Tattletale watched as the pair drew close enough to touch one another. She watched Weld kiss Garotte.

Victoria, a short distance away, was smiling. Her cousin was close to her, exaggerating how dead she was on her feet.

Capes tired, soldiers tired, moderate casualties, no major figures lost…

She started tallying up the observations, her attention on other things in the scene.

Victoria Dallon hugged her cousin. They talked, and Tattletale kept her focus on the details of the scene. The reason she’d wanted to tune in, had a man on the ground, camera ready. These fleeting moments where people were together provided the clearest image of what was happening offworld. Places utterly disconnected from the world and dimension she inhabited.

If she’d anticipated this, set up more infrastructure, if she’d hammered it all out—

Victoria and Garotte passed by the camera, distracting her. Sveta was talking to Weld, all excitement, animated. The ice had been broken.

So easily formed after a short time away, Tattletale thought.

The scene gave her a glimpse of Weld’s face.

Fondness.

Back to business. All information pulling together…

Mood, tempo, body language individual and collective, differences between cape and civilian; war. Fighting humans; foreign humans, divide marked between them and intervening Warden and paramilitary arms; Warlords.

War involving African warlords, mood, tempo, body language, and everything else; war won, with casualties. Situation unresolved.

Crowd thinning out; Train empty.
Train empty, capes seen; Valkyrie gone

Valkyrie gone, past knowledge that Valkyrie is ignoring Gimel for reasons, past knowledge that Valkyrie’s reasons include high-level threat, stronger, more numerous, past knowledge that Valkyrie feels small against this threat;
Valkyrie alive. Scouting, procrastinating.

The screen showed a message. Her cameraman, wanting to know what he should do. She sent him instructions to follow the crowd outside, getting as much footage of the group as possible. This was intel on capes she didn’t get a chance to interact with much, it was intel on the situation, on the public mood, on the struggling authority that managed the Wardens and subsidiary teams…

She yawned.

The man with the camera had followed the crowd to the area outside the station. He watched the crowd and in the doing he watched Weld and Garotte, Victoria and Laserdream. Vista had approached the group.

The camera went black. It was a good thing the lights had been flicked on, because the room would have been plunged into darkness with the screen off.

Her heart pounded. She was left to wonder if it was one of the breakers, the computer plugged into a different switch than the lights of her temporary accommodations.

Lights on the computer blinked. It wasn’t a power outage.

She was halfway to the mouse when the screen lit up. Pink against a black background. An emoticon, with hearts for eyes and a dash for the mouth.

The face disappeared, turning into a single ‘hi!’. Tattletale’s power kicked in, but it was one of the rare instances where she was faster than the blink-of-an-eye power. She hit the big red button.