“Just—I really don’t care if you add your stuff to it. I like my places feeling lived in. Some of the stuff is a friend’s, and they’ll take it when they get set up. Some is Mom and Dad’s. Some is yours, and that’s fine. That leads me to my second point. I want you to be here. I want you to feel comfortable.”

“Thank you.”

“I know my couch isn’t much, but you need a place that you can kick your shoes off and leave them where they are.”

I might have mentioned that I wasn’t quite that personality type, but I held my tongue. I understood the sentiment, what she wanted.

“I want you to have a place that’s yours, Vic.”

⊙

“I’ll start by asking this: why not be independent?”

Foresight had a strong aesthetic running through their costumes. Primary among those things was a mask or helmet design where each of the members of the team lacked eyeholes. Helmets with opaque visors, masks without eyes. The aesthetic involved lots of paneled body armor and loose fabric elsewhere, with iconography worked into the panels. It made me think of ninjas from movies, with the mix of lightweight costumes and armor, but without the Eastern style.

Their team symbol was a stylized eye, sans pupil, with a wildly exaggerated ‘4’ struck out in bold lines that extended well past the curved lines of the eye.

I was wearing my best civilian clothes. I’d opted to leave the mask off. I sat in a chair. Two of them sat in chairs in the office, and another two stood at the side.

I gave my answer. “If I’m being entirely honest, independent doesn’t pay unless you’re really good. At the risk of sounding arrogant, in another time and place, I think I could scrape by because I do have that experience, I have the knowledge, and I can hold my own.”

“You don’t think you could do it now?” Countenance asked. He was the second in command and the highest ranking team member in the room. His outfit was heavier and draped more than the others, both in how the cloth hung loose and how the armor panels were connected so they dangled from the piece above. The Foresight icon was in the center of his mask, like a cyclopean eye.

“I know who Foresight is and how you operate,” I said. “I know you want to move forward, you’re interested in helping the little guys, tackling the right issues, and take decisive, needed action in a calculated, smart way.”

“You read our webpage.”