a - *000000* - CHERREADS

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**Scene 1**

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The device sat on the floor like an accusation.

Aoi hadn't moved it since she'd set it down three hours ago. It occupied the center of the room the way things did when you weren't quite ready to deal with them — present, patient, indifferent to her hesitation. She was sitting with her back against the wall opposite the door, legs loosely crossed, blindfold on, watching it the way she watched everything: not with her eyes.

The Six Eyes didn't need light.

What they gave her instead was geometry. The room rendered itself in spatial pressure — the weight of the ceiling, the faint bow in the floorboards under the window, the still-warm thermal signature of the laptop she'd closed an hour ago. The device registered as a knot. Dense, irregular, still faintly active in ways that had nothing to do with electricity. The oscillation field that had made it structurally coherent was gone, discharged in the moment before she'd torn it free. But something remained. A tension in the local space around it, fine as a thread, that she couldn't quite resolve into meaning.

She left it alone for now.

Instead she reconstructed the fight. Not because she needed to — the memory was already indexed, timestamped, filed away in the part of her cognition that never really stopped running — but because reconstruction had a different purpose than memory. Memory stored. Reconstruction evaluated.

*Trick had seen the charging sequence begin.*

That was the first thing she'd confirmed in the immediate aftermath, adrenaline still doing whatever adrenaline did in this body. She'd read it in the shift of his weight, the quarter-second where his attention moved from her to the mounted weapon and then back again with the specific flatness of a man deciding something. Not panic. Calculation. He'd stepped back rather than forward, which meant he'd expected the weapon to handle it, which meant he'd seen the charge complete often enough to know what the effective radius looked like.

That was useful information. It meant the Merchants had used the device before. It meant Squealer had deployed it in the field before tonight, which meant there was a deployment history, which meant somewhere in the PRT's records — if they were tracking Merchant hardware at all — there would be incident reports that would tell her what the weapon did to normal capes.

She filed that.

*PRT response estimate: four to six minutes.*

She'd heard the first siren at the three-minute mark, by her internal count, but the sound had come from the north which put the responding unit at least a mile out. They hadn't arrived while she was still in the area. She'd moved before the four-minute window closed and she hadn't been followed — not by vehicles, not by anyone on foot, and not by whatever Thinker or surveillance network the PRT ran, because if they'd had eyes on her departure route she would have felt the spatial geometry of a camera or a drone before she'd cleared the block.

Which meant the PRT's current file on her consisted of whatever the Merchants had reported, whatever bystanders had seen, and whatever physical evidence she'd left at the site.

She catalogued that second item carefully.

White hair. She'd been wearing the hoodie's hood up but it had slipped during the grab — the moment she'd seized the weapon mount and pulled, the hood had fallen back, and Trick had been close enough and the streetlight had been close enough. He'd seen it. Which meant the PRT would have white hair in their description by now.

Sunglasses at night. That was strange enough to note even in a city that had normalized strange.

No costume. No visible insignia. No verbal communication during the engagement.

Brute classification would be their first guess. She'd felt two of the discharged fragments hit — had let them hit, deliberately, because an unknown cape who took tinker-weapon fire and stayed on her feet read as Brute, and Brute was comprehensible. Brute was a box they knew how to use. An unknown that took no damage whatsoever while performing spatial manipulation at the level she was capable of was a different kind of file. Smaller box. More eyes on it.

She'd made that decision in approximately 0.4 seconds, in the middle of the engagement, which was either good instincts or a sign that the threat-modeling part of her cognition had begun operating faster than she'd realized.

She noted that too.

*The fight had looked spontaneous.*

She let that sentence sit in her mind for a moment. Turned it over. Examined it from the angles that mattered.

It hadn't been.

She'd walked to the docks with a purpose. She'd mapped the Merchant patrol routes over two days. She'd known the weapon existed. She hadn't known Squealer would be running a test cycle that night, hadn't known the timing would land the way it did — some things were genuinely random and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise — but the context in which the encounter had been possible at all was not random. She had built that context. Deliberately. Methodically.

Two days earlier.

She closed her eyes behind the blindfold, which accomplished nothing and was therefore a purely habitual gesture, a residue of a body that had once found comfort in darkness.

*Two days earlier.*

The room was exactly as it had been. The device on the floor. The closed laptop. The thin mattress she hadn't slept on yet. Outside, Brockton Bay made its nighttime sounds — a car on the street below, something crashing in the middle distance that could have been anything, the low persistent hum of the city's electrical grid pressing against the edge of her spatial sense like a tide.

She had arrived in this city with eleven dollars and forty cents.

That was where it had started.

—

---

**Scene 2**

---

The first morning had a specific quality to it.

Not bad. Not good. Just — unfinished. The light came through the window at an angle that turned the dust in the air into something almost deliberate, and she'd sat on the edge of the mattress for approximately ninety seconds doing nothing, which was longer than she'd done nothing since arriving in this world, and then she'd stood up and begun.

Survival mode had a texture. She recognized it in retrospect the way you recognized a fever after it broke — by the particular flatness it left behind, the sense of having operated on a narrowed aperture for days. Food. Shelter. Don't be noticed. Don't use techniques where anyone can see. Count the change. Sleep in increments.

That was done now. Shelter was solved. Food was provisional but manageable. The immediate threat surface had compressed to something she could hold in one hand.

Which meant she could think.

She stood at the window for a moment, not looking at anything in particular, and let the Six Eyes open up.

It was difficult to describe, even to herself, because the nearest analogy she had was *attention*, and what the Six Eyes did was not attention — attention implied selection, implied foreground and background, implied the ordinary human experience of choosing what to process and discarding the rest. The Six Eyes didn't discard. They received. Everything in her spatial range arrived simultaneously and fully formed: the street below with its cracked asphalt and the three cigarette butts near the drain and the loose manhole cover that shifted 0.3 millimeters every time a vehicle passed over it; the building across the way with its fire escape and the window on the third floor that had been left open and the potted plant on the sill that was three days from dead; the people on the sidewalk, six of them visible, each one a distinct pressure in local space, each one moving with a gait pattern that told her things she hadn't asked to know about their physical state, their intent, their approximate emotional register.

She was not multitasking.

She was simply thinking. All of it, at once, without the overhead cost that would have made it impossible for anyone else.

She had understood this about the Six Eyes since she'd first woken up in this body. What she was beginning to understand now — standing at a window in Brockton Bay on a Tuesday morning with eleven dollars and forty cents — was that this was not merely a combat advantage.

