The lawyer will explain that Samora can't legally trade her powers for money yet anyway, because the United States forbids anyone to work within its borders unless they get permits with the government. Those permits can sometimes be hard to get, but there's a fast-track process for capes whose powers make "extraordinary contributions to American lives or American society," and if what she's seeing on PHO is at all accurate then Samora will easily qualify. If Samora likes they can scope their relationship to just that permit application, and figure things out on new terms once Samora can earn money legally.

The PRT and its superteam the Protectorate are governed by the Parahuman Response Team Code of Justice. The PRTCJ requires that PRT soldiers obey "all lawful orders" from their superiors, with a complicated carve-out for cases where the soldier believes in good faith that their superior was influenced by a Master or replaced by a Stranger. They are allowed, and sometimes even required, to refuse unlawful orders. The PRTCJ does not define "lawful orders"; further research suggests that orders to commit a crime, or to deliberately target uninvolved civilians, would both qualify. So would other things, probably, but it's hard to tell exactly what. There don't appear to have been any high-profile cases of this happening in the Protectorate, which it turns out has only existed for about 18 years.

Samora getting a work permit and some money and then paying the lawyer for advice on whether to join the Protectorate sounds good to her, if it wouldn't take unreasonably long.

Not having any illegal-orders controversies in eighteen years is a good sign, unless they had some and concealed them. Would an order to break the Endbringer truce be considered illegal? What about an order to break a more temporary truce arranged with a specific villain, or kill someone after accepting their surrender? For that matter, what are the rules on treatment of prisoners, though that one seems unlikely to come up for her in particular.

There aren't any famous enough that your clumsy searches can find them, anyway. You do turn up a few notorious cases from the military that the PRTCJ is based on, where military personnel were ordered to kill civilians, did, and were later convicted for it. There've been a few instances of villains or rogues breaking the Endbringer Truce, usually in small or ambiguous ways; you can't find any examples of the Protectorate doing it. Treatment of prisoners seems broadly covered by a pre-Protectorate international treaty, but it's easy to find stories of capes being held in conditions that would be inhumane for normal people as a makeshift way to restrain their powers. There's apparently also a strict norm against revealing the civilian identities of other capes, even if they're your enemies and you've captured them.

The lawyer, if asked, mentions a case where a hero in Houston deliberately let a villain get away, on the grounds that they'd be sent to the Birdcage if captured. When charged with disobedience, his defense was that the Birdcage was inherently immoral. This didn't work; the hero was demoted and transferred, and eventually the villain was captured and Birdcaged by someone else. Her opinion is that most PRTCJ cases are handled in ways that don't become public knowledge; the Birdcage case was unusual in that everyone involved was willing to push for a public trial.

Restraining imprisoned capes in variously terrible improvised ways is basically the same as keeping wizards handcuffed and not letting them sleep a full night: the best of a bad lot of options. She adds "Look into ways to disable capes that work better than the Birdcage" to her to-do list, but if Plane Shifting people to Nirvana is off the table she's not very optimistic.

She does more reading. There are parts of the world with worse problems than Brockton Bay, but those problems are much worse, and she doesn't think she's suited to become a government and turn a patch of warlord territory into a safe and peaceful place. Even if she could manage it, it wouldn't be the best option for Earth in the long term. If she wants to hold back the Endbringers, keep the world's best heroes alive, and mentor the planet's first generation of priests, America really is the place to do it.

And the Protectorate really is the group to do it in, she thinks. They have a good reputation, the best resources, the largest number of other heroes to explore power combinations with, the nationwide coordination to do things like bring her the top fifty Behemoth casualties. She may end up wanting to leave eventually, if enough of a church of Iomedae gets off the ground that she should have an official position with them, but for now, this is where she can do the most good.

Samora informs Dragon of her intention to join the Protectorate.

Why does she feel conflicted about this? Dragon is a Protectorate member, and a happy one, on the whole. She wants to work more with Samora, and she wants Samora as close to Colin as possible, just in case. So...?

Her response has all her hesitation carefully wrung out of it:

That's wonderful news. I'm looking forward to working with you, and to seeing your future plans as you learn about our world.

I've informed Armsmaster and Director Piggot of your decision. The next steps will all be a little formalized: there's a meeting with the Director, your formal oath-taking ceremony, and finally a press conference where we officially introduce you as a Protectorate hero. As I understand it this can happen in parallel with your immigration application, so it's possible that everything will be completely settled within a week.

