“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.”

“Cheit,” Sveta said.

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

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

I saw them considering.

“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.

“I—” Lookout 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-okay. They’ll talk to the prison—”

“Yes!” Lookout shouted.

“We can go in as a group—”

“Yesss!”

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.”

Beacon 8.3