The city was information.

Every city was information, in the sense that every city was a system, and systems had patterns, and patterns had leverage points. But extracting that information was, for a normal human, a project measured in years. You learned a city by living in it. By gradual accumulation. By asking the wrong people the wrong questions and slowly triangulating toward something approaching understanding. Most people who'd lived in Brockton Bay for a decade knew their neighborhood, knew the three or four routes they used, knew the faces at the places they frequented. The city at scale remained abstract to them. A shape without resolution.

She looked at the street below and felt the grid of it extending outward in her spatial sense, block by block, the topology building itself in her mind without effort, and understood that she was not going to have that problem.

She had three problems.

She numbered them the way she numbered everything, which was to say immediately and without ceremony.

*One: money.* Not sufficient. Needed to become sufficient, then surplus, then irrelevant. In that order.

*Two: information.* She knew almost nothing about this world at a structural level. She had fragments. She had implications. She needed depth, because depth was what turned information into strategy.

*Three: identity.* She did not exist. No records, no history, no legal presence of any kind. This was simultaneously a vulnerability and — she had already begun to notice — a potential instrument. But it needed to be managed rather than ignored.

She listed them, ordered them by dependency, and then she went outside.

---

The Six Eyes, walking through a city, were not subtle in what they produced.

She moved down Dalton Street at a pace that looked unhurried and was, in fact, the result of continuous calculation — the spatial geometry of foot traffic, the sightlines from storefronts, the location of cameras, the shape of the morning crowd thinning toward the business district. She was mapping. Not consciously, not as a deliberate act, but the way a musician's fingers move through scales: automatic, effortless, the result of a system doing what it was built to do.

The city organized itself.

She walked east toward the docks and felt the neighborhood change under her feet — not metaphorically, but in the literal spatial data, the density of foot traffic dropping, the building maintenance quality declining in a gradient that was almost mathematical, the frequency of boarded windows increasing at a rate she could have graphed. She walked north along a commercial street and read the inventory turnover in the store windows without entering any of them, the dust patterns on unused display space, the price tags on items that had been sitting long enough to accumulate small environmental changes.

Gang graffiti she catalogued separately. Tags, territorial markers, the difference between fresh and aged, the layering that indicated contested space versus stable claim. She had no context yet for what the symbols meant, which gang controlled which color or glyph. That gap she noted and set aside for the information phase.

What she could read without context was the *structure*. The logic of it. Whoever held the docks held a chokepoint. Whoever held the northern residential blocks held a population. The commercial district in the middle was contested, probably, or taxed by multiple parties, because the small businesses there had a specific kind of tension in them — the slightly-too-alert posture of owners who paid more than one set of people to leave them alone.

She had seen that posture before. In a different city. In a different world. The geometry of protection rackets was apparently universal.

She noted that and kept moving.

By the time she turned back toward Dalton Street, two hours had passed and she had a working topographical model of approximately forty blocks. Not complete. Not verified against historical data. But *structural* — the bones of the place, the logic of how it had arranged itself, legible to her in a way that would have taken a normal resident years to accumulate and which she had assembled on a Tuesday morning before breakfast.

She stopped at a drain grate near the intersection of Dalton and a street whose sign was missing.

The Six Eyes showed her a glint.

She crouched and retrieved a quarter, two dimes, and a ring that was not gold but had a stone in it that caught the light with the specific quality of something that had once been valuable to someone. She put the coins in her pocket. She held the ring for a moment, turning it in her fingers, then put it in her pocket too.

She stood.

*Poverty in cities like this*, she thought, *wasn't a lack of money.*

*It was a lack of attention.*

---

The pawn shop on Renner Street didn't open until nine. She knew this because she'd read the hours in the window the first time she'd passed it, filed the information, and now it was 8:47 and she was standing outside a bakery two doors down eating something that had cost her sixty cents and was, objectively, the best sixty cents she had spent since arriving in this world.

She had time.

She used it to develop the system.

Scavenging was inefficient as an endpoint. It was efficient, she had already demonstrated, as a *beginning* — a way to bootstrap capital without requiring infrastructure she didn't have. But it had a ceiling. The ceiling was determined by object-loss density in the urban environment, which was not zero but was not high, and which she could maximize by applying spatial analysis to the problem rather than moving randomly through space hoping to find things.

She mapped the areas she'd covered against the object-loss rate. Drains and grates were high yield: water carried things to them. Construction zones were moderate yield: materials moved, pockets were full. Transit stops had a specific pattern — items lost in the moment of movement, boarding, rushing. High-foot-traffic areas lost more than low, but high-foot-traffic areas also had more eyes, which created a constraint.

She optimized.

The constraint was solvable. The hood of the hoodie she'd bought with the last of her capital was functional. She was not remarkable-looking when the white hair was covered — just a slight person in a grey hoodie moving through the city at a measured pace, which described approximately seven hundred people in Brockton Bay on any given morning.

By the time the pawn shop opened, she had the ring, a small tangle of copper wire she'd retrieved from behind a construction skip on Howell Street, and a children's watch with a cracked face that still ran. She sold the ring for four dollars — the owner knew it wasn't gold and she knew he knew, and neither of them pretended otherwise, which she found she respected — and the copper wire for scrap value and the watch for two dollars because the movement was intact.

Eleven dollars and forty cents became eighteen dollars and seventy cents.

She stood outside the pawn shop and updated her internal accounting and felt something that wasn't quite satisfaction but was in the same neighborhood. The sensation of a system working. Of a process validating its own premises.

*One week*, she thought. *Maybe less.*

She didn't mean surviving. She meant the other thing — the threshold past which money became a problem she had already solved rather than a problem she was currently managing. The gap between those two states was not as large as it looked from inside the first one. She had advantages that did not depend on this world's history or her knowledge of its future. She had a mind that processed information at a speed that was not, she was increasingly confident, in the normal human range. She had senses that turned the city into a legible text. She had, if she chose to use it carefully, a spatial technique that could interact with physical infrastructure in ways that were useful without being obviously supernatural.

She began walking toward the electronics resale shop on Mercer Street that she'd clocked two days ago, whose window inventory suggested a stock turnover rate of approximately two weeks, which meant they were moving product and might pay reasonably for a working laptop in good condition.

She didn't have a working laptop yet.

That was next.

—

---

**Scene 3**

---

The laptop cost her forty-three dollars.

