The runaway van is - 

Not a problem in the slightest because he looks both ways before crossing the street, like any person with intelligence?

- carrying something the city's other superhero (superhero, supervillain, what's really the difference...) made which is firing beams of glowing energy that disintegrate things they hit, while she chases after it screaming apologies.

Dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge - 

"Oh my god I'm so sorry -"

The beams are getting more frequent! Previously they were blasting, like, dust specks. Now a sign just disappeared.

Dodge, dodge - 

ZAP.

... The Titanium Tyrant takes a moment to stand up, pat himself down, and catch his breath.

Where is he?

In what appears to be a shop, closed for the evening. Superhero figurines and merchandise line the shelves, including "Armsmaster Patented Super Fly Swatter", "Miss Militia's Bandana", and "Velocity Shoes, By Nike".

Mmm. Unfortunate. (He's never heard of any of these people, but there are plenty of local heroes he hasn't.)

Is there a security camera looking at him? Are there windows? If so, is there anyone on the street outside?

(All these are being checked in the first fraction of the second.)

The security cameras are all aimed at places someone might plausibly try to enter the store through, not the places where someone might spontaneously appear from thin air. There are windows! It's night outside and the street seems empty. 

There's also a movie poster advertising 'Legend Lights Up Seattle: Coming to Theaters Fall 2010'. It shows an extremely handsome man gazing fondly into the eyes of a costumed hero, while a single cup of coffee sits on the table between them, foam on the surface formed into a heart.

The poster looks old, like someone put it up a while ago and hasn't gotten around to taking it back down. 

Well, while he wants to get out of the store without getting seen by a security camera, which is pretty easy especially if he's willing to compromise on the back of his head being visible, there's some nonsense that needs noticing, first:

2010. An old poster. The obvious explanation for that and for all these new heroes is time travel - this store doesn't look fantastically rich or futuristic - a bit odd - he's sure the cameras are better, but - 

- He'll spend another half-second scanning for dates on objects in the room. Plenty of things will have a date of manufacture in small print, or say "new since" or just include a suspicious "the 1982 model Whatever". This is an easy hypothesis to start testing.

Years on products range from 2009 to 2011.

Well, that is horrifying. Most likely this is a hallucination, or quite probably an elaborate trap, and possibly it is dimensional travel to an alternate universe thirty years in the future, but there is another alternative to consider and it's a very bad alternative.

He will depart, avoiding the cameras. He wants a a public library, but he will settle for a newspaper, a passerby he can ask for directions to the nearest public library, or or a taxi he can tell him to take him to the nearest public library.

The first one of these he can find is a newsstand that's just now opening up, selling newspapers from today, January 22nd 2011. Apparently the Sailors are going to the NBA playoffs this year, and a city council member was photographed at an E88 rally.

Fascinating! He has quite a lot of money but thirty years of inflation will do very bad things to his ability to use it. He'll buy one and casually ask the vendor, "Do you have the time?"

"Four thirty," replies the vendor, who normally has at least another half hour to drink his coffee and properly wake up before his first customer.

"Thank you." And by whatever streetlight there is he will try to tell what world this newspaper is from. Are there any names he recognizes in it - the Survivor, Minerva, Reagan? Are there more unfamiliar supers? What technologies do they casually mention that are alien to his world? Some progress must have taken place in the thirty years he is expected to believe passed.

There are plenty of unfamiliar supers: Hookwolf was at the Empire Eighty-Eight rally with the city council member, there's a blurry picture that was reportedly taken on someone's cellphone. Local villains by the names Uber and Leet dressed up as video game characters "Mario" and "Bowser" and broke into a nearby branch of the US Mint, throwing fireballs and stealing cash. The entire thing was "live streamed" over the "internet" which is mentioned in a few other articles and seems to be a ubiquitous electronics communication network - apparently the newspaper itself can be accessed over the internet.

In the answers to Thursday's rather atrocious crossword puzzle he finds Henry Kissinger's name. The clue was "Best smoocher in Nixon's cabinet".

The Tyrant is exited about the future! There's some cool future stuff he will be eager to know about, just as soon as he can break out an encyclopedia that can tell him how to use it.

He'll tell the newspaper vendor he was looking for the library and got lost, he have any idea where it is? (If this fails, he can ask variants of this question to the next few people he sees.)

The vendor has no idea, but the second pedestrian he asks does. He is provided with directions to a grand but poorly maintained library. A larger than life metal statue of a sailor looking through a telescope stands out front.

Progress! He'll walk inside and take a look around. It look like a normal public library to him?

Almost! There's a row of computers for visitors to use on the first floor. 

Future computers, at that.

In the present, where he lives, there are really two possibilities for computers. For tinkers, there's AI sidekicks with a visual design based on whatever sci-fi movie they loved growing up that you communicate with by issuing voice instructions (that is, talking to them). For absolutely everyone else, there's the Apple II. This is not an Apple II; it is shiny and futuristic and has some kind of screen he hasn't invented yet. He wants to check out the computer; this is truly excellent.

Unfortunately, he's at a public library, not talking to Mechanos who just invented this last week, which means it is also going to be agonizing.

"Excuse me," he will say to whichever one of the librarians looks most likely to be both helpful and free, "can you show me how the computers work?"

(He will do his best to choose his tone to persuade this person. Unfortunately that probably involves sounding HUMBLE and having an EXCUSE prepared for why he FAILED at this EXTREMELY BASIC TASK that is not LITERAL TIME TRAVEL or possibly ENDING UP IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.)

"Were you having trouble logging in on the guest account or something?"

"I am as of yesterday no longer a member of the Maine Restorationist Reformed Baptist Synod," he says, "thank God should he happen to exist. I have never actually used a computer before and do not know how, but have heard great things about it."

He's pretty sure he's in enough (subtle) makeup and altering his default style of speech and facial expression enough that this mildly suspicious interaction will not be that easy to connect to the life he plans to lead.

Weird. You get all types at the library and this isn't the first time he's had to walk someone through the basics of using a computer. So long as the Not-Amish man doesn't try asking the librarian for his credit card info, he can get a very basic lesson in how to use a computer

"So, welcome to the wider world I guess?"

"Thank you."

Does this lesson happen to include 'click on internet explorer to explore the internet?' How about 'what Google is?'

The lesson includes:

- How to login to the computer.

- How to search the library's catalog.

- How to use internet explorer and Google.

- How to play solitaire. 

And lastly a warning on how he should not download porn on the library computer.

He will cough slightly, look mildly embarrassed, and say "I understand, thank you."

And then he will GOOGLE. Obviously someone has installed a tracker on the library so he can't do anything illegal, so his chief security is through obscurity. He is going to Google for the names of various famous superheroes and supervillains, himself included, and see what they've been up to recently.

Some of the more generic names do in fact turn up results for capes, Survivor was one of the first American vigilantes and was ultimately killed by Murder Inc, the mafia organization. Minerva was an rather successful italian heroine who died due to getting to close to Behemoth's kill aura. 

The more specific names don't turn up anything relevant. The Titanium Tyrant turns up a brand named Tyrant of overly macho knives, many of which are titanium. The advertisements say they are very hard and triple serrated. 

Easy enough to displace, if he continues in his current career.

Well, this confirms alternate universe (/attempt to make him believe he's in an alternate universe), not future.

