"It'd probably help if people were less likely to notice my schedule once we move again."

"If you're going to move maybe you can get someplace with better quality of neighbors."

"So far the places we've been able to afford have had at least a few low quality neighbors."

"Why aren't you politicking your budget up a skosh, then?"

"People get uncomfortable with anything that looks like my parents manipulating me into helping them. I make the standard Wards salary and there's a standard amount of attention paid to not letting my cover get blown."

"Have they got jobs?"

"My dad used to be an economics professor and now he tutors people online. My mom was a history post doc and still gets the odd contracting job from one of her former colleagues but nothing steady."

"I don't have any very clever ideas for that, alas."

"I'll make more once I'm a full Protectorate member. And get access to the trust fund they put aside while I'm a ward."

"I'm um. Happy you're taking it so well?"

"...as opposed to what? I've discovered you have parents. I didn't think you sprang from the head of Zeus."

"I don't know, I don't have much experience with people I already know finding out my parents were in Simurgh quarantine. You didn't freak out and try to arrest them and you haven't told I should stop living with them for my own good."

Shrug. "It made me a little more suspicious but, like, the fact that somebody was hassling them didn't seem like a reason to hassle them much more than that."

"It's probably accurate to be a bit more suspicious - rates of people slipping past detection are really low but rates of mass murder in the general population are lower."

"Yeah. I had ulterior motives in offering the bot and one was gonna look at the phone screen but I wasn't going to strongarm them." Shrug.

Vaguely discomforting but reasonable of her!

"... I'm not sure of a good way to transition to passing on the message from my mom that you're invited over for dinner, with the subtext being that she thinks I need more friends. She told me to include the subtext when I passed on the message." Lucien says, smiling a bit.

"That's very nice of her, but I don't think this has changed my mind about my unmasking protocols."

"Yeah, I told her that's what you'd say."

"How was the rest of your patrol otherwise?"

"Otherwise uneventful. No explosions turning everything in the radius into a cartoon or whatever the fuck else she's cooked up."

"Bet you Vista would be able to undo that somehow. Her and Clockblocker have been defusing bombs left and right - turns out shrinking them and surrounding them with stopped matter is enough to deal with most things she cooks up."

"Are they observing good infosec about not letting it leak that that's how they're doing it?"

"Yeah, officially it's Armsmaster who's defusing them most of the time."

"Good."

Bakuda's rampage results in what might be the closest to a unified front the city has ever had, with the non-ABB villains cooperating in an attack on Lung that results in his capture by the Protectorate, and Armsmaster managing to corner Bakuda while Vista and Clockblocker disable her final bomb, this time getting public credit. The Protectorate and Wards teams* throw a small party to celebrate, Vista spends the next few days beaming with pride and Clockblocker wears a skirt to patrol through Empire territory for what he insists is the tactical advantage of its twirliness. Lucien takes three entire days off to hang out with his parents and comes back refreshed, even if he spent one of those days helping them pack.

*Mostly Assault.

Lorica attends the party for a decorous amount of time but mostly she wants to be tinkering or doing whatever it is she might be doing in her civvie identity.

Assault, who might be inebriated, threatens to throw her a surprise party but aside from that no one minds her leaving early - Armsmaster leaves early as well.