Not new. Nothing about it was new — the hinge was slightly stiff, the trackpad had a dead zone in the lower-left corner, the battery held approximately three hours of charge before it needed to be plugged in. The man at the electronics resale shop on Mercer Street had quoted her fifty-five and she'd looked at the machine for a moment and said forty, and he'd said forty-eight, and she'd said forty-three, and something in the way she'd said it had apparently communicated that forty-three was not an opening position but a conclusion, because he'd taken it.

She'd had forty-six dollars by then. The gap between the morning's scavenging run and the pawn shop, then a second circuit through the transit stops near the waterfront, then the copper wire she'd found behind the second construction site. The math had been tight. She'd known it would be tight when she'd walked into the shop. She'd also known that a laptop was not a purchase she could defer — it was infrastructure, and infrastructure paid for itself in utility, and three hours of battery was enough to do what she needed if she was efficient about it.

She was always efficient.

She bought a prepaid internet card from the convenience store two blocks away — fifteen dollars, thirty days, data-capped but functional — and a cheap prepaid phone for eleven dollars that she had no intention of using as a phone. The SIM was useful. The device itself was a platform. She had seven dollars and change left, which was less than she'd started the day with in absolute terms and more than she'd started with in terms of *position*, which was the only accounting that mattered.

She walked back to Dalton Street, set the laptop on the floor, plugged it into the wall socket with the fraying cable the shop owner had thrown in without her asking, and while it ran its slow startup cycle she sat cross-legged in front of it and thought about what she needed to know first.

The answer was: everything. Which was not a useful answer.

She refined it.

She needed to know what this world was, structurally, before she could make any decisions that depended on knowing what this world was. She knew fragments. She knew parahumans were public knowledge — had been since before she'd arrived, clearly, given the normalization she'd observed in how people moved around cape-adjacent spaces, the specific quality of non-reaction that was different from ignorance. She knew there was a gang structure in this city that involved capes. She knew the PRT existed. She knew something called the Protectorate existed, which she'd inferred from graffiti and one overhead conversation and the lettering on the side of a vehicle she'd seen in the distance.

What she didn't know was the shape of it. The depth. The history.

The laptop finished loading. She opened a browser, navigated to the first search engine that came up, and typed a single word.

*Protectorate.*

---

She read for four hours without stopping.

Not linearly. Not the way a normal person read — page by page, link by link, the patient sequential accumulation of information at the speed human cognition allowed. The Six Eyes did something to reading that she had noticed during the calibration work in this room but not fully mapped yet: text became spatial. The relationships between pieces of information were not just logical but *geometric*, arranged in her perception the way objects in a room were arranged, visible all at once rather than in sequence, cross-referenceable without the friction of having to hold one thing in working memory while retrieving another.

She opened sixteen tabs.

She read all of them simultaneously.

This was not hyperbole. It was a description of a process she didn't entirely understand but could observe in herself — the way a paragraph in one tab would connect to a figure in another without her having to consciously navigate between them, the way contradictions between sources surfaced immediately rather than requiring careful comparison. She was not processing them sequentially at high speed. She was processing them *in parallel*, the information arriving and organizing itself the way the spatial data from the Six Eyes organized itself: as structure, not stream.

Within forty minutes she had a working model of the Protectorate's organizational hierarchy, its funding structure, its relationship to the PRT, and the general shape of its cape roster system.

Within ninety minutes she had a map of the major parahuman organizations in North America, their histories, their conflicts, their current status as best she could reconstruct from publicly available sources.

Within three hours she was reading about the Endbringers.

She stopped there for a moment.

Not from difficulty. The information was clear enough. She stopped because she was doing something she rarely did, which was sitting with a piece of data before filing it — letting it exist in her perception as something other than a fact to be categorized. The photographs in the articles were grainy or absent, usually absent, which she suspected was deliberate. But the descriptions were not. The dimensions. The casualty figures. The pace at which Leviathan had moved through Newfoundland, specifically, which a coast guard report had documented with the flat precision of people who had watched something happen and not had time to be afraid until afterward.

She filed it.

Then she opened a new search.

*Brockton Bay economy.*

---

The differences had started accumulating before she'd consciously looked for them, the way inconsistencies in a room's geometry registered in the Six Eyes before she'd decided to examine the room. Small things. The price tags in store windows that had made her recalibrate her initial estimate of purchasing power. The particular shape of the economic vacancy in the commercial district — not the ordinary vacancy of a city in recession, but something that had a more structural quality, the kind of emptiness that came not from decline but from *damage*. The distinction between a city that was getting poorer and a city that had been hit.

The research confirmed it.

Brockton Bay wasn't in decline in the way her memory of declining cities worked. Her memory was from a different world — she was clear on that, had been clear on it since the first day, had not permitted herself the comfortable error of treating this Earth as a version of her own with cosmetic differences. The divergence was fundamental and old. Whatever had happened when parahumans first appeared — the 1980s, based on what she was reading — had cascaded through every system that touched it, which was every system that existed.

She worked through the economics methodically.

The financial markets first, because markets were where systemic pressure showed itself most legibly.

In her world, the 2010s had been characterized by a particular kind of market behavior: algorithmic trading, high-frequency systems, the gradual displacement of human judgment by statistical models operating at speeds that made human oversight mostly ceremonial. She had not been an economist. She had not followed markets closely. But she had lived in 2025 and read the news and absorbed the general shape of how global finance worked.

None of that transferred cleanly.

Earth Bet's financial markets had developed under a constraint that her Earth's hadn't: Thinkers. Not theoretical Thinkers, not the vague possibility of insider knowledge, but verified, documented, publicly acknowledged cases of parahumans whose power gave them predictive or analytical capabilities that made ordinary market advantage look like coincidence. The regulatory response had not been subtle. She found references to the International Parahuman Financial Oversight Act of 1997, which had created mandatory disclosure requirements for any financial entity employing a rated Thinker, and the subsequent decade of legal battles, regulatory amendments, and market restructuring that had followed.

The result was a market that had evolved *defensively*. Not slower, exactly, but more — armored. Pattern monitoring systems looking not for fraud in the ordinary sense but for the statistical signature of precognitive or analytical cape activity. Transaction freezes tied not to monetary thresholds but to anomaly scores generated by models that were themselves classified, because if you published the detection criteria you told Thinkers what to avoid. She read about the Chicago Event of 2003, which she had no prior knowledge of and which the articles referenced obliquely, and pieced together that it had involved a Thinker or group of Thinkers and had caused sufficient market disruption that three major regulatory frameworks had been rewritten in its aftermath.

