The Tyrant's house does not look like it is an extremely secure bunker, which is honestly kind of creepy for people who are less good at being Thinkers than Tattletale. (To her, it tells her that it's Thinker-designed.) There's a are nice wide gardens with an (electric) fence in front of them (and an open ha-ha with a foot-high microfence in front of it, to stop wild animals from wandering in, and a concealed trench behind it lined with spikes) and good views for security cameras and some very nice rosebushes (that conceal security cameras, and plausibly also conceal emplaced guns that will fire on remote command, or those might just be emplacements and the guns aren't installed yet) lining a lovely garden pathway (that looks like where there might be a landmine but she thinks it was probably just built with the option for landmines), and there's another trench outside the house and no trees that can easily be cut down, and the foundations are built extremely solidly and there are very lovely first-floor windows but from her deduction of the house's architecture none of them actually see into anything useful and all of them can clearly be covered with steel shutters that will automatically drop down from the walls... looks like it can flood everything outside the house with light at night, either visible or intense ultraviolet... there's a garage by the side that contains cars and there's probably also an exit in the garage that lets you get swiftly from one of the cars to the outside via n underground passageway, she'd need to look for where that entrance would be and it would be designed to be an optimized kill-zone...

... Huh, and the windows also serve as excellent firing positions from within the house - they may be concealed - those bits of decorative stonework look like they open to conceal loopholes into the walls looking over the positions where you'd approach the house or the windows, very concealed and they look like they might contain riflemen or more automatic guns... probably the house doesn't have room for more than a few hundred people unless there's very deep underground bunkers...

There's a secret escape route from the house. Possibly more than one, but at least one. She doesn't know where it is, but she suspects it opens up somewhere in the woods outside of town and is extremely trapped and is also designed so that someone inside can easily and automatically disable all the traps even if Shatterbird does her thing or if the Simurgh attacks, though why exactly John Morgan considers preparing for the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Simurgh to try to kill him personally is still unknown to her.

... Oh, and unless this is a deliberate trap for her in particular, there's supposed to be a large security staff and it isn't there yet - only the automatic systems are active, right now, and what the owner and a maybe small group have on them.

(To her hypothetical mundane sight, if she's bothering to use it, it's a really pretty neo-Victorian building somewhere between a large house and a small mansion; not extravagantly showing off, but clearly made to be beautiful and to be comfortable for someone with old-fashioned tastes.)

Snazzy.

She strolls up to the front door and rings the doorbell.

The Titanium Tyrant will of course check the security cameras before he goes out there himself.

His visitor is a blond haired teenager, perhaps 16 years old, wearing a hoodie and jeans and carrying a packet of "Missing Dog" posters. Her clothes look (to the Tyrant) to be high end  - the outfit certainly cost well over a hundred dollars, maybe over two hundred. She has a phone in her hoodie pouch and she could probably fit something else there behind the phone but it's not obvious if she has. The dog on the posters is an adorable mutt.

On her face is the bored smirk of someone who is entirely too cocky for their own good. Whatever she's here to do, she's not really worried about it going badly.

There aren't any stores in town selling those clothes, and he has a distant passing acquaintance with every family in town rich enough to pay for those clothes for their daughter and likely to, so this is a ploy. He reviewed all known security camera footage of every supervillain in Brockton Bay (at 10x speed, for most of them, while playing poker) and height and build are actually pretty hard to disguise. He'll make sure all the automatic bug zappers are on, do a really intense scan of his yard to make sure there's no black widow spiders in it, and stroll out to meet her, keeping an eye out for any attempts to bug him.

The man who comes down wears dark colors, rich purples and browns and blacks to suggest a particularly sober emperor, multilayered (which is sensible in Maine) in a way that makes him look, like his house, almost Victorian, like those pictures of gentlemen with frock coats and vests and six layers between their chest and the surface; he is not tall but is bulky, broad-shouldered and muscular; she would guess him to have poor natural physical control but to have made up for it with determination and focus at mastering the body which is his. 

