“Can we compromise?” I asked. The looks I got back in surprise ranged from Semiramis’s wary one to a ‘get real’ look from Prancer, and hostile eyes behind a jolly bearded faceplate for Little Midas.

“Compromise?” Prancer asked.

“Lend him to us. We investigate, which helps all of us, we see what we can do to undo his hold on anyone, disable his power, whatever, and then we reunite after. If you’re satisfied, we follow through with our plans, imprison or sequester him. If you’re not, then we’re exactly where we are right here, right now, but with cooler heads.”

“That involves a lot of trust in heroes,” Prancer said. “And no offense, Tattletale, but you’re kind of a jackass. You and your teammate did get on the bad side of more than a few villains here.”

“Are you negotiating right now because you believe in it, or because you really like debating?” Tattletale asked.

“The second, I guess?”

“Back off?” she asked, in about the least offensive way someone could say that.

“Sure, fine,” Prancer replied. He backed off, walking away a few steps.

“It does involve trust,” Semiramis said.

“I’ve dealt with Bluestocking, I’m approaching you here in a fair, open way, about a situation that could hurt you. I’ve been fair,” I said.

“You say ‘I’ and not ‘we’, I notice,” Semiramis told me.

“Sveta too.”

“You’re carefully avoiding mentioning Tattletale.”

“Look,” I said, “nothing good comes from our guy staying here. We’ve got enough shit on our plates that we can’t make the time to exploit this guy against you, and that’s not our style anyway. If it was, we’d be doing way better than we are, instead of building the Wardens’ third headquarters downstairs and trying to wrangle a half dozen teams in the center and downtown areas of the city.”

“Admitting weakness?” Semiramis asked.

“Admitting reality. Things are a mess.”

“The difference is that we have to live with the people here,” Midas said. “We have to lead them.”

“You’re insecure,” Tattletale said.

Midas stiffened slightly. “I’m aware of what it takes to lead. Do I need to remind you that you ran a city and you lost it, your group is fractured, and you’re having to ask heroes for support because you don’t have enough of a team to lean on?”

“Talk to me in a month, Midas, because I haven’t backed down or bowed down yet, and I’m going to recover and surpass you without needing to quiver at the knees, biting your nails and worrying what the big bad group of F-lister villains in your corner world think.”

This… this was a massive pain. She was taking a completely different approach from me, where I was trying to build empathy, and Tattletale was… I wasn’t even sure. Getting him to back down?