She thought about Bitcoin.

In her world, Bitcoin had emerged from a specific confluence of conditions: post-2008 financial crisis distrust, libertarian ideological energy, the particular moment in computing development when the proof-of-work system had been feasible but mining hadn't yet been dominated by industrial-scale operations. The timing had mattered enormously. The ideological context had mattered. The absence of regulatory response in the early years had been crucial.

Here, the conditions were different in ways that compounded.

The post-crisis distrust was present — more present, in some ways, because the crises had been more severe and more repeated. Endbringer attacks on coastal cities had created insurance collapses, bond failures, regional depressions. There was a market for alternative value stores.

But the regulatory environment for anything that looked like an anonymous financial instrument was not 2009-friendly. It was 2003-Chicago-Event-friendly, which meant agencies that had already developed frameworks for detecting non-ordinary financial behavior were primed to examine anonymous digital currency with a specific kind of attention. She found references to something called CryptoCoin — which had launched in 2009, same as Bitcoin in her world, as if the timestamp had been preserved while everything around it changed — and followed the thread of its development.

It had been regulated within eighteen months of significant adoption. Not banned. *Regulated* — which in the Thinker-oversight context meant exchange registration requirements, transaction monitoring, mandatory waiting periods for large transfers. The libertarian ideological energy that had let Bitcoin grow in her world before anyone in authority had quite understood what it was had not been present here, because here the financial authorities had been expecting something like this and had known what tools to reach for.

CryptoCoin existed. It was functional. It was not anonymous. It was not a frontier.

She had no 2009 knowledge advantage to exploit here. She had no 2025 knowledge advantage to exploit here, because 2025 Earth Bet was not her 2025, and the divergence was not cosmetic. The technology development curves had bent differently under the pressure of cape activity — slower in some directions, faster in others, and in the specific areas where she might have had an edge, the regulatory and market landscape had evolved to close the gaps she'd have been looking for.

She noted this without distress.

She had known this was the likely conclusion before she'd started. The research confirmed it, which was what research was for.

The advantage wasn't *what she knew about her world.*

The advantage was *how fast she could learn this one.*

---

She read for another hour about the cultural texture of it.

The media was the most immediately visible difference, and in some ways the most disorienting, because media was where culture made itself legible. She found a film database — a functional equivalent of something she'd used in her world — and spent forty minutes looking at the top-grossing films of the last decade.

The cape content was pervasive.

Not in the way of her world's superhero films, which she'd had opinions about, which had been a genre with specific conventions and a recognizable aesthetic vocabulary. The cape content here was *documentary-adjacent* in a way that suggested a culture that had not yet fully aestheticized its own extraordinary reality. There were action films featuring cape protagonists, yes, but more interesting were the films that were about the *experience* — the coastal reconstruction documentaries, the Newfoundland disaster retrospectives, the prestige dramas about families in cities touched by cape conflicts. The industry had grown up alongside parahumans rather than fantasizing about them, and the result was a media landscape that held capes with a specific mixture of awe, exhaustion, and grudging normalization that felt different from anything she'd encountered in her own world's cultural output.

Music had a similar quality. She found a streaming platform, listened to fragments of popular tracks, found in the production a particular darkness of theme that ran even through the upbeat material — disaster as background radiation, survival as a persistent minor chord in songs that were ostensibly about other things. A song that was, on its surface, about a relationship ending had a bridge that used flood imagery in a way that her search results told her referenced the Manila Endbringer event of 2008. The metaphor was specific. The audience was assumed to know what it referred to.

She thought about Elena.

Not analytically. The thought arrived on its own, which was unusual for her — most thoughts arrived because she'd directed them somewhere. Elena's description of the city, the first day in the diner, the particular inflection when she'd talked about the docks: *everyone who ended up there either ran out of options or ran out of somewhere else to be.* She'd said it without self-pity, which had been the noteworthy thing. The resignation in it was structural, the resignation of someone who had fully incorporated the reality of their situation into their worldview and was not fighting that incorporation.

This was a city that had learned to absorb bad things.

She filed that and closed the browser.

Three hours of battery, almost exactly. The laptop was warm in her hands. Outside the window the afternoon had arrived at some point without her particularly noticing it, and the light on the wall was horizontal now, the dust in the air doing the same thing it had done that morning.

She sat for a moment.

She had arrived in Brockton Bay six days ago with eleven dollars and forty cents and no understanding of what this world was.

She now had forty-seven dollars in her pocket, a functional laptop, a prepaid internet connection, and a structural model of Earth Bet's political, economic, and cultural landscape that was more coherent than most of what she'd found on any single source she'd read.

The model had gaps. Large ones. It was a skeleton, not a body. But skeletons were what you built first, because everything else attached to them.

She put the laptop aside and stood up.

She needed to walk.

—

---

**Scene 4**

---

The city in the afternoon was a different text than the city in the morning.

She'd noticed this the first day and confirmed it the second: the morning city was transactional, purposeful, people moving along established routes toward established destinations, the social geometry of it legible and relatively simple. The afternoon city was looser. The purposeful traffic thinned and what remained was more various — people without fixed itineraries, groups forming and dissolving on corners, the commercial streets shifting from business to something more ambient. More information per square meter, in some ways. More noise in the signal, in others.

She walked north first, along the route she'd mapped that morning, and let the Six Eyes do what they did.

The city's topology was already present in her mind as a working model — block structure, major arterials, the gradient of neighborhood quality that ran roughly from the ABB-held areas in the east through the contested commercial center to the Merchant-adjacent zones near the waterfront. She didn't need to rebuild it from scratch. What she was doing now was *resolution work*: filling in the fine structure, the details that a walk-through produced that a mental map couldn't, the texture of a place that only came from being in it rather than reasoning about it.

She turned east on a street whose name she'd already memorized and watched the character of the storefronts change.

The ABB territory markers were different from the Merchants' in a way she found interesting. The Merchant graffiti was dense, layered, slightly chaotic — territorial assertion through volume, the visual equivalent of making noise. The ABB markers were sparser and more precise, placed at specific chokepoints rather than broadcast across surfaces, which suggested an organizational culture that was less expressive and more functional. She noted the distinction. It told her something about how each group understood territory, which told her something about how each group understood threat.

She didn't go deep into the ABB zone. She mapped the edges of it and turned back.

The Protectorate presence in the city was detectable mostly by its absence — she saw two PRT vehicles in the afternoon, both moving, neither stationary in a way that suggested active patrol. The response infrastructure existed but wasn't dense. Whether that was a resource issue or a strategic choice or simply the reality of a city that had been declining long enough that it no longer merited the same level of attention as a higher-value target, she couldn't determine yet.