None of these, however, are the first and most obvious fact to Tattletale, nor the second, nor the third. The first and most obvious fact about the man is that he is a supervillain. It's really kind of obvious; every facet of his appearance and character just screams EVIL MEGALOMANIAC OUT TO CONQUER THE WORLD. For this man, anything other than powered armor (or possibly the sort of lightly-armored costume with six death rays concealed and a helmet that only covers most of the face) is civvies, an intentional disguise; any manner of speech other than evil monologues to break the will of whatever hero he faces is an affectation. Which supervillain, she doesn't know, but he clearly seems competent. The additional layers are partly because he likes the style and partly to disguise the amount of Kevlar (or tinker fabrics? He's not a tinker but he might know some) on him, and there are at least three weapons concealed on his person, probably more - once you get past three doing an exact count is tricky. These include either tinker weapons or at least one military hand grenade, based on the fact that he didn't confidently know she lacked brute backup but came down here anyway, and also a shoulder holster for which she is about eighty percent sure he has a perfectly legal concealed carry permit, and then at least one holdout weapon because this is not a man who would go out of the house without a holdout weapon.

The second most obvious fact about him is that he is attempting to conceal this, and is doing it well enough that the average person who deals with him probably doesn't know that he's a supervillain. Really it's kind of astonishing that any supervillain as supervillain as him would bother.

And the third most obvious fact is that he's a thinker, and knows she's a thinker, and which thinker, and is looking forwards to this conversation and picking up from her at least as much as she's getting from him.

Wait shit, that's her thing! The nerve of some people. Her hand tremors, as she suppresses the urge to move it closer to her gun - if he was going to shoot her he wouldn't have just answered the door. Still, she's not too shaken by his appearance - she's spent plenty of time around supervillains, including one who absolutely wants to take over the world and another who will want to once Tattletale's finished corrupting her.

(Tattletale herself has never been the taking over the world type - sounds too much like work and her power's best for turning a small amount of leverage into something major. She also doesn't really have the ego to want to rule the world, having people take her too seriously is boring and means she'll never get to surprise everyone with a dramatic third act reveal. While she won't admit it to herself, she also doesn't think she deserves to rule the world. She's let too many people down.)

She considers briefly whether this is Accord - his design sense fits but the power seems off... Something about this situation is really giving her Accord vibes but it's not the man standing in front of her.

"Hi! I've lost my dog, have you seen him?" the girl asks, smiling sunnily.

(Presumably he's the sort of halfway competent thinker that I can extrapolate from this that she's pretty sure she's bugged and someone else is listening in. If he's actually good at this he'll be able to tell that that someone is her boss, who she absolutely hates. Either way she'll learn something.)

(As her hand moves a tiny fraction of an inch towards her gun, he begins a movement that appears to be casually scratching his chin and that is in fact bringing his hand nearer the shoulder holster, and as she stills it he just scratches his chin.)

He's actually good at this. "I'm sorry, I haven't. What does he look like?"

He... is really confused about why someone would have a thinker minion they don't trust? (This is visible on his face, if you are Tattletale.) Why is she plotting against this person, and how has she not succeeded yet?

(It is also clear that his best-but-low-confidence-guess is that the person is Skitter, based on how slight movements of his eyes are checking for insects on her clothing.)

Her eyes are not bothering to check for insects at all on account of how it's definitely not Skitter. The way she crinkles her eyebrows indicates it's a Thinker, with a fucking annoying power.

"If you see him, would you let me know?" she asks, handing him a poster. She doesn't actually know whether this egomaniacal supervillain is better than her boss right now and needs to know more before she risks betrayal.

Ah, understandable. Given that she's plotting against him anyway, probably some kind of precognitive or imprecise steering.

"Of course," he says, taking it.

(The Tyrant feels that, and it is visible that he feels that, a competent employer does not keep powerful slaves. People you work with need either to be people who want you to live because they share your goals, who want you to live because you are a valuable source of resources and you can't pay them if you're dead, or totally powerless to harm you in any way, and it's very hard to be sure of that last one. He keeps his people in line with good pay, good benefits, and not hiring people who hate him, the way a sensible person does.)

Man, that's freaky to see from the outside. 

What's her power got on his leadership qualities... Oh! He's like a not shitty Coil!

"If you find him there's a reward" she improvises, indicating that she'd be quite happy about switching employers for decent money and the ability to actually fucking leave if she wants to. As a peace offering she absentmindedly plays with her hoodies' string, coiling it up, to indicate who her employer is. Not actually absentmindedly. Presentmindedly.

"Thank you," he says, "But I don't think that's necessary." (The second sentence is to be ignored, it's just to stay in character. She can tell that.)

String, loop, snake, coil, Coil it is, then, and the man with a secret power is a thinker who can't recognize treachery or deceit but has some paths to counter it anyway.

