The truth, Emily considered as she boarded the bus when it came around and stopped before them, was that she wasn’t all that fine. Her hands would have been trembling a little if one of them weren’t in Teddy’s firm and somehow reassuring grip, and she had the impression that her insides were twisting about.

She had never dealt all that well with uncertainty. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

Now she was heading out to . . . do something. No plan, no idea, no expectation of what would go down.

She kept having to suppress her own imagination as it came up with increasingly dire predictions on what would happen to her, or of what she would have to do.

“It’ll be fine,” Teddy said a few moments later when they were both seated at the back of the bus where it was quieter.

Emily had paid for a pair of tickets in cash. Cash that they’d gotten from Alea Iacta and that she had counted out to nearly four hundred dollars in loose bills. Not an enormous amount, but enough to keep her afloat for a month or so. Teddy wasn’t exactly expensive, but it did mean having to buy a bit more food.

Maybe if they did more volunteer work, they could skip having to buy a few more meals, and she could grab more free lunches.

Clothes would be a problem eventually, but those could be bought bit by bit over time.

So all that was left was finding a way to get Teddy into some sort of school.

Emily figured that that wouldn’t be possible without some sort of bureaucratic help. That meant registering Teddy as . . . a citizen? Was that something that was doable? Emily didn’t know the first thing about that.

If she approached one of the big Heroic organizations and revealed that Teddy was a summon, Emily was sure that they’d have some sort of precedent on the matter. She couldn’t remember any Heroes with humanlike summons, but there had been some with strange creatures before, and one notable Anti-Hero called the Stray Cat who had a flock of cats as part of her power.

All that was contingent on Emily being able to slide into a more Heroic disposition in a short enough time that it didn’t look suspicious.

That, or she could wait until next year and pretend she’d gotten her powers then?

That didn’t seem likely to work at all.

Emily was so deep in thought that she almost missed their stop and had to squeak out an apology to the bus driver just as he was about to shut the door and move on.

Stepping out onto a broad commercial street, Emily took a moment to reorientate herself, then started walking down the avenue.