She begins lowering them very gently and delicately toward the ground.

Dauntless remains on guard, waiting for an attack that doesn't come, and Velocity arrives soon. Dauntless explains what happened, and then someone comms them to inform that Stormtiger was nowhere to be found.

"I don't think that was mental, I think it was sonic," says Sokoreth. "None of you heard the noises she was making, right?"

"Right. I'm still a bit dizzy and have a headache, but it was much worse before, and I was nauseous and having trouble standing as well."

"I didn't get dizzy or nauseous, but I heard a horrible noise. I think it's because my ears work differently than yours, and maybe my balance too. And earlier, the sound she was making every few seconds - it didn't sound quite like any echolocation pulse I've heard before, but now that I have a chance to think about it, that's how she seemed to be using them."

Hooray.

"Thanks," he says. "I guess I did all right for my first time out."

"Capturing a member, even a new one, of the most dangerous parahuman group in the city is quite a bit more than alright."

"Well, when you put it like that."

He laughs, and claps Ashras' shoulder in a friendly way. "Seriously, you did good. You should be proud."

"If you insist. But I'm still going to work on my aim and firing speed."

"Yes, of course, don't take my praise as an excuse not to improve," he says, laughing.

"I generally don't!"

"I see you'll fit right in!"

"That is the idea."

The next time Piggot asks Ashras to meet him, she curtly congratulates him on his part in capturing Cricket, then informs him about High School. Apparently he's the first teenaged Case 53 (or similar) to join the Protectorate, but they have rules for those, given that they tended to have no memory and thus being dropped in school would be highly useless—not even the Youth Guard could argue against that logic.

The compromise is that teenaged Case 53s will be allowed to choose whether to go to High School or not, and if they prefer not to, they will be allowed to test out, and will have onsite time dedicated to studying for those, with occasional unscheduled Youth Guard visits to guarantee they are getting an appropriate education.

Hey, thanks for showing me where to go. I'm settling in nicely with the Wards so far. For some reason I'm supposed to learn about history and literature and mathematics instead of spending all of my time obsessively developing and testing new magic weapons, but at least they didn't send me to high school, which sounds terrible.

Oh, that's good, I'm happy it all worked out for you. So you do magic weapons? And I can't say I dislike high school, I have friends there, but I suppose you have those on the team, too, so it probably loses much of the appeal.

My teammates are by and large pretty great.

I'm supposed to keep some things about my powers secret for tactical reasons, but yes, "magic weapons" is the basic concept. Wands and staves. The ones I've used in the field so far throw stun bolts, force blasts, and lightning (at nonlethal intensities), and you might have guessed I can also do fire, but if I have any other tricks in reserve I'm not talking about them, both for tactical reasons and because I'm not totally sure I have the designs down and I don't want to brag until I have a working prototype held in my own hand.

That's cool. And your English is going pretty well.

Everyone is very surprised by how fast I picked it up, but they had someone teaching me who had a translation power, so I don't see it as that surprising. And of course I practice a lot. Always someone to talk to or something to read.

I suppose. I would still have taken much longer, probably; I'm terrible at languages.