"So I could make you a whole suit but that's a substantial materials outlay and killing Jack Slash got me only a million dollars and I spent most of it on the house. Probably we're looking at earpieces and maybe lenses, do you think you can do contacts or do you want spectacles?"

"Not sure if it'd work if I'm fully covered - doesn't work with cars but does with bicycles."

"Contacts work - glasses over my dead body."

"It's not like anyone but me would see you!"

Glare.

"Contacts and earpiece. I can maybe do some kind of reactive armor that moves around on you but is never covering all of you at once. Possibly you should have something that can incapacitate you if you get hit by somebody's area-of-effect Mastery even if they can't notice you coming, you're not very dangerous to me but you could grab a gun or something."

"What sort of thing?"

"Tranqs used to be my go-to but I'm not sure I can still reasonably source the juice. So maybe I can work it into the reactive armor that it can go for your wrists and ankles and not cooperate if you try to shoot me or something."

"I can get some tranqs."

"Can you non-stealingly get some tranqs."

"Why."

"Is there an answer that would satisfy you and lead you to mend your ways after bowing to my superior ethical philosophy?"

Aisha stares for a second and then starts laughing.

"Didn't think so! So why are you bothering to ask?"

She shrugs. She'll get some tranqs later. Probably from the Undersider mercenary stash tbh.

"So I'll design it to work without tranqs, unless - Rete -"

"It is not legal for you to buy useful quantities of tranquilizer."

"That's what I thought."

Whatever.

"Did Regent's power work on you? Could he use it to notice you when you were unnoticeable?"

"Nope."

She's probably feeling an emotion at this, though fuck if she knows which emotion.

"Didn't work at all, or just didn't work to notice you when you were unnoticeable?"

"He lost control if I relaxed my power."

"Control?"

"Regent's power was that he could control people if he jerked them around enough."

"Oh, I didn't know that. Well, that's not going to be a guarantee for any of the others but it's suggestive."

"Mhm. I'm not planning on giving any of them the chance to realize I'm there."

"Sounds good. I'll get underway on mission gear but we're almost certainly not going to move till we know what the two mysteries do."