Lorica puts more eyes out. No skin off her nose.

And a few days later, one of those eyes catches leafy movements out of its corner.

It is so hidey. It gives very hidey chase.

And sure enough, the weird leafy monkey seems to not notice the cloaked robot. It goes on its way, trying to be sneaky, looking around corners and such. It seems to be moving with purpose.

Follow follow. (It reports in, of course, every move it makes.)

So it'll report the sudden appearance of five other monkeys basically out of nowhere, jumping from the shadows between buildings higher than they ought to be able to, given their statures, somehow able to see the bot in spite of the cloaking.

Yeep! The bot attempts evasive maneuvers. Glam's asleep or it'd ask for a copyswarm.

The bot descends, struggling to fly; and then it zooms down in an attempt to shake their grip.

He manages to get rid of two of them, but the other three are still holding on tight. And now they're battering it with, again, deceptively strong fists. The vines start squeezing it, finding better grips and starting to dent it.

With only three it can ascend a little, until they damage the housing for its rotors and the rotors bend.

Which does happen! Followed by damage to everything else. Those vines are really strong.

And then it stops reporting.

The monkeys squeeze and pound on the robot some more just for good measure before vanishing into the night.

Zoom go more numerous bots! Zoom. They stay high, except the expendable ones that Glam provides when they can.

And Lorica's also asked to provide everyone with bots during patrol, because that's just good sense.

It is just good sense. Everyone gets a bot! You get a bot! You get a bot!

And at one point the PRT and, therefore, the people manning the consoles (currently Armsmaster and Lorica) receive a report of a disturbance near where Silica's patrolling with one such bot.

Is Glam available to provide reinforcements for the bot?

Ayup.

Bots proliferate and accompany Silica's sand golems to the disturbance.

...Technically speaking as long as the civilians nearby are okay and they're in position to chase the combatants after they're done, this is no skin off the Protectorate's nose. Bots and golems discreetly attempt to make sure nobody's stuck in a nearby building without exit access.

The bots report all this in from their discreet vantage points.

"Glam, I could use some extra cape power on the scene," Lorica says; bots dodge and swirl around in unpredictable patterns while maintaining a view of the scene as the sand golems continue to batter the monkey.

"Here." A bot hides and its feed is routed to Glam.

Two copies appear, one holding a large gun and another equipped with two sharp-looking blades. They join the fight, and as soon as the monkey notices them it tries to go through the golems to flee.

Silica forms the golems up into a larger golem that's a little harder to plow through. It forces the monkey to the ground.

The sand golem divides in two and re-forms into one with no vines in it. It tries to give the gunGlam a clear shot. Bots signal Glam to turn them into Loricas and assist.

Bots can move where Silica's not looking, no problem.

Loricas join the attack, holding and striking and zapping the monkey.

And the monkey holds for a surprisingly long time under the continued onslaught, but it wasn't made to withstand that. Blade Glam gets enough of an opening into the monkey that they climb into it and start slicing at internal organs, and after causing enough damage the monkey starts drying up, crumbling into an indistinct mess of blood, gore, and plant matter.

Yep.

Damn. And there's no figuring out where the monkey came from either. But they can step up the patrols in the area... Lorica tries to get her cloaking device working well enough to function in daylight to no avail.

In go heroes to usher out zoo visitors, set up a perimeter, and contain/destroy plant monkeys. Miss Militia suggests fire. Well, "suggests". "Tries aiming a flamethrower at a plant monkey" more like.

Glam-flamethrowers for everyone, especially the bots. (Bots note without relay that Piggot is swearing a lot while she reviews incoming fight data.) Fortunately, a lot of the zoo's biomatter is locked up. Unfortunately, some of it's open enclosures and the monkeys are more mobile than your garden variety penguin. FIRE.

Bots, at Lorica's instruction, start paying attention to making sure the dead monkeys are actively on fire and therefore unappetizing to eat. Others help Glams contain the flame.

"We've got flame-resistant monkeys, if you've got other tricks concentrate force there," says Lorica, and bots shine a spotlight on the lineage. "Don't let them eat anything! Glam, foam sprayer some bots!"

