"Crazies coming ain't new." Rosa doesn't quite smile, but she almost does. "It means we've got something worth fighting for. Capabilities, loadout, and priorities?"

"Legato has telekinesis strong enough to pull a sand steamer's cannon free from its hinges with fine enough control to clothesline someone with said sand steamer's railing. Elendira has less strong telekinesis but she can generate matter and often uses that to summon dozens of flying iron nails similarly to how Knives generates knives. They might have others but if so I don't know who.

"You should really hole up and hide once Jeneora is in range of Legato's TK, he will throw you guys around like puppets and try to make me kill you or have to make choices about whom to save. You do not have a way to survive a fight with him any more than you have a way to survive a fight with my brother."

"That being said, we would really appreciate prep work. Um, not that you, have to or anything, just. We really don't want Legato to have places to hide."

Rosa clearly does not like the idea of leaving defense of her town to someone else, but. ... She and the rest of the town are also clearly out of their league, and furthermore not in any state to fight any telekinetic psychos.

"... Fine," she sighs. "Prep work. So that's just... clean things up and make sure there's nowhere someone can hide? Hell, we were going to do that anyway."

Time for business. All traces of Zash's sheepishness and guilt and upset over this town are gone, pushed into the back of his mind and replaced by almost military singlemindedness. Yvette might find the inside of his head very interesting right now, the ease with which he creates a mental picture of the tactical situation of this town and their enemies and starts going through them. She might've caught a glimpse of that before, but not this much, not occupying as much of his attention and processing power as this.

"That's a good start, but there's more we can do if we turn out to have enough time, and if we can parallelize. Someone should give one of us—probably Yvette—the fine-toothed comb description of the whole place. Every nook and cranny, every corner, horizontally and vertically, everything you know about this town that outsiders don't. With that we make a tactical map of the place, find the most defensible spots, the spots with best visibility, the spots that can be best used when trying to fight—or escape—a telekinetic maniac.

"And for that matter, escape routes. We need to find or create some, redundant if we can, balancing ease of use by you and difficulty of use by them. The battlefield of my dreams has one-way teleporters inside incredibly thick-walled, secured, and trapped facilities whose layout is only known by the people inside it and which is designed to be impossible to navigate to outsiders, outfitted with arrowslits, cannons, and automated machine gun turrets. We can't get that but that's the dream and the closer we can get to it the better.

"Anything we haven't thought of, any suggestions, any wild ideas, bring them up. Yvette and I are well within each other's telepathy range everywhere in this town so you can get either of us from the other and Morgan should be with one of us at most times so we can be used to coordinate and for instantaneous message-passing.

"Questions, concerns, worries, ideas, requests for clarification?"

(...... help her husband is competent and she appreciates this about him. As in: she finds it hot. Zash being a gigantic adorable goof is great and all, but, but. It's a good thing no one expects her to know anything about anything in this sphere. She doesn't literally whine, but. Whine.)

Rosa is not nearly so distracted, and looks to be precisely in her element.

"Nah. Sounds like just the kind of thing we've been missing out on, here. Tonis, sweetie! Come down baby, it's about time your mama taught you some tactics."

Zash can introduce Morgan to these people, too, and they can Discuss™, though for a lot of this they will in fact need that tactical map which will probably work better once the town is more cleared up so that the townies can show them places. He'll give an overview of his ideas based on his remembered layout of the city, some suggestions that he expects the townies can improve upon, but once that's done the most immediate way to help will in fact be using the two bullshit superhumans to start clearing the rubble. And the town did in fact decide they'll take the plants, so a message can be sent up to Nai to bring them over.

"So, uh. Telepathy," says a woman named Maria, who lost her legs to a boulder when Nai destroyed the town, to Yvette while Zash and Morgan are out cleaning the place up. "Are you two together in your heads? All the time?"

Yvette does not have bullshit superstrength, but she can make herself useful without it. Mostly this involves doing domestic chores; if she yawns a little while cleaning things up, oh well.

"Not quite. We can be, if we're near enough to each other, but it gets harder and more lossy with distance. And with Zash it's by preference, we're not stuck in each other's heads. We can give each other space. Just, um. We kind of prefer being together."

"In your heads?" She shakes her head. "If I'd had my husband nagging me in my head as well as in person I'd have—well." Uncomfortable shrug. "Doesn't matter anymore, does it?"

"... Sorry," she winces.

Then, because obviously Maria does not want to linger in the land of grief, she attempts to apply levity directly to the trauma.

"The novelty might wear off after a while, we're in our proverbial honeymoon stage with it. Besides, between the two of us, I'm the one nagging, which is much more fun."

"He seemed to be having fun with it so I can buy that."

"He is absolutely delighted to be nagged and bossed around," she agrees. Then... she doesn't know what else to say, so. She'll just keep sweeping; no one has cared to do it for a while, for obvious reasons, and the dust certainly built up.

"So uh how'd you meet. I know you said you ran into each other in the desert when you came but, uh, I'm getting the impression the two of you were somewhat less than straightforwardly truthful with us then."

"Oh, I found him hanging upside down as a warning to others," says Yvette, a little fondly. "Left for dead but somehow not. We'd met just a little bit before we showed up in town declaring we were married."

"...you weren't even together back then? Fooled all of us, you looked completely enamoured."

"Nope! I thought he was an escaped super soldier from Julai, and Vernon thought it was smarter if we all pretended to be as uninteresting as possible. Apparently the best way to do that was by marrying us off. I'd say he didn't realize how right he was, but then again, maybe he did." She gives a sad smile. "He was good with people, that way."

She still misses him. It hurts less, now, it's easier to think of him fondly instead of just feeling a stab of agony, but. That doesn't mean it's entirely gone.

"...he was pretty good at his job, huh? Managing you. And afterwards... you survived because the Human Typhoon managed to keep you out of danger? Have expected him to drag you into danger instead..."

"He was. Good at his job. And I didn't, really, keep out of danger, without him. I survived because Zash and Morgan -- uh, that's the blue haired girl he's being super strong with -- worked very hard to keep me alive, and even with that it really just. Came down to sheer dumb luck. I should by all rights be dead by now."

Yeah, you should be, she doesn't say. Sometimes the people who deserve to live get crushed by rocks and the people who don't just live anyway by sheer fucking dumb luck and that's how it goes on this rotten pebble they call a planet. She just looks away and sighs.

"...why'd you come back? After everything. Why here, why us?"

There are a lot of reasons, but she's pretty sure Maria doesn't want to hear about the rational ones right now.

"... Because I could help. We, could help. And, um. I didn't realize it at the time, because I was a bit of a dumbass, but, um. You were very kind? Even after. The smart thing to do would have been to at least steal my car."

Snort. "Rosa's too much of a softie. I'd've told her to keep the car if I'd been, you know. Not delirious with pain and maybe bleeding out."

"Yeah, well. Fair enough if you had, really. I'm a dumbass city slicker who didn't know the value of what I sat on. But I also think you'd have dropped me off somewhere in civilization, after robbing me blind. Besides, no take backs, you were nice to me and so nyeh, get your just desserts."