In the meantime, if you find you need anything at all, please write to me. Or if you prefer, to the lawyer Ms. Dallon recommended; I don't know her but her record is very strong.

Dragon

Samora doesn't notice any hesitation, so mission accomplished there. While the immigration paperwork is in progress she works on her blog posts, and Raises more Dead. And does Sendings to her parents and brother explaining why she can't send letters anymore. It hurts, but they understand.

Eventually it's a mutually convenient time for Samora to do an Owl's Wisdom on Armsmaster.

Strictly speaking this is supposed to be a day off, but he usually spends those in his workshop anyway.  They'll do this down there instead of in his office; Dragon asked to sit in, and the monitors are better.

He tried writing down a list of questions he was interested in, but without knowing what sort of effect the spell would have, it was hard to come up with anything.  The resulting list is a little scattershot, everything from "How can I disable Lung?" to "Is it possible to predict Endbringer attacks?"  If he makes progress, he can probably get Samora to cast the spell on him again.

"You should know, I'm recording both audio and video today, so that I don't have to waste time taking notes.  Any standard procedures we write for professional use of this spell will be informed by what we do today, so your own impressions are also valuable.  I'm ready when you are."

"Noted." Hand-tap, "Owl's Wisdom."

He thought it would feel like something. A flash of heat, maybe, or a sudden sense of inner peace. The whispering of angels. Something. "No immediate physical impressions," he says, for the benefit of the recording.

The rulebooks -- which they know aren't a perfect match for Samora's world, but which still seemed a reasonable starting point -- said Wisdom is "willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition". Based on that he expects that he has a reasonable amount of it already, but if you take the literal numbers seriously the spell should still have a huge effect. The details depend on how variable humans are, but a +4 is definitely more than a whole standard deviation in...whatever Wisdom is. He should expect to be able to tell the difference.

So. Can Endbringer attacks be predicted? His intuition says "yes", same as before the spell. But when he tries to dig into the particulars -- meteorological data? population statistics? -- he doesn't see any new angles. Except maybe the spell is doing something, because his perspective broadens a little and he realizes that actually he does; that there's one standing right in front of him right now, with her little tiara and silver eyes. Normal precogs can't predict the Endbringers. What can cleric magic do? But there was a nuance there, it was in the transcript Alexandria circulated...ah yes.

"Samora, you once remarked that prophecy isn't broken on this planet. What did you mean by that?"

"There are spells for predicting the future. When the god Aroden tried to take physical form on Golarion a hundred years ago and died instead, those spells became a lot weaker or stopped working altogether. But they still work on other planes and planets. They're expensive for the god backing them up, but can be worth it."

Expensive for the god backing them up. One probably couldn't, then, make a standard policy of casting several monitoring spells every day, to track the Endbringers and predict their attacks, even if Samora's magic did pierce their usual anti-precog defenses.

Well, that's a relief.

...is it? Why?

Because she's going to eclipse me.

The thought is startlingly sudden, with no resistance. And then, following like Leviathan's water echo: Ah. So that's why I kept thinking about inviting Samora to the Protectorate, and then not doing it.

He may have screwed himself, here.

Armsmaster's secret wish, never once spoken aloud but never a mystery to him, is to join the Triumvirate. To be spoken of as one of Earth's best and greatest heroes, like Alexandria, Eidolon, and Legend. To add a fourth to that group of three, the way it was back before Siberian killed Hero and tore out Alexandria's eye.

There's a sense in which they're his peers already. Each of them runs a major branch of the Protectorate. Each of them attends every Endbringer attack, fighting and giving orders. Each of them was on that endless email thread debating how to pick Behemoth casualties for Samora's power and, he's sure, each of them found it bitterly frustrating.

None of that makes him their equal. They're the Triumvirate. Icons, where other heroes are merely famous. By any metric you could construct -- press hits, lunchbox sales, whatever -- those three are in a league of their own. Armsmaster, meanwhile, placed eighth in the last big Protectorate popularity poll. Not bad, by any means. Far better than most capes could ever attain. But still, a silver medal. Good, but not quite good enough.

It will be ninth, once Samora is better known.

Rumors about her are already swirling on PHO. No one's officially credited her with Denver's impossibly low casualty count, but it's not a secret. How could it be, when there were over a hundred grateful witnesses? The spectacle in the hospital parking lot the other day was almost redundant. Raise Dead isn't public knowledge yet, but that gets less tenable every day; they have to announce it soon, before it's leaked and they lose the initiative. Probably Branding will want to make it part of her introduction press conference. They can put a few people on stage who she's brought back and have them talk about it, to make the whole idea seem less like an absurd lie.