Glam provides foam sprayers and switches to laser guns. Armsmaster burns the remaining few monkeys around himself and gets his halberd, using its sharp blades and metal balls to tear through the ranks of the hybrids.

Foam sprays on the flame-resistant monkeys. Drupe, who wasn't using fire to begin with, beats feet towards the site and applies plant control.

Plant control is useful! While the monkeys can resist it some because they're not completely plants, it still limits how fast they can go and how much they can spread. There aren't that many flame-resistant monkeys, anyway, and they're susceptible to more mundane forms of extermination.

And fire continues being an effective weapon against the other ones, until they're all dead or foamed. None seem to have even attempted to escape.

And now it's cleanup time. Well, that's not the capes' job, although the bots don't mind helping the PRT.

And Glam can spare a few bot-controlled copies with appropriately conjured cleaning tools to help, too.

Lorica gratefully turns her attention to matters other than the cloaking device. Robots fly loose, looking around. If civilians address them they will even pause to make polite small talk and then move on.

A bot opens the door. Lorica's having lunch. "Hey you."

"Hi, love. How're you?"

"I'm all right. Amused by the PR spin on my bots."

"Yeah, I saw that. But hey, it frees you from looking into cloaking!"

"It does, I was getting almost nowhere with that, it was so frustrating."

"How does it work anyway?"

"You mean besides 'badly'? You really want me to try to explain you tinkertech?"

"No, I mean, how do you convince your power to give you a cloaking device? Not the details."

"Oh. My power will cough up most things if I give it enough levers for software rather than a human operator to push. I got it to work at night because light conditions vary a lot more meaningfully at night - so I could have a setting for flying under a streetlight and various levels of light pollution and moon phases and stuff - and I was trying to convince it that 'daylight' was a valid setting but didn't get anywhere. And it didn't work very well because I didn't want it deciding when to be invisible, I needed to be able to guarantee that it'd just stay that way, and I didn't think they'd find 'it will probably usually judge that it is correct to be invisible' would fly."

"Couldn't you do that and then not tell them?"

"It's not that uncommon that the bot makes a decision that I wouldn't have known to authorize in advance. That's okay if it's just making tactical choices but it's a problem if it catches me in a lie about my design."

"Are there many instances of it making decisions you wouldn't have approved of even in hindsight?"

"Not lately. But there are totally things I'd want a bot to go visible for, and they don't want it to go visible under reasonable circumstances, they want it to never do that."

"Wouldn't the bot agree with you that showing the Protectorate only invisibility was a good decision, even if it was in fact capable of choosing not to be invisible?"

"Not if it thought it wouldn't get caught and there was some kind of emergency calling for it to be visible. It learns from me and that's the kind of thing I'd do. But if I am calling the shots and people don't like the shots I call I can say 'sorry, won't happen again, human error' and if the bot does it while I'm not at the keyboard after I told them it would not do that no such leeway. Ugh, I want out."

"Ugh," they agree. "Yeah, that sucks. Why couldn't they just let the bot decide...? They use its AI on Endbringer fights!"

"In Endbringer fights the PR stakes are lower and the baseline rate of gone-to-hell is higher. They can tolerate a lot more variance. People try all kinds of crazy shit in Endbringer fights and I'm nowhere near the most outrageous."

"...I suppose," they agree reluctantly.

"It all makes sense, it just doesn't make my sense."

"...I didn't know there were multiple kinds."

Snort. "Now you do."

"What's the difference between them, then?"

"Mine's better."

"Oh, of course, now I know."

"I don't see how you didn't guess it yourself, really."

They giggle. "Well, when you mentioned there were different kinds it did become pretty obvious, I suppose."

"Mm-hm."

"Anyway. I'm bored, do you have free time? I wanna do the Turing Test."

"I can extend my lunch break. Remind me what protocol you wanted to do it with?"

"I didn't define it completely but I think I make a you-copy, I go to my room, one of you comes, we talk for a bit, if that you isn't you you squint at it, I come here, I make a you-copy again, then back to my room, then the one who didn't come the first time comes then, we talk a bit more, then I try to guess which was the real you."

"Okay. Copy me up."

