"She controls bugs. It was chosen by the PRT as a suitably unimpressive villainous name which sort of backfired into making the heroes look incompetent after she uh. Most of the way took over the city."

"Huh, I actually think much more highly of it as a name choice combined with the power."

"It certainly has me hero name beat - I was Tunnel Teen. I do not in fact create tunnels."

"Oh no, how did that happen?"

"The ward who joined most recently before me chose Clockblocker on live television and the PR team was extremely annoyed about this and wanted more control over naming. I didn't think it was worth making a fuss about."

"...what's Clockblocker's power?"

"He can temporarily freeze things he touches, why?"

"I just couldn't figure out what would go with the name, that's a pretty apt one though!"

"Yeah he's ended up a fairly popular hero despite the efforts of both himself and the marketing department. Or because of both their efforts - depending on how you look at it."

"What efforts are they making to market - or not market - him?"

"The action figures they made with his name on it got recalled but this just made the ones that did get sold more valuable as a collectors item. He also has a habit of plugging the merch they still make for him in a juvenile fashion but I think people like it in a sort of stick it to the man kind of way."

"Espers sometimes do product endorsements but not really in a way where there's third parties trying to control their image, that's between them and whatever brand they're working with I think."

"There's a bunch of complicated regulations for the Wards in particular, though even for the older capes there's an assumption and usually a contractual obligation to involve the PRT. It's rather a pain to manage but I think it works out well for providing capes with a somewhat competent institution that's on their side in marketing deals - also the PRT would do a lot of the marketing anyways just by virtue of having so many capes working for them."

"I think like... three?... or something like that... people have ever awakened while sixteen. Even seventeen is unusually early, and I'm almost eighteen. Plus the official stance is that the government doesn't need your birthdate or your legal non-esper name to give you an esper ID sufficient to buy dungeon-grade ordnance and whatnot, so if I wanted to lie they would not have any formal route to check on me. So - functionally an esper is an adult."

"I think there are situations in which capes are sometimes treated as adults even when they are much younger than sixteen, but the Wards in particular tries to push against that and in some ways that's good and in some ways that's bad."

"I guess if there's a lot of pressure towards fielding them, yeah. A solid majority of dungeons don't really need espers, let alone espers without adult-quality judgment that they'd have if they just lived civilian lives for a few years, so you don't see anybody calling for us to drop out of school and do dungeons if we don't really want to and if we do really want to we're acting as free agents, not - well, wards."

"The wards do still go to school, though only part time. Also I think the majority of non-adult capes are villains, and to some extent the point of having the Wards is to provide an alternative to that."

"...huh. Why are kid capes more likely to be villains?"

"My guess would be you more often get cases where there are problems with the capes family life that the government won't as a rule fix for them and running away and making their own way does better? Also might just be that the thing where capes tend to have heightened emotions has more of an impact on teens." 

"...I guess there's no good 'run away and do non-criminal child labor to support yourself' option."

"There exist some people doing non-criminal child labor thing - a powerful precognitive that the Undersiders rescued does contract work for the government and a bunch of other places and is making an insane amount of money about this. I suppose she might also do some jobs for villain groups like the Undersiders but the government doesn't want to be aware of this since then they might not be able to make use of her services."

"So... the government is willing to pay for non-combat child labor without involving the parents, and just doesn't advertise that they will do this in a way that random twelve year olds will ever hear about."

"Uh, keeping in mind that I can't say what her family situation is since that would be private even if I knew something, I think they would be able to engage with her even if her parents weren't involved, but only because of how incredibly valuable she is. This isn't entirely unique to her but it's not a consistent policy either."

"If you knew that it was generally the policy of the government never to directly contract with minors without involving their parents you could probably say that. I guess hypocrisy is par for the course though."

"That is in fact the policy of the government - I'm not sure I would call it hypocrisy so much as generally having rules that flexible if the relevant authorities on the ground think they need to be flexed but I am um. Known to be perhaps too forgiving of the government's faults."