... And his family? His friends? Everyone who worked for him in the Royal Court? He has real names to search for, if the supervillain names fail.

Nope. Nothing about any of them.

(There is a singer with the same real name as one of his Royal Court, but further research reveals this to be a coincidence.)

Unsurprising. Prudence may still be around, but if she is she hasn't told anyone.

All right.

What's the current state of the power armor industry, our of curiosity? He'd like to see how long it took for them to catch up to him without his helping hand.

The power armor industry can be divided into three categories.

1)  Power armor made by tinkers, a specific sort of cape. These suits vary wildly, from building sized suits to lightweight form fitting bodysuits that nonetheless provide the wearer with enhanced strength, durability and lasers. These suits generally speaking are not for sale. According to the internet this is because they require substantial ongoing maintenance.

2) Amateur power armor, made by engineer types in their spare time as a hobby. These look cool but aren't useful. They also tend to be hazardous to the health of their users - their are public safety campaigns cautioning against trying to build your own power armor if you aren't a tinker.

3) Various industry prototypes that seem to be mostly for show - none of these have been deemed practical enough to manufacture in any real quantity.

There was a period, which lasted for actual years, in which the Titanium Tyrant believed that there existed basically reasonable people who tried to do things, and that they would end up at various offices of power at corporations and in governments and so forth and so on because this was useful for doing things. One of the only people he knew who was actually as smart as he was had told him that not believing it was his major failing, and he always took Mr. Smith seriously even if he ended up disagreeing with him. It had taken years for his wife to gradually ease him out of this belief, and what he had considered the charming naivete of his youth.

He had actually figured, by the time he turned thirty-five, that he had accurately calibrated his cynicism about the competence of the rest of the world. They never solved the feedback problem or worked out any half-decent efficiency program and their engine miniaturization is completely inadequate - they had forty years and they still haven't caught up to where he was when he was seventeen -

Well. He'd thought Stage Three would be hard. All right. He'll spend the next few hours looking up superpower categorizations for both origins and effects, recent history, who the President is, the world's most infamous supervillains and greatest heroes, and so forth and so on, and then he can move on to researching how gambling is done in this world and just how secured casinos are against people being him at them.

There are twelve classifications used for powers, though not all of them fit into those categories. Categories that may be new to him include thinkers, who have various sorts of enhanced cognition, and trumps, who have powers that have to do with powers themselves (such as nullifying, enhancing, or providing them).

The first sources he finds when he searches for the origins of powers indicate that powers manifest during very intense moments, and that the best powers tend to come from moments when someone is being very heroic. However further research on the parahuman specific PHO wiki and the more general Wikipedia itself, indicates that basically all powers manifest from intense stress and trauma. The heroism story seems to have come in part from confusion over a PR campaign designed to keep teenagers from trying to give themselves trigger events. 

His initial googling of "world politics" brings him to a Wikipedia page with a map of the world near the top of the page.

The Titanium Tyrant is disturbed by this world having "Thinkers" as a whole category of powers and not being perfect. His world has one Thinker, who spent his life being a supervillain, and if there are any others they are smart enough to not tell people and to make a quiet killing in the stock market, and yet they seem in many respects (most notably powered armor, but that's his specialty) to be behind his world in spite of having thirty more years to develop. 

... Going by the origin story, local powers are not the same thing as powers at home. (They don't even mention idealists.) Noted. He'll need to avoid making too many assumptions that any type of power will work the same way here and at home.

Some islands appear to be missing. Is there an entry in this online encyclopedia for "Newfoundland?"

Newfoundland is the Canadian island that was sunk on May 9th, 2005 when the Endbringer Leviathan broke the continental shelf with his macro-hydrokinesis, applying pressure on a scale sufficient to sink the island. Over half a million people died.

The name Leviathan links to a page about him: Leviathan is thirty feet tall, one of the fastest speedsters in record, and incredibly durable, but it's his large scale control of water that is his most dangerous trait. Locations he attacks are battered both by torrential rain and tsunami-intensity waves, and with sufficient time he has shown the capability to sink landmasses. His attacks on ports have led to a substantial decline in global trade.

A linked article provides a list of his attacks, roughly one per year since 1996.

Another linked article provides a list of capes that were killed defending the world from him. There are several hundred entries.

That is - horrible. Genuinely horrible. The Titanium Tyrant is shocked.

Could the Atlantic Six stop Leviathan? Yes. Leviathan would be a day with an unfortunately large number of civilian casualties, and then they would arrive, teleport him into outer space on a trajectory for a black hole, and that would be that.

But if the Atlantic Six had attacked - before the Smith copied the False Sage, before Gateway joined, before Minerva made her army, after Livia had weakened the Survivor, in the first years of the Six's formation...

... Every member of the team except the Survivor would be dead.

What are the other Endbringers?

Behemoth was the first Endbringer, emerging in 1992, and physically the largest. He is dynakinetic, capable of manipulating energy to shoot lightning bolts, spew fire, and redirect attacks. Within approximately 32 feet his powers are not Manton limited* and capes who get that close are typically killed instantly. His cape casualty list is twice as long as Leviathans.

The Simurgh emerged in 2002 and is physically the weakest of the Endbringers. Her most devastating powers are her unrivaled precognitive ability and the psychic screen she issues that breaks and reshapes the minds of everyone in the city she attack. Victims exposed to her scream will generally act entirely ordinary until they find themselves in a position to inflict massive harm, engaging in suicide bombings, poisonings, and sabotage months or even years after the exposure. The Simurgh uses her precognition to aim many of these attacks, setting up complex chains of events that result in maximum damage. Her cape casualty rate is shorter than her siblings, but a disclaimer notes that do to a lack of certainty, secondary victims of those affected are not included.

*A term for the limitations of most powers around effecting other people, and the insides of other people.

Behemoth, only the Smith (or the False Sage he copied, of course) could beat, and not by conventionally fighting. The Simurgh - 

- Precognition is not a thing. Some people have boasted of having it, made public predictions and been publicly wrong. There might be a precognitive who has told nobody that precognition exists and is making a killing on the stock markets, but if so they haven't told anyone. The general theory is that no precognition can model the effects of superpowers that haven't been created yet, because they are so purely chaotic and because they are not present in the world as of the time of the predictor gaining their powers.

The Simurgh is completely terrifying and he has no idea how the world still exists.

He'll continue his research.

Capes have had a substantial impact on world politics since they first appeared in the early 80s. The Cold War ended when a single parahuman, Scion, began to blast missiles used for nuclear test out of the sky and disable launch facilities. The Soviet Union collapsed soon after, and while Thinker led market reforms saved the country from complete economic ruin an attack by Behemoth destroyed Moscow and an unstoppable parahuman named Sleeper roving the country had left it too fractured and destitute to have any real impact on the global stage.

The United States emerged as the most powerful geopolitical entity, with the Chinese Union-Imperial (CUI) second, it's cape all conscripted into a single military force.

Recently geopolitics has revolved substantially around the Endbringers, both in terms of how to coordinate fighting them and in terms of managing aid and refugees. Sydney and New York City were both rebuilt following early Endbringer attacks, though recent policies have started to focus less on rebuilding and more on resettling affected populations - immigrants make up an increasing portion of the US population. An reasonably well respected Endbringer truce allows heroes and villains to contribute to defending against Endbringers - a South American dictator attempted to order the arrest of dissident capes recovering from injuries after the fight and was swiftly deposed. However both CUI and Russia have demonstrated considerably less cooperation with the truce.

