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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.
He nods. "I'm not sure it'll change a whole lot, though, it's not like people knowing I'm responsible for copy-you changes much about their strategies."
"Yeah, I'm not completely sold on the idea, just crossed my mind."
"But on the other hand I am legitimately limited by how much attention I can pay to things and how much stuff I can have conjured, so it might be a good idea anyway."
"Yeah, but I'm not sure if that's a good reason to have a Lorica instead of just another standard bot chassis which is easier and cheaper to make and maintain."
"True. You know, the other day I was trying to think about names for the bot, and Bot Only Talks To Lorica came up and it's a terrible name not to mention untrue but B.O.T.T.L."
"That is in fact a terrible name, congratulations on your discernment."
"It'd be funny! And I think acronym names are the way to go. I've been trying to find one for B.O.T. with no success."
"I don't really like acronym names, I mean, I get the punny appeal but I don't want to name my bot based on it."
"Maybe unless there's one that would work great even if it weren't also an acronym."
"Yeah, acronymhood just isn't a deciding factor either way."
"Yeah," he sighs. "We already went through a lot of mythological figures, too. Are there any languages or perhaps stories or characters you particularly like?"
"Well, 'Lorica' is Latin, but it's unusually pretty Latin. Greek's nice too. I like the kind of thing they make you read in English class, and speculative fiction sometimes."
"Do you have preferences about, like, meaning or significance? Or is it just aesthetics?"
"If you came up with a sufficiently pretty nonsense word I could go with that but I don't want it to mean something silly or irrelevant."
"Okay, so maybe characters from stories that somehow resonate with you and slash or the bot, bonus points if in Greek?"
"Trying to make the comms more robust against tampering. They don't have to hold up against Behemoth in particular anymore but the fact that they didn't irks me on a professional level."
"Well, I think he was sort of an exception to these kind of rules? Endbringers in general are."
"Yeah, but that's their stress test use case and I want them reliable."
"He was a general dynakinetic—and something else, even, he could manipulate gravity there in the end—and he was holding back, I'm not sure there's any way to even in principle deal with that."