Drillbit had harmed himself enough with his addictions that he could no longer be trusted. The loop had repeated too many times. He wouldn’t get better and didn’t want to get better, and he would either engage in a cape fight while inebriated or drive inebriated on his way to or from a cape fight, and he couldn’t drive while brimming with enough chemicals to kill another man. He would get arrested, even cooperate sometimes, get pulled into jail, enter withdrawals, and break out, sometimes letting other prisoners free.

Without a place like the offworld prison Goddess’s attack had torn up, there was nowhere and no way to keep him. He was the one I felt worst about here.

Sightly’s power scarred people for life to make herself beautiful on a temporary basis. At her peak, she danced through combats, all grace and poise. At her valleys, when she was at her lowest point and more than a week without a victim, she manifested attack mutations. Raw strength, claws, and teeth in hidden places. Her track record of victims was almost enough on its own. Her recalcitrance when it came to getting help or seeking alternatives sealed the deal.

Copse’s master had no last-of-the-endangered-species to collect on this world, now that she was set up again. There were no rare animals, and so she had taken to sending Copse after people. Two of the three victims had had rare conditions, vitiligo and keratinous horns, and both had featured in a modeling shoot that portrayed the beauty in those conditions. The third had been a Case Fifty-Three.

Copse’s master had collected them and kept them naked and contained in an open-to-the-sky garden prison, surrounded on four sides by manor, with windows looking in, so the master could always watch, treating them like zoo animals.

In the process of investigating and solving that whole situation, Foresight had found out that Copse’s master had ordered Copse to kidnap a son for her to ‘adopt’, five years ago.

The old woman had killed herself when the law caught up to her. Copse had been brought in. She was processed, taken before the courts for preliminary hearings, and given bond, which she paid. Less than twenty-four hours after release, she had been reaching out, pitching her resume, so to speak. Clear intent to recommit. Bond revoked, and… here she was.

And Happyland… simple enough. In our world he was a nobody, but he was a nobody who could snatch people up and disappear with them. They’d go to a pocket world of his where he had absolute power, and if and when they died, he left the bodies there, in a cell he never visited.

“We just going to do it in the lobby? I thought the box was upstairs,” Signal Fire said.

“It is,” Lookout said. “We can operate it by remote.”

“It’s weird to do it in the lobby,” Signal Fire said.