Lorica takes home the surplus root beer.

Two days later, Behemoth attacks New Delhi. 

She probably is not worth transporting to New Delhi. She'll let Dragon borrow her old software if that's still useful, though the chassis are now irreplaceable and she'd rather not deploy many of those.

Dragon takes just one.

The Undersiders go, bringing most of their allies as well. Dinah stays. Vista goes, the Protectorate continuing to feign ignorance of her forging her parents signatures on the relevant forms. Lucien goes.

The battle is like any Endbringer battle, until it isn't. Rumors swirl afterward on PHO about just what happened and who was involved. Many of the rumors are about Brockton Bay crime lord Skitter. Some say that she helped the mad cape Phir Sē, sabotaging a hero's attempt to stop him. Other say that she attempted to coordinate the heroes to direct Phir Sē's attack, to prevent collateral. Those rumors include footage of a towering half-cylinder shaping the blast, protecting the most populated areas of New Delhi from an explosion that was visible as far as Pakistan. 

No one has the energy to debate over whether Behemoth retreated after the explosion because of the damage it did to him, or because the damage it did to the city was enough to satiate his appetite for destruction. Over a million dead - the highest death toll of any attack by the beast.

Whatever happened, there's really not supposed to be infighting at Endbringer battles. Disappointing that it happens anyway.

The surviving capes return home, exhausted and weary and in desperate need of sleep.

Hey um. My powers make it so I cannot sleep but I do not particularly want to be alone with my thoughts right now. Any chance we could chat or something?

Yeah, of course. Online or do you want to meet up?

Meet up would be nice.

I'll pick up a thing of coffee ice cream so I can stay up a bit late and meet you at the plaza out front of that boarded-up pizza place on the boardwalk?

Okay. I'd take some strawberry ice cream if it's convenient to pick up at the same time.

The walk to the plaza is weird. He'd never seen Brockton Bay as ... whole and undamaged before.

Lorica arrives. On a motorcycle.

The motorcycle does not, strictly speaking, work. The owner fucked up the engine somehow and sold it on Craigslist for peanuts rather than getting it repaired for more-than-peanuts. But the wheels turn. And it's big enough that Lorica can be it. So she shows up on her weirdly quiet Suzuki that she barely has to touch the handlebars to steer, and parks it and walks over to him and offers him a single-serve Haagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream.

"Thanks."

He is distracted staring at the skyline, and how not on fire it is.

"No problem." She peels open her coffee one. "Do you want to talk about it or about literally anything else?"

"I um. Hadn't though that far."

"Anything else? Though I might change my mind."

"I got the bot to make me a new Civilization mod. It's not exactly revolutionary, but it's novel software work that I didn't specifically program it to do, and it's also not a half-bad mod, it reskins everything to make it fantasy-themed. Art and all."

"Oh neat. Did the bot make the art?"

"Yes. It's not as good at that but it's, like, fine, it just wound up working in a much simpler style for anything it couldn't just recolor. I'm waffling on whether to tell it to self-modify - it can't without my say-so and might still not be able to with it, I'm not sure, I don't exactly - remember how I put it together on that front, and it can't access capacities I'm not letting it use in order to check."

"Huh, I'd have thought art was way outside of a bots capabilities - seems like the sort of thing computers would be bad at. What would it self-modify to do?"

"Well, in this case, be better at art, but it's the sort of thing you want to be a bit cautious about, self-modifying AIs aren't much safer than self-replicating biologicals."

"How would you go about making sure it was safe?"

"Probably ask Dragon for help. She thinks it's cute."

"Man, Dragon is great. The more things I learn about her the more I like her."

"She's really cool. I wanted to get more chances to collaborate but now I guess I will have to settle for asking her to do my homework because I have lost my metaphorical hands in a tragic accident. Also my literal hands and the rest of my original body."

"Unfortunately, it was a good body." says Lucien, too exhausted and emotionally out of whack to filter anything he's saying.