"Gallant will save money in the long run, Armsmaster saves time, the PRT gets a licensing agreement they wouldn't have had otherwise, and you get a bunch of extra start-up cash."

Lucien is proud of himself.

"Wins all 'round. I'll come to you next time I have an idea too clever for my amount of diplomacy."

"Please do!"

Their patrol route is on the edge of ABB territory. Not too risky for Wards but also not one of the easier routes. 

Lorica tinkers a lot, growing her flock, refining her software. She gets her dad's suit done and assigns some bots to Armsmaster's workshop.

A few days later flurry of tinker made bombs go off, sending half the city into a blackout. Further bombs take down bridges and a school. In the chaos Lung is sprung from jail by his lieutenant Oni Lee.

The ABB didn't stop there, and swelled in size and power as the bomb tinker Bakuda continued to organize attacks all over the city, hitting anywhere that might have a connection to any other power base in the city. 

Wards and Protectorate members attempt to defuse bombs where they can, but often all they can do is manage the aftermath.

Stretched thin, Lorica ends up on a solo patrol in a part of town where Bakuda seems to have run out of targets she's interested in. A barbershop in the area is now frozen solid and half of a duplex is covered with thorns.

These are... bomb results, yes? Weird bomb results but still just Bakuda and not more separate people?

Yep, Bakuda's bombs yield weird results, not even the weirdest ones! A 100 foot sphere of downtown Brockton is frozen in time and in one case everything nearby turned inside out and yellow.

Lorica's patrol is quieter than most were even before the bombs - people are staying indoors and out of trouble mostly. However, right when she's finishing up her route she spots what looks like a tense confrontation outside a rundown row of townhouses. Three burly men in jackets are surrounding a man and woman, the contents of a shopping bag scattred on the ground around them. One of the men is blocking the path to a nearby door, and another one is yelling at the couple that they aren't getting in until they let the men search the place.

She jukes left as though she didn't notice them. A bot settles on a nearby awning.

"Nothing you're saying is going to change what you are," one of the men insists angrily, "Now you let us in to make sure there's nothing threatening us or our families in there or we'll break down the door and search it anyways."

The bot's camera is good enough to tell that both members of the couple have a white bird tattoo on the back of their left hand - the same tattoo that marks people cleared for release from Simurgh quarantine zones before the D.I.D.D. act was repealed a few years ago.

Ah, shit, it's complicated. She pings the console with a summary.

Console would like to know if anything is recently exploded or about to explode and if neither could she please handle it herself.

Nothing is exploded. Bot, consult on whether Simurgh-affected persons are a protected class or anything?

The vast majority of the people with the tattoo aren't actually Simurgh-affected, they were people who were near enough to Simurgh attacks that they were held in quarantine until their whereabouts during the attack were confirmed thoroughly enough and Protectorate thinkers vetted their psychological state. Initial standards were lower than they are now and in some cases people were re-quarantined after those standards were changed, but people who are out now are considered safe. A few exceptions have managed to slip through the cracks.

The US Govt has lots of badly marketed campaigns trying to inform people that the tattoos are not a mark that someone is Simurgh-affected but nobody actually wants to get near the issue with a ten foot pole. The people aren't a protected class legally - current legislation mostly tries to pretend the whole debacle never happened.

All right, she's going to drop to street level. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"Just trying to keep the neighborhood safe without wasting anyone's time," replies one of the men.

"Ah, well, here I am, wasting time anyway. What would you say seems to be the trouble?" she adds to the tattooed couple.

"Um, these men want to go into our house and we would like to be left alone," says the tattooed man nervously.

"Do you have some excellent reason for this?" she asks the men.

"If they don't have anything to hide they wouldn't be complaining so loudly. Way I see it - if you're trying to live out around this many people with one of those -" he gestures to the tattoos "- and a punk kid that made himself scarce right when the bombing started, well. The least anyone could do is give their neighbors some peace of mind."

"Do you let people in your house if you make them nervous, sir?"

"Sure! My neighbors come by my house all the time."

"Uninvited, unwelcome, just because they're alarmed by your habit of confronting strangers and demanding entry into their residence?"

"If I had one of those tattoos and a son who everyone knew was in a gang I hope someone would come in and smack some sense into me, yeah." 

"Gosh. Well, thanks for alerting me to the situation, next time try our phone number it's very well-staffed, how about you three go along and I'll talk to these folks here and make sure everything's all right."

One of the men would like to know how this is going to keep their neighborhood safe.