In the US and Canada, the government sponsored Protectorate, and corresponding paramilitary non-cape group the PRT, have established themselves as the most prominent and powerful of hero organizations.

Eidolon and Scion are generally considered to be the two most powerful heroes. Eidolon has the ability to manifest whatever powers he might need, often with the individual powers being sufficient to make him a heavy hitter in their own right. Scion is known for continuously flying around the world and doing good deeds, ranging from putting out forest fires to healing a woman dying of cancer to fighting off Endbringers, often with powers involving a glowing golden light. While he has demonstrated imminent power, he doesn't seem to have any particular prioritization in what he does - in one particularly famous case he flew directly past a fight with Behemoth to rescue a kitten stuck in a tree some hundred miles away. The only known time he spoke, or communicate at all, was when he said "Scion" in response to someone asking his name.

Other famous living heroes include:

- Alexandria, with flight, strength, and invulnerability. Member of the Triumvirate that leads the Protectorate, along with Eidolon and Legend.

- Legend, third member of the Triumvirate, with laser based powers and extremely fast flight

- Dragon, the world's foremost living Tinker.

No normal villain comes close to the Endbringers in terms of global impact, though there are a other well known ones:

- The Slaughterhouse Nine, a roving band of generally sadistic monsters with no goals other than terror and mayhem, having proved a threat to even the most powerful of heroes. 

- Nilbog, a bio-manipulator who's self-replicating monsters are quarantined along with him in the former town of Ellisburg, New York.

- Sleeper.

- The Three Blasphemies, Tinker constructs which interfere in European politics with unclear aims.

- The Siberian, a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine who disproved Alexandria's invincibility when she took Alexandria's eye. In that same encounter she killed Hero, the original fourth member of the team team now known as the Triumvirate.

- Glaistig Uaine, a power stealer who massacred the first groups set to capture her, stealing their powers. Hero groups successful coordinated a massive fifty cape attack on her that ended in their defeat, retreating after she claimed over a dozen of their powers and lives. The heroes responded by treating her as they would an Endbringer, calling in everyone - domestic and international, hero and villain - only for her to surrender. She is currently imprisoned in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center, colloquially known as the Birdcage, from which escape and release are both of unheard of.

- The Ashbeast, a roving monster of fire and destruction located in Central Africa, his impact tempered only by the fact that he generally moves slowly enough to allow evacuation of cities before he approaches.

... Who exactly deposed this dictator? The Protectorate? His local superheroes? His own men?

Scion is the dumbest Idealist he has ever heard of.

... Also, his general opinion of the superheroes of this world is generally very low. They're quite good at building prisons, it is genuinely very impressive to build a prison that even supervillains cannot escape from, but if you have a roving band of nine superhumans and you haven't wiped them out what are you even doing? That's enough that they need a van, for transport, if they can't just teleport themselves across the planet or hide in a pocket dimension. The Tyrant has considerable experience trying to maneuver a van's worth of infamous criminals to evade the attention of the superheroes of the world while carrying out plans much more complicated than random mayhem, and he strongly suspects that if the heroes of the world aren't idiots due to Endbringers eating all their best rising stars the Nine have a very powerful (if dumb) Thinker or precognitive backing them. 

... Who exactly deposed this dictator? The Protectorate? His local superheroes? His own men?

So the Protectorate does not simply depose governments they disapprove of, or at least not publicly.

Well, he'll have more research to do later, but he's going to need to make some money at some point, so he can get himself an apartment and a fake ID and a computer of his own.

So. Gambling. Is it legal? Do they have procedures to detect Thinkers? Do they procedures to detect people who resemble Thinkers but technically aren't because they're Survivors not Parahumans?

Gambling's legality is varies across the US, there are government thinkers who specialize in financial crimes in the government agency Watchdog, as well as some who work directly for casinos. They aren't very public about what their methods are, but to a decent extent this is because thinkers who prevent and commit financial crimes vary wildly in powers. The impression he gets from articles about Watchdog's successes is that they only even consider investigating when at least a few million dollars appear to be involved.

Online poker also exists, often with capped earnings of any individual player to minimize the damage from cheating, superpowered or otherwise.

At the point where you have thinkers working for a government board trying to stop people from making very large amounts of money instead of conquering their own countries or at least making very large amounts of money themselves, something has gone horribly wrong. (Anyone who can hack an online poker website and cheats to observe secret information instead of draining the assets of every other player into a Cayman bank account deserves what happens to them.)

... How many of the hundred largest corporations in the US are thinker-run?

There are no obvious cases of a top hundred company being run by a thinker.

The Elite, America's largest villainous organization (which depending on the branch might not be that villainous) publicly admits control over several corporations, one of which is in the top hundred, though it appears to be tinker and not thinker run. A few others are rumoured to be run by members of the Elite but there's nothing solid.

There are three companies that used to be in the top hundred that were revealed to be secretly controlled by a villain named Teacher who could grant thinker and tinker powers. Teacher is now in the Birdcage for, among other things, assassinating the US Vice President and the British Prime Minister.

This is fantastically disturbing. It is - really not plausible that there would be so few people who want money. Maybe this is just because smart Thinkers don't tell anyone (how hard are powers to detect?) but at least as likely...

... What fraction of people with powers become capes, white hat or black?

Powers are extremely difficult to detect - there's an extra piece brain anatomy present in parahumans called the Corona Pollentia, but it's hard to verify if it's present and significant portions of the population without powers have the same thing.

Somewhere between 80 and 95% of people become capes, depending on the specifics of your definition and what study you are looking at.

That's not possible.

Counting white hats, black hats, people who engage in renumerated violence, and people who buy superpowers specifically so they can be one of the above, the figure in his universe is under ten percent. (Unless you count Livia's Legion, who distort all the statistics and so are usually left out.) Even with the fact that triggers come from stress and most supers are Survivors and Survivors need to be physically endangered to get their powers, which means that quite a lot of supervillains started by accidentally murdering someone and then descending into a spree of other crimes since all hope for a legitimate career is already lost to them. Even with the Six on the one hand and him on the other trying to persuade everyone they can to put a mask on and cause chaos. Even with federal policy designed to make life easier for superheroes and supervillains in a thousand ways closed to normal citizens. Putting on a mask and punching other masked people in the face is just not a very good way of achieving most goals! Is this universe using precognition to only give people powers in ways that would make entertaining movies to watch, or is this hostile mind control?

People really don't like discussing where they got their powers! Though this one cape does seem to be located in a place that got hit by an Endbringer, this other cape seems likely to have triggered at a place and age where she might have been a child soldier, and this third cape, a villainous child biotinker, seems likely to have been found by the Slaughterhouse Nine before she got powers.

All this seems to match 'superhero origins similar to his world's', meaning there's still an unexpected order-of-magnitude difference variable to explain and he should non-confidently model all parahumans as subject to inhuman personality modifications and therefore potentially dangerous in unexpected ways.

