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With Armsmaster's death, Miss Militia is promoted to team captain. Even with the losses, however, the Protectorate ENE doesn't get new capes—all teams got hit hard by the last Endbringer attack, and even though it was by all accounts a major victory, it did not cause capes to start lining up to join.
Days pass, and winter hits Brockton Bay. It's pretty mild, as winters go, but it's enough to drastically reduce criminal activity. The heroes have an altercation with white supremacists the following week, but nothing much comes of it, as cape muscle seems to prefer to remain comfortable inside. Capes nationwide are somewhat subdued, perhaps as the aftermath of the victory against Behemoth. Nothing much seems to change, however—the Simurgh continues to fly around in her unpredictable pattern, Leviathan continues to be impossible to locate, lurking in the depths of the ocean. The public gets hopelessly contradictory information about what really happened during the fight from unofficial sources, secretly fed from official ones to make sure people don't jump to the right conclusions, and the topic loses its momentum.
And all of this completely fails to distract Sadde, who seems to not be getting better from the post-battle funk. Or, at least, not straightforwardly better. The depression and fatalism turn—maybe not completely, but at least a bit—into unease and anxiety, or perhaps stir craziness. It is, after all, true that, other than for class, Sadde doesn't really leave HQ a whole lot, not since they reached the comfortable position of being able to patrol from the comfort of the console—of, in fact, being more effective when doing that, for the average uneventful patrol.
Fatalism, depression, anxiety, and unease, all combined into a Sadde-shaped ball, are currently floating upside down in Lorica's workshop, failing to read a book while she fugues.
"Yeah, but I kinda know this city like the back of my hand, it's not much exploring. Maybe reexploring?"
"Well, it's all new to me. What's obvious on a second look at this street?"
"Sometimes if you look at something twice don't you notice different stuff that wouldn't be clear on a first look."
"Oh. Hmm." He looks around. "That building is slightly skewed to the left," he says, and points at a 10-story building that is, in fact, slightly skewed to the left. Vvveeeeeery slightly.
"Brockton Bay was a very... organically built city? Stuff just kinda started being built and refurbished as was needed, so you'll find a lot of places with stuff like that, or super modern tall buildings side-by-side with small, quaint, old ones."
"Huh, I was thinking some cape fight knocked it over just a little bit."
"That'd be a very weird fight," he laughs. "To just knock it over a little bit like that and not, like, destroy it or damage it any other way."
"Very true," he admits. "I can't remember any Brockton Bay cape who could've done that but then again I don't remember the entire history of capes in Brockton Bay by heart."
"Well, it's already lots of work keeping up with capes that are currently active, if I were to deal with the past thirty years of them I'd never do anything else!"
"Not 'cause of that, I mean historically. We have one of the largest concentrations of capes in the country, and a lot of it was because of villains seizing the import business when it was booming and then the Protectorate stepping in to curb that. Now there's an equilibrium of sorts, what with the industry pretty much sunk, but it's a tense equilibrium and our Protectorate team has high priority when petitioning for capes."
"Yeah. The Empire is a big part of it nowadays, they have a lot of superpowered muscle and keep getting more, they're rumored to have links with the Gesellschaft in Europe, the Protectorate needs to keep a lid on them. Aaaand here we are," he says, as they reach a little strip mall between the tall buildings, and heads to a specific gift shop there.
And, as promised, the price tags are nowhere near the kind of thing one'd find on the Boardwalk.
"Wouldn't it be a little weird to buy a Boardwalk postcard from, well, not on the Boardwalk?"
"You can buy a Downtown postcard instead," he suggests. "The only difference between these and the ones on the actual Boardwalk is that these pictures were taken a year ago and the ones there would've been taken more recently."