She filed it as an open variable.

---

The diner on the corner of Dalton and Mercer had a quality that she was learning to identify in Brockton Bay establishments: the specific kind of endurance that wasn't the same as prosperity. The tables were clean. The coffee was bad in a consistent way, which was different from being bad. The menu hadn't changed in some years, she estimated, based on the wear pattern on the laminate surface and the price points which were slightly below current neighborhood averages — not because the owner was generous but because they hadn't updated them, and updating them would have required a decision, and some decisions got deferred until deferral became its own policy.

She went in because it was on her route and because she'd been awake for nine hours and because the research had left her with a specific kind of cognitive flatness that had nothing to do with fatigue and everything to do with having processed a large volume of new structural information and needing a pause before the next stage of integration.

She ordered coffee and did not think about anything for approximately four minutes, which was, she suspected, the longest she had not thought about anything since arriving in this world.

Elena was working.

She hadn't been looking for Elena specifically. Elena was simply the person who materialized at her table with the coffee pot in the way that people who worked in diners materialized — efficiently, without announcement, reading the room in the particular practiced way of someone who'd spent years learning which tables needed tending and which needed leaving alone.

She set down the mug and poured without being asked.

"You look like you've been staring at a screen."

Aoi looked up. Elena was mid-thirties, brown hair pulled back with a pen still stuck through the knot, the specific quality of tiredness in her posture that came from being on her feet all day rather than from being unwell. She was looking at Aoi with the expression of someone making an assessment rather than starting a conversation.

"A few hours," Aoi said.

"Job hunting?"

The question was casual, the kind of question that filled space rather than sought information. Aoi recognized the category. She had not, prior to this world, spent much time in situations where casual questions filled space, because most of her conversations had been with people who either wanted something specific from her or were trying to survive an interaction with her, both of which produced different social textures.

"Research," she said.

Elena set the coffee pot down on the edge of the table, which was technically not protocol but the diner was half-empty and no one was waiting. "What kind of research?"

"The city."

That landed differently than she'd intended — or possibly exactly as she'd intended, she was still calibrating what *intended* meant when she was operating without a specific social goal. Elena's expression shifted slightly, the assessment quality deepening.

"You're not from here."

"No."

"Thought so." Elena picked up the coffee pot again, not moving to leave yet. "You've got that look. Like you're reading a manual."

Aoi considered that. "Is it obvious?"

"Only because I've seen it before. People who come here and don't know what they're walking into." A pause. "Where are you looking?"

"I've been through most of it. The residential zones. Some of the commercial district."

Elena's expression did something complicated. "Did you go east?"

"Along the edge."

"Don't go east." Not emphatic. Not alarmed. The tone of someone stating a fact about weather. "Not alone, not at the pace you move."

Aoi looked at her.

"You walk like you're measuring things," Elena said. "Which is fine, mostly. But east of Zion Street, you walk like that, somebody notices." She shrugged, one-shouldered. "It's not that people are looking for trouble. It's that they're looking for things that don't fit the pattern, because things that don't fit the pattern are usually trouble."

She moved then, back toward the counter, the conversation apparently concluded on her end. Aoi watched her go and thought about the shape of what had just happened.

It was advice. Unsolicited, specific, and practically useful. Given not from warmth particularly — Elena's register hadn't shifted into warmth during the exchange — but from something that was adjacent to it. A baseline of civic decency, maybe. An unwillingness to let someone walk into a thing without being told the thing was there.

She drank the coffee, which was exactly as bad as it had been two days ago, and found herself in the unexpected position of not minding that.

---

She went back to the room and updated the map.

Not the mental model — that updated continuously, passively, without requiring any deliberate action on her part. She updated the *working document* she'd started on the laptop, which was a different thing. The mental model was comprehensive but existed only in her perception; the document was partial but would persist, could be revised, could be referenced by the part of her cognition that needed the discipline of having committed something to a specific form.

She opened the file. Typed: *East of Zion — pattern recognition by residents. Movement style flagged.* Then, after a moment: *Elena. Diner. Local knowledge source — not interrogatable, but conversational.*

She sat with that last phrase.

*Not interrogatable, but conversational.*

The distinction mattered. She had, in her previous life — in her previous *world* — a particular reputation for interactions that were effective in the sense of extracting whatever she'd needed from them and not effective in most of the other senses. She was aware of this. She had been aware of it at the time and had not considered it a problem, because the things she'd needed had been extracted and that was what the interactions were for.

This situation was different. She needed *ongoing* access to a source of local human knowledge — the kind of ground-level understanding that her research couldn't provide, that her spatial mapping couldn't provide, that only came from someone who had lived inside the texture of a place rather than analyzed it. Elena was that source. And Elena was not a source she could optimize against without destroying.

She was going to have to be — she searched for the word.

*Present.*

That was the word. In the conversation, rather than behind it.

She wasn't sure she knew how to do that. She thought she'd once known. She was aware that she had, in some prior configuration of herself, been capable of presence as a mode — not performed, not calculated, simply there. She had lost access to that, or buried it, or the body she was currently occupying had rearranged the priorities around it.

She would need to find it again.

She made a note of this in the document and was immediately aware that making a note in a document about needing to be more present in conversations was precisely the kind of thing that indicated she had not yet understood the problem.

She deleted the note.

---

The identity problem had been sitting at the back of her processing since she'd numbered it that morning. She'd left it there deliberately — not avoidance, but ordering. You solved the problems in dependency sequence, and money was upstream of identity because without money you couldn't implement any identity solution, and information was upstream of identity because without understanding the world's systems you couldn't know which solutions were viable.

She had enough money now. Temporary, insufficient in scale, but enough to operate.

She had enough information now. Skeleton-level, gapped, but structured.

Which meant identity was now.

She thought about it the way she thought about spatial problems — by mapping the edges first, identifying the shape of the constraint before proposing anything within it.

She did not exist in this world. There was no record of her. No birth certificate, no social security number, no tax history, no educational record, no employment history, no digital footprint of any kind. She was a null value in every database that would have a record of her if she had arrived here in the ordinary way.

The vulnerabilities were obvious and she catalogued them quickly: no legal employment, no bank account, no lease in her own name, no ability to interact with formal institutions in any capacity that required identity verification. She was limited to cash transactions and informal arrangements, which was manageable in the short term and increasingly constraining in the longer term as her operational ambitions scaled.

