"Well, the point of the test was checking whether your bot could flawlessly imitate you. If you start coaching it and vice-versa it becomes a test on whether I can tell you apart anyway."

"...I was listening to the conversation and it would have been monitoring my facial expressions during."

"Oh. Then I'm really good," they laugh.

She pats them on the head.

"Still need to repeat the experiment and validate my results, especially the last part."

"Let me know when."

"It'll have to be on a boy or at least enby day."

Nod.

The week trudges along without much further ado. No new hybrids emerge, the heroes are praised by the public for averting a terrible crisis, the deaths are mourned, speculation picks up, people note that Armsmaster mentioned a lot of teamwork but for all that the heroes aren't very visible, and the end consequence is that on Friday afternoon the Wards are to visit a school. So, they have one day to prepare a topic to talk about for half an hour each, and will also have to socialize and make the children and younger teens like them.

Half an hour. Geez. Lorica throws something together encouraging the kids to consider a career in technology.

"I have no idea what I'm gonna talk about."

"They ought to have given us longer."

They raise an eyebrow. "Longer?"

"To think of something and write up a presentation. And they should excuse Windflower, because can you imagine Windflower trying to do public speaking, poor thing."

"Oh, right, I thought you'd meant longer than half an hour. And yeah, poor Windflower. I wonder if we can do something, she doesn't have the most sympathetic of powers, either, this is not going to help her image."

"The bot can write her something and make her a slideshow if she has a topic, but she'd still have to stand up there and talk."

"Ooh, can it write me something? I think I can do the showmanship part."

"What do you want to talk about?"

"I don't know yet! I was trying to think of a way to instil on them the same sense of wonder comic book enthusiasts had for superheroes before we were real."

"What do you mean?"

"Like, before superheroes existed, before Scion, there were comic books and people were pretty crazy about them and super interested in them, a little bit how regular cape geeks are nowadays but not exactly, and—basically, I want to somehow instil some cape geekiness on at least some of those kids."

"Why?"

"A few reasons. One, personal PR. Two, hero PR. Cape business is typically seen as this distant background knowledge by most people, bringing some more excitement into it would help. Three, if any of them trigger, they're more likely to join us instead of some gang if they see it as cool and exciting. Four, there are hopelessly few people actually going into cape research, and it's something I'd like to encourage, too."

"Fair enough. But if you're going for flash and bang the bot's writing style probably won't help."

"Hmm, yeah, maybe. I mean, I think if I can come up with an actual topic that will achieve my objective and that Branding won't object to I can probably invent the presentation, my power's made for this."