Glam isn't allowed to actually patrol the following day (it's a Sunday), so they mostly browse the 'net and read books. Echo's busy with her family (and she is allowed to go out patrolling), and Lorica's... doing something.
They're slightly worried about the fact that Yates hasn't replied to their email, but it's the weekend, so maybe that's why.
Has she replied to the email by Monday?
New Glam shrugs.
"We were actually wondering if it's possible to play up the secret identity aspect," Lorica says. "Maybe have Glam not speak in public, be even vaguer about their age than usual -"
"It won't fly," Yates says. "Maybe in another decade, but not now."
Yates frowns thoughtfully.
"My recommendation is Glam as the female persona and the second one as the male - you're more than welcome to name him."
"No, Lorica's right," nods Yates. "I'll need to think for a while about appropriate names for the second persona, and a costume unless you already have one in mind, but the option is viable if you can cope with the schedule. I'd want to have Glam patrolling at least a few weeks before the second persona."
Glam revises their opinion about their own sense even further down. It does not feel good.
"Should I change my silhouette and stuff? Make it maybe more obviously female? Should the, uh, non-cape identities also be distinct, or is it mostly okay if the other Wards know?"
Making Glam more obviously female: also does not feel good.
...Boots is gonna have a field day isn't he. Sigh.
"Genus, in the same line, if Phylum's taken," copy suggests, as his body's proportions change a bit as well.
"I can help them work on something to handle that," says Lorica.
"We can talk costume now or another time. No rush on getting Phylum street-ready under the circumstances," says Yates.
"It's as good as any," shrugs Phylum.
"The white has more-or-less sentimental significance, in addition to being pretty gender-neutral..."
"...but I'm not particularly fond of any color scheme."
"What should the mask look like?"
"It could change each time I go out, maybe a different animal every time while keeping the same general style?"
"Though that might be too similar to the mask that shifts all the time..."
"Too similar," agrees Yates. "You could go with some kind of animal headdress option as a mask, perhaps a wolf, or the costume could be less obviously related to the powers. Glam's projected attitude seems kind of whimsical or I'd recommend adding a tail... If the whole thing winds up organic a more earth tones color scheme might work better. Do you prefer to go armored?"
"I can just generate whatever armor's necessary at the moment," explains Glam, "but he's more limited in what his supposed powerset can do."
"Though with enough practice with my actual power my regular bodysuit could be just as bulletproof."
"Why does my attitude preclude adding a tail to his costume, though?"
"I think I can pull off almost anything with enough practice."
"Might need to script some things and play with the character in my head, maybe write about it a little."
"Probably practice with the people here in HQ before actually going out."
"Well, it's no good deliberately adding grump to a persona, there's more than enough to go around. Serious and focused aren't bad traits to play up. So, armor, animal head mask, I'm less and less attached to blue and gold as I think about it - bronze, maybe, bronze armor over grey underarmor and a coyote head mask and possibly an accessory through which to 'channel' your power to generate the animals."
"His power's gonna be generating animals, then? Should it have a limit? Like, maybe one animal at a time, maybe a type limitation or something?"
Yates turns her monitor around. "Coyotes look like this. There can be a difference between what your publicly displayed Phylum power is and what hidden depths you can reveal in a more serious emergency; most capes don't reveal all their contingency options. Sticking to mammals, a small number at a time, or animals with realistic capabilities for their species are all reasonable 'show limits' that you can discard under pressure before resorting to collapsing your personae. I don't think Phylum should display the ability to fly under his own power, but animals to carry you around are likely enough."
"A 'no' would have sufficed. If you evoke Native American aesthetics and aren't planning to claim, in costume, believably and ideally truthfully, to belong to the culture people will think of when they see you acting that way, then we will have protests to deal with and it is my job to prevent that. You could probably get away with a druid look but you'd need to replace the bronze with leather and deal with the reduction in defensive power."
"Or maybe I could be really good at dodging?"
"Another idea for the summoning would be making the animals appear from out of view, round a corner or something."
"Especially with species whose presence in Brockton Bay makes no sense."
"If you're in a crowded situation or there's backup for your opponents watching and you don't already have the creatures that you need made, there's no hiding that the animals come from nowhere, and limiting yourself to local species would leave you mostly with small vermin of limited effectiveness plus cats and dogs. I think you're going to have to conjure them, but going through a noticeable ritual first is better than just spontaneously appearing everything. That, or you could have a single animal capable of shapeshifting?"
"I think yes, but advise you to stick to relatively accessible Gaelic or Welsh - names that have assimilated into Anglophone cultures or a fairly straightforward and pronounceable noun. Possibly change the cape name from Phylum to something which matches. Fawn-colored leather armor, bronze studs, green under it, perhaps a gray wolf or some other animal instead of a coyote."
