“I’ve got one camera with good aerial camouflage that I really don’t want to get damaged because it took a whole weekend and a lot of stuff to put it together. I have two more that don’t have special camouflage, they’re just painted to match the sky, and I can only use them if the sky is the right color, or if I don’t mind them being spotted. They could get destroyed and I wouldn’t mind them breaking that much. It would take me something like two days to get more advanced sound built into any of them, and then I’m putting a lot of eggs in one basket or I’m making a disposable camera not so disposable.”

“But you can do it?” I asked.

“I’m better with visuals, but yeah, I can do it.”

“Even if we decided it was worth building, it would take a while before you had that kind of microphone online,” Rain said.

“It’s a sound camera, not a microphone,” Kenzie said. “But yeah. And I’m trying to figure out the teleporters and the longer ranged cameras and I’ve got to fix up some old stuff so it’s ready if we need it, and that’s all stuff I really should do, and if I’m doing that I’m not doing any of the fun stuff.”

Ashley, on her screen, paused to write something down.

LEAVING SOON

She used a small burst of her power to destroy the paper shortly after writing it down.

Kenzie snapshotted the note, then typed it up, adding it to a log in the sidebar, where it joined two other brief notes that Ashley had written on her way into Cedar Point.

“One thing I’ll say about Ashley?” Tristan said. “She’s provocative. From what I saw of that conversation, she impugned Prancer’s leadership right off, forced him to prove himself, gave us a sense of the power structure. She almost had him talking about anti-surveillance measures, but he’s being smart about keeping that mostly under wraps.”

“He probably has some we haven’t heard or talked about,” I said.

“She didn’t make any friends while she was doing all of that,” Rain said.

“We don’t need her to make friends,” Tristan said. “She’s not going undercover. Not explicitly. She’s just… there. Keeping an eye on things.”

I said, “My instinct is that if she keeps pushing on the level she was, people will get antsy or suspicious. It might be good to have her hang back, wait a bit before making contact or visiting again.”

“I could swing through,” Chris said.

“We should wait until we’re more settled,” Tristan said.

“There are actually a few obstacles to figure out,” I said. “Sorry to take over the one whiteboard here.”