It's the anniversary. Glam would very much not like to celebrate.
It’s their last day on Winslow High—they’re being transferred to Arcadia on Monday—and also their last day without a patrol schedule assigned.
And the PRT released a small announcement on its website about Glam joining the Wards. Now their wiki page doesn’t get erased, of course—they’re no longer speculative. They wonder what it’s got on them.
She also got a note with a time and a place she had to be if she wanted to get more of that drug.
And that's why Lorica's sitting on the roof near the intersection in question, frowning at it.
At the exact time written on the note...
No one shows up.
However, a bizarre winged half-rat-half-plant hybrid creature comes from an alley, flying low and dropping a syringe with a note attached to it in front of Glam before starting to fly away between the buildings, keeping to the shadows.
Lorica drops to the ground beside Glam to look at the note.
The creature goes through tight alleys and stops to hide a lot before checking with echolocation whether the area's clear. On one of those checks, it notices Lorca's bot and starts fleeing.
"Somebody must've made that thing. I don't think it fits any known villain powersets. Or for that matter rogues."
"I didn't see it very well, what was it? I thought it was a bat."
"There's plant in there, and a rat tail. The wings might be bat wings. It self-destructed when it noticed it was being chased and couldn't lose the bot so it's at least slightly intelligent."
"Hm. Weird." Glam looks like their costumed self again. "We should probably have Miracle Max look at this thing," they say, grabbing the syringe.
They report their findings and return to the PHQ with the note and the drug.
Lorica paces.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Thinking about how to stealth a bot better."
"Oh. Aren't there, like, magical Tinker things that can make it invisible or something?"
Snort. "It's slightly outside my specialty. I'm mostly a software Tinker and invisibility is thoroughly hardware; that I can do robots at all is very much constrained by the extent to which this constitutes indulging my specialty better by giving the robots more free rein for decisionmaking. I'd need to make a really complicated cloaking device or try to figure out how to collaborate with Armsmaster on it."
And Glam has interacted with Armsmaster enough by now to say: "Yeah I don't really see him wanting to help."
"Yeah. So I might figure out how to do the really complicated cloaking device which leaves the robot enough meaningful control over it that my specialty will stretch that way, now that it's inconvenienced me to have one visible."