Natalie nodded. “It was nice to meet you all. You have my number if you need it.”

There was a chorus of farewells. I walked Natalie to the side door of the building, where the fire escape was. The way down was steep, and she kept one hand on her little messenger bag and the other on the railing as she made her way down, bringing one foot down to a step, then bringing the other foot down to the same step.

Her entire demeanor made me feel faintly anxious. I didn’t have a great read on her yet, she’d spent ten minutes at the temporary headquarters here, and most of it had been spent observing.

It was something of a relief to have her available if we needed her, and it was a different kind of relief to have her gone. The others, too, seemed to relax a bit.

“Natalie seemed nice enough,” Sveta said.

“She did,” I said.

I took a moment to get Natalie’s number off my phone and put it on one corner of the whiteboard I’d been using, the whiteboard leaning against the wall. I then wrote down Gilpatrick’s, with a note beneath it. For emergencies only.

The Patrol was a resource, Gilpatrick was one too. I didn’t want to overuse that card, though. Gilpatrick had already been too kind with being a reference for me while I hunted for work.

With those numbers in the top corner, joined by my own, I wrote down ‘Hurdles’.

We’d already covered the basics of the major players on the scene. Speedrunners, Birdbrain, Braindead, Bitter Pill. There were others that we’d learn about, I was sure. Prancer was the closest thing we had to a kingpin that needed toppling.

In a hypothetical world where everything went perfectly, I wouldn’t have minded getting Tattletale as a part of things. I wasn’t sure my hopes were that high.

I put them down as the people the group needed to knock down before they could fully set up.

I wrote down ‘Team: Needs name & brand.’

“Ooh,” Kenzie said.

She was watching me write stuff down, her attention no longer on her computers.

“Here,” Tristan said, approaching my whiteboard. He held it up, and then created the orange sparks. They solidified, becoming the legs that raised the whiteboard up to a convenient level.

“There’s no rush to name ourselves,” Sveta said.

“No rush,” I said. “But it needs doing. It’ll be easier to interact with other heroes once you have something. Are you taking a cape name?”

“Probably,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to go the doll route. A little too similar to Mannequin. A lot of the reaching, grabbing names are already taken.”

“Brainstorm, think about it, see what feels comfortable,” I said. “Kenzie and Tristan, you guys too. You probably can’t use your old cape names.”