"You can catch her now if you want but she'll be annoyed if it isn't important. I can take a message," says the bot.

It is as it was left.

"Good night," says the bot, and it flies away.

"Hello. I'm the new Ward."

"Glam, yes, Chevalier told me about you. Do you want to bring any particular questions or concerns up first or shall we just get started?"

"Yes, one particular concern. I, uh, don't really have a gender."

"So that's the 'little challenge' he mentioned," snorts Branding Lady. The nameplate on her desk says she's called Phyllis Constance Yates. "I think this will cause a relatability problem. Sans you the Wards are gender balanced at the moment, but Windflower doesn't get much face time and Lorica doesn't exactly radiate femininity; given my druthers I'd tell everyone you're a girl. A butch one if you like."

"Uh, yeah, but see, I'm not. At the moment. I'm very eager to cooperate with you in most things, but this is one where I'm pretty unlikely to budge. As for the relatability problem... well, I mean, look, I'm not the only nonbinary person in the country, and while you may not need to focus on the nonbinarity, I'm pretty sure having one such cape in the Protectorate would already do lots in that department for other enbies."

"Other...?"

"Enbies, like letter n then letter b, plural? For nonbinary."

"Whatever the kids are doing these days and however they're abbreviating it, we try to stay out of niche politics like that," says Phyllis Constance Yates, waving a hand.

"I wouldn't say it's 'these days,' and it's not really a matter of politics to me. It's just—a thing. The politics, well, it helps you probably, and you could play it up or down however you feel would be best, but marketing me as boy or girl would both be lies." They sit cross legged on the air. "I mean, look at this costume, it's about as genderless as it could be, action figures wouldn't be out of place in either aisle, and that might even boost sales since you'll have twice as many potential customers."

"Excuse me, do you know what market segmentation is?" says Phyllis Constance Yates. "It's a good sales strategy you're proposing to completely abandon for naive economic reasoning just because you want to do something cute with your presentation. We want you to stand out, but not for... random modern notions."

"I don't actually care much about the economics of it, I'm just trying to figure out how to convince you, because it's not something cute, it's something important to me. I don't want to stand out—well, I mean, I do, but like I said, this particular aspect is not what I want to stand out about, I don't give a drat about what you do it with so long as you don't lie about it. It will be very grating—and I'm being euphemistic—to have people misgender me on the street or in the media. And I guarantee you I will be very cooperative about everything else, I'll even get rid of this particular suit, just let me have this one thing?"

"Kiddo," says Phyllis Constance Yates, "do you think anybody's completely thrilled to pieces with their public image? You have to live with it because working with the public and being accessible on the right level to the public is part of your job. And even if we made it out that you were ultra-paranoid about your identity and wouldn't tell your real gender, whatever that is -" she looks them up and down "I guarantee you people would guess and run with it, only they'll trip over each other without a unified image to go by."

"...but this is my real gender." Sigh. "And besides, I'm offering you basically free rein about everything else in my image and I'm pretty sure you don't have even that for people like, say, Lorica. And if we're consistent about it it's really not that hard, yanno, 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she,' it's even grammatically correct no matter what some people on the internet will tell you. And in any case, I don't care if people guess and run with it, so long as we don't actively encourage them to it."

"Lorica has technical constraints on her costume. And so far I see no evidence that there is a 'we', that you're willing to work with me on anything, or that you have the slightest understanding of what things are and are not 'that hard'. You're not going out in costume until you've been cleared by me, do you realize that?"

"...look, you do realize parahumans are a bunch of traumatized people with typically combative and asocial personalities and more power than anyone ought to have in their hands, right? I mean, there's a reason villains outnumber heroes two-to-one, and if when they try to become proper recognized heroes they face this kind of opposition it's no wonder. There are like a million different ways you could've phrased that."

"I don't like your tone."

"I'm sorry! But I wasn't exactly super happy about yours, either, and I'm pretty sure mine wasn't any worse than that, and again, with an environment full of superpowered traumatized people who could be triggered by the color chartreuse, I think all of us should really be trying to get along a bit better."