Lorica and her copy high-five. "Shoo," says one of them. It's hard to tell which when they've both got helmets on.

So Glam shoos and returns to their room.

And presently, Lorica knocks.

She opens her door. "Hi, love."

"Hey you," says the Lorica. She or it sits on Sadde's bed.

"Your bot monitors every conversation you have, doesn't it? Having the exact same conversation twice in a row wouldn't be a good idea."

"Yeah. I mean, it does have a better memory than I do so unless it was prompting me I couldn't pull off a verbatim duplicate."

"So if this is the real you and your bot were trying to emulate you later, it would also not pull off a verbatim duplicate. Unless you'd want to ask for its help to do it?"

"I get info from the bot all the time. Reminders and Wikipedia checks and calculations and whatnot. It's probably like thirty effective IQ points when I put the helmet on."

"Thirty?"

"I haven't actually sat down with a Stanford-Binet," she admits. "But I'm not sure there exist IQ test problems my bot can't do so I might just break it if I took it while flagrantly cheating."

"I suppose. So, if we were to repeat this conversation, would you blatantly cheat?"

"Unless I had some reason to want to fuck it up, yeah. Better come up with a new opener for trial two."

"Oh, well. Anyway, what've you been working on?"

"Populating the flock. Patrolling a whole city's a big job for a few dozen."

"Hadn't you been doing that at night already, before?"

"Yeah, but now I need enough of 'em that they can also perform normal bot functions when I'm patrolling in person or called to some location."

"Oh. Fair. Couldn't I supply you with some, in the meantime? Set them up so that shoulderbot," she pets hers, "will ping me or something the moment they disappear?"

"Sure, that'd be nice. Trouble is they can't go too far on their own because if they do disappear - you're distracted or whatever - they just vanish and you can only remake them near one that still exists."

"Yeah, that's true. But, hmm, that sounds like a solvable problem."

"Yeah?"

"I'm not sure how to solve it, but something I just couldn't ignore, like... Maybe a very loud sound in earbuds, something I couldn't ignore. It wouldn't work while I'm asleep, but," shrug.

"We'd have to test that."

"Mmhm. Do you have other ideas?"

"Not off the top of my head. You do seem to have a limit in how many things you can make at once, so if you suddenly have to make a lot of stuff there'll be disappearing bots no matter what the shoulderbot does about it."

"Yeah, but the limit seemed to have to do with how much I could notice those things. Like, when there were too many things to keep track of, and they could get away with disappearing without my noticing, which the loud beep is supposed to prevent."

"It might turn out to matter at scale if you can tell which one it is."

"That... is true, yes. We should definitely test it."

"We should!"

"How many bots do you even need, to cover Brockton Bay? And how many do you have?"

"Depends on the standards for 'cover'. I have fifty now and I'm aiming for seventy-five."

"Hmmm, I think twenty-five isn't that hard to manage, and actually less than that since you'll continue to build them."

"Sure, so you're welcome to fill in for now, but I want those test results before I rely on it too heavily. And you sleep."

"Yeah, I do sleep, so not at night, probably."

"Sleeping's so inconvenient. Miss Militia's lucky."

"She is. I wonder what it is about parahumans who don't sleep, it's not like her power has anything to do with sleeping."

"Well, it's not like my tinkering has anything to do with mental opacity, some people are just lucky like that."

"Yeah, that's true." Pause. "And that led my brain through a tortuous path that makes me wonder, how'd your dad move about before you made his suit?"

"...teleporting, same way he does now? It wasn't as effective because he didn't have safeties to turn on and off for precision."

"Yeah, that's what I mean, how'd he get anything done? ...how high's the variance in his precision, anyway?"

"Really high. He could still do the roof angling thing - absent subways - but he had a hard time being effectively tactical."

"But I mean, is it high on the level of city blocks, cities, states, countries, continents...?"

"Farthest he ever goes in one hop is thirty miles."

"Is that the farthest he goes from his starting point, or the farthest he can end up from his target?"

"From his starting point. He can't target per se, at least not with his power. He only gets to pick direction."

"Oh, so he always ends up somewhere along his chosen direction, it's just how far along it that changes?"