The advantages were less obvious and she sat with them more carefully.

No record meant no *search result*. In a world where the PRT maintained files on capes, where the Protectorate had analytical infrastructure designed to identify and classify parahumans, where the various gangs and factions had their own intelligence operations of varying sophistication — in that world, a person who generated no paper trail was genuinely difficult to locate by conventional means. She could move through the city's social and physical infrastructure without producing the kind of searchable data that made people findable.

She had demonstrated this already, passively. Six days in Brockton Bay. No one looking for her. No inquiry at the Dalton Street boarding house beyond the landlord's perfunctory weekly check for noise. She was invisible not through any active effort but through structural absence.

The question was whether she wanted to fill that absence and how.

The options organized themselves.

She could fabricate an identity. Documents, digital history, the full architecture of a person who had existed somewhere before arriving in Brockton Bay. This was technically achievable — she had skills that were relevant, she had the processing speed to research what was needed, and the black market infrastructure for identity documents in a city like this was something she could locate within forty-eight hours if she needed to. The risk was that a fabricated identity had seams. Checked carefully enough, it failed. And if it failed at the wrong moment, with the wrong party examining it, the failure was worse than having had no identity at all.

She could build a *digital* identity — not documents but presence. A work history that existed in online spaces, a portfolio of something, a reputation that could be verified at the level of casual checking rather than forensic examination. This had a longer build time but a lower failure rate because it wasn't forged so much as constructed. She had resources that made this more achievable than it would be for most people in her situation: processing speed, research ability, and — she noted this with the specific awareness of someone identifying a tool they hadn't yet used — skills from her previous life that had not stopped being skills because she was in a different world.

The third option was to remain officially nonexistent and build operational capacity entirely in informal and cash-based systems. This had the advantage of maintaining the stealth property of her current null-presence, at the cost of the things that formal identity unlocked. It also had a ceiling — there were categories of resource and opportunity that were simply inaccessible without formal existence, and she was beginning to see paths forward that would eventually require crossing those categories.

She didn't decide. Not yet. She was still upstream of the decision — still in the phase where you mapped options rather than chose between them.

But she noted that the digital construction path had something the others didn't: it was additive. It built toward something rather than substituting for something. And it used what she actually had.

She had a mind that processed information at a speed that was, functionally, several tiers above what this world would classify as normal. She had, in her previous life, been in a profession — in the loosest possible definition of that word — that had required her to understand and teach complex technical systems. She had skills. Abstract, generalized, possibly not perfectly mapped to Earth Bet's technical landscape. But skills.

Digital products. Software. Tools that did not depend on her physical presence, that could be distributed, that once built required no ongoing labor to keep selling. In her world, in 2025, the market for such things had been saturated in ways that made entry difficult. Earth Bet's digital economy was less developed — not less sophisticated in absolute terms, but less *filled*. The same kinds of infrastructure that governed financial markets here — the cape-event disruptions, the reduced globalization, the different pace of technology adoption — applied to software markets. There were gaps. She had seen some of them already, in the forty minutes she'd spent on the film database, in the structural search results that had returned results slower and less accurately than any comparable tool in her world would have managed.

The gaps were opportunities.

The constraint was time. Building anything required time, and time required money in the immediate term, and she was still in the phase of solving money through direct means.

But the phase was almost over.

She looked at the figure in her working document. Forty-seven dollars. She'd started the day with eighteen.

She had a system. She had a city model. She had a laptop. She had a research foundation.

In a week — less, if the system continued to improve at the current rate — she would not be counting change. She would be past the threshold where the immediate financial problem had been solved and could start solving the *next* one.

She closed the document, opened a new browser tab, and started reading about Brockton Bay's digital infrastructure.

Outside the window, the evening was arriving the way evenings arrived here — not gradually but in a specific moment, the light quality changing all at once, the street sounds shifting register. She noted the time. She noted that she hadn't eaten since the sixty-cent pastry at 8:47 that morning.

She noted that this was the longest she'd gone without cataloguing her food intake since arriving, which meant the survival mode accounting had loosened further than she'd realized.

She ordered her thoughts, closed the laptop, and went back to the diner.

—

---

**Scene 5**

---

Elena was finishing a table when she came in.

The dinner rush — such as it was, in a diner that ran at approximately sixty percent of what its seating capacity suggested it had once been designed for — had passed its peak, and the remaining customers had the settled quality of people who weren't in a hurry. An older man near the window with a newspaper. Two women in their forties at the center table who were clearly not talking about what they were ostensibly talking about. A teenager in a booth near the back who had been nursing the same soda for a while, based on the condensation ring.

She took the same seat as before, which she recognized was a choice rather than a default, and registered that she'd made it without deliberating.

Elena came over inside of two minutes, which was faster than the previous visit.

"Didn't have you down for dinner," she said.

"I forgot to eat."

Elena looked at her with the expression of someone receiving information they found mildly implausible. "You forgot."

"I was reading."

"Must have been a good book."

"It was research."

"Right." Elena set a laminated menu on the table, the kind of gesture that was protocol rather than suggestion. "The city research."

"Among other things."

Elena didn't leave immediately. She had the posture of someone whose next task was not urgent — a slight shift in weight, the coffee pot held loosely rather than purposefully. Aoi had already noticed that Elena moved through the diner with a specific economy of motion, the kind that came from years in the same space and not from any deliberate cultivation of grace. When she stopped, it was because she'd decided to stop, which was different from being idle.

"You look less like a manual today," Elena said.

Aoi considered this. "What do I look like today?"

"Like you figured some things out." A pause. "Still reading the room, but less like you're translating it."

The observation was precise enough that Aoi took a moment with it rather than responding immediately. Elena's model of her was more accurate than it had any right to be given the total length of their interactions, which was somewhere under forty minutes across two visits. She filed this as a data point about Elena rather than an anomaly — some people were simply better calibrated to social information than their circumstances suggested, and the diner context specifically rewarded that calibration. You read tables or you didn't last long.

"I walked most of the city today," Aoi said.

"Most of it." Not quite skeptical. More like testing the claim's weight.

"The parts worth mapping."

Elena's mouth did something brief that wasn't quite a smile. "You do it on foot?"

"Yes."

"How long were you out?"

"Four hours, approximately. Split across morning and afternoon."

Elena looked at her for a moment with an expression that was doing several things at once. "Where'd you end up?"

"Eastern boundary of the ABB territory. Northern waterfront. The commercial district. Some of the residential zones between here and Zion."

