Sveta asked about Roos, AKA ‘Jacked’, who had surgically removed his own body parts to implant hypermuscular cyborg replacements, and did just fine for himself until he got hurt in a fight. He’d left the hospital after weeks, which had been enough time for the natural degradation of tinker stuff over time to ruin his implanted parts. With broken parts he hadn’t been able to collect materials or earn cash to buy the materials, couldn’t keep up with tinkering. His health had suffered, and he’d ended up at the Asylum, trying to get stable so he could get back on his feet, literally. I told her he’d passed. Even with the hospital’s help, he hadn’t bounced back.

There were ones who’d ‘graduated’, ones who’d left or outright escaped, and ones who would have stayed for a lifetime, had Gold Morning not cut those lifetimes short.

“I wish Armstrong had met some of them,” Sveta said. “He was always super interested in the weird cases, parahuman research, all that geek stuff. He’d love to collab with these guys, since they’re apparently fantastic at deciphering this stuff.”

“I might be interested, forgetting everything else,” I told her. Thinking about the ‘everything else’ put a bit of a damper on my mood, after the lighter conversation.

Lighter but not ‘light’. Even now, I was kind of strategizing, and I was pretty sure Sveta was picking up on what I was trying to do. Keeping things positive, highlighting that parahumans had issues too. Now we talked about positives.

I wasn’t lying, though. A big part of me wanted to work with anyone who could help decipher parahumans and powers, especially with what Amy had said. Everything on the line, cracks spreading, broken triggers on the scale of Dauntless happening in greater frequency and numbers.

Yes, they’d tried to hurt us or kill us. They were after our reputations, all for the sake of political points. They had a twisted view that we were in a separate box from everyone else, and we thus didn’t ‘count’ when it came to the terms of war or diplomacy.

In their eyes, killing one of us was worth thirty of their own dying. To wound all of us with something as fuzzy as temporarily detaining a group that had just been on television for causing issues? They viewed it as worth a possible diplomatic crisis. Miss Militia or Jeanne Wynn? Too high profile, too problematic. Us? We were more acceptable as targets.

And I wasn’t ruling out that Amy or Chris had said or done something.

There were a hundred things I wanted to talk to Sveta about, but we chattered instead, keeping up the lighter tone, talking around the elephants in the room, and tried to convey a positive image.