The game goes badly for the townsfolk the first couple of rounds, with the Mafia (Vista and a Lorica) picking off innocents.

However during the third round...

Is Galea a type of bug?!?

"OH god is that going to happen every time Taylor walks by." NO SHE IS NOT

Well so long as she's sure.

Taylor does indeed show up a few minutes later.

"Your power wants to know if I'm a bug," grumbles Galea.

"Huh, I wouldn't have thought that would be an option."

"My power apparently lets me spoof myself to other people's powers and I guess it's not picky about selecting only ones where this would ever be a reasonable thing to do."

"Can you spoof precogs?"

"Probably. Though I'm not getting queries about them all the time so maybe only if they're thinking about me in specific."

"Do you know if it works on the Simurgh?"

"The defensive power does. I guess I'll find out next time we hit a Simurgh fight."

"Seems really useful if it works on her, especially if it works on things downstream of your behavior, like orders you give to other capes."

"That was the tentative plan if I'd, uh, lived long enough to see a Simurgh fight."

"Makes sense."

Taylor arrived just in time for the second game of Mafia, in which she handily leads the townsfolk to victory. The night concludes with a third game of mafia (during which an all loricae mafia team wins) and winds down from there.

"Death to townies."

Plumata elbows her.

"You make a terrifying criminal gang, you know," Tattletale says, grinning.

"Not at all, we're pure as the driven snow."

Tattletale chuckles.

"Aren't we all."

"Maybe it'll rub off on you eventually."

Off go Loricae.

So. Heartbreaker.

In theory this is simple. All of her are immune. They go in with some Tinker swag and they put a bullet in the asshole's head.

In practice, he might conceivably have any defenses against this kind of thing? Like, otherwise someone could bomb his house from the air, too high to target. He doesn't have a kill order because they don't want to encourage anyone to go bother him and make more victims, but it's pretty obvious that if you actually pull it off you'll get one retroactively, and he has to know that. In addition to the possibility that he has booby-trapped his house, he has a lot of captives and kids. It's not impossible that the captives will wake up as though from a horrible nightmare when the power that ensnared them is defunct, but it's not the way to bet, and even if that happens, it won't leave them equipped to support and parent their superpowered offspring.

Rete makes some inquiries with the foster care system in Canada. They can supply robots to help, and Tribune can render appropriate foster parents or care workers immune to the kids' powers, but it's the sort of thing you don't want to be pulling together at the last minute. She phrases it as a hypothetical, like she's just worried about the time bomb - Heartbreaker is not known to have any particular age resistance - but probably everyone, including Dragon who winds up CC'd on something at some point, can tell that she's totally going to go murder the guy.

Hypothetically they could in fact manage the kids that way, which is probably preferable to there current plan of screening the kids and bird caging the ones who have committed crimes and don't seem likely to behave.

One of the PRT members CC'ed on the email chain would like to make clear that murdering Heartbreaker is against the law and as long as the continues to be the case they will prosecute any failed attempts to do so to the full extent possible. They don't elaborate on what would happen if there's a successful attempt, except to note that there isn't any reward for his death given the lack of a kill order (though there is one for information on his whereabouts). 

Dragon replies to the emails with a note about how the granted mind control immunity for foster parents will allow them to avoid the problems that would probably crop up given the (admittedly limited) information they currently have on Heartbreaker's kids, which includes:

- one who can make people sense the same things they do

- one who can make people afraid of them

- and one who... they aren't entirely sure what but he reduced a police officer to an emotional wreck after a short conversation. 

Though of course, Dragon notes, they will still have to be wary of the fire arms expertise some of the kids have exhibited, using this detailed and annotated list of weapons. 

Rete can keep a kid away from guns, but they'll have to make sure they have enough of a flock of bots before relying on it to do this.

For some reason Lorica imagined Heartbreaker being relatively stationary. If he moves around that makes it much less likely that he has an entrenched defense situation. But it also means she has to hunt him down. Does he have a nice obvious internet footprint?