"Yeah. The power picks a safe place, and if there's lots of those it picks a distance too."

"Okay, gotcha, I thought it could vary around the direction, too."

"Nope."

"By the way, if you're the fake Bella, does the real one get a recap of this conversation? Like, would she be listening in, or getting a summary later, or something?"

"It wouldn't be fair otherwise, since the bot always listens in on me."

"Okay, good. In that case I think we're done, don't wanna run out of stuff to talk about before the other one comes."

He opens the door. "Hi, love!"

"I'm not used to you swapping binary genders in the middle of a day," she remarks. She sits down. "Hi."

He sits down, too. "Today's a nonbinary day. I usually stick to a single gender on those, but I wanted to change up the experimental circumstances."

"Doesn't that fuck with your independent variable?"

"Eh, maybe, but I'm pretty sure I already know the answer."

"Really."

"Yeah."

"You want to turn in your results now or sit me here for a while longer keeping me in suspense?"

"Well, not exactly suspense, but I do want to make sure. There's effectively no body language to pick up on, here, so I have to kind of go with my gut and some small details. Don't wanna guess wrong just because I wasn't patient enough to check."

"All right."

"Alright, so, picking up where we left off... I had a thing I wanted to talk about but I can't remember what it was."

"That'll make it hard to pick up where we left off."

"Yeah! But now I remembered. Do you know if anyone triggered around the same time and place you did?"

"If they did they're trapped in London quarantine, Sadde."

"Oh, right. Man, fuck the Simurgh."

"Rather not."

"Anyway! Reason I brought it up was that I was reading some stuff undergrads study on Parahumans 101, and there was a bit talking about how people with more than one power tend to be parts of mass triggers."

"I didn't think Miss Militia was, although she doesn't exactly talk about it much."

"Maybe she doesn't know it is. And, I dunno, maybe not-sleeping doesn't count as a power at all? She's not the only cape with that thing, and no other powers have exact duplicates."

"There could be multiple ways to not-sleep."

"Yeah, fair enough, I suppose."

"Somebody's taking really effective microsleeps every few times they blink, somebody's sleeping and then time traveling to the past and erasing all memories of their shameful sleepy secret..."

"Time traveling would be huge, if whatever gives us powers used that to keep someone awake that'd be such a waste."

"Yes, I know."

He eyes her speculatively. "You're the real one."

"Is that your final answer?"

"Yeah. It is."

"Squint at me and find out."

So he does!

"It really wasn't. I was fairly sure it wasn't you the first time it said 'we'd have to test that,' and I was also fairly sure you were you when you asked me about ducking with my independent variable."

Snort. "Do I not say we'd have to test things? I am pro testing things!"

"Yes, but that's... in some sort of undefinable way, not really the kind of thing you'd have said at the time. I'm not sure I can tell what you would have said, and I may be completely mistaken about what's really going on in my brain, but I think it wouldn't have been that."

"Huh. I didn't conduct a parallel conversation where I said what I would have said so I guess we'll never know for sure. But you did guess right."

"Yup! Do I get a prize?"

"Gosh, what could you possibly want."

"Hmm, I have a good enough model of you to tell you apart from the bot. Do you have a good enough model of me to guess?"

"Is your model good enough to detect sarcasm?"

"Yes, I was playing along."

She snorts and starts shucking armor.

"Oh look, you do know what I'd meant."

"We're going to compare fingerprints, right? I can't do that in armor."

...he sporfles.

"I'm clockwise swirls!" She shoves her hand in his face to demonstrate and push him over onto his bed.

He's pushed over! "You know, it never occurred me to look?" he says.

So she has a look at his hands. A look, a nibble, they're so similar.

"Maybe my fingerprints are vanilla and yours are chocolate, how am I supposed to know if I don't check?" Nibble.

"You're right, silly me, we should determine this with science!"

Science ensues.

This is the kind of experiment he can get behind.

Mmm, prepositions.

Rrrreally? He really likes those.

Science and prepositions and a Turing test well done.

"Maybe? I'm not sure how to actually fix the thing you noticed."

"Well, the better the model it has of you the easier its job will be? But I'm not sure it can have a good enough model that's not tantamount to just simulating you, and..."