The last word registered. Elena's expression settled into something that was neither approval nor its opposite — more like someone recalibrating.

"You listened."

"You gave me useful information," Aoi said. "It would have been inefficient not to use it."

That landed in the space between them with a slight irregularity that she was already identifying as she said it — the word *inefficient* in a sentence about a social interaction was not wrong, exactly, but it had a texture that was slightly off from how people usually talked about taking advice. She noted it without being sure what to do about it.

Elena, apparently, decided to find it acceptable. "What did you think of the commercial district?"

"Contested. The surface reads as normal commercial activity but the underlying economics have a different structure. Multiple protection arrangements layered on top of each other. The business owners have adapted — you can read it in stock levels, turnover rate, which products are kept behind the counter and which aren't. They've done the math on operating costs and incorporated the gang economics into it."

Elena was quiet for a moment.

"Most people who come here just see a street with shops," she said.

"Most people aren't looking at the shops."

Another pause. The teenager in the back booth shifted, the sound of ice in an empty cup. Elena glanced toward him automatically, the reflex of someone whose attention was always partially on the room, then back.

"You want the soup," she said. "It's the only thing left from prep that's worth eating this late. Bread's still good."

It wasn't a question. Aoi understood it wasn't a question.

"That's fine."

Elena moved away toward the kitchen. Aoi watched her go and thought — not analytically, or not entirely analytically — about the specific quality of the interaction. There was a transactional surface to it that was real: service, customer, information exchanged in the gaps. But the transactional surface wasn't the whole of it, which she found she could observe clearly enough even if she couldn't entirely explain it. Elena had offered advice about Zion Street unprompted and had come back to check that the advice had been used. That was a small thing. It was also not nothing.

She thought about what she'd noted earlier, about needing to be *present* rather than behind the interaction, and recognized that she had been more present in the last five minutes than she'd been in most conversations in recent memory — recent memory in this world, which was still measured in days, and possibly recent memory in the other sense, which was measured in much longer units she didn't want to examine too closely at this particular moment.

She looked at the newspaper the older man near the window was reading. She could read the headline from here — the Six Eyes resolved the spatial distance between her and the text without effort, rendering the letters as clearly as if she'd been holding the paper herself.

*PORT AUTHORITIES REVISE CARGO INSPECTION SCHEDULE FOLLOWING INCIDENT — FULL STORY PAGE 4*

Dry headline. Bureaucratic language masking whatever the actual incident had been. She filed it in the Brockton Bay operational model under *docks — recent disruption, nature unclear.*

Elena came back with soup and bread and refilled the coffee without being asked.

"Where are you from?" she asked. Not prying — more like the question had been sitting on a shelf and this was a reasonable moment to take it down.

"Far away," Aoi said.

Elena looked at her. "That's not really an answer."

"No," Aoi agreed. "It's not."

Something in her tone must have communicated that the non-answer was not evasion so much as genuine difficulty, because Elena's expression moved through a brief consideration and settled somewhere that wasn't intrusion.

"Okay," she said. Just that.

Aoi ate the soup. It was considerably better than the coffee.

---

The city after dark was a third text, different again from the morning and afternoon versions.

She walked back to Dalton Street via a longer route than necessary, because the Six Eyes produced their best topographic data in low-traffic conditions, when the spatial noise from crowds thinned and the underlying geometry of the built environment was more legible. The streets in the residential zone south of the commercial district were quiet at this hour, the lighting intermittent, the occasional sounds carrying farther than they would have in the day.

She was building the night-time layer.

The gang activity at night had a different distribution than during the day. Not more prevalent — possibly less, in certain zones, where the daylight activity was actually the primary operational mode — but more concentrated, more visible in the spatial sense. A cluster of people on a corner read differently than the same number of people moving through the same space during the day. She mapped the positions, the ranges of the clusters, the movement patterns between them. She would need repetition over several nights to understand the patterns well enough to navigate them reliably, but the first layer was already taking shape.

She turned north at the end of Havisham Street and then east toward the waterfront, not planning to go far, just extending the map by a few additional blocks.

The Merchants were visible before she heard them.

Not them specifically — not yet. But the *spatial signature* of something moving that was heavier than a vehicle should be, taking up more space in the local geometry than its size accounted for, which meant either a very large vehicle or a modified one. She stopped at the edge of a block and held still and let the Six Eyes extend.

Modified. A vehicle with something mounted on its frame that was not standard, the additional mass cantilevered in a way that slightly altered the vehicle's center of gravity and produced a characteristic wobble in its movement through space. She tracked it. It was moving along the waterfront road, slowly, the kind of movement that was either patrol or display.

She stood and watched it for eleven seconds.

She thought about what she'd read: Squealer. Tinker, specialization in vehicles and large-scale mechanical systems, affiliated with the Merchants. She looked at the vehicle and the mounted thing and thought about what a tinker-modified weapon mounted on a vehicle would likely be capable of, and about PRT response times, and about the Merchants' territorial claims near the waterfront, and about the fact that the weapon was currently in a pre-charged state based on the spatial irregularity she was detecting at the mounting point.

She thought: *this is going to happen soon.*

Not tonight. She wasn't ready for tonight. The map was incomplete and the strategic analysis was incomplete and she had exactly forty-seven dollars and a laptop with a stiff hinge and she was not going to make decisions based on proximity to a moment rather than readiness for it.

She turned around and walked back to Dalton Street.

She would be ready when it was ready.

---

The room.

She sat on the floor with her back against the wall — the exact posture she would be in three days later, facing the captured device — and updated the working document. City model, current status. Gang distribution, current estimates. Thinker-relevant observations. She typed quickly, the text appearing at a rate that the keyboard was almost not fast enough for.

She reached the identity section and stopped.

The blank digital footprint was not a problem she could solve tonight. It was a problem she could *start* on, which was different. She spent twenty minutes on preliminary research — the landscape of identity documentation in Earth Bet, the digital infrastructure, the specific ways in which her absence from records would manifest if someone looked — and came away with a clearer shape of the constraint.

The city had a specific kind of information ecosystem. Local, layered, partially formal and partially not. The formal layer was the PRT, the city government, the public databases. The informal layer was everything else: the diner, the pawn shop owner, Elena's general orientation toward new arrivals that was neither welcoming nor suspicious but watchful. To exist in the formal layer she needed documents or digital history. To exist in the informal layer she needed only to be consistently present and consistently not-threatening.

