - you aren't trying. It doesn't have to be retail."
They laugh. "I didn't say that."
"Noted."
"So, why are you bouncing around all alone in this cold, dark city?"
"I'm considered responsible and versatile enough to handle solo patrol and didn't ask for company."
"Ah, yes, patrol. One of the many perks of being a Ward."
"Mm."
"Aren't you going to try to convince me to become one, fight the good fight, get all those nice toys and stuff?"
"They don't pay me to recruit. I'd probably walk you through a pros and cons list if you were a tinker and therefore perpetually budget-constrained, but you're not."
Pen and a notebook appear in Glam's hands, and they speak out loud as they write: "Pros: if you're a tinker and perpetually budget-constrained, you get help with that. Cons: it's awful enough that even a tinker doesn't want to convince anyone else to join and be miserable together."
"I don't like the theory that misery loves company. And I'm not miserable anyway."
"Well, I think it's not unreasonable to want company when you're gloomy and the world's weighing down on your shoulders, the responsibilities crushing your sooouuulll..."
The pen and notebook disappear.
Lorica doesn't answer that. She just keeps hopping roof to roof.
They continue floating alongside her. "...hey, sorry, maybe that wasn't a very appropriate thing to say."
"No harm done."
"So, uh, any news on teleporter guy?"
"He hasn't turned up again."
"And you guys hadn't met him before." That wasn't a question. "That's a dangerous element to have around, leaving a body behind to do nefarious things while he's already ducking other people up is scary."
"Yeah. The explosives weren't good but they still exploded. Strategy pending."
"What powers do you guys have available?"
"Isn't that on the wiki?"
"It is, but I haven't had a reason to look them up before trying to consider how to create a strategy against a teleporter-copier using them."
"Wards are me, Echo, Dauntless, Boots, Windflower, and Althaea. Protectorate is Transit, Armsmaster, Miracle Max, Beneficence, Miss Militia, Velocity, Antares, Chevalier, and Drupe. That jog your memory?"
"...I've heard about Echo, met Dauntless the other day with you, know about Althaea, Armsmaster, Beneficence, Miss Militia, Velocity, Chevalier, and Drupe."
"Transit's a long-distance low-precision teleporter. Boots kicks people. Windflower's airborne poisons, assorted. Miracle Max is a chem tinker, Antares is a fire breaker."
"Okay. Hmm. Can people be made preemptively immune to Windflower's poisons?"
"Why?"
"Well, if we engage teleporter guy while immune to her poisons and then poison the area around us, he might inhale some of that and since stuff on him gets copied with him eventually the poisons should affect him."
"Windflower can't actually immunize people but I can air filter and so can Armsmaster, Antares burns it off before it gets near him, and Miracle Max can make it tolerable for another couple people if he gets taken off his usual work for a while. Don't know if Beneficence can boost people against it but she might be able to."
"Alright! So, how will that plan fail?"
"Well, for one thing, a rogue came up with it and it will therefore meet political obstacles, and for another we'd have to choose our ground to not poison random passersby."
"A rogue came up with it? Nonsense, it came to you in a flash of inspiration while you were patrolling."
"Aren't I clever. Why am I your point person for this?"
They shrug. "I just happened to run into you today. Also, I like tinkers, and the fact that you didn't try to convince me to join was a big plus."
"It still means that we'd have to know when and to expect the mover to pop in and start stabbing and expect to be able to get him to do it where we wanted him, somewhere clear. Even if everyone were on board with it."
"Yeah. Are all of Windflower's poisons deadly? No stun-poisons or anything like that?"
"Far as I know, but she's new and hates her power."
"I can understand that."
No comment.
"Okay, other than that, limiting his visibility is the obvious thing, probably. Also putting trackers on him, maybe if we could predict where he was about to land...? Or maybe one of your robots, a very fast and discreet one, could perhaps attach itself to him and try to tranq him?"
"I did land a tracker on him last time but it didn't help that much. Maybe I could rig something up that could do gaze-tracking through his mask and tell where he'd land and have something ready there but it'd need split-second timing."
"Hmm, maybe a tracker designed to deal with him, hooked up to lot of people's visors or comms or something so everyone knows where he and his copies are all the time."
"Transit's the only one who wears something with an HUD that's me-friendly. Armsmaster might be able to figure out an interface, I guess."
"Can't you design one for the other heroes?"
"Branding doesn't like it and I'm not particularly good at 'inconspicuous' to get around that, and it's hard for other people to get along with my tech anyway."
"Why?" Pause. "To all the things."
"Interferes with costume flow and recognizability, not my specialty, not my specialty."