"I don't think it's going to wake up as me. The way it produces me-responses isn't very much like simulation."

"How does it?"

"...Well, it's not simulating my thought process, anyway, it's emulating what I've said in the past and consulting what it knows I know."

"Hmm, that'd explain it, I suppose."

"How?"

"Well people don't act exactly the same way twice, even if it knows everything you do, if it's not performing the same steps of inference you are it will try to just predict your actions based on similar situations and that'll be fine most of the time but sometimes it won't."

"It's also a little more conservative in general than I am because I don't like it to commit to things that I only might agree to."

"That, too. And I think it didn't swear a single time while we were talking. You're more—lively."

"It did too. It knows you're not on the list of people it needs to swear-filter me for and it did in fact say 'fuck it up'."

"Oh. Then I dunno, I may be full of it. I mean, I was pretty sure you were you very quickly, but I don't know which parts of it tipped me off."

"A mystery."

He plants a kiss on her lips. "Maybe I have a psychic connection to you."

"I'm immune to psychic connections."

"But mine's special, it's infused with the power of love."

"So much the worse for the power of love. Get your psychic connection off of me."

"Oh, well, guess we'll have to live with the mystery, then."

"Alas."

Snuggle!

Snuggle.

"Rewind's removing her casts next week," he comments.

"I should have a first edition of a suit ready by then."

"That's really awesome. Rewind with a suit will be unbeatable."

Grin.

"Will it be different than yours or your dad's?"

"Yeah? I wouldn't give her an exact duplicate of either. Dad's is riddled with toggleable safety features to control where he bounces and hers needs to be optimized to take advantage of the rewinding."

"What kinds of optimizations?"

"I'm going to organize the onboard memory significantly differently and have it extrapolating a lot from the fact that it finds itself in the past relative to what the rest of the network says."

"Yeah, makes sense."

"It's just lucky she can rewind things through armor-thickness stuff or I'd have to have all kinds of hardware in place to make it get out of her way when she seemed to be purposefully reaching for stuff."

"Couldn't you have made it, like, really thin around the hands, or something?"

"It'd depend on how it worked. If she could work through flexible material but not anything rigid..."

"She could work around her suit, at least."

"Yeah. Which is not rigid or made of rigid parts."

"I wonder if her power needs actual contact or just has a very short range."

"Good question. Maybe I'll schedule some testing for that. If it's contact and not range maybe she should go around with a baton."

"...I just had this hilarious mental image of her going around batting people into the past."

"Kind of cartoonish."

"If it's contact and no range, though, she could use something like a grappling hook of sorts, or something smaller, even, a thin chain she shoots from her hand to touch someone."

"Oooh, I could totally add those to the suit, we should power test this before I get too deep into building it."

"She'd be much more literally unbeatable if she could get an actual range."

How do I test that?

The bot can field this one. Wear a bunch of layers of gloves, and if you can't get enough gloves to make it not work try tapping stuff with sticks of greater lengths. And are you sure you have to actually touch things to rewind them?

I'll try that when I have some time, and I just tested, yes to the second question.

If it turns out you can tap things with other things it'll affect suit design!

How?

Extensible bits that auto-aim so you don't have to close with a target.

Awesome! I'll test.

And when those results are in and promising Lorica brings Rewind a glove with an extensible cord that taps whatever she points to see if that works too.

"How does it work? What should I do?"

"Point at something! And, uh, until the suit and you have more practice together don't point at things you don't intend to boop. It'll notice if you don't boop something it taps and update. This is just to see if it works though."

"Like, what, with a finger?" she asks, then looks at her shoulderbot. "Can you scoot over there so I can point at you?"

She points at the bot with a finger.

Zot! goes the glove, tapping the bot gently.

The glove retracts the zotted thing. "I'm going to make that retract faster," Lorica says, "but this sufficed to make sure it'd work at all."

"I'm gonna need to practice timing with this thing, I had meant to send the bot a bit before that. And I don't know if it needs to retract, 'cause—" She points at a wall.

Zot.

Then she "touches" the glove, aiming for it—and the zotting stringy thing attached to it—to rewind back to the coiled state.

