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Time elapses. Rewind is allowed to leave her prison—er, hospital room. She needs to go around on a wheelchair, and it'll still take at least a month for her bones to mend completely, and she needs help to move around and do stuff. But she definitely won't complain about being able to eat real food more often (she is very thankful for the bot bringing her takeout), and she can keep riding along with paramedics even when she can't really move around a lot.
And one of these days, while she's in an ambulance, something lands on it, rocking the vehicle and startling her from her thoughts. The ambulance stops, and whatever it is makes noises as if it's moving and then jumps off it. Rewind twists to see through the window, and—
"Console, a really weird leafy monkey just jumped on the ambulance and then off it," she says into her comm.
"In part, yes. But also because, well, I've seen other heroes' faces, so have you, they're not exactly known to be super reasonable and nice to us while we're on the team, it would be totally in character for them to do that kind of thing even to you."
"I'm hoping that Dad and the obvious conflict of interest it would be for me to work against the Protectorate will help me there, but you don't have such a direct connection..."
"Yeah, but I'm gonna be out. I guess you'll be out first."
"Maybe. It depends on whether I'll actually decide to leave, it's not horrible and having contact to people to whom I can mention the Siberian is a definite plus for the saving-the-world plan."
"Mm." Glance at Charlie, who is in the next room addressing remaining dishes in the aftermath of the board game.
Sadde has totally been taking the parents into account and has been pretty silent in the relevant parts, but: "Maybe we should go to your room?"
Up he trots after her. When in her room: "Anyway, yeah, I've actually been thinking about staying in the Protectorate because of. Those reasons."
"I don't really have a strong opinion. Although if the Protectorate decides they don't want me freelancing with them your field effectiveness is going to be way down sans bots."
"That's true, but I don't really care much about my field effectiveness. It's small potatoes, compared to what my actual objective here is."
"...yeah. Um. I'll need to plan out my decision contingent on stuff like that."
"So, what-all can they take if you're not around? Bots, comms—if they take the comms they're really stupid, those things are awesome."
"They probably won't take the comms. They're the same model used in the Endbringer fights and there's no good reason not to use them between Endbringings."
"It depends on how paranoid they get about it, ranging from 'I guess Lorica just really wants to be a trillionaire but still supports heroism and loves her dad' to 'oh no the Simurgh got her after all'."
"On the whole. I think there should be a lot, a lot, more parahuman focus on non-combat applications like Rewind's paramedical thing, but as long as some people are going to commit fly-by shootings and turn cities into monster pits it's important to have a significant number of opposing field-experienced capes on it. The Protectorate has many terrible flaws as an institution but does surprisingly well all things considered."
