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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.
It really is! He smiles. "Mostly a spectrum along the binary axis? I feel like I'm more boy and therefore less girl, and vice-versa, depending on the day. Sometimes I'm pretty neutral and just go with whatever I was the previous day, and it doesn't usually change while I'm awake but sometimes it does. Most commonly I just wake up feeling like something or other and dress and behave and prefer to be gendered accordingly."
Nod, nod. "It's really great that you've got that figured out, so many people go such a long time without knowing that sort of thing about themselves."
"Oh, yeah, I've known this forever. My mother said it was obvious since I learned to talk."
"Didn't have the easiest of childhoods. The reason why I moved to New York was that my mom divorced my father because he was kind of a butthole about it." Note the mom vs. father.
"Yeah. And theeeen she died in '94," New York '94 should be obvious enough, "and I had to move back in with my father, so you might have guessed why I have—have had, anyway—a particular grudge against that particular Endbringer. Wow, can I not bring the conversation there all the time? Well done, Sadde."
"It's okay, it makes sense it'd be on your mind!" she assures him. "Oh, you poor thing."
He shrugs a bit. "And there was also some bullying about the genderfluidity, so I likely built the pride in being weird as some form of coping mechanism. Too ingrained in my personality by now, though."
He grins. "By 'too' I mean that there's probably absolutely nothing I could do to remove it, not that I'd want to. I like myself."
And it turns out to be called 'The Ice Cream Place.' It's small and very charming, a short building among several tall ones, quite incongruous with its soft primary colors and a list of several flavors on the door. There's a fair number of people inside, too, apparently it's a well-known ice cream place.
"Tell me more about you! Let's start with concrete questions, where are you from?"
"Yup. I had a long flight here and my seatmate didn't want to chat."
"Aww! Well, you're a lovely conversationalist yourself." She pats his arm.
"I'm glad you think so. But I seem to have forgotten to talk about the city, I'm not a very good tour guide."
He beams. "Well, after ice cream I could show you around and then we could have lunch, in what's an inversion of the natural order of dessert and main meal that would send mothers all over the nation screaming."