... He's potentially interested. Chiefly because Coil is spying on him, and if this is as a prelude to an attempt to murder or kidnap him he's going to want Coil dead, but also because he would appreciate having superpowered muscle for some of his plans and he considers the Undersiders to be talented youngsters with a great deal of potential who are probably going to pick a fight they can't win (but could, in ten years, with proper equipment and training) and all die before they turn twenty, and that's just a waste of talent. On the other hand, he does not want his secret identity blown, and while they have a great deal of potential being involved in supervillain fights either personally or as a sponsor in any identity that could be traced back to him would be an extremely large downside, and he is frankly not certain that every member of her team is as attuned to high-stakes negotiations as she is.

(His opinion of the Undersiders isn't really deliberately sent, it's just that Tattletale will pick it up if she tries. By their standards, he's pretty bad at lying.)

If Coil's spying on her through her bugged phone, he suggests she - 

- limits of their method of communication, can't just tell her any of his phone numbers or email addresses with it - 

- He can put a note for her in his mailbox once he's no longer being spied on with a throwaway email address on it that she can use to get in touch with him, or read via bug if Skitter is in on this and her bugs have good enough vision. Or put it at some Schelling point location in Brockton Bay, though he doesn't trust her enough to show up at a location of her choosing where her deadlier teammates might be present in person, yet.

Tattletale barely resists the temptation to dig deeper and try to grab an email from his mannerisms - she can probably do it but doesn't want that bad of a headache later. Her eyes continue to not dart around to indicate that Skitter has nothing to do with this. Skitter, and the rest of her team, don't even Coil is her current boss. Hopefully rolling her eyes communicates this? Fuck if she knows how much he's getting off that.

But sure, she can check his mailbox lat- wait nope, throwaway timeline. Now that she thinks about it she's completely certain this won't have happened - ambushing a Thinker for recon purposes is too damn stupid to do for real. She sighs (almost) imperceptibly - she left her 'This Timeline Is Going To Have Never Happened' wine in the car.

"He tends to chase after interesting smells, and this time he got lost I guess. I just hope that he can come home and it will be like he never left," she says, doing her level best to communicate what's going on here without being so obvious Coil will notice when he listens.

She nods. So he needs to avoid attracting any attention. Fair enough.

"With luck. I'll let you know if he turns up." She really ought to stop extending the conversation, if her boss might notice and this would trigger a disaster. (He has not picked up that he specifically is being simulated because he doesn't actually think about simulations much. He has picked up that her boss can make unspecified bad things happen if the Tyrant acts in any way differently than he models the Tyrant as acting without this conversation, which is still pretty good.)

He has picked up that the rest of her team isn't in on the conversation. He recognizes that this may be a special circumstance unlike the vast majority of others, due to her boss's power, but in his experience trying to plan elaborate schemes that the rest of your team isn't in on does not usually go well, and is one of the main causes of the sort of drama that ends with half the team murdered by the other half, which he generally tries to avoid in his daily life.

Well shit, he couldn't tell.

(A bit of her is happy that she's found a place where she's better than him - she'd have been able to pick up on that.)

"Okay. I'll probably be back here again later to put more posters up so if you forget those will remind you," she says, with a slight emphasis on 'back here again later' to indicate that Coil's power allows him to repeat things, and 'forget' to indicate that it actually will undo anything that happened this time around.

OK, no, that's just bullshit. That is complete nonsense as a power. Time loops? There's got to be some restriction on those - probably he can only repeat the past few hours, but 'few' might mean a day or two - why has this man not taken over the world yet -

"Then I'll expect to see you around." He strongly recommends she leaves before she tests her boss's patience further.

"Oh, I might not come back," she says, trying to communicate that Coil can't go backwards in time, "it's possible I'll just multitask and put some up now." she adds, indicating that he can have multiple timelines but not actually repeat things properly.

... Interesting. Multiple timelines and pick one. That's a fascinating power.

He nods. "With luck he'll show up at your doorstep tomorrow and it'll all have been for nothing." This is in fact just cover-maintaining, you can't depart from truth that much, and she can tell he doesn't believe it. "If you want to leave posters here, there and there look to me like good places to put them up; will you need more?" Does pointing out two trees that overlook the drive to his house successfully ask the question 'two timelines'?

She's briefly confused, but her power continues to be excellent and figures out what he's trying to say.

"Those places will do."

He'll nod. "Do you need tape, or do you already have it?" Once again this is cover-maintaining, but if she does it'll be a great opportunity to show her a piece of paper with an email address written on it.

She pats her pockets briefly. 

"Already got some," she replies, the awkward stiltedness in her voice indicating that her refusal isn't about maintaining cover smoothly, but because his email plan won't work for other reasons. She's hoping he can figure out on his own what those reasons are - he seems like a smart fellow.