She was already three days into the informal layer.

She noted that the two layers had different access points and different risk profiles, and that she should probably build in both directions simultaneously rather than sequentially.

She closed the document.

She thought about the digital products question. Not exhaustively — it was late and she had allocated this part of the processing cycle for consolidation rather than generation. But she let the thought sit for a moment.

The gap she'd identified in the search infrastructure was real. The film database had been slow and imprecise in ways that weren't hardware-limited — they were algorithmic. The search tools she'd used throughout the day had a particular quality that she recognized from very early in her memory of the internet in her own world: functional but unoptimized, the tools of a field that hadn't yet been forced to compete for attention at scale. Earth Bet's digital market was not small. It was less *finished* than she was used to. The same collective intelligence and technical infrastructure existed, but it had been pulled in different directions by different pressures, and some of the directions she'd expected had simply not been traveled yet.

She had skills from a previous life that were not nothing.

The specific skills were not perfectly mapped to what was needed here — she would have to adapt, research the local technical conventions, understand what already existed before she could identify what didn't. But the underlying capacity was there. The processing speed was there. The ability to look at a system and see its shape and its gaps simultaneously was, in this body, enhanced to a degree that she was still calibrating.

She was not going to be counting pennies in a week. She was confident of this in the specific way she was confident of things she had actually modeled rather than things she merely hoped.

The question of what she would be doing instead was still open.

She considered it the way she considered everything, which was directly and without sentimentality, and found that the answer was not fully formed yet. There was a version of this city she could imagine navigating — not as a cape exactly, not in the organized sense, but as something operational, something that solved problems with the tools she had. There was a version of this she could imagine that was quieter: a presence without a profile, a system running smoothly and privately, sufficient to itself.

She sat with both versions for a moment.

Neither felt complete.

She thought, briefly and not analytically, about Elena's observation. *You look less like a manual today.*

She closed her eyes behind the blindfold.

*You figured some things out.*

She had. And she would continue to. That was, if nothing else, something she was good at.

Outside, Brockton Bay made its nighttime sounds, and she listened to them without cataloguing anything for a while, which was the closest thing she had, at this point, to rest.

—

I'll research PHO chapter style from Worm canon before writing.

PHO format fully internalized from canon source. Writing now.

---

**Scene 6**

---

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You have one infraction. You were last warned on February 14th, 2011.

■

♦ **Topic: New cape at the docks? Merchant hardware gone, one witness report — discuss**

**In: Boards ► Brockton Bay ► Sightings & Local Events**

**Dockrat_BB** *(Original Poster) (Verified Brocktonite)*

Posted on September 9th, 2011:

Alright, so my cousin works dispatch at a towing company that does PRT contractor work near the waterfront, and he's telling me they got called in to recover a Merchant vehicle — one of Squealer's, based on the description — that had a mounted weapon torn *off* it. Not disabled. Not blown up. Physically removed from the vehicle frame. The mounting bolts were still in the chassis. The thing that was bolted to them wasn't.

No cape fight was reported. No one was hospitalized. PRT showed up four or five minutes after the fact and there was nobody to arrest.

What they did have was one witness description from a guy who was, admittedly, high, but who was coherent enough to give a statement: white hair, sunglasses, young woman or possibly androgynous, no costume, no insignia. Took two shots from whatever Squealer's thing was and kept moving. Then she grabbed the weapon mount and walked off with it.

Someone new is in town, boys.

**(Showing page 1 of 3)**

► **TinkerWatch_92**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

Hold on. She *walked off* with it? How big was this thing?

► **Dockrat_BB** *(Verified Brocktonite)*

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

My cousin said the original vehicle was a modified flatbed, so. Not small.

► **TinkerWatch_92**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

Brute, then. Obviously.

► **MsAlabaster**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

Not necessarily. Could be a Mover thing, leverage and angle rather than raw strength. Could be a Tinker with an exosuit. Could be a lot of things. White hair isn't a natural color so either she's a cape or she's nineteen and going through something.

► **NailBat** *(Veteran Member)*

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

@MsAlabaster the sunglasses at night detail is interesting though. Brute types don't usually have aesthetic choices that specific. Most of them wear whatever doesn't get torn up too fast.

Sunglasses at night is either a light sensitivity power, a vision-enhancement power, or she's doing a thing. The hair makes me think she's doing a thing.

► **Chorus_of_One**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

she survived tinker weapon fire from Squealer's kit and didn't go down

that's the part that should be freaking people out more

Squealer's stuff isn't subtle. the oscillation-wave weapon she's been running field tests with took out a support structure on the old Heaton warehouse in July and nobody even figured out she was testing it, they just thought the building fell down

surviving a hit from that is not trivial

► **Dockrat_BB** *(Verified Brocktonite)*

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

Wait, the Heaton thing was Squealer?

► **Chorus_of_One**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

allegedly. it's on the local sightings log. unconfirmed. but yes allegedly.

► **TinkerWatch_92**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

If it's the weapon I think it is, taking two hits and remaining ambulatory is in Brute 5+ territory minimum. Unless the discharge was partial, which is possible if the witness didn't see the full charge sequence complete.

► **MsAlabaster**

Replied on September 9th, 2011:

Or she had some kind of field. Shielder or Stranger with a physical-block ability. Or a Tinker suit that absorbed it. We have one high witness and zero other corroboration, let's maybe not rate her before the PRT does.

**End of Page. 1, 2, 3**

■

♦ **Topic: Re: New cape at the docks — PRT statement (posted)**

**In: Boards ► Brockton Bay ► Sightings & Local Events**

**Hemlock_Actual** *(Verified Brocktonite) (Moderator, Local Events)*

Posted on September 10th, 2011:

PRT just dropped a public statement. Archiving it here for the thread since these usually disappear off the main page in 48 hours.

*"The Parahuman Response Team, Brockton Bay division, is aware of reports of cape activity near the Dockside waterfront on the night of September 8th. We are investigating. No injuries to civilians or PRT personnel were reported in connection with this event. If you have information relevant to this investigation, please use the anonymous tip line at [link]. Do not approach any unknown capes."*

So that's basically nothing. Standard boilerplate. They've confirmed they're investigating, which means the physical evidence was substantial enough that they can't just not-comment. That's something, I guess.

Also, Squealer reportedly has not appeared publicly since the incident. Skidmark was spotted near the north Merchant territory yesterday looking unhappy, which is his resting expression, but more so.

**(Showing page 1 of 2)**

► **NailBat** *(Veteran Member)*