"Oh, you know. Stealing from the rich. Fighting other gangs, not directly profitable but our boss sometimes wants to us to stop someone doing something bad. The Empire runs dog-fighting rings and Bitch goes to a lot of effort to break them up. The ABB held someone for ransom once and we rescued him." And got most of the ransom payment, but Tattletale thinks she's got a pretty good handle on what Elan might find off-putting. 

Stealing from the rich is a pretty standard rogue thing… Elan should probably ask some followup questions about the gang fighting thing… dog fighting sounds really mean so putting that down is a good thing… rescuing people who have been kidnapped is definitely good.

"That makes sense," he says thoughtfully. "Who's your boss and what kind of stuff does he want? And why does he not wanna work with the PRT?"

Elan's guess is that it's most likely a Law/Chaos thing, but that's a pretty broad category of reasons and Lisa will probably have a better answer.

Yes, Lisa, who is our boss, inquiring minds want to know.

"We have a mysterious backer! He doesn't want his identity revealed and he's worried someone might find out through us if we're ever arrested."

"We vote as a team whether to take on each mission he gives us. The PRT, well, a lot of people don't like the government. Sometimes they hurt people, more often they just don't help when you need them most. If they can't or won't stop the gangs, what are they even for? They take my taxes but I don't feel secure walking down the street in half the city, and if I ask them for something there's endless laws, regulations, red tape everywhere."

Oooh, a mysterious backer. How mysterious! There's a chance that the mystery is because he's playing both sides in some way, but there's a lot of other explanations, too, like maybe he had to fake his own death after someone he thought was his best friend betrayed him.

… Elan should probably actually think about working for a mysterious employer in a world where there's so much messed-up stuff when he knows it's at least a possibility that he would be helping someone do actual bad things. He's not sure where to actually start, though.

"I understand about the government," he says instead. This definitely sounds like there's at least a little Law/Chaos conflict going on. "Will they actually get you in trouble for helping people if you didn't ask permission first, or do they just not do enough to help people who need it?"

That's a question that really needs context. "They don't go after you just for helping people, they're not cartoon villains. But sometimes a person really needs help but the law says you can't do the obvious thing, or you have to get government permission. And the government workers who are meant to help people in trouble care more about following the rules than actually helping, and if they don't follow the rules maybe they get fired..."

"Ignoring the rules is a lot more fun."

They need an example... Can't tell Brian's story since he just didn't, can't tell Alec's story because he shouldn't know she knows, can't tell her own story to any of them... Could tell him Rachel's story, it's public anyway. Would it bother Elan that Rachel's considered a murderer?

No. Cute puppies, evil stepmother.

Huh. She can definitely work with this!

"So for example, Rachel - don't call her that, she prefers Bitch even in private, she's only Rachel to blend in with civvies - her parents died when she was a child. She went to several foster homes, never found a place she belonged. By the time she was a teen she was stuck with a really strict foster mother, they hated each other... Rachel loved dogs but the foster mother forbade dogs in the house. She brought home a puppy and tried to keep it secret but eventually the mother found out and tried to drown it. Rachel triggered and her power made the dog grow and it killed the mother. Her power doesn't control dogs, you see, only makes them big and scary, she has to train them first to obey her."

"This is all public info, it's on the internet, obviously I'd never tell you about anyone's trigger that wasn't public. Don't talk to her about it though, she hates it. The reason it's public is that she ran away, and she was convicted in juvenile court of murder - without her there - because everyone assumes the worst of parahumans. While she was homeless. So she's a fugitive from justice and we're criminals for not turning her in."

"A random cop might not be a bad guy but he'd still arrest her if he knew there's a warrant. ...we're not all outlaws. In case that gave you the wrong impression."

(It's a little hard to think of her as Bitch, but if it's really what she prefers, then it would be more rude to ignore it than it is to use the b-word in general.)

The story with her foster mom sounds terrible! The part where she got orphaned, and the part where she was in a bunch of houses that weren't home, and the part where her pet almost got killed. And it was probably really scary to kill her foster mom by accident, even if they hated each other.

"Does she still have that one? Sorry, not important. I can definitely see why you don't want to work with people who want to send," (very small pause) "Bitch to jail, even if the cops were doing all the things they should be doing, like finding good homes for kids who lose their parents."

He thinks a moment. Right, he wanted to ask about the gang fights…

"What does fighting other gangs usually look like? Brian mentioned the big ones earlier, but it sounds like you're not usually going up against those ones because they're, well, the big ones."

"We don't fight them for the sake of fighting, and we don't claim territory like some of them do. If we're fighting someone it's because they're in the way, and we'll try to go around them. Or they attacked us and we're trying to get away - we're good at that - or they attacked us but we decide to fight back so everyone else doesn't think we're pushovers and goes after us next. So only if we think we're going to win, and Lisa's good at the thinking."

Yesterday wasn't like any of those and Brian really hopes it won't happen again.

Elan nods. He still feels a little uneasy about the thought of getting mixed up in gang fights, but "we don't fight for the sake of fighting" and "we try to go around other gangs" are good to hear. It sounds like this world is one where it's hard to always do the right thing because of a bunch of complicated reasons, which doesn't mean you shouldn't try but does mean that trying might look… different.

"Have you had to fight back so people didn't think you were pushovers recently? How did that go down?"

"A couple months ago we robbed a drug dealer's stash, burned the drugs and took the money. They called in a cape called Trainwreck and we could have gotten away before he got there, but we knew we could take him so we stayed. I blinded him, Alec made him crash, and the dogs took apart the robot he built for himself. That told them not to come after us later."

"Yesterday we miiight have made gone the other way! Made an impression we can't live up to. But Lung was coming for us, nothing we could do to avoid that, and we got lucky meeting you and Bug."

"It was awesome and we should do it again."

"Lisa just said we can't do it again -"

"We should get Elan and Bug to do it again, obviously."

"We are not," Brian says firmly, "picking any fights for the fun of it."

"Besides, if it's a rematch then he's more likely to come out on top," reasons Elan.

The Trainwreck story is reassuring, though, especially since it sounds like they didn't seriously hurt anyone and weren't trying to. Also, fighting robots sound badass. But he's got one other question.

"You said you vote on whether to do stuff when your boss asks… does that mean that everyone goes along with the vote, even if they personally voted the other way?"

"Normally, yeah. We can't force anyone to participate but if someone did that a couple of times we'd probably vote on kicking them out. We need to depend on each other."

"Obviously if you have a really good reason you can, y'know, tell us about it! If you think the pay isn't worth the risk or something, we can talk it out."

That actually sounds a lot better than Elan was worried about!

"That makes sense."

Although…

"If you did have to kick someone out of the group, how… bad would that be for you guys? Like would you have to change where you hang out so that it'd be harder for someone who wasn't in the team anymore and mad about it to betray you or call the PRT on you or something like that?"

… Probably they mostly cover that by being pretty sure someone wouldn't do that before they invite them. Elan is pretty sure he wouldn't; he thinks that even if he found out something horrible about one or more of these guys he would not want to call the cops on them about it.