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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.
"I don't know, I could argue that a harmless prank didn't warrant the memory loss etcetera but you did it four times, so that argument sort of loses traction."
"And losing ten minutes of memory when doing nothing of particular gravity is pretty harmless, too, I think."
"I'm... I suppose I see where you're coming from, but I don't feel that possessive of all of my thoughts?" he tries.
"Well, I see my, uh, overarching thoughts and persistent personality traits as me, but most of the day-to-day stuff is noise? I mean sure it's noise that eventually adds up to and is a consequence of the overarching stuff, but..."
"It will add up differently, from that point on, to what it would've added up to at the end, but for one it's ten minutes which is, like, a rounding error—I would be much more upset over losing a day, for instance—but I don't really see any of the potential future mes as meer than the one I will actually end up being."
"Hmm, I don't have the same relationship with what I consider to be my self that you do, I think."
"I mean, I don't see, uh... my future self and my current self as that... fixed? My being rewound ten minutes here and there only means I will turn out to be a different self than I would have been if I had not been rewound, but like, one, that other self is not really meaningfully less me than the other would've been, and two, it's not that different than what self I would or would not be because of any other specific happenstances."
"Like... sense data and me. And the sense data should be accurate or at least communicative."
"Well, but like, there are lots of layers of indirect manipulation going on that you don't directly affect or notice or whatever, even without taking powers into account, and implicit biases and subconscious stuff."