She's going to be good in interviews, he's sure. And she'll want to give them, so she can talk about her goddess and her philosophy. The public will love it, the way they love Myrddin's schtick. Hell, even he likes her; how much better will it be for people who don't have to compete with her? It won't take much of that at all before she's the queen of healers, the way Dragon is the queen of Tinkers. And then...

She could make it. She really could.

She lacks direct combat power, compared to the other three, but she brings so many other unique capabilities that it won't matter. They won't do it right away. They'll want to see how she handles herself in public, see how the religious fundamentalists react, see how she performs under stress. It will probably take a few years.

But eventually they will.

If she's still a Protectorate member then.

Is there anything he can do about that?

Preventing her from joining is probably impossible now. If only he'd had this insight before he invited her in! That's a pretty serious weakness in the spell, he realizes. You have to cast it before your major decisions if you want to benefit from it, but it also helps you realize which decisions are the major ones in the first place. Circular. This decision, he let slip by without ever thinking about it.

Well, he can at least look ahead. What chances will he have later? He doesn't, he definitely doesn't, want to stop her from doing her work. Healers are too rare and valuable, even leaving aside all her other powers. He just wants that work to happen somewhere else. Where else might she want to go?

She's not a cape, she's a cleric. It takes him a moment to figure out why he had that thought right then, but he manages: she already has a job, in a sense, as the head of a whole church of Iomedae on Earth. Right now there's no conflict between that and the Protectorate, since her "church" is just her. As it grows, and takes up more of her time, it will necessarily pull her away from direct hero work. Past a certain size, the duties of even a normal line hero would become difficult to balance, and she could never sustain a schedule like Legend's or Alexandria's. And all he has to do to make it happen is help her with something she'll naturally want help with anyway! It's perfect. It's insightful, in a way that his political ideas almost never are. The spell works, he has to admit.

What else?

Can he sour her on the Protectorate? Make her less interested in sticking around? To some degree that will happen on its own, no matter what Armsmaster does. She wouldn't, just for example, have appreciated everything Chief Director Costa-Brown had to say about resurrection prioritization the other night. There will be more things like that, and he should make sure she knows about them. Or maybe not; he isn't a subtle man, not in that way. Maybe it's just that he shouldn't exert himself to hide the problems from her. That feels safer.

It's not his native instinct. The Protectorate is his responsibility, his and others', and he wants everyone to see how important and valuable it is. But it's a small sacrifice, compared to what he gains.

These are good plans. They preserve everything heroic about Samora, and still let him achieve his ambitions. They're simple enough that he can execute them even without the spell, even when he's busy or tired.

And he'll never have to explain them to Dragon.

He's never told her his goals, never tried to explain how dissatisfied he is as "just" the leader of Protectorate ENE. She might have figured it out anyway; she's thrillingly insightful, about more than just Tinkering. Maybe she's known the whole time and likes it about him, or maybe she accepts it, the way he accepts her agoraphobia. At the very least, she knows he has a fierce ego, a drive to prove himself -- but you need an ego, to take a purely human body and fight someone like Lung at halberd's length.

Armsmaster respects Dragon, on so many different levels, but he suspects that she doesn't really understand that about him. How could she? Her condition means that she always has to fight at a distance, and her extraordinary power means she can get away with it. She's the world's greatest Tinker, she doesn't dare go outside, and -- he's long suspected -- she has other problems too, problems she doesn't want to share even with him. He can't judge her for that, but it means she might not get it, despite her extraordinary imagination. In a certain sense she's never been in a cape fight, and doesn't know what it's like. How fast, how brilliant, how disorienting everything is. How it works on the nerves, like a car crash that never comes to rest.

To walk into them willingly, all you need is to love them a little bit. As long as you like the adrenaline and the risk, you don't need anything logical. But to get up and go to them every morning, coldbloodedly, as a career, a man needs a goal. Something unreasonable, outrageous, insane. A goal worth making sacrifices for.

What has Dragon sacrificed? He's sure the answer isn't "nothing". What was she like, before Leviathan destroyed her home? What did it cost her to reach out again, in even her painfully limited way? How much was she exerting herself, back at the start of their friendship? At the time he didn't know enough to even ask the question.

And why, while he's asking himself about her, has she taken such an interest in Samora? Even with the spell up it's a mystery.

