Yup, she has emails from office assistants stating their availability. Dr. Clark has the first opening; there's a cancellation after lunch today.

Excellent! They'll take that one.

Ceru needs to spend some time talking to Musoka about a few different things, once she wakes up, but it shouldn't take too long. Does Minerva have any suggestions for things that make sense for the two of them to do as soon as possible? (They can do the rich people healing in the afternoon, assuming Musoka is okay with it). 

The most important thing for them to do is the de-aging, which is important but probably not urgent. After that, combat practice for ambushes is the only other thing that might be time-critical, since while we don't expect any serious attacks, we also want to be ready for whatever happens.

Combat practices against ambushes sounds like a really good idea. 

...With Musoka's permission, Ceru would be interested in running some "live fire" drills, with someone on their side mimicking the capabilities of a likely adversary and pretending ambush them sometime today. Does that seem feasible?

With Musoka's permission, certainly. With stun weapons there's no real risk unless she hurts herself falling, and if her ordinary shields keep up while she's conscious there's no chance of that.

(If they go down, getting her armor will be much more important.)

Ok. Ceru will warn her a realistic amount of time before they strike.

She reads online while waiting for Musoka to wake up. 

She dreams that she overslept, and Ceru didn't wake her up on purpose because she was so worried she wouldn't get enough sleep. Then Minerva is disappointed with her. She starts to apologize-

and then she's in a box, trapped on all sides and then the False Sage shows up and he's even older and more wrinkled and he's shrieking about how he's destroying Beijing now, and it's all her fault and everyone is so disappointed in her

-She awakes with a start, panting.

<...Musoka? Are you okay?>

<-Just peachy!> She closes her eyes and shakes her head back and forth.

Then she yawns.

"...Bad dream?", she doesn't say. She's seen Musoka get a few nightmares (normally about more ordinary things), and they usually fade from her memory quickly, if she doesn't dwell on them. If she needs to talk about it, she can bring it up.

<Good morning. I've a fair number of things to talk to you about; do you want to chat while you eat and shower?>

<...Yeah.>

She rolls out of bed, makes herself a lazy breakfast of cereal with some fruit, and then washes up; Ceru talks her through her proposed schedule.

She's serious and a bit subdued about the therapy appointment, nodding at the details and asking to reread Dr. Clark's profile.

<Thanks for setting that up.>

     <You're welcome.>

Excitement and nervousness swell through her at the mention of ambush training with live fire tests.

<Oh, wow. ...Good idea, let's do it.>

    <You sure you're up for it?>

She shrugs carelessly. <I mean, I think so? And if not... that's good to know, too.>

She makes such faces when Ceru mentions that one round of healing could actually earn her billions of dollars this afternoon.

She's definitely ok with that, as well as healing people Minerva thinks make sense to heal. 

    <Proud of you. This will do a lot of good.>

<Thanks.>

POWER ARMOR? that can go to SPACE???

<Being rich is awesome!>

     Ceru laughs, lightly. 

She reads the full text of Minerva's warning email to her (Ceru summarized it, last night, but it's not the same), as well as the follow-up conversation.

...She tears up a bit at You are the hope of the salvation of the world, but dries her eyes with a serious expression on her face.

<...You're right that this would have scared me, pretty badly... But I still think you were wrong, not to tell me. I think I would have recovered my emotions before a serious threat arrived.>

It'd been hard to know, for her, how long they had before a serious threat arrived, and how long Musoka would have taken to stabilize.

...That wasn't what Musoka needed to hear right now, though. <I'm sorry.>

They move onto the subject of her emails.

<...If you promise not to do that again, you can read them and summarize them to me, yeah. But if I'm not busy or I ask, you gotta show me the specific text, okay?>

    <I promise. And that's fair, yeah.>

<Alright. Let's see what this is about, then.>

Ceru projects the contents of "Please save my wife." onto Musoka's vision, using tiny blue light constructs to form a HUD for her.