"Okay," says Lorica, "but you don't necessarily want to have to do that all the time, especially since both gloves will have zot things and you might have a lot of targets."

"I might do that all the time anyway, my M.O. was booping someone else and then immediately booping myself away from them, it's not that different."

"It'll be easy to make it quick-retracting anyway. Unless there's a reason it shouldn't I'll just go with the design I have."

"Okay," she shrugs. "How far will it go?"

"Ten feet. I can get it longer if you want but it'd involve switching to a gauntlet instead of a glove."

"Longer would be cool, but maybe you could make, like a gun for that, instead of the glove?"

"Sure."

"Cool! I'll have to practice a lot."

"Yep. Every time you zot a thing the bot will learn more about how to anticipate you."

"Awesome, no way that fucker Lung will escape me now."

"Uh, well, he'll have a harder time closing and the suit will hold up against a modest amount of fire but please don't be rash."

"With the gun, I don't even need to be close enough for him to notice me."

"He'll know something's happened when suddenly the things around him are ten minutes ahead of where they were."

"Yeah, but I'll still be pretty far from him and can retreat and stuff, he can't just literally swat me aside like he did."

"I guess. But please don't get yourself killed overextending something I gave you, I would feel guilty."

"Fine. But I still want to get that fucker."

"That's understandable."

She grabs a pen and reaches to scratch under the leg cast. "Hate this. Can't wait to get it off, but they said I shouldn't go out for at least a week after that. Ugh."

"Well, at least you won't be itchy for that week."

"No but I'll have to run water over it all the time and rest and be still and I've been still for weeks."

"Sorry. The shoulderbot's distracting you as best it can."

"Yeah, like, it's much better with it around, and going out on ambulances to help people is cool, too, but it's still being carted around everywhere and cooped up and ugh."

"Well, not much longer."

"Yeah I know but it's almost worse because of that."

"Anyway, any last-minute suit input?"

"I dunno, make it look sleek?"

"I can do sleek."

"Cool! Thanks!"

"You're welcome." And off goes Lorica to tinker.

And a few days later, Rewind's released from the "hospital" which just happens to be inside the PRT building. Glam, of course, throws her another party, because why not.

Robots fetch ice cream cake.

"Ooh cake, I want some. With my own arms. I can move, ha!"

"Help yourself."

Worth celebrating, that.

"You could wear it now if you wanted but I'd keep asking for bits back to make changes. Wouldn't hurt to have a trial fitting though."

"Awesome! Can we do that now—" Pause. "After the cake?"

"Yes, we can do that right after the cake."

So there's cake, everyone's happy, Glam has to man the console and remotely patrol, and Rewind's bouncing with excitement.

The suit's in Lorica's workshop. "Here you go. If you start putting it on it'll help, you'll get used to that."

"Help how?" she wonders as she starts doing it.

The armor answers: it snugs up when it's been correctly located, and bits attach to each other. "Like that."

"Oh, cool!" she says, and finishes putting it on.

"There you go. It's impact cutting, you're probably fine to run around even on a recently healed leg, give it a whirl."

She tries jumping.

The suit can't predict-and-amplify her as well as it can predict Lorica, because Rewind doesn't have implants, but it's easy for her to touch the ceiling and she lands lightly.

"How do I fly?"

"...I explained it's not point-and-click. But now that you've mentioned it the bot knows you've got flying on the brain and you should be able to kick off, and it'll get easier as it learns you better."

She tries jumping again.

And this time she winds up hovering about a foot off the ground.

"Woo! This is awesome!" She tries leaning forward.

The bot understands that! It propels her forward at a nice sedate inside-Lorica's-workshop pace.

"Eeeeee!" she says, trying to turn around and go the other way.

She swivels in the air and goes the other way, veering slightly anywhere she turns her head towards or looks at for more than a moment.

Her movements are a bit more expansive than that, using her whole body to turn, and doing so in a zigzagging fashion akin to the way she moves on the field.

The bot picks up on this after some practice.

"I'm gonna need to play with this, with like, dummies or something. Oh I bet I can get Glam to make me pretend villains to swat!"