He can't do anything that really hurts Samora. Can't do anything that even looks like it was meant to really hurt her. He hadn't planned to anyway, but the stakes are much higher than he'd realized. His goals are his goals, and he doesn't want Samora to interfere, but it's not worth damaging his relationship with Dragon.

...that was a strange thought. His career, his cape life, means everything to him. Even in his head, to himself, he's Armsmaster. Not out of costume, admittedly -- but he spends less and less time out of costume these days. Armsmaster is his real life. Colin Wallis is...what's left over.

So, given all that stuff he supposedly knows about himself, what was that last thought about Dragon again? He tries to catch at it, and misses. Tries to settle his mind, to wait for it to re-emerge.

And maybe it works, because a thought bubbles up, like a jet of volcanic sulfur in deep water: I'd rather lose my rank, my position in the polls, my endorsement deals, everything, than lose her respect.

What?

And then, Because I'm in love with her.

Oh no.

He's had his share of girlfriends, over the years, but there was a crushing repetitiveness to it that started to make the whole thing seem futile even before he triggered. Women were drawn to him, sometimes, by his energy, his athleticism, his drive. He saw himself as different from the people around him and they seemed to like it, at least at first. But in the end they were always pushed away again, by...he never knew what. His distance, they sometimes said. His moodiness, his unapproachability. He has a flash of one of his high-school girlfriends, electric blue eyes sparking, spitting "You say you love me but you don't even know what that means!" She'd broken up with him...that day? That week? Soon after, anyway. It was fine. He could always find someone else.

After he joined the Protectorate he started having liaisons, rather than affairs. Always in his civilian identity, always with no strings attached. In the last few years he's let even those vestigial romances wither away. Why not? His work was always more interesting.

They wanted me to see the unread-message notification and get excited. They wanted me to tease them a little, in ways that showed how much I admired them. They wanted me to just be happy they were nearby, even if it's just on the phone. They wanted me to trust them with things I'd never show to anyone else.

Full credit to that high-school girlfriend. She was completely right. But now I've changed. Now I've figured it out, with the one woman in the world who I can absolutely never have. He'd have better luck seducing his way into the Triumvirate, with Legend or Alexandria or both at once.

Twice, earlier in their acquaintance, he'd suggested that they meet in person, work together directly instead of by video link. She'd kindly but firmly deflected him: it didn't matter how much she trusted him, she'd said, she didn't see people in real life, ever. He'd suspected there was more to it than just agoraphobia, but she so obviously didn't want to talk about it that he'd left it alone. So to speak.

Damn Samora and her spell, anyway. Now that he knows about this, what the hell is he supposed to say to her? What is he supposed to be doing?

Um.

Wasn't he supposed to be saying things? About the effect of the spell? Into the recording devices that he himself set up?

According to the timer he set, the spell has been active for four minutes and seventeen seconds, during which he's said one thing. He no longer remembers what it was.

"This is rather disorienting," he manages, racking his brains for an insight he can actually share with his audience. "I've become a little self-obsessed. More so than usual." That last seems like the sort of self-aware joke Dragon might like, the kind he wouldn't normally make. Then finally he remembers what Samora told him, two shattering realizations ago, and blurts, "What does 'expensive' mean, in this context? Can we test it? I'm wondering whether we can use your magic to predict Endbringer attacks."

"Owl's can be like that. Expensive means—gods can only intervene on the Material a limited amount. At least some of that is a physical limit and some of it is all the gods agreeing not to do things that would just cancel out. Predicting Endbringers is probably worth it. The spell Divination might work for it, it gives you a few words about some topic with a range of a week. I don't know if the range will be longer here or the message will be clearer or what. There's also Commune, which lets me ask Iomedae up to eleven yes-or-no questions. I don't know the math for using them efficiently but maybe someone here can figure it out and then I can use it for where the next attack will be and which Endbringer." That seems like a good ratio of useful information to spell duration, so Samora stops talking and takes a few seconds to feel anxious about being in charge of allocating Iomedae's intervention budget for an entire planet.

Colin clearly noticed...something.

What did he notice?

What did he notice?

Just now he's noticing, once again, that Golarion seems to have a level of science and math knowledge that doesn't line up with wearing breastplates and swinging swords.  The math behind "eleven yes-or-no questions" is widely-enough known that Samora knows about it even if she can't recite it?  Who on Golarion invented that?  Based on what?  If he had Share Language (Celestial) up right now, would he find that it had a single short word for "information-theoretic bit"?