"She's not quite a realistic animal. You're controlling her, so that's not unexpected, but you'd pass casual inspection better if you knew more about how your favorite shapes for her moved," comments Yates. "Can you whistle? It might be good to occasionally whistle at her and pretend to be delivering commands that way."
Loen appears, new costume and all. "...but I think it's pretty clear that I'm at fault for last time."
"It was probably gender plus authority not meshing very well with my personality but that's..."
"Kinda exactly the point."
"Like—sometimes I can introspect and think about some aspect of myself and go, 'Hm, this should not be here, I should change it.' But sometimes I only notice there's something that needs changing after it bites me in the butt. The former feels nice and good and yay I am good at self, but the latter feels more like I am a moron for not having noticed it before it caused trouble."
Glam goes to bed cuddling with Loen, and since they aren't yet enrolled in Arcadia they go to their old school still. In the afternoon, most of the Wards are chilling in the Break Room when she and Loen arrive.
"My point was more that sometimes powers can have more room for variation than we think of at first. Also that with Tinkers everything's possible but either they must be really interested in helping out or you must have money for that, so not much of a point in itself other than 'Tinkers have really broken powers.'"
"Pronouns," says Windflower.
"Pronouns!"
"Well, everybody won't do my thing, this thing is done by less than 1% of the population. And the rule's pretty easy in my case: the one that looks like a boy is a boy, the one that looks like a girl is a girl." He gestures at himself and Glam as he says this. "And if there's someone you genuinely don't know or remember, using 'they' is actually a pretty good and grammatically-correct catch-all alternative."
"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."
"And make buoys, one at a time, farther away from you," says Lorica, "and a robot can hop along the line of them and see how far away the farthest one you can make is. If you can make functional binoculars that might help."
Bye binoculars, hello small toy telescope.
Couple more buoys.
Stop.
"Hm. Now if I were to guess it's the angle. It's far enough away that any new buoys would be hidden by the old ones."
But! A few of the buoys have started disappearing. And it's not been half an hour yet.
Glam has not noticed this.
At first, as the circle of buoys expands in all directions, they all stay.
(Actually not all, some of the buoys of the line suddenly had never been there.)
(It's kinda hard to keep track of the buoys when the disappearing effect makes you question whether you were really seeing that in the first place.)
But eventually, once the sea has moved them enough that some buoys could get away with disappearing without the casual human eye noticing, they do.
Think think.
"Okay, so, I'm thinking along the lines of my brain's... resolution, so to speak? Like I said, I can't really keep track of literally all buoys, and as long as what it looks like to me is the same then my power keeps stuff within that limit? And you didn't tell me immediately about the duck vanishing, so I couldn't... accurately expect to be informed of its disappearance. Or maybe it's because you're invisible to my power or something. I'm getting a Schrödinger's cat vibe, here."
"Maybe? But if my power looks at ways I could come about the information that my duck disappeared, goes through the bot, and then hits a spot it can't see, it might've just thought no decision would be made, or that the information wouldn't go past that node. We could test the same thing, except this time you resolve in advance to tell me immediately when the duck disappears, and then test it again but make it so some automatic alarm not involving you will go off when the duck disappears."
"For my power to work I need to... be reasonably confident that it worked, is my guess. Which normally just translates to field of view, right, that's how I normally tell if a thing exists is by looking at it. But this is apparently working off knowledge of the world that I don't necessarily have."
"Ha. Okay, so your range qua range is big enough to be legitimately challenging to test, but for other reasons, when unassisted you are mostly visual-or-immediate-staging-area range. Next time I'm around the world at a Simurgh fight after she flies off I'll get you a private feed of some place."
"I mean, unless you've been under the influence before you've probably got uncontaminated judgment and my main advantage is conservatism. But neither Leviathan nor Behemoth could nope you as totally and permanently as she could, so you should save her for last."
"When you trusted the robot to bleep at you in response to the duck, you got the duck to appear. If a robot would reliably inform you of what was and was not sticking around, you'd have feedback on it even if there was lots of it and some of it was behind you, no?"
"And in any case there's a truly ludicrous number of buoys around right now, I think on a typical situation I won't be running into these limits. My power seems to leave me some leeway between my not paying attention to a thing and it making that thing go away, namely the half-an-hour thing, though that leeway seems to get shorter as I make more stuff."
All buoys disappear, a bunch of new copies appear so everywhere's observed by someone, new buoys start appearing again.
The rate of disappearances from sections the copies are looking at is higher than before, but lower than the unobserved sections were.
However, now copies start noticing disappearances. "One vanished here!"
"One here."
"Two here!"
"Here."
...it is not the easiest of tasks keeping track of which Glam is saying what.