He can read her War and Peace! He can also ask her if she has thoughts about how to handle various problems people might have in his territory when he does get to running one - he can at least guess at various scenarios and figure out how to handle them and that way he won't be completing neglecting being an Undersider (not that he phrases it like that).

Oh, that's a fun exercise. Civilization: Urban Warlord Edition. Can they construct a map with little paper markers on it without unsnuggling too much?

Yes they can do that! Lucien also has some scratch art paper with a layer of scratchable black over red that he can use his power on to quickly draw complicated line diagrams of the layout of the city.

Oh that's so neat. So, is power still being supplied by the city? Garbage collection?

Power is on a rotating schedule varying based on location, the Undersiders have a decent amount of input into that schedule. Garbage collection is provided at a few centralized drop off points.

So most people don't have power most of the time? Presumably they're already prioritizing hospitals but - what season is it here and now -

They evacced a lot of the severe cases, and the remaining hospital and two smaller clinics (one of which is run by the Undersiders) all have diesel generators for power. It's very nearly summer, which is good in terms of heating but the fact that the gas mains aren't a priority means a lot of people don't have working stoves.

How's the diesel supply looking to hold up? Have they considered prioritizing cooperative restaurants so people can get cooked food even if they don't have stoves? Is the destination to which they evacuated people going to continue to be available or are they in danger of losing a safety valve if they upset the wrong person?

They are getting diesel trucked in - most of the cost is in the generators and making sure the diesel doesn't get stolen or intercepted. Cooperative restaurants sounds neat, how would those work? The nearest hospital outside the Bay is two hours away given the state of the roads and technically is already at capacity but won't like, turn people away? Though there could definitely be politics about transporting people though. The Undersiders have some backup medical facilities of their own but not anywhere near a hospitals amount.

Well, May's not sure exactly how willing most people are to work for the Undersiders, but it sounds like whatever they're doing works on orphanage caretakers and also hospital medics, somehow, so taking it as a given that some people will go for this sort of thing, imagine a diner or something agreeing to cook food on behalf of, or directly provide food for, persons identified as in need of this assistance, in exchange for getting to keep their power on all the time, since it sounds like the power schedule rotation is under Undersider control.

It's generally only under their control in that they can influence when a given zone has power, not how much time it has power in total, but plausibly they can put a restaurant in a location so it can be part of two different zones and get power whenever either zone is scheduled?

Oh, that requires establishing a new restaurant, she was imagining working with an existing one. If they're going to build a whole new facility it might want to be more like a soup kitchen than like a restaurant.

Maybe if they move the borders of the zones around they can get a major street with a bunch of restaurants to be in both?

Maybe, but then there's no incentive for the individual restaurants to play nice with their barbarian overlords friendly neighborhood criminal gang.

"I'm pretty sure the way Skitter would solve this is by telling them all they have to play nice so they can all have the power working, and then she'd do something terrifying but probably not actually harmful to the first place that defected. I am not a fan of that solution but it feels like there should be some way to get things to work out so that the restaurants and customers can benefit without my having to be so horrible about it."

"Well, yeah, the way that works is that they pay for electricity and the ones that make enough money by attracting enough customers can continue to pay for electricity. I don't know if there's a way it works out like that when they have to make nice with the gang leaders to have electricity available to buy at all."

"Yeah there isn't a functioning market for electricity right now - we could do auctions but they'd have to coordinate to buy electricity and there also isn't a functioning system to do that. If things were better there'd be a restaurant union maybe. .... Though even then they would also need capes to defend them from looting and the heroes are spread too thing to want to prioritize anything besides major crimes. Which we also help - at this point the Undersiders outnumber them by quite a bit, and Skitter alone is worth several of their capes when it comes to stopping mundane crime."

"They're really scared of bugs?"

"Uh, she can control all the bugs in a several block radius, as well as sense what they are up to. So she can web up criminals with a very large amount of spiders, or bite people with various things. She chased some particularly recalcitrant people out of town with bullet ants which I don't really approve of but was under the circumstances not the worst decision she could have made."

"...what did those people do to need bullet ant torture? Where did she even get bullet ants, aren't those from Africa or something?"

"She imported the ants. Uh, I think it was a particularly aggressive burglary attempt and they made a bunch of bad choices when she tried to talk to them afterwards so she decided the best approach was to bite them with bullet ants a few times until they managed to turn themselves in to the police."

"You can't get aid to Africa but you can get them to mail supervillains bullet ants?"

"It's much easier to get a small number of ants when you can pay thousands of dollars than it is to efficiently distribute aid?"

"I guess, that's just really disappointing."

"I guess that makes sense. I haven't actually figure out how I'd handle a similar circumstance but I am sure it wouldn't involve bullet ants."