Still, it paints a grim picture. This world - in the sense of civilization - is ending. Not merely in the sense that his was, where democracy, more the work of Sam Colt than of George Washington, was fading as power shifted from the masses and those who could control them to the new breed of supermen, but in the sense that the new breed are not worthy of the crown, seemingly preferring to squabble amongst each other than seek rational goals. Crisis after crisis has hit until the heroes of the world are incapable of resisting the onslaught of the Endbringers, who they can't even destroy, instead hoping to drive them off so that they will destroy somewhere else?

(His heroes haven't destroyed Voidwrath. Though they have destroyed the Necromancer, or functionally so. Still a sign of greater competence.)

He can't conquer the world without saving it. And he can't save it without...

... Well. A great deal of trouble.

Actually, wait, he should do one thing before he gets to implementing his plans.

Are other worlds known? Do travelers from his universe show up regularly?

Other universes were discovered a while back by a villainous tinker, but there is only one which he can find information about - Earth Aleph (as opposed to this Earth, Earth Bet) which resembles this Earth if it hadn't gotten superheroes. A single tiny pinhole wormhole connects the two Earths.

The Tyrant probably did not look noticeably tense, he's very good at controlling it, but he will still relax quite a lot when he hears that. If there's an established multiverse, then someone in his world will invent a means of dimensional travel, the Queen will get her hands on it by hook or by crook, and then the Royal Court will arrive to bail him out. And whatever limitations he may have on his ability to face this world right now, with the Royal Court at his back he is well aware that he can beat Voidwrath in a fight.

Right then, back to using Google to locate things he will need in the short-term. Location of Indian casinos in Brockton Bay (or other casinos, if casinos are legal to run for anyone else), how to hire a cab in the 21st century, where to obtain 21st century cell phones, where to buy computers (computers are tiny even if you aren't a tinker), where the cheap local hotels are (hotels come with free internet?)... he'll do a little quick googling on 'online poker' while he's at it. And apparently Google does pictures, so a few quick shots of the local casinos so he knows what security looks like - 

And then he can worry about more research later, and go make some money.

The Titanium Tyrant's casino strategy is not actually all that complicated. Casino security may ask for ID; it doesn't look at them, not seriously, and he can, with the equipment on his person in a restaurant bathroom, adjust the birth and expiration dates on one of his to look less absurd.

It appears that they have poker being played, with decks that are shuffled in front of the players' eyes, as though they expect their players can't keep track of which of 52 identical objects occupies what position in the stack. The Titanium Tyrant needs to go to quite a lot of effort to not win a statistically implausible amount of money, but there are ordinary good poker players and he has a moderate mount of experience at looking like an ordinary good poker player, so once he's done enough of that that if he did more he might risk looking odd, he will drift over to the blackjack table, card count until shortly before his model of the people they have observing him says they will get suspicious, and then, having won a moderate, unsuspicious amount of them of the sort people quite often win, he will go on to another casino.

Once he's accumulated enough cash, the next step will be a hotel room. He plans to hole up in the hotel room, doing research, getting sixteen extremely suspicious credit cards that can nonetheless be paid back promptly and used to play in sixteen different video poker games with sixteen different accounts and fake names while he does the research, and quietly exploring his options. After a while he'll update from the hotel room to a short-term lease on an apartment, which is not a serious change to his strategy.

Then he's going to get slightly in touch with the local criminal underworld (under a fake name and with makeup and a wig and clothes that aren't his style and an unusual build, of course), buy a fake ID, one of the most expensive kind, where someone registered a fake birth and then carefully did all the paperwork for an imaginary and very boring person for decades, and then he can really get going with his plans.

During one particularly lucrative hand of texas hold'em, the Simurgh strikes Canberra.

Australia's capital city is quarantined, all 600,000+ denizens declared most likely homicidally insane. A third of the city's population is composed of refugees from Sydney, Australia - destroyed by Leviathan 13 years prior.

Yes. He knows.

At least he made a few grand with his pocket threes.

Unfortunately, the Tyrant's existence will be known to the world once he starts doing interesting things, and that means he needs to prepare everything before he starts anything.

Still, once he's made his money and has an ID that can stand up to the best the United States government can throw at it (complete with getting a driving license, which really does not take very long at all), it will be time to move to his next target. (Gambling can still serve as an income supplement, but not where he can be found.)

He needs a home base. He has very specific concerns, for just where this home base has to be. It needs to be somewhere with no known supervillains, or else only weak and mild and moderate supervillains who are much weaker than the local heroes and absolutely not holding back - which means a town, not a city (one in ten thousand people in this madhouse is a parahuman, good God) but ideally a town with an unemployment problem, that used to be dependent on a single large factory that only recently shut down. (Thus providing him with skilled labors.) It needs low property values but not an absolutely absurd crime rate such that people might trigger themselves failing to mug him, to be only lightly industrially regulated, to be within an hour's drive of a city worthy of the name, and ideally to be within an hour's flight by private jet of Washington D.C. but not close enough to the coast that he needs to fear all three Endbringers instead of only two. And it needs to have exactly the normal reaction of a failing town that depended on a single factory for work and doesn't have that factory any more and has a severe unemployment problem to someone who looks like he's rich-but-rich-from-a-working-background-who-likes-to-roll-up-his-sleeves-and-fix-his-own-damn-car-if-it-breaks who might want to open up a new factory there: Desperate, desperate hope.

This town an hour west of Brockton Bay fulfills all his requirements - it used to be a stop along the freight line that left Brockton Bay where warehouses were located, but the line no longer functions due to the collapse of the shipping industry. The warehouses are now used as auxiliary storage for the National Cheese and Diesel Stockpiles. The town attempted to revitalize its economy with retraining programs and a subsidized vocational school for manufacturing jobs that never materialized.

Sounds perfect.

He'll show up, then, and get started on his plan.

Stage one: Show up! Talk to people! Meet them! Talk to whoever in their government is panicking about their trade! Gently give the (true) impression that he runs a small manufacturing firm and is planning to build a new factory!

Stage two: Buy some land! Cheap land. Build a house! Is there a local construction company? If yes and they are competent, hire them! If yes and they are incompetent, engage in gentle competence-related politics that he is pretty sure will result in them becoming more competent, possibly due to a change in leadership! If no (more likely), hire a construction company from Brockton Bay that is competent! He's pretty sure that as a fellow hard-working blue-collar Guy Who Builds Shit he can find people he can works with pretty well. He has plans for the house which are very detailed and very clever and produce something with a very large workspace that is incidentally earthquake-resistant and hurricane-resistant and has an electric fence up to stop "deer" and excellent lines of sight and has what are not labeled on the plans as secret passageways but, once he finishes furnishing it, totally will be. (The registered copy of the plans can also be swapped out for something missing the secret rooms.) With the flood of immigration to the US, he expects he can get skilled labor very cheaply, by the standards of back home.

Stage three: Move into an apartment or motel room while his house is under construction, begin construction of the shell for a factory. He'll need investment do do more.

The most competent construction company in the area is Fortress Construction, a company which is best known for constructing Endbringer shelters. They have a branch office in Brockton Bay that doesn't normally build houses but responds to inquiry and informs him that if he wants something particularly fortified and can pay their exorbitant fees they would be delighted to help - here are some blueprints of residences they have built previously, a few of which are actually more cleverly designed than his own plans.

If that's out of his price range there's a more local but affordable construction company which does contracting work for Fortress and other major companies that is surprisingly competent, though they lack substantial experience building properties on their own. There's also a bland mid-range option in Brockton Bay that seems reasonably competent if neither of the other options will do.

