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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.
"The solution is of course to become post-human immortal mind uploads with access to our source code and backups and stuff."
"Sounds like a plan. And then ruling the world as a software Tinker will be much easier."
"We'll probably need to figure out a lot more about how powers connect to people before getting there, I guess."
"I... don't think I'd mind losing mine all that much if it was a necessary part of becoming an emulation?"
"Well, yours is kind of different, if we're assuming the sim quality is any good you could replace most of its effects. Mine's about how I think and can think and cannot be made to think."
"But having full access to and edit rights for your source code would obviate the need, wouldn't it?"
"The hacking problem would still be there regardless of your thinker power, though, and if you were an em you might be able to actually develop your tinker knowledge in a way that's not nebulous sourceless ideas."
"Maybe. We don't know how tinker bullshit actually works well enough to guess if that would cut it."
"Well, whatever it is you're doing is actually doable, so it should be possible to figure it out..."
"It's been speculated that tinkers are actually not tinkers, that we have some kind of other power holding stuff together."
"Well, but, it'd have to be really long range, wouldn't it? ...although I suppose my power's pretty long range, too."
"Or it persists on the tinkered thing - plenty of capes can affect objects and then be arbitrarily far away from the objects."
"Persists but wears off, under that hypothesis. I... suppose it has some merit, but then how does software tinkering even work? What is the power focusing on?"
"It's just not obvious that there's any nondeterministic behavior in the software for a power to sneak in to help with."
"There could be unforeseen side effects with the particular implementation of your language? And it's not unthinkable that your power might be subtly influencing your mind from the inside and making you neglect to notice this kind of thing."