"...'interferes with costume flow and recognizability' sounds like a really bad reason not to do a thing."
"I presume that one would be in your 'cons' list."
"No comment."
They giggle. "Right."
Patrol, patrol.
"Why does Transit have a you-compatible HUD?"
"He's my dad."
"Oh. That's nice."
"Yeah."
"You mentioned long-range low-precision teleportation. How does that work, exactly?"
"Okay, look, you seem nice, but I'm starting to feel like you're hoping I'll slip and reveal someone's secret weakness and I'm literally just summarizing wiki entries."
"Oh. Uh. Sorry. I'll wiki him later, then." They shrug. "I suppose my saying that if I were trying to do that I wouldn't be so obvious about it doesn't help, does it?"
"Only a little."
"Right." Pause. "Satisfying my curiosity about other people's powers is actually a pretty big incentive to join up. It doesn't quite overcome the cons, but still."
"If anybody ever asks me how to improve recruitment I'll mention that."
"Will you really?"
"If."
They giggle.
"Costume androgynous on purpose?"
"Mmhm! They pronouns, please."
"I'll alert the media."
"Please, do! ...and there's another nice pro, the media knows about you more readily. I should make a wiki page about myself."
"Go for it."
"I need to appear in public more often. Something grand, like singlehandedly capturing teleporter guy, or Purity, that'd make the news for sure."
"Admittedly, yes, but you're looking at a bad fatality rate there."
"True, but maybe I could be really stealthy and kidnap her without her noticing and then she wakes up in some containment facility—well, that's bad, I guess, but still better than harassing people on the street because of skin colour."
No comment.
"...you know, the lack of facial expressions and ambiguous body language makes it really hard to know if your silence is because I've put my foot in my mouth or what. Not that I'm saying you should do something about that, I'm just a random person. I'm just saying." They sigh. "For no good reason, really."
"I just default to saying nothing when I don't have anything to say. Although I do wonder how long you're going to follow me."
"Until I get bored, your shift ends, or you tell me to get lost, whichever happens first."
Patrol patrol.
"...you can tell me to get lost if you want, by the way, I won't be offended, and I understand my talkativeness doesn't tend to be universally appealing. I know how to shut up as well, though."
"Well, you might know that you won't flip out over minor social friction and become a serial killer, but I don't know that by default, and therefore you don't get to know exactly how much or little I might or might not want you to get lost except 'not enough, apparently'. It's a quandary."
"Oh. Right. That cape thing where we're all damaged horribly and tend to have conflict-seeking personalities."
"That thing."
"I'm not sure which would help more with convincing you I'm not about to go serial killer, just following you around in silence or leaving and finding something else to do."
"Probably depends on what you'd find to do."
"I'd probably fly around, doing a half-baked and untrained form of patrolling without access to back up if I need it or knowledge about any potential normal patrol routes and interesting areas, maybe run into some other hero doing the same and tag along again, eventually get bored and go home."
"Harmless until you provoke a villain, I guess."
"Mmhm, but I think I acquitted myself quite well against teleporter-guy. Of course, if it was actually Purity or something I'd probably fly the other way, or the way to the Protectorate base."
"She's bad news."
"That's one way to put it."
...patrol patrol.
Patrol, patrol, patrol.
The event that happens first is her shift ending. No killing sprees happen.
"G'night," Lorica says as she disappears into HQ.
"'Night." They fly away, and decide it's as good a time as any to go sleep.
Patrol patrol. Lorica gives a homeless dude the address of a soup kitchen and arrests a mugger and leaves a prostitute alone. Patrol patrol.
"Fancy meeting you here."
"Hello again."
"Miss me much?"
"Heaps."
Patrol patrol. "I alerted the media, but I'm not sure they won't just pick something and run with it."
"...that would be very annoying."
"Can't do anything about it, sorry."
"I wonder if I could convince them to call me something else by using a very different pronoun? Like zie, maybe, or ey."
"Strikes me as even less likely, but might work."
"Well, you know, it could be exotic and funny. What's your gender? Hero. But what's in your pants? Justice," they say, changing pitch to indicate the different characters.
"If you want to be classed as an independent hero and not a rogue you might have to interact with paperwork."
"I don't wanna be classed as anything, I just wanna help people in costume and get really famous while doing it. The first part's the important one, by the way, I'm not about to start staging heists just to be famous."
"That's good to hear."
"And my wiki page got taken down for being made up. Made up!"
"I'm not sure how notable you have to be before that's guaranteed not to happen."
They shrug. "...hey, could you ask your branding people about the gender thing? Like, what they think is best, going with 'they' or something else, or stuff?"
"I try to avoid talking to her. I can give her your email?"
