“We wanted to wait until you were here to do anything,” I said. “Tattletale’s a persistent issue. She’s lurking in the background, and she’s hard to shake. Instead of having her looming, it might be nice to rattle her a bit. It might be possible to do it in a way that doesn’t tip her off about who you guys are or how you’re operating.”

“How?” Ashley asked.

I explained, “Kenzie can call her old teammates. We’ll offer an exchange. A favor for a favor. We know that the people in Cedar Point are easily spooked. This is new, untested ground, and thanks to you, we know that Prancer is the closest thing they have to a boss and he’s inexperienced. We can put them on the back foot.”

“I’ll give you the transcript and a recording so you can check it out on your own time,” Kenzie told Ashley.

“Back foot?” Ashley asked.

“They’re easily spooked and Tattletale gave them free questions they can ask. They’ve used some already, and they might have used them all,” I said. “So… we leverage hero groups and some secondary people. They do a one-loop patrol or light investigation, show their faces.”

“Pressure,” Tristan said. “Part of why you patrol in the first place, but we’re using other people.”

“We can apply pressure on our own,” Ashley said. “We have me, and we have Chris.”

“The law student said you should back off a bit,” Sveta said. “You did a good job of being intimidating and believable. It would be better if we stirred the pot some, let them focus on other things, heat dies down. There’s less of a chance they’ll investigate you if they’re focused on heroes.”

I jumped in, “Seeing how you were in Prancer’s face, I think it might be better to have you keep doing that, than to have you inexplicably be nicer or calmer. We just drop you back into Cedar Point when they’ve already got their hands full, you get to make them miserable and blindside them. They might even turn to you for help.”

“And that gives us power,” Ashley said.

“And we have a trump card,” Tristan said. “The recording of the conversation with Tattletale. That’s endgame stuff, but if it turns out she’s digging and she’s on our trail anyway, we can use it to mess with her. We can give them the impression she wanted us to pressure them so they’d use questions and keep buying her services.”

Ashley smiled.

Hm. Maybe not the best thing if Ashley was that pleased with my idea.