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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.
"...okay maybe I have an analogy. Imagine you're reading a series of books, and you really like it. And then you hear about this other series of books that looks maybe interesting. You could go read it, or you could not read it, but you still have the one and it's very nice and not having read the other doesn't make the one any less enjoyable, but reading the other also doesn't make the one any less enjoyable, they're just different book series and there's nothing missing if you don't decide to go read the second but the only thing that changes if you do is your time availability to read them."
"I do in fact feel like I'm missing out if for some reason I cannot read an interesting-sounding book, though."
"You don't? Feel like you're missing out if you hear about a book and it hasn't, like, been translated into English or the store is sold out or for mysterious reasons your existing book collection will vanish if you go read it?"
"Not really? I just feel like, oh, that's a shame, back to the rest of my life without that one specific thing. I... there are lots of books and things and experiences and people and places in the world, in all worlds and universes, I'm missing out on the vast majority of them all the time, and the fact that something's been brought to my attention but it turns out I can't have it anyway doesn't make me want it noticeably more than I already did."
"Well," she says, "yeah, there's lots of stuff, which is why you need to prioritize and become immortal, but still."
"Well, yeah. But lots of those things are mutually exclusive anyway, and even being immortal most of those things are still going to be beyond my reach."
"And I don't want to read every book I hear about, but if I do..."
"Yeah, I'm not," he shrugs. "Past a certain—baseline, I guess, my desires and ambitions are more the prosocial kind than anything to do with me having or experiencing things."
"Okay. Thank you. And we'll probably not hang out that much, she's just a tourist anyway."
"Nothing special. Although I'm toying with the idea of building a duplicate of myself-in-armor that wouldn't rely on you for its existence, now that people have caught on to what we're doing."