That is impossible, so he makes a note that Fortress Construction gets its plans from a Thinker, updates his designs with the brilliant insights he has gleaned from their work, and goes for whichever of the other two options strikes him, when he talks to their leaders, as more inclined to do good work on time at a decent price and less inclined to sell his secrets to the highest bidder.

(Accord, if he were aware of this, would strongly consider being flattered.)

The locals are happy to accept the contract and hope he'll have more work for them in the future.

He expects so!

Stage Four.

Stage Four is the very slightly tricky stage. Up until now, everything he's been doing has no real risk of interference by anyone. Stage Four is different. An intelligent opponent who is watching the world in general, but has not zeroed in on him in particular, may, for the first time, be aware of part of what he is planning.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is largely funded by issuance and renewal fees. These are only given to people whose patents are granted. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office therefore approves quite a lot of nonsense patents. His patents aren't nonsense! They are very logical and sensible patents, and any sensible system would grant them. But when it granted them they would not be buried in a flood of bullshit patents, one more needle in the world's largest haystack, and people would therefore notice that his verbose, long-winded patents complete with extremely complex schematics - all described as processes generally of value, that might turn out to have dozens of industrial uses, if they aren't just bullshit intended to sue people with - are for components of what is about to be this world's first non-tinker powered armor.

He has an email!

Hi!

I saw your patents for modular lightweight piston enhancement formulaics! They seemed really cool and potentially an important step towards non-tinker powered armor that the PRT and civilian law enforcement could use. If you'd like to talk shop sometime or need funding or support I'd be happy to help!

- Dragon

What the -

He thought Dragon was a tinker. Clearly insufficient research - his patents were designed to be almost impossible to distinguish from the dreck and nobody has time to read all of it - who the hell is Dragon really?

Dragon is by a significant margin the world's most famous living tinker! She is prolific, wearing a different power suit practically every time she is sighted. She also invented the containment foam sprayers that are the PRT's most useful non-lethal takedown measure, is warden of the Birdcage, member of both the Protectorate and the Guild, rumored admin of the PHO forum, manages the communications network used during Endbringer fights, is one of the very few parahuman members of the PRT, and was season three runner-up on the Masked Singer. 

Her voice is clearly (to the Tyrant) hidden behind some sort of technological obfuscation and there isn't any conclusive evidence that she's actually been in public during any of her appearances rather than just piloting her suits remotely. 

So she's either a software tinker who subdelegates all her work to constructs, a tinker/speedster, a tinker/thinker, an AI or a collective identity. No mundane has the time and energy to do all of that.

(He would be so bored in a simpler world.)

Quick scan of her history... no obvious way to distinguish these theories... possibly a collective identity, she does have something of a thumbprint but astonishingly little of one... maybe a tinker mimic, like the Smith... the remaining options are harder to tell apart, unless she's piloted multiple armors simultaneously or any of her armors wouldn't fit a normal human being.

No and no! Though she's experimented with having non-capes pilot suits she's designed, but only a few at a time and never in combat as of yet.

And this is her official address.

Risk of offense, versus risk of someone using a plausible way of spoofing emails?

He'd like to create an account on PHO, and send Dragon a message there -

Hello,

This is James Morgan,

Someone identifying herself as you recently messaged me at -

- and he will give his address.

- my apologies for disturbing you (should it not be you) or wasting your time (should it be), but I wished to ensure I was not taken in by an imposter.

May I confirm that you sent this message?

- James Morgan

Yup, it's me!

(Does this message come disturbingly quickly?)

It comes with the sort of delay one would expect from a very online friend.

And, back to email -

Thank you.

As a non-parahuman engineer, the construction of non-tinker powered armor to help preserve our shared world has long been a dream of mine, one I have high hopes of bringing to fruition in the near future. I planned to seek out venture capital as a source of funding shortly,

Because otherwise he is going to be sued into the ground by someone willing to settle out of court for all his patents and a NDA,

not having the resources to accomplish this on my own, and anything you could do would be extremely useful. Your endorsement would have a great impact on my prospects of accomplishing our shared goal, as well as earning my undying gratitude.

James Morgan

Minerva could not have caught on to him that fast and she's a very deadly hive mind! Dragon is disturbingly impressive!

(It's possible this is an evil plot to co-opt him, but he's not going to ignore it if so.)

I'd be happy to fund your creation of a prototype and introduce you to some venture capitalists who can provide further funding!

Dragon has also flagged him as mildly suspicious given the fact that he is both tech savvy and didn't have an online presence until a month ago, but nothing he's done has indicated anything besides positive intentions and who is she to judge someone for suddenly starting to exist fully formed and in need of seed capital to build revolutionary technology. Some investor, whose identity she's still unsure of, funded her in her early days and she's happy to pay it forward.

This is a fantastically complicated question. If he accepts her help, he owes her, and his long-term prospects are quite likely to bring him into conflict with almost any parahuman, hero or villain. But if he declines her help, that is being rude and standoffish, and offending a powerful ally who may well be ninety-five percent aligned with his goals while on a tim elimit.

Also, he wanted his house to be finished so he had a fortified home base with an electric fence built so the Totally Not Keep and Totally Not Bunker could both hold off a siege, before he attracted any superpowered attention. But he's done that now, Dragon or whoever is behind her, and there's no way out but forwards.

Thank you for your offer of assistance, I'd be very grateful for any help you can provide.

Dragon happily transfer him whatever starting funds he needs to cover materials and R&D to get a working prototype.

And he can spend the resources he would have spent on materials without Dragon's subsidy on building his house and the resources he would spend on building his house can be partially invested in index funds and partially allow him to work longer hours instead of needing to spend time playing internet poker to fund his inventions.

And before too long, his house will be done and he will thank the construction workers with bonuses and a party with free beer and pizza, and then he can cart his parts, many of them ordered custom-made from specialist machine shops, over to his workshop and spend a few days machining them further and hand-crafting with his own workshop's tools the few specific components nobody can make and then assembling them.

(He feels so much more comfortable, knowing that given a minute or two's warning he can be very bulletproof.)

And then he'll message Dragon.

The first prototype is operational. Would you prefer a video or would you rather to come inspect it yourself, or send a person or drone?

Well, she'd like to come and visit herself but actually really doesn't have the time to visit every promising project she gives seed funding to, unfortunately.

Video will be fine, I'm too busy to come myself sadly.

Right. Then he can get started.

He'll start the video in full armor. The pseudo-Durendal - he's just referring to it as "the armor," for now, and he's avoided some of the stylistic flourishes of the pure Durendal in case anyone from his world shows up, still gunmetal grey - is more of a wearable tank than the sleek smooth skin of tinker powered armor; it adds most of a foot to his height and the same to his width. (Part of that is the sheer thickness of the plates; he can't afford reactive armor without a tinker, and so he has no choice but to use mundane metal to make up the difference. Most of it isn't.) It has no jetpack, no build-in computers, no attached weapons; none of the flourishes. It just works.

