“New team is having its grand unveiling at one of the community centers,” I said. “One member is Fume Hood. She was a B-list villain, once upon a time. She’s what we term itinerant. Wandered from city to city, looking for opportunities or teams to join. Petty robbery, grand larceny, mischief, vandalism, criminal mercenary work. A lot of the time she was one of the low-rate hangers-on in a group that a bigger villain would hire to pull a bigger job. You could even call her a professional distraction. She started when she was sixteen, stopped at twenty-four or so. She’d be twenty-nine now.”

They were listening intently, even the new guys. That was good.

“As a villain, she went by Bad Apple, Poison Apple, Pomme De Sang, probably called herself Applesauce, I don’t even know. I guess she wanted to corner the market on apple-related names so nobody would have something similar. She spent a lot of time palling around with a biotinker called Blasto. She kept going back to him to pair up. Might have been boyfriend-girlfriend, even. That ended when the Slaughterhouse Nine passed through Boston. We don’t know what happened to Blasto, but we can guess it wasn’t good. Poison Apple got a little reckless after that, even though she hadn’t met up with him in over a year at that point.”

I opened my folder and found one of the articles. I laid it against the front of the folder and held it out so they could read it.

“She pulled together a group of some old teammates and new teenage villains and pulled a shopping spree, hit a mall and took what they wanted. Heroes showed up, they ran.”

“Miscarriage,” one of the new people in the group said, reading from the article.

“Poison Apple makes globes in her hands. One of the tricks she can pull with them is send them flying off in straight lines. They explode on contact with hard surfaces, just enough oomph to knock you to the ground, and they create clouds of gas or splashes of liquid poison. Usually enough to make you nauseous, a little bit feeble, more if you touch the poison in its liquid form. Nonlethal and mostly nonviolent, most of the time. Except this time, a pregnant lady was caught in the gas, or in the explosion. She lost her baby, and it became a thing in the media. Poison Apple turned herself in, partially because of the backlash she’d generated. She was serving time for pled down charges of assault and battery when Gold Morning came around,” I said.

A couple of the angry faces in the group looked a little angrier.