Frederick Foswell taps his finger off the surface of the table a few booths behind the Enforcer's own, feigning interest in whatever's in his glass. The move comes from a thousand minutes of every weekend spent in a Columbia dorm room practicing at the typewriter. It's a nice piece of body language to mould into Patch. Makes him look preoccupied.

The world's changing. Two decades ago he'd have been using an actual typewriter for a start. He got into the digital age on the wrong foot, partly because he wasn't ready to adapt, mostly because Jameson flat out refused to. Until he found out spell-checker and email could shave time off proofreading and layout by a few seconds.

Foswell's not going to call it yellow journalism, because if he did he'd have had to walk out the Bugle's doors a long time ago on principle. Thank God for Joseph Robertson. But just because someone at the Bugle is ready to roll with every change and stick to the fundamentals of what they're supposed to do for a living doesn't mean everyone else will.

Suddenly it's a young person's game. Suddenly something like Patch is vital to someone like Foswell's survival. Back in the day maybe money changed hands now and then but you never had to change your face.

First rule of the many you'll hear learning journalism and still best enough to be the first: write the story, don't be the story. If a young buck like Li can pull off inane sensationalism for every deadline then someone working their tail off as hard as Fredrick Foswell doesn't really have an excuse. And that's why while Patch has given him a hell of an edge by getting him into places like the Big Sky he's had to be careful he remains an observer and never an instigator. Sometimes it feels like he really is becoming Patch, whoever that is, and it worries him that one day not even a source like that will be enough to get him a story, to keep him ahead of Li and the others, and that he might do something to get one. Something very stupid.

He may have found a way around that though. The world's changing. Something beyond computers and typewriters and possibly everything human is scuttling out of the shadows.

This…this is interesting. The Spider-Man is interesting. And even if every so called super villain in the big apple didn't suddenly have something to prove by getting bigger, harder, so there's no way in hell a kid could beat them down like that, Patch has heard rumblings that Foswell's old Pulitzer winner Silvio Manfredi is about a month away from walking out of Ryker's and having words with whoever's waiting for him. Like the Big Man and the Master Planner. Or Electro. Or Sandman. Or Doc Ock.

All of who show up a lot, alongside Spider-Man, in the photos of one Peter Parker. Who may or may not be Spider-Man, but regardless has managed to nab more pics of the wall crawler than half the pros Foswell's known in almost a decade. And the more Patch hears the more it sounds like Foswell, whether or not he is Spider-Man, might be doing himself a real big favour endearing himself to this young man who, even if he isn't saving the world, is really damn good at taking pictures of someone who can. Pictures which would be just what some of Foswell's stuff could use to endear his writing to young and old alike.

It is a young person's game after all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, if you know what you're doing.

Let the world change on it's own. The less someone like the Patches and Foswells of this world need to do to watch something blow up without actually blowing it up, the better. A little moral ambiguity keeps their consciences clearer like that.