And then he can demonstrate. Lifting very heavy weights, walking around his workshop, jogging briefly in the woods outside, loading a (perfectly legal) .44 caliber handgun in spite of the loss of dexterity in his armored fingers; he places it carefully on a table, safety on, gets out of the armor, walks to the far end of his workshop, puts on leather gloves and a safety mask, shoots it in the chest six times, and steps back to observe that although the metal was scratched the armor is not noticeably dented. (He suspects the video quality is good enough that with magnification, Dragon will be able to see that, yes, bullets did impact, it wasn't a trick.)

And then he will step back, disassemble it, and reassemble it, privately careful to swap literally identical parts himself to prove their interchangeability. (This part of the video, since he expects she may end up passing it on, is fast-forwarded; it's something that would break a large fraction of tinker constructions, in his world.) Then he'll get in it again, walk over to the weights, lift them again, and put them back down, just to prove that it still works.

This is really impressive! The way the joints use a non-newtonian fluid damping system to redistribute weight is incredibly clever and makes perfect sense once I've seen it but I've never thought of myself. I'd like to get this into the hands of the PRT and other law enforcement agencies as soon as possible  - I can put you friendly VCs, with my recommendation that they invest if you'd like?

Also, I'd be interested in licensing the underlying technology myself for use in my Dragon's Teeth squad I've been looking into setting up - this sort of non-tinker tech should let me significantly ramp up the size.

- Dragon

Thank you very much,

writes the Tyrant, who has just apparently won an extraordinary success.

I'm very grateful for introductions, and for your recommendation. There may be no one on the planet it would mean more to.

And, really, the purpose of this technology is to ensure that our species be protected from our world's threats. I don't think licensing will be a problem.

(Getting Dragon on his good side is worth far more than whatever the fees would be; he'll arrange it for one dollar, that'll look better than zero, more stylish.)

And then he can finish it and sign it and send in on.

Dragon is going to pay James Morgan a fair price and is willing to negotiate aggressively to achieve this. If James wants he can donate the money.

James is really quite certain that a fair division of the profits is that he gets one dollar! If she wants to reward him beyond that she will have to tell everyone that his technology is brilliant and innovative and the latest word in warfare. He certainly isn't going to take worse than that.

(It is a very valuable asset, to have given technology away to Dragon for free. He's not giving that up just for money.)

Legally speaking, him charging her only one dollar would almost certainly constitute her receiving a gift from him, which would necessitate all sorts of complicated bureaucratic form filing on her part.

(This wouldn't actually be difficult for Dragon, she files that many forms almost daily, but she's not going to mention that as long as they're negotiating over this.)

She's going to be treating him the same regardless of the price, of course.

Of course she is!  But really, think of the poor shape of his nonexistent bureaucracy. He has no powers to let him run three jobs in a day; all he is is a poor struggling engineer (tongue firmly planted in his cheek) and the cost and administrative burden of having to locate and donate such funds - while he still needs to set up his business and hire both lawyers and accountants - is really much heavier, and so for the good of the world, she will need to only give him a single dollar.

(Dragon is 50/50 on him having powers at this point - his work wasn't tinkertech but it was weirdly good.)

That sounds really difficult! She can recomend a good PA to help manage all that - her payment will more than cover their first year of salary.

He's grateful for her recommendation and will be sure to take that under consideration, but if he's donating it he can't hire anyone with it, really.

Also, won't she be investigated by the CRA if she receives the suspicious exact donation that she just paid someone? So then she'll have to do all the paperwork, anyway.

- Minus one dollar, of course.

That's a good point about the PA and donation money, she'll have to pay more to cover both. Careful, or she'll be overpaying him, and neither of them want that, do they.

(Also, she does not run any organization that accepts donations.)

But then he'd be receiving an unjust fee for his services, and as she just observed, that's really not acceptable! He feels that the central issue is that he benefits directly from her having better technology, in that he is more likely to live, and this means that almost any split would inherently be unfair if it suggested she, not he, benefitted more from his invention. If she really wants to she can donate it in his name!

Oh, but this works both ways - the world benefits from the legible existence of a monetary incentive structure that encourages people to develop advanced technology - making an exception for one person undermines the welfare of everyone else! Why, neglecting to pay him for the value of his labor would undermine the core tenants of the very civilization she hopes to use his work to defend.

(The initial reply to Tyrant's offer was handled by a subprogram, but at this point Dragon is happily writing her own responses.)

Ah, but there are two flaws with this argument! First that the monetary incentive structure is fundamentally structured around the idea of voluntary agreement, and no one is going to think that he was cheated if he voluntarily accepts a single dollar - twenty thousand, perhaps, zero, perhaps, but not one, especially with her sterling reputation - and second that he is going to be exceedingly compensated when he licenses the patents to other people. Really, given the nature of the patent systems of the Anglosphere he is probably going to be overcompensated, since probably someone else would have invented the ideas anyway in a few years if he hadn't gotten to them (this feels intuitively true to him but he is aware is almost certainly false) and he'll have a monopoly anyway. So for the sake of universal justice, and for the sake of the core tenets of the very civilization she hopes to use his work to defend, she clearly must pay him one dollar, or else he will get completely unfairly rich off of this and that would be a disaster.

What Dragon would like to do us continue negotiating, but she actually has several hundred things on her todo list for today so instead she will graciously admit defeat and pay only one dollar.

The rest of what she'd like to pay him she'll instead donate to a nearby vocational school that retrains people in manufacturing jobs - she has a few ideas for specific skills that might be in demand in the near future.

And of course, Dragon will put him in touch with several venture capitalists! This one is a tech billionaire who now specializes in speculative but high upside technologies, this one is a PRT consultant who does some angel investing and has useful contacts, and this fund invests in companies that might aid law enforcement.

Bwahaha he is victorious and has triumphed in his key goal. (Of getting along with Dragon and winning valuable PR, once this leaks as it inevitably will.)

And the Tyrant is then going to spend the next few days interviewing private security companies! (Also secretaries.) He wants competent people with plans for if supervillains show up other than "roll over and die" who are willing to let him talk to everyone in their hierarchy with enough influence that, if they secretly were working for Livia, they could let her perfetti kidnap him, and confirm that they are honest and honorable and not selling information or working for any supervillain, mundane crime boss or national government knowingly or unknowingly. (He doesn't explain it to them that way, of course; instead he describes it as wanting to understand their organization. He can give the impression of someone rich and important enough they really want to secure his contract, and pays very well.) If there are no such organizations he'll have to build one, starting with whoever the most competent and honorable and underappreciated subordinate is in the organizations he visits, but he expects someone isn't leaking, it's a big country.

He's also going to want to start pitching investors, or at least scheduling meetings with them. His company's business plan is to have a prototyping facility here, near where he lives, which will focus on doing fairly small production runs to test his armor designs, while licensing the technology to other companies for mass production for the army and the PRT. He expects large income in the short term and then a steady income flow from improving his designs over time, and intends to sell only a minority of shares in his company...

(If he gets that far before something interesting happens, he will come off as both indefinably slightly foreign and as quite old-fashioned, like he's much older than he looks. Also both extremely brilliant and very, very prepared.)

It makes for a busy, but largely boring, week, interviewing prospects and talking to potential employees and security firms and investors.

On Monday, a PRT consultant named Thomas Calvert cancels on him, but nothing else disrupts his routine.

Interesting.

On Tuesday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Fascinating, maybe...

On Wednesday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Huh. Annoying. What if...

On Thursday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Goddammit. If he just orders his mercenaries to...

On Friday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Shit. How did that go worse.