And what a relief, he can share these insights out loud.  "Is Iomedae's realm operating on a much higher tech level than Golarion?  Do they have flying machines, guns, computers?  We saw the same thing with the spellsilver test: the lantern archon you summoned knew things that no one on Earth figured out until fairly recently.  It's possible that scientific progress isn't as contingent as we thought, but it's strange to me."  And then another thought hits him, hard.  "Aside from Golarion, and apparently Earth Bet, how many other words are connected to your afterlives?"

It's strangely uncomfortable to use words like "Heaven" or "angel", even though they seem to be proper terms of art.  Or, all right, not strangely; probably most people have complicated associations with those words, even if they've never been religious.  Maybe he should get another Share Language, learn the Celestial terms for them, and start using those instead, just to stop those weird implications from sneaking in.

Damn it Colin that clearly isn't what you noticed!

"Oh, yes, all the outer planes know a great deal that Golarion doesn't. There are a great many planets, and as far as I know they all go to the same afterlives, so you'd expect them to know at least as much as the most knowledgeable planet. Probably more, since they can make their own discoveries as well. But the outer planes sharing knowledge with mortals counts as intervention, so they usually don't. That's why I had to tell the archon you already knew what the isotopes of lanthanum are."

"How did it know you were telling the truth?"

Because lying to an angel would be pretty messed up that's not an explanation. "Summons get some information about the summoner, so it knew I was a cleric of the Inheritor, and that means I wouldn't take the trust that exists between all the servants of Heaven lightly."

"What would have happened if you'd lied to it? Not that you should have or would have, but would Iomedae have known? Does she see everything around you? Know everything you do?" He hesitates, then decides that he dares. "I ask because I'm wondering how things will be with your church here on Bet, once things are a little better-established. Will they be able to trust each other, the same way that archon trusted you?"

"Probably nothing would have happened except that the world would have been a little worse. Iomedae can see Her clerics, and anything related to Her areas of concern, but that's so many people and places across all of Creation that She's hardly ever paying more than a tiny fragment of attention to any one person or place. And yes, if She chooses any other clerics on this planet I will trust them and cooperate with them and encourage them to cooperate with each other. It's not a guarantee, because clerics of a Lawful Good god can be Lawful Neutral or Neutral Good, and of course trusting someone to be honest and well-intentioned isn't the same as trusting them to be competent, but it's a reason to work with them."

"Actually, that's something I should make explicit: if Earth starts getting as many clerics as I hope, I may eventually end up needing to leave the Protectorate to work full time on turning those clerics into organized churches and on being part of the local church of Iomedae. I don't know how long that might take and I intend to do my best work here in the meantime, and I hope and expect that if and when the church of Iomedae on Earth becomes its own organization it will work closely with the Protectorate."

Armsmaster nods.  He doesn't try for a sympathetic, understanding nod; she cast Owl's Wisdom on him, not Cat's Grace.  Or no, that was for physical grace, not social graces.  Whichever. "It's good to be clear about that.  You should say the same thing to Director Piggot.  I'm sure no one will mind, when the time comes, given how useful even low-level clerics can be."

Then, because even though he started this line of questioning as a distraction he's getting invested in it now, "We thought we were recruiting a powerful cape, but really it's more like we formed a treaty with a foreign country, one we only loosely understand.  Not even that -- with a dozen different foreign countries, each with its own rules and priorities.  We didn't think about it because" no reason not to say it "at first nobody really believed your story.  I had to argue to even get air transport for the first set of Behemoth casualties.  You may recall that I promised you teleport priority, that day in Denver, but I flatly could not get it.  That's all resolved now, of course.  But the point is, the Protectorate's relationship with you is also a relationship with Iomedae, and we don't really understand how to manage it."

"Commune is a good example.  Dragon and I" did he say her name normally, just then?  Was there anything weird about it?  He can't tell "ah, could learn a lot from eleven yes-or-no questions, and Watchdog could learn even more, but apparently it would cost Iomedae something to answer us.  It seems clear that it's a cost she's willing to pay, at least to a point, but how can we tell whether we're being efficient?  We might want to start by asking about that, rather than anything more concrete. But we shouldn't ever order you to cast Commune, because you're in our chain of command -- or will be -- but Iomedae isn't."

did he say her name normally, just then?

He did not! There was a quaver! She can't tell what it means.

Her voice is immaculate, as always: "I think Iomedae must be interested in stopping Endbringer attacks, or else why put Samora in Denver on that specific morning? But she might not want to tell us how to, I don't know, build better computers, and might not be able to tell us where powers come from, just to pick two examples."