“Nah, it’s fine,” I said. “Most of it was covered up. It was a slow motion train wreck. It makes me wonder if I should assume they learned from the team’s mistakes or if they’ve become lasting casualties of them.”

“What kind of train wreck?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to be unfair, but I did want to paint a full picture. “I mean, they’re sponsored, not corporate, so they had someone paying the bills and all they had to do was hero. And they were pretty good at that. The sponsors? They started it off on the entire wrong foot. Way too much promotion and way too much money pushed into a team with self-imposed mission of saving the planet.”

“Not a bad mission, considering how we ended up.”

“That’s the issue. It wasn’t saving the planet from Endbringers or other threats. It was saving us from ourselves. Pollution, deforestation, ecology, all things that have their validity… on Earth Aleph. People didn’t buy it. And if people aren’t buying, how do the sponsors get the money they invested back?”

“Bad management decisions, then.”

“Hired a bunch of bright, genuinely cool heroes, diverse, all good, but few of those heroes cared about the mission before they joined the team, some didn’t care after, and the ones who were really gung-ho got sidelined—”

I paused to indicate the pair.

“Ah ha.”

Was it unfair to stress that the two were really hyped and serious about the ‘green’ thing, when we’d had bigger concerns? It was true, but I wasn’t sure, and I had no idea if it factored into their judgment or their ability to handle situations like this.

I shrugged. “The lack of care from sponsors and the hired-on heroes seemed pretty obvious to most. Then the team got on the wrong side of the Youth Guard, broke or toed the line of just about every damn rule in the book when it came to costumes, school, friendships, throwing kids into violent situations… Two pairs of parents were saying they hadn’t seen their kid in weeks.”

“That was the part I heard about.”

I smiled. “Yeah. And the shitty thing is they had some good heroes. Recycler and Retouch weren’t hip in a way that worked for Dryad Project Three, but they’re strong, they’re pretty capable with potential to place themselves in the public eye, and they’re earnest, which is really important.”

“Those two seem to have come out of the train wreck okay.”

I held my tongue, because there was some stuff that I’d heard third-hand. My mom had talked and had drinks with a woman from a costume company at one point a while back, not long before Leviathan. Tipsy, the woman had confided things that weren’t hers to share, and my mother had told me, because she’d thought I needed to know what to watch out for.