... He needs more information, and as much as he distrusts her, Tattletale is the tool for this particular job.

On Saturday... well, it has yet to be determined whether or not something unexpected occurs.

Tattletale is pretty darn sure she's in a throwaway timeline, an attempt by Coil to gain knowledge about some newcomer to the area without any intention of keeping around whatever fallout results. The trouble is she's not completely sure - if she were completely sure she could fail on purpose, probably get herself killed, just to screw over Coil. However, she's not, so she actually has to fucking try at this.

On the plus side, whoever is holed up in this (custom, Thinker-designed, heavily secured) building sure has got Coil annoyed as all hell.

Maybe they'll be friends.

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.

Ah.

Which is that she thinks this is a simulated timeline. Neither of them can pump information out of it to the other; their only possibility is to persuade Coil to keep it.

"Pleased to hear it." He smiles very slightly. "I expect you to find him." He thinks he can talk Coil into keeping the timeline. (Provided, of course, this is the first attempt in which they have actually spoken - in the event that Coil has talked to him before, that means that he failed to convince him the first time and this second try will fail disastrously.) Is Coil on the other side of the phone in her pocket, or is there a henchman between them?

"I'm sure I'll find him, even if he won't come back on his own." Coil may or may not be listening personally, but his number is the only contact in the phone regardless and she expect he'll pick up.

Right. He gestures very slightly towards his shoulder holster. His plan is that he holds her at gunpoint and she passes him whatever information is needed through dumb-show while he talks to Coil. Doing this purely by reading Coil's voice is hard, any information she can convey via other means would be appreciated.

(He assumes she can pick up on the fact that he will obviously not shoot her because she is useful and having murdered someone is not useful, and also it would tick off Skitter, who is has the potential to be one of the best assassins in the world, and he isn't dumb. And both of them are better at reading others than lying, at their level.)

She mimes writing things down, which she could totally do as long as she's not too loud about it.

(She rolls her eyes while continuing to not look at bugs at the 'mention' of Skitter, who continues to not be here.)

His opinion of her visibly (to her) just dropped; he assumed she'd thought of that and they were being watched by a henchman of Coil's with a sniper rifle, or some equivalent sight-as-well-as-sound problem. He gestures at his lips; he can read hers.

Well it's not her fault he can't read subtext!

'That'll work,' she doesn't say.

Right. If she could pass him Coil's real name as soon as he's on the phone, he'd appreciate it. Ready?

Shit, using real name sure is trampling over the Unwritten Rules. 

'That's a hell of a button to press.' she mouths, 'he has no idea I know it and I do not want to know what he'd do if he did. End this timeline real fast at least.' 

As far as the Tyrant is concerned, that line was crossed when Coil sent someone to his front door. And he is quite confident he could invent a plausible alternative way of knowing it. But he appreciates the strategic advice.

She will be pissed if Tyrant gets her killed.

'Ready.' she mouths, nonetheless. 

And he draws.

It is possible that, with teenage reflexes and natural grace and a shorter distance between hand and holster, she could outdraw him. It's also possible not, or that if she did she wouldn't hit anything. Aiming well enough to hit takes a lot of rounds downrange, and doing it after a fast draw is harder - 

- But this draw is very practiced, hand flicking under his arm for the gun and then out, flicking the safety as he moves, and then she's facing down a gun-barrel.

"And now, madam, the phone and the gun, please. By the barrel, if you would, and slowly."

'Madam?' she mouths, amused, as she hands over the phone, speeding up her breathing in case that's audible over the phone. Perhaps she could have beat him to the draw, she's not sure. Regardless, that would rather defeat the point.

He slides the screen up to open it, the move nowhere near as practiced as the draw, and dials the only number in the contact book.

(It costs nothing to be respectful.)

There's a brief pause as the call is routed to one of Coil's burners, followed by the phone beginning to ring.

Tattletale texts when she finishes missons instead of calling, this is an anomaly. Before answering Coil opens and scans through the transcript written by his subordinate assigned to listening in on her mission.

ASSET: "Hi! I've lost my dog, have you seen him?"

TARGET: "I'm sorry, I haven't. What does he look like?"

ASSET: "If you see him, would you let me know?"

TARGET: "Of course,"

ASSET: "If you find him there's a reward"

TARGET: "Thank you. But I don't think that's necessary." 

ASSET: "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."

TARGET: "With luck. I'll let you know if he turns up." 

ASSET: "Okay. I'll probably be back here again later to put more posters up so if you forget those will remind you."

TARGET: "Then I'll expect to see you around."

ASSET: "Oh, I might not come back. It's possible I'll just multitask and put some up now." 

TARGET: "With luck he'll show up at your doorstep tomorrow and it'll all have been for nothing. If you want to leave posters here, there and there look to me like good places to put them up; will you need more?"

ASSET: "Those places will do."

TARGET: "Do you need tape, or do you already have it?"

ASSET: "Already got some."

TARGET: "Pleased to hear it. I expect you to find him."

ASSET: "I'm sure I'll find him, even if he won't come back on his own." 

TARGET: "And now, madam, the phone and the gun, please.  By the barrel, if you would, and slowly."

Clearly there is subtext here, though it's unclear what. The sudden swerve at the end indicates that Mr. Morgan has figured out something, and decided to confront... whoever he thinks is on the other end of this call.

Normally Coil wouldn't bother to answer. He does not, as a rule, talk to anyone of importance without first knowing both what they want most in the world and how to kill them. Of Mr. Morgan, a suspiciously competent inventor and plausible mundane-tech Tinker, he knows neither. His initial attempt at a meeting broke down almost immediately, as Mr. Morgan deduced not only that the man posing as Thomas Calvert was a body double but also that the real Calvert was a supervillain - Coil had ended the timeline immediately, resigning himself to gathering information via other routes rather than take such a risk, even in a throwaway timeline. 

His next attempts had faired far worse, as his mercs failed to capture Mr. Morgan for interrogation, to break into his house to search for information, or to assassinate him with instructions not to consider collateral damage in the slightest. Prior to attempting Tattletale he had even sent Faultline's mercenary group to capture the man, only for the group to go dark and stop responding completely. This transcript, however vague, is the most detailed conversation he has any record of Mr. Morgan having. 

And so, faced with a week of frustration and failure, Coil decides to answer the phone.

"Coil," he says, calm but amused. "So, is this our first conversation?"

This is, approximately, the hardest thing he ever does. His heart is beating faster; he knows he'll start to sweat soon. Clock-fighting is impossible. Trying to steer someone he's never met into folding a winning hand with nothing but his voice... makes clock-fighting look - not easy, nothing makes it easy, but doable. His mind is absolutely intent on the phone, his eyes are on Tattletale for whatever information she can pass him -

Frustrating, and far more unnerving than anything on the transcript. Still, no harm in playing dumb.

"I don't know when we would have talked previously, Mr. Morgan."

 'Knows what you meant, being cautious.' Tattletale commentates silently, her lips moving so rapidly her words would be unintelligible if she were trying to say them aloud.

The man on the far end - Coil, almost certainly - is paranoid, is stressed, and is desperately curious. A desperation that he suspects a previous conversation would have lessened, for almost all previous conversations.

 "Oh, I see we haven't. Then this is the first time for both of us; good. I do dislike unnecessary conflict."

