“I’ll get you a copy because you liked it so much. There’s also a video I don’t think I’ve shown you but it’s mostly you walking through a club with someone and everyone gets out of your way. That was interesting.”

“Do you want people to get out of your way, Kenzie?” Sveta asked. “I don’t think it’s good or fun.”

“Definitely no. It’s still interesting. But, um, I also want to learn from Victoria because I do want to be on a team, I want to be on this team of course, but whatever happens I want to be on some team. Then I want to be useful so I stay there. The more I know the more useful I can be.”

“I am interested in hearing it too,” Sveta said. “About teams, making heroics work.”

“I looked over my schoolwork and some old projects before I came today,” I said. “I typed up some bullet points and thought hard about what I wanted to say, and… being here, I’m not sure it’s valid.”

“It’s valid. I want to hear it,” Kenzie said.

“I would too,” Ashley said. “It’s why I’m here.”

I was caught a little off guard by that.

I could remember Ashley’s comments when the topic of the cards had come up. She’d liked the ‘handle with care’ aspect of it, which was illuminating in its own way. More specifically, she’d liked it while interpreting it as a ‘do not fuck with’ license.

The way it had been framed and what I knew of Ashley and Damsel of Distress made me imagine it as a ‘warning: volatile’ label on her breast, worn much like a nametag.

She’d reacted to me belittling her even in a small way, earlier, when I’d reduced her to a pin on a map.

“It might be worth saying why you think it isn’t valid,” Mrs. Yamada suggested.

I tried to find the words to articulate what I wanted to say without getting on anyone’s bad side, my fingers twirling a lock of hair while I looked down at the floor. I looked up and looked her in the eyes, then looked at everyone else as I said, “I can come here and I can say, alright, finances. Being a hero team is tough financially. I touched on this before. How do you get funding, one source, many, or is it institutional? What’s your budget, what can you expect to pay, where are the hidden costs, like medical or needing a headquarters, and what are the potential costs or risks if you decide to save money by trimming the budget somewhere? And maybe that angle works for some of you.”