"Oh, good idea." Pause. "Except I don't have a secret identity email. I'll make one later today, can you tell me yours? Mine will probably be mxglam@yahoo.com, but you never know, might be taken."
"My cape email is lorica@protectorate.gov but I have a bot handle everything."
"...dot gov. Damn. That's so sexy. Another point in favor of joining up." They shake their head quickly. "Anyway. What does the bot actually do?"
"Trashes spam, replies to routine queries, very rarely runs into something it's not sure about and brings it to my actual attention."
"If I sent it something like 'Hi it's Glam this is my email' would it think it's spam?"
"No, but it'd probably say 'Hi, Glam, you spelled my name right'."
"Why would it say that?"
"Well, mostly because it's always supervising me to pick up more information about how I'd reply and I just suggested it, but also because it's an innocuous reply to a first message from a source that doesn't seem to have gotten my email in a context where it could be copy-pasted."
"Huh. That's interesting. Why'd you set the bot up, anyway?"
"I use it for other things too."
"...would asking what things skirt too close to the fishing-for-secret-weaknesses-and-simila
"Li'l bit. But one thing it does is monitor forums for some topics and comment for me."
They blink. It's quite comical, a drawing of a face blinking on the mask. "Why would you do that? Commenting on forums is fun!"
"Spending all my spare time in a Tinkering fugue is more fun."
"Hmm. Tinkering fugue. That does sound kinda like a fun thing to have."
"I like it."
"Is it like flow, or completely different, or like it but much better?"
"It's like flow on steroids."
"...part of me really wants to know what that's like but another part is scared of wireheading. Although you and other tinkers seem to be pretty functional and not suffering from withdrawal all the time."
"Withdrawal takes a while to set in and feels sort of like wanting to, like, go for a walk, or pick up a book you had to put down in the middle of a good part."
"Does it get better or worse if you spend longer without doing it? If I spend a while without picking a book up eventually I kinda forget about it, or just don't think about it much."
"Plateaus."
"Well that's not too bad, then. And at the end you have a shiny new thing made."
"Yeah."
"And what does it feel like, actually making the thing? How does the knowledge—appear? I don't even know what questions to ask about it. And this time I did look it up online before asking, but I'm curious about a first-hand account."
"What does it feel like to - assemble a sandwich? You already know what things go in sandwiches, you can vary which things you put on a sandwich depending on what you're in the mood for and whether you think relish goes with turkey, you won't usually have hilariously wrong ratios of mustard to bread or put all of your lettuce on one side, and at the end you have a sandwich. It's like that. Only more so."
They blink again. "Well but, like, a sandwich is, I mean, you can just look at one and see the things that are in it, and I'm not completely confident I'd invent something that's exactly a sandwich if one didn't exist and wasn't available before."
"If I had to think of something that you would invent that nobody else has invented before, we'd be here all week."
Pause. "Okay, point, but still, tinkers have specialties, and the particular way you do things is different—but okay, I guess as far as subjective sensations go, I'm starting to get the picture."
"That's the idea."
"Changing subjects, you mentioned you don't like talking much to your branding person?"
"Not especially, no. I mostly convinced her to leave me alone after she consulted on my color scheme and have her seventy-five percent convinced that it would make me completely inoperable to make any aesthetic concessions that don't come to me mid-fugue, and don't want to remind her I exist."
"Does she have much input on other tinkers' aesthetics, like, say, Armsmaster's?"
"She mostly leaves him alone too, I think, except to occasionally complain about the beard."
"...seriously?"
"What?"
"I dunno, it just sounds incredibly... Well, you know, when you think of heroes, the Protectorate, saviors to us all, yadda yadda, you don't really think about someone nagging Armsmaster about his beard."
"Well, no, because that's not part of the brand they have us project."
"That goes squarely to the cons list."
"I'm sure."
"Not that they'd want to touch my image, of course, even when I'm covered from head to toe I'm gorgeous. But still, it's the principle of the thing."
"They'd definitely have to have a conversation with you about it even if they decided your costume was fine in the end."
"A conversation. Right. Well, I'm my own supplier," they say, and oop, now they're holding a copy of their bodysuit, minus face glass pane. "Soooo yeah, I'm cool, we can have a conversation, it'll just end in me wearing what I want to wear anyway."
"They get on your case about it if you go out in unapproved costume."
"Of course they do. But frankly, my costume is made of white." Extra costume being held is now gone. "It's about as unobjectionable as it can get. I don't even have a cape that could get stuck in a turbine or something."
"You might be fine, but they might think you're too boring-looking to merchandise or that you were too or not enough matchy with whoever you seemed most likely to be paired with in the field."