Seeming confirmation that he knows Coil's power, or at least some aspects of it, and the presumptive presence of Tattletale serves to complicate matters.

"As do I." Coil says, non-committal, "Is my employee safe and unharmed?"

'Suspects I might be feeding you information. He doesn't actually care about me.'

"Oh, at present. She's not bad, for a child. Give her a few decades and she might even be qualified for the job you gave her."

He sounds amused, not murderous.

Tattletale flips her new ally off with both hands.

A dry chuckle can be heard over the tinny speakers. Condescension is the last thing he'd expect from a puppet of Tattltales. Not conclusive evidence, but rather suggestive. Relatable too.

"We make do with the tools available to us."

Well, that didn't land. Apparently Coil just does not know what he has. He needs to lower his estimation of the man if he wants reliable predictions of his actions.

(This reduction in his respect for Coil is probably visible to Tattletale.)

"That is one option, certainly."

"Mmm?"

"When faced with resources insufficient for your task, you have three choices. Gather more resources, change your task, or fail. I dislike failing, myself. It's very hard to survive doing it very often, even for the best."

"I can empathize, though I've found changing the temperament of some of my employees to be ... more trouble than it's worth."

He's not sure how to respond to the implied threat.

'He's ignoring the threat, defaulting to thinking of this timeline as not mattering, doesn't take consequences in throwaway timelines seriously.' she reports.

Ah. ... Coil is a fool. A picture of his psychology is starting to come together. He is afraid, but fear is not his master, pride is; he is a man who does not change himself except faced with the cudgel of power. The Tyrant must either submit to his pride, and allow him to rule over him until the moment the bullet can strike... or else terrify him into submission. He knows which one he prefers.

"No, your preferred strategy is different," he agrees. "Your strategy is to fail, and fail, and fail again, and finally ascend to victory atop a mountain of your own corpses, confident that no wound they ever suffer will harm the real you. Or am I mistaken?"

"Mostly the corpses of others, unacceptable collateral, rather than my own." Coil replies, stiffly.

How blatant does the Tyrant need to be about his threats? He would have thought that professional supervillains would be better at recognizing when someone knows all their secrets and is threatening to use them to destroy them.

... Coil doesn't like giving in to threats. Doesn't fit his model. But - 

- there's something there. Somewhere to lean in - Coil needs information, craves it - he's powerless when ignorant and hates being powerless -

"Oh no," the Tyrant says. "Do you think that if, say, you found yourself trapped by Simurgh-song in one time, you could escape to the other so easily? If Heartbreaker or Mathers had a word with you? I am neither Master nor Stranger, but this is not a conversation with you that I will have twice."

Coil tenses.

"And why is that?"

Fear. Fear in ignorance and fear in the knowledge that he isn't invincible, that - 

- That his power has limits, his power he already used on the Tyrant -

"I'm very insightful," he says drily. "We are talking here because your attempts to murder me, spy on me, kidnap me, and generally remove me from the board are growing tiresome, Coil, and I am prepared to try talking once, because murdering people who annoy me is generally a waste of my extremely valuable time, but in the event that we meet again after having talked before I will be able to tell the difference. Let this one go, Coil. Some fights you just can't win."

There's a pause on the other end as Coil evaluates his options. The fact that the Morgan was able to determine what happened in the prior timelines lends credence to his claims, and is worrisome to say the least.

He could bet that Morgan is bluffing, end this timeline, and make further attempts in new timelines to test the man's claim of being able to deduce what had happened previously in other timelines. However, if Morgan isn't bluffing than doing so would cut off all chance of negotiation. What Coil really needs hasn't actually changed - information.

"It seems you have me at something of disadvantage - I know far less about you than you about me. Hardly the sort of grounds on which to start a negotiation."

'Nervous that you're not bluffing but isn't sure. I bet he'd give in if more scared.'

Don't give him any information. Information makes him feel safe. Ignorance makes him afraid.

The Tyrant laughs. "You're in over your head, Coil. You're swimming well, but there's bigger fish in the sea than you - as you know." This isn't the first time Coil has had a conversation like this one. He's been rattled before, he's been shaken before, he's been bludgeoned with threats into backing down before, and the Tyrant is almost certain it was since he got superpowers. (If he's wrong, he'll never know.) "Leave me be, and I will have no need to pay you any further heed."

... That's unmistakably a Cauldron reference.

A few things snap into place. A year ago he'd discovered Battery had received her powers from the same secretive organization as him. He'd taken the opportunity to investigate the source, kidnapping Battery and having Tattletale interrogate her, hoping to cross reference Battery's experiences with his own to learn more about the mysterious organization to which he still owed a week of service.

Minutes into the interrogation he'd received an email requesting he stop the investigation in his safe timeline. It had been the only instance he'd encountered of someone breeching the boundaries of his timelines, until today when this mysterious new Thinker has done the same.

He'd stopped trying to gather information after that, resigning himself to waiting till he had gained more power, and especially more Thinkers, however undignified it may be to be in the dark. 

There's a long pause as Coil thinks.

'Holy shit you hit a nerve. Not sure what - can you get more of a reaction out of him?' asks Tattletale.

"Leave my town and my work alone, Coil, and we need have no further words." He pauses. "Keep the timeline."

And then he drops the phone and crushes it under his boot very, very thoroughly, until any bug of any noticeable size will be ground into dust.

The bug was purely digital, which Tattletale would tell him were she not bending over and trying not to let her head spin too badly from the combination of adrenaline and oncoming Thinker migraine.

"Need an Asprin?"

'Yeah, though I have a bit till the migraine hits properly I think.'

Oh wait she can talk aloud now.

"Bet I could have gotten who you reminded him of if you kept him on."

"Oh, I think it went well enough. At some point if I'd kept on he would have noticed what I wasn't saying. - One moment."

And he will go inside and get her asprin and a cup of water to drink it with.

"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."

In the Tyrant's world, secret identities are a useful tool with a life expectancy measured in years, if you're lucky, or one defeat, if you're unlucky. Most supervillains have been outed; he was after his first fight with the Smith.

In the Tyrant's world, anyone who shows up in a public or semi-public place in a recognizable mask can expect to have people doing at least one of asking for an autograph, calling the police, or taking pictures to sell, sometimes more.

This is not the Tyrant's world, and he discovers new ways this is true every day.

"It's winter. Would ski masks not work?"

What the fuck is going through the Tyrant's head right now - she.... she probably is already going to have a migraine tomorrow morning and still has to deal with her team and get them to agree to meeting him. It's not critical to know the details right this second - she's confident he's loads better than Coil.

"I could sell that? But uh, it is actually a bit of a cost - makes it more of a gray area than it normally would be to go after them in their civilian life later."

"Indeed. But if someone sends a picture of you in your masks to the police and the Protectorate makes an appearance, that will be a much more embarrassing way for our plans to fail than I prefer to risk." He raises an eyebrow. "Moreover, I am not actually placing a team of professional supervillains on retainer. I'm hiring four young adults to sign up as private security to protect me from supervillains. It would be a quite serious problem if the latter was mistaken for the former."

(There is a slight emphasis on 'adults' in a "please allow me to pretend that I don't know you're all underage for employment reasons" sense.)

"Oh huh, you're not positioning us as a corporate cape team? If we were doing that wearing generic domino masks would be the way to go."