Unearthed
She was chasing a Thinker, she was sure of that. A good one, unfortunately.
There were many Thinkers in the beginning, using their powers to game the system and make easy money manipulating stocks, international trade and black markets to make easy money. The public hardly even took notice amidst the then sudden emergence of real superheroes and the very conspicuous villains they fought. The spectacle of people smashing one another through buildings was infinitely more fascinating than a man setting up a money laundering scheme.
Parahuman financial crime became more noticeable when mass fortunes were amassed from nowhere and economies worldwide began to fluctuate and crash. Government hired Thinkers began to see patterns emerge seemingly everywhere of other Thinkers and their machinations. Any and every government with the capability to do so cracked down on these parahumans. Urgently crafted laws to combat such crimes were often draconian in their scope as many felt were necessary. Needless to say anyone who was caught and tried to play hardball received less than warm reception.
Even today after things reached more of a semblance of stability and many laws had been rewritten, there were harsh punishments for anyone committing financial crimes using parahuman ability. Anyone who tried generally didn't last very long. This fact made whoever was doing this very intriguing.
Dragon had only noticed it by chance. She was looking for a company to purchase an esoteric metallic alloy when a background search into one of the companies tripped a red flag. Checking through its credentials she found that the people in its employment did not in fact exist anywhere but on paper. Following through she found connections to other dummy companies, shell corporations and front businesses.
As she tried to follow the money to trace it back to whomever was behind this, she found that in many places it seemed to enter from many individual sources. At times the sources added in money at several hundred thousand USD at times several hundred million. A great deal of these sources were… Protectorate heroes?
She tentatively compiled a list of all the sources of money and ran them through a program to find any commonalities. Two things found by the program were that each individual had access to money in one form or another and had all been browsing for… a way to gain powers.
As she scrolled through the data and tried to come to terms with what exactly she had unearthed, alarms alerted her to an anomaly in her base. Someone was breaking into her home and-
"Hello, Dragon."
A woman in a neatly pressed suit was standing next to one of her central processors.
"You've found something we need to talk to you about."
AN: Well, I wrote a thing. This is actually the first thing I've ever written. As a story at least. Writing's harder than I may have first expected...