Scowl. "Deeeefinitely going in the list of cons."
"They sort of have a point. Imagine if the Triumvirate looked stupid or overbalanced together. Blue purple orange."
That draws a giggle. "Okay, granted, but it's my costume, it has sentimental value."
Shrug. "I think it's fine."
Patrol patrol.
"Do y'all have patrol schedules or do you, like, throw dice to decide it—wait, this is probably one of those too-invasive-and-suspicious questions. Nevermind."
Lorica snorts.
Conjure little rubber ball and start playing with it and throwing it at rooftops to watch it bounce.
"Miss Militia was really curious about you."
"Oh?"
"Your powers seem similar."
"Oh." They ponder that for a bit. "Similar-ish, yeah. From what I heard she has this energy thing that becomes a weapon but always a single weapon that only she can use, yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Mine's... different."
"Well, yes, they're not exactly alike."
"For that matter, are there any duplicate powers on record? I've never heard of it but I've never actually looked for it and someone with the Protectorate might know better."
"Second-gens, sometimes very similar indeed, but no outright dupes that I know about."
"Oh, and you're second-gen, right? It's interesting that you and your dad have such different powers."
"Yeah, no idea on that one."
"How rare are you? ...I mean, second-gen capes that haven't powers very close to their parents'."
"I don't have stats, and you'd have to define 'very close' anyway."
"Well, I guess just not-very-different would be enough. You two don't even share a category, and granted, they're arbitrary and not quite natural, but yeah."
"I do have a mover subrating for the suit, but yeah, not my focus."
"I wonder where they'd even put me. I guess there's mover, blaster definitely, maybe shaker since I can make stuff appear and move and misbehave in a large area, maybe changer, but that feels kinda incomplete."
"Mostly depends on your tactics, when you're that versatile. The ratings aren't descriptive, they're what you yell to the PRT squad."
"What would you have yelled to them if I had fought against you guys that day with the Asian gangs and the teleporter guys?"
"Would've depended on what I'd seen. If it was basically the same tactics, shaker blaster mover."
"...I'm gonna drive forum-posters crazy when I'm all famous and stuff."
"How so?"
"Well, for one, I'm gonna be reeeeeally vague about my powers, and try to use them in bizarre ways in public. But in general, forum-posters tend to get really attached to these classifications as if they were Meyers-Briggs tests or astrological signs or something. I've seen some heated fights about whether a given cape did or did not count as a Brute for using armor that gave them a size, durability, and strength advantage."
"Yeah, that's dumb. You have to act like they're a Brute regardless."
"Oh but are they really a Brute, deep down?"
"No. But I don't let my bot get into arguments like that, so."
"It could be funny to create a trollbot and feed the flames."
"I don't think so."
They shrug. "I have a peculiar sense of humor."
"I can tell."
"I mean, my mask has a moving smiley face."
"I can tell that, too."
"I know, it was just an example of where my peculiar humor shows."
"Yeah."
"I ran into Echo the other day."
"She hasn't mentioned."
"It was the end of her shift, and didn't feel very comfortable talking to a rogue."
"She's got slightly fewer options if you suddenly go... for lack of a better phrase... rogue."
"That's true, I suppose. I won't ask what you'd do if I suddenly," air quotes, "'went rogue,' for obvious reasons, but it's fun to think about."
"Have fun with that."
"Do Protectorate heroes not 'go rogue,' though? I mean, I guess joining up selects for having less abrasive personalities or being more willing to put up with inconveniences, but surely y'all have protocols to deal with that."
"Yeah, sure, but we're less likely to do it at any given time and more likely to have discernible warning signs."
"I'm curious about the 'discernible warning signs' part."
"If Echo started acting out of character, we've hung around her enough to notice. And her established character is 'be a Ward'."
"Huh. I'd expect suddenly being triggered by a random thing to be more common than anything that could leave enough time to be detected like that."
"If it turns out she can't stand being around the color chartreuse and it will drive her to murder, we're doomed. If the branding lady gets on her nerves, we have an opportunity to detect that."
"...chartreuse is a color?"
"Yes."
"Huh."
"It's not a very pretty one, either, but I think it has a low rate of driving people to murder."
Glam looks slightly unfocused for a moment—or their emoji-face does, at any rate—then they tilt their head. "Apparently I cannot produce chartreuse-coloured stuff using that as a parameter."
"Huh."
"Anyway, I'd thought light green was a calming colour, though now that I think of it I don't think I've seen many Protectorate buildings coloured that. ...what kind of colour is chartreuse even?"
"Light green. Well, yellowy light-green."
"Oh. Well then."
Patrol patrol.