"He's definitely keeping the timeline."

"Pleased to hear it. - While you're here, I must ask you: Why haven't you killed him yet?"

"Really fucking hard and if I miss there's a shitton of blowback."

"... Skitter puts black widows in his shoes and in seventy-two hours they bite."

"She's never even met him, I don't know where his base is, those aren't deadly, and he has antivenom around I think. Also he interrogates me and my teammates every once in a while in throwaway timelines, I'm pretty sure."

"Also, Skitter doesn't kill."

Additionally Skitter would have to stay near him to keep the bugs under control during that whole time period, but Tattletale isn't going to give away a weakness of Skitter's power without a reason to.

It's not so much that the Tyrant thinks that she should go ahead with these plans despite those reasons, as it is that he thinks that she's a thinker. Even if he survived the poisoning attempt, he would be hospitalized in both timelines, allowing him to be pinned down for a simultaneous assassination, she can read him and determine which antivenoms he carries and use an insect he doesn't defend against, even if the world's greatest assassin happens to be unwilling to kill he suspects Tattletale can talk her out of it -

- and really this is fundamentally just one way to set up a time-delayed assassination. Persuade a tinker to make a 72-hour-trigger poison and put it in his cup. Sneak a timed explosive the size of a pea into his pocket. Replace one of his bodyguards with a shapeshifter. Detect that the other him is in a throwaway timeline and shoot him in the head, forcing him into a world he's already sacrificed. There are dozens of ways to kill Coil if you're as smart as Tattletale is, and the Tyrant is not hugely impressed by the fact that she hasn't even managed one of them yet.

"And yet she's a supervillain?" He shakes his head. "She's wasting her talents."

"I bet she'd be happy to be offered a more compelling alternative," says Tattletale, smirking.

She's pretty sure all of the plans he just thought of would fail, though she has no idea what the specifics are. Coil is a slimy bastard and killing him quickly isn't her priority. Longer she waits the more stuff she gets to inherit afterall.

"Well, apparently it happens to have taken less than a week from registering my first patent to the first attempt by a supervillain to kidnap me, so as it happens I am in the market for capable professionals with superpowers who want large sums of money and are interested in long-term employment dealing with - problems like the one that occurred today." He'll need to accelerate setting up his own independent security operation, but he expects he can manage that. He's planning to spend most of the next few weeks hiring, anyway. "I'd love to meet her."

"Actually you'd love to meet most of my team, and the you'll be fine with hiring the remainder in order to get the packaged set."

Tattletale is back to her usual smart-ass self, oncoming migraine be damned.

"Plausible." His personal experience is that a threefold division of villains into sensible people, people he can work with with some effort, and people who must be either avoided or killed usually works wonders. "Of course, I'm not a supervillain. How well do you think your teammates would work with that?"

(He suspects that if Skitter is unwilling to kill people who threaten Tattletale's life, she'll be all for it. It's Bitch he's most worried about - she has a body on her and one of the least subtle powers he's ever seen.)

"Skitter'll love it, Bitch won't notice, Regent won't care. Grue and I will be fine with it, so long as the money stays good, more or less."

"... Won't notice?"

"Bitch doesn't track the sort of things that separate you from a supervillain. She doesn't really track it for the heroes either really."

This is not filling him with confidence that he will, in fact, be able to work with her. He doesn't despise people who are so incapable of knowing what the rules are they can't follow them, but he also doesn't hire them, whatever color hat he wears. "Can she refrain from casually committing crimes for nonstrategic purposes?"

"Someone kicks a puppy in front of her then she'll kick them. Not sure if that works for you?"

"The question is if she'll kick the individual responsible, if she'll gouge out one of his eyeballs, or if she'll turn the puppy into a gigantic monster that eats his former master's face." (The Titanium Tyrant has a lot of experience with supervillains.)

"Not for kicking a dog. She attacked a dog fighting ring and didn't empower the dogs there since she hadn't trained them yet. There weren't any casualties, even though people fought back. Some people might have gotten hurt, but no one dead."

He nods. "Does she prefer to handle that sort of issue herself, or is it an element of the world that she wishes excised from it?" If the latter, he can call the cops on dog fighting rings before his private security gets there.

"She'd be okay with such rings just not existing I expect."

He nods. "Assuming the geographical remit is fairly short, this should be manageable." If he keeps her here away from the Bay outside of missions, then he can call the cops if she has problems, and if there's supervillain support for it and he has to offer the services of his private security team as deputies to handle the crisis, he can do that.

"Sounds perfect," she says, smirking. 

... After a second she wipes the smirk off her face, not actually certain that looking smug is the correct thing to do after a negotiaton with a new boss she actually likes.

Her new boss thinks that she should be her best self! Except insofar as this interferes with his evil plans, in which case she should be the version of her best self that doesn't interfere with his evil plans.

"How does Lake Wilmington work for you, as a place for me and your friends to meet? Mundane clothes." It's outdoors, hard to bug, easy to sneak bugs into, hard to spy on all the routes there, and easy to talk to without being overheard by passing travelers. It'll be cold, but not that cold. And Tattletale can suggest a time, so the balance won't be too far in his direction.

(And he does not particularly consider the possibility that she might not know how to disguise herself such that nobody can recognize her while wearing mundane clothes. It's winter in New England, bundle up tight and nobody can see more than a thin line around your eyes anyway.)

"No masks would be a hard sell?"

" - Why?"

"Cape and civilian life are generally be kept separate and people tend to enforce this but will be more hesitant if someone blurs the line."