“There are a few other things to do,” I said. “One way is to essentially run a protection racket that isn’t a racket. It’s easy for that to go wrong. There’s a higher level effect, which is easier to pull off when, say, a city has a downtown area and the shop owners gather together to pay a wage to the hero that draws attention and has a positive influence on their area…”

“Things have to be stable before that happens,” Tempera said.

“We’re not there yet,” I said. “There’s training and support. Offering powers for helping with the rebuilding, which Auzure was doing a bit of. There’s merchandising, but that’s a dead market right now, I think.”

“We fished in that pond prior to getting underway and we didn’t get any bites,” Crystalclear said.

“I was selling my brain, I know a lot about capes and the community, having grown up with it. That job’s done, and I don’t know if there’s much more opportunity for that.”

“Tell you what,” Tempera said. “I’ll put out feelers. See what people say.”

I nodded. “Sure. Thank you.”

⊙

I was lost in thought enough that my retracing of my steps on the way out of the hospital turned me in circles. I approached the same nurse’s station for a second time, and I stopped at the desk, waiting for someone with a spare moment to give me directions.

I wanted to do something.

There weren’t any openings. I was pretty sure Advance Guard had turned me down because of my background, the two year gap prior to Gold Morning. Others had their reasons for rejecting me. As it was, the field was fairly cluttered. Villains were keeping their heads down. As much as there was always going to be the bad guys, like Tempera had said, we didn’t have the systems in place to identify them or address them.

No way to make money off of my powers, to pay the rent and get out of Crystal’s borderline uncomfortably cluttered place.

“Yes?” a nurse asked.

I blinked. I didn’t ask her for directions. My thoughts went in another direction, spurred to life by my thoughts of the unpaid cape work.

“If I said ‘crisis points’, would that mean anything to you?” I asked.

“It’s been a long time since I heard that. Yes, it means something. Do you work with capes?”

“I… kind of am a cape. Would you be open to me giving you a hand?”

“Let me look into it. I’m not sure what the usual methods are, and it’s not fresh in my mind.”

“You’d want to identify the key patients, check with any parents, if they’re under eighteen, and they often are. Then with me, you’d want to check with legal, you can call my references, which I do have on hand…”

⊙