This chapter, and the next one, necessarily present Eidolon as more of a hothead than I think he really deserves, but there are reasons for it which will become clearer later. I'm not just bashing him for the sake of it, I'm doing it for the story! :) So please don't complain too much if you happen to like the idiot.

"That was unnecessarily provocative, wasn't it, Brain?" The Varga sounded quite amused. "I had formed the opinion from our research that Eidolon was… more aggressive than entirely ideal… but I can't help thinking he's deliberately pushing his luck here. Legend isn't pleased about it, and very apprehensive, while Alexandria was surprised."

'I think he wants a fight, but doesn't want to simply say it,' Taylor replied thoughtfully. 'Weird. I had a sudden flashback to dear old Sophia there for a second.'

"I would advise not taking the bait, even if you could probably easily take him if you acted quickly," her friend added. "We could simply squash him and I doubt, unless he's already got the relevant power ready, that he'd react in time. But that would be an overreaction of an extreme kind. It's not needed in this case, I feel."

'I'm not planning on killing Eidolon today, Varga,' she laughed. 'Or ever, for that matter. He's supposed to be one of the good guys. But you're right, he smells like he's ready for trouble. He's been getting more and more… apprehensive? No, not that. More like he's excited.'

"Foolish," the Varga rumbled quietly. "People who look for a fight often find one and he knows very little about us. The opponent you don't understand is the one more likely to get you."

She agreed, studying the three members of the Triumvirate. Legend was definitely looking both worried about her reaction and more than a little annoyed at his colleague, although he was hiding it well. His scent gave both emotions away clearly, even so. Alexandria was more annoyed than anything, she seemed confident she was in no danger, but bearing in mind her reputation and power-set, that was quite possibly not a misplaced confidence. This was the woman who'd gone up against, indeed led the charge against, all three Endbringers on multiple occasions.

She was neither easy to harm or the sort of person who shied away from a fight, obviously.

But Taylor didn't have any plans for a fight today. She had work to do, not to mention that these were supposed to be the good guys anyway. But that said, the man was irritating. His statement was clearly meant to be deliberately provocative, and she thought it was more than a little rude even bearing that in mind. Taylor knew someone with something to prove when she saw it, she'd had way too much experience with Sophia Hess to miss it. He was nowhere near that pushy, but there were traces of the same attitude present. Even the way he was standing suggested he was keying himself up for action.

'Well, we'd better let him down and stop worrying Legend so much,' she thought with a small laugh. 'I want to find out what Alexandria really wants, which this obviously isn't. Although she's ready to join in if needed, look at her tensing!'

"The woman does appear to be somewhat concerned," the Varga noted slyly. "Perhaps a demonstration?"

'Not just yet, I don't want to give them an excuse,' she replied. 'But there is a limit to how much pushing I'll let him get away with before I'll have to be firm. They're guests here, they should be polite. I would in their place. The joke with his name isn't enough to warrant that sort of behavior.' Sighing now, in the privacy of her head, she thought for a moment, then acted.

Paul glanced at David, then Rebecca. He could see that the former was ready for any sudden action, he had long practice at reading his friends, but he was also not quite ready to start anything. His words had been very ill-chosen, although Paul was unsure whether they'd been a deliberate attempt to trigger a reaction, despite him promising not to. He thought for a moment, then sighed. Although, thinking back, he'd never actually promised, had he? Merely said he wouldn't.

'Idiot,' he thought with annoyance. 'One day you're going to find that ultimate opponent you're always looking for, David, and that's the day you're going to regret it one way or the other.'

Looking at Rebecca he saw in the lines of her body that she was keyed up and ready at a moment's notice to leap into action. Glancing at Kaiju, who was inspecting all of them from much closer than he was comfortable with under the circumstances, he formed the opinion that she might not have that chance if the huge reptile did in fact decide to do something unfortunate. She was definitely faster than she had any right to be, and she was... right there!

He twitched as Kaiju's head was abruptly only a few feet from them, the warm breath from the end of her muzzle flowing over them all. Rebecca emitted an undignified although faint squeak while David visibly jumped a