Cash it is! (Which fortunately doesn't get flagged as odd.)

And Ellie assumes Ruby will be covering her order as well.

Does that make this a date? (She's fine with covering Ellie's order either way, of course. Gotta keep your consultants well supplied with baked goods.)

It makes this an appreciation of Ellie being intelligent enough not to try turning Ruby in.

She'll add in extra coffee, then. 

That'll do.

One of many benefits to helping her out. 

Fair trade.

Good! 

She has questions about the local villains, next. 

Unfortunately there's not a single online hub for villains like there is for heroes. Ellie is in a Facebook group for villain sightings, however, so she does have pictures, however piecemeal. There are usually a couple small-timers like Lady Venom floating around, but Ellie is pretty sure Ruby will consider them all equally boring. As far as big organizations go, there are really only two in Philly: the mafia, and the Witch Riders, a biker gang.

The mafia is... the mafia. They do the same organized crime racket stuff, just now their enforcers are superpowered. Lots of villain capes wind up in their orbit just because they're so entrenched. Their current headliners are Blink, Skip, and Somnus. Blink is a teleporter, short range and line of sight limited but he can do a lot of hops very quickly. 'Blink and you'll miss it' is an appropriate reference. Skip is- kinda weird, no one has a good explanation for how their power actually works. Basically, they seem to choose whether or not they get hit by anything. Shoot a gun at them and you'll find the bullet in the wall behind them, throw a punch and their body is just half an inch out of reach, that sort of thing. Wide area effects seem to be their weak point. Somnus has sleeping gas for breath. Usually he wears a gas mask and tosses grenades he filled up earlier, but if pressed he can and will knock out an entire battlefield.

The Witch Riders are probably more interesting. They're an offshoot of the Warlocks, another biker gang. The current leader, Charybdis, apparently took offense to the Warlocks' white-supremacist, male-only ethos when she triggered back in the mid-nineties. The first couple years of her career were spent driving the Warlocks out of town entirely. The Witch Riders took over their place in the ecosystem, making some loose alliances with other lower-level gangs against the mafia and becoming more or less the opposing pole for the underworld to orient around. Charybdis herself is a hydrokinetic who makes tentacles of water to attack and defend, and drives around on a custom motorcycle designed to look like a sea monster. Her second-in-command is Salle, who makes forcefield cages of varying size, from just big enough for a person up to the width of a street.

The Witch Riders sound pretty interesting (and fire versus water could be nicely thematic) - Ruby might allow them to stick around - but the mafia...

Nothing says boring like highly organized crime. 

That'll be a project. They haven't lasted this long for no reason.

She'll need to understand more about the legal system's handling of superpowered criminals, for one, and how bad corruption is, for two, and then for three what would happen if, let's say just theoretically, every local member suffered a tragic and bizarre tiger related accident... Or, more realistically, simply vanished. 

Everyone else in the city would probably band together against Ruby, if that last one happened. Bounty on her head. Might even get the Triumvirate involved.

And if it couldn't be traced back to her? 

Mass panic and witch-hunts.

Ugh, annoying. 

What about a citizen's arrest with evidence pinned to their clothes? 

That'd be basically vigilantism, which is... a little controversial. Depends how solid the evidence is, but the mafia does have deep roots.

Ellie is not as versed in this aspect of cape life.

She's done some maneuvering in the shadows before - but it's different when you're both members of a secret society, and no one else knows magic exists. 

She'll have to do a lot of digging and prep work and ugh, though she might be able to get the capes to attack her and at least get a self defense argument up... And she can always provide - alternative forms of employment. 

Alternative employment?

Start her own gang - a cooler one, and one the mafia can't fuck with (on pain of tigery doom).

Ah. The traditional route.

But better. More supervillain, less mob.

Of course, of course.

And if stealing their business and their potential 'associates' out from under them gets them to attack her - well, at that point she's just acting in self defense.