"I bet they'd be delighted." (Glam's shoulderbot relays this idea and admonishes them to be gentle with the suit and Rewind.)

Glam promises they'll be nice.

Good.

"What now, then? Do I gotta give you the suit and only take it when I use it or do I take it with me or what?"

"I'm still making finishing touches but you can practice with it whenever I'm not doing that. Your shoulderbot can let you know."

"Oh, okay. Do you know when it'll be, like, totally complete?"

"It'll be ready to go out with you when you are, but I'll need to maintain it. Tune-up every two weeks if nothing hits you that you don't rewind away, and after it takes lasting damage."

"Alright," she says, and starts taking off her armor.

"And that's less often than I have to fiddle with mine or Dad's because yours is going to spend less time in active use and experiencing the ongoing passage of time."

"Well I don't rewind that often," she says, a touch defensively.

"You do in combat, which is when it'd be under the most materials stress. I'll need it back more often if you're planning to just walk around in it all the time like I do."

She ponders as she finishes taking the suit off. "Mmmmmmaybe, flying's cool, and it'd help your bot know more about me, yeah?"

"Yeah. So I'll need it back once a week or so."

"Okay, cool, I can deal with that, six out of seven days in a suit is better than no days at all."

"I'm glad you like it."

"Are you kidding me I can fly and shoot stuff out of my hands to tag people and there's a HUD it's awesome of course I like it!"

Giggle.

"I'm gonna kick Lung's aaaassss," she singsongs. "Thank you!" And she scoots off.

"You're welcome!" Lorica calls after her.

And just as Rewind is walking away from Lorica's workshop, one of the bots patrolling downtown notices some suspicious movement over there.

It refocuses and approaches to investigate.

Two hybrid monkeys jump out of the window after Crusader, and two of Crusader's clones that were inside the building follow them. When they're outside, one of the ways they've evaded tracking this long becomes obvious to the bot: at least some of them seem to have evolved a very advanced form of camouflage, quickly taking on the properties of their background (though it seems not quick enough when they're actually running around). That, coupled with their very low body temperature, coupled with Brockton Bay being a big city, meant that they could effectively stay out of sight most of the time.

Glam conjures more bots!

Lorica writes thirty lines of code real quick to sharpen the bots' visual discernment for this situation and then goes back to paying attention to the fight. Glam's shoulderbot suggests that flamethrowers would be good too.

Bots chase the escaping monkeys with extreme prejudice. Other bots - disposable Glambots - enter the building with the tree to check it out.

The robot informs everyone that it is definitely time to freak the fuck out and solicits permission to torch the place. It is sure the flock could contain the fire barring unforeseen circumstances. (The flock looks for non-Empire human presence in the building.)

The bots attempt to form a three-dimensional perimeter and shoo civilians from neighboring buildings while they can still pretty much go down the street on foot. Maybe the monkeys (and the E88) should be contained with foam on the various exits?

That sounds like a swell idea! Glam provides imaginary foam sprayers and pops in a couple of copies under their own control so they can help along, too. They need to be transmitted a visual of their copies so they can go into the building and see if they can't contain the monkeys more directly.

The bot can handle that no problem.

"Auntie Em," Lorica indulges herself; the comm doesn't transmit it. "Glam, I need population and if you can't sustain it I need kamikaze bots."

"On it, make sure they beep really loudly if even one of them disappears. What do you want on them?" they ask, already making a couple here and there where people aren't looking and then where people are looking 'cause at this point it's pretty much a given that Glam works remotely to anyone who's been paying attention.

"Narrow flamethrowers that only burn organics if you can swing that, and infinite foam supplies."

And the bots chase monkeys and set them the fuck on fire, ready to foam anything other than monkeys that catches; and bots are trying to contain the ones that are still in the building; and bots are directing evacuees to MOVE IT.

The bots start ganging up on the monkeys to make sure they're ash and not - seeds. Bots set fire to the tree.

"Suicide run bots!" Lorica says. "Shaped flame charges with bot chassis, keep them coming, they'll wreck themselves as fast as you can make 'em." The shoulderbot indicates where they need to be.

Glam makes them!

They promptly sacrifice themselves for the cause!