"The basic idea is prepping darts with the poison in advance, or maybe using a tinker-made suit of sorts that could generate them in real time but that's probably harder to do and more of a hassle."

"Lorica doesn't make stuff for people besides her and her dad and asking Armsmaster would be even worse," says Betty. "Anyway I tried that. I didn't want to hurt the rats I really didn't but - they were okay anyway, nothing I make works injected."

"Why would asking Armsmaster be worse? And hmm, not working injected is annoying but not insurmountable. Do they only work inhaled?"

"Some of them work when they touch skin but most of them are inhaled. And have you ever tried asking Armsmaster for anything?"

"Can't say I've interacted much with him," he admits. "But touching skin is promising. If we patrol together, I—well, my Glam self could probably make you some form of contact dart." He looks over his shoulder at Glam. "Hey me, can you get me some contact darts?"

"I don't see how I'm supposed to get the poison into the darts. It has to go through the air."

"Hmm, where do you release the poison from?"

"Wherever. I can aim best if I breathe it out but that's still not very well."

He opens his mouth, closes it, looks over his shoulder and says, "This'd be easier if you were the one having this conversation."

"She can generate poison anywhere, has an easier but still not easy time aiming if she breathes it out, her poisons are inhale or contact only, and need contact with the air to work."

"I'm sooooort of aerokinetic, but only of air that has some of my poison in it," sighs Windflower, "and less if it's not very much, and not nearly well enough to keep it from dispersing."

"Hmm... Suppose I designed a dart with an aperture for your index finger that closed hermetically once you withdrew it, would you be able to generate the poison inside it and have it stay there? Or at least have only suitably nonlethal quantities of it escape?"

"As long as there was air in the dart, I guess. And room for poison in with the air. I can't make poison underwater or in my shoes if they're tight or anything."

"Maybe? I don't know."

"Oh. Hmm... Well, okay, it's possible to figure this out. If we have enough success with this we might get a Tinker to reproduce something similar. The nonlethal part is, is it possible to make antidotes for your poisons? And if so, do you have any poisons that disable someone but take long enough to actually seriously harm them that we can apply the antidote before that happens?"

"Miracle Max can do sort-of antidotes. He says they're not really antidotes just symptom suppressants but they'll keep people alive long enough to get it out of their system, anyway. And yeah, I've got a range. I've even got the blue stuff that can't actually kill even a rat however much I make. Poor rats though."

"Oh? What does it do?"

"It's inhalation only and it'll make you cough up blood and puke and get really dizzy and sometimes pass out."

"Hmm, okay, not terribly useful. But okay, if it's possible, then that could be your thing: shooting contact darts with poison that disables someone quickly but lets them last long enough to be given an antidote."

"It'd be better than just sort of standing around because if I do anything I'll hit somebody else," sighs Windflower, "I guess."

"Yeah! And it could be useful against the tougher capes Boots can't kick into submission, and some types of minions."