Blue Lantern,

For the sake of humanity, for the sake of prosperity, and for the sake of self-interest,

Please save my wife.

We met at work, on a doomed project that thought ‘recruiting the best people’ meant hiring for reputation instead of for intelligence. It lasted two weeks before collapsing in a self-destructive pile of recriminations and insults, and I spent the first week trying to convince everyone else that collaboration was the only sensible option and the second week joining her in mocking everyone else's stupidity behind their own backs. When the smoke cleared, we were the only ones who’d stuck with it, and, armed with our own collection of insights on how not to approach our lives, we went off to start our own firm. 

She’s never had a life she liked, a name she liked; I called her Thei, and it stuck; as we made our way through life on our wits and our wills. For fifty years, I have trusted her with my life and many others, but fifty years have passed, and we have aged. Thei and I have three children; Our older daughter, Elizabeth, was born in the year Voidwrath attacked Chicago, and I saw the scars in his eyes when he laid his foot on the mayor’s office. Elizabeth wants to follow us in the family business, and she’ll be very good at it. Our son, Julius has always looked up to me, and I do not know that he has always been right to. And our younger daughter, Catherine, wants to be a historian; she’s never loved the present more than the patterns of the past.

And Thei is dying. Cancer. I tried to find other options, and I have failed to do so, and now, in the hour of crisis, she may have one year to live. And now when my wife dies, all three of them will be in grave danger, as will every other person in the world.

Because, you see, I am the Titanium Tyrant, the world’s most infamous supervillain, and she is the Gorgon Queen, and my equal. Thrice has our rule been contested, and three of the Nine Nightmares have we slain, and I will not long outlive Thei. A hundred supervillains and more live in Novapest, a muscle coiled to strike wherever it is directed - so long as we live. When we die, there will be anarchy, and the forces I have kept penned so long will be loosed to strike in a hundred directions, wherever it wills. Perhaps my children can bind it, but there will be blood in the streets of Novapest - a nuclear-armed Great Power - whoever triumphs.

I will, of course, pay you, in money and in favors if you so desire. If you are willing to save more lives than one, I will ask for my own life; if you are willing to save more than two, there are many who have followed me, who have been my friends, who have fought Voidwrath and his monsters by my side who I would not see die.

But if you will only save one, please save my wife.

Signed, 

His Majesty,

Sandor Balog,

King of Novapest,

The Titanium Tyrant.

Oh no, this poor man's wife is dying...

...this is the Titanium Tyrant?

<...You should forward this to Minerva.>

<Done. ...I did some research on these people last night; I'll brief you while we wait for Minerva to get back to us on this.>

(She also forwards Musoka's responses to the healing and surprise attack inquiries.)

The safest thing to do, writes Minerva, whenever the Titanium Tyrant says or writes anything, is to consider, in advance, the goals he might desire to achieve, and then see the actual words as a cleverly-crafted piece of fiction he constructs as a tool to achieve this conclusion, and see if the goal he is working towards matches the conclusion drawn by his message - for instance, are you, in fact, persuaded to do what he wants? If so, he wants to persuade you, and you should probably not be persuaded. If you are angry, you should probably not be angry, and if you want to trust him, you should certainly not trust him; he considers rules like 'do not lie' as a set of restrictions to find loopholes in, not as any kind of moral principle he should follow for any reason than his personal enjoyment.

I will arrange the healing. And the ambushes.

Hmmm. It seems like his goal is that he wants her to save his dying wife.

...His dying wife... the supervillain with mind control powers...

...That seems like a really risky endeavor, but the dude sure did make the alternative sound scary. Does Minerva have thoughts about his request? 

(Could they demand concessions?)

Ah. Of course. So this is how someone with magic de-aging powers arriving to heal everyone on the planet goes horribly wrong. No doubt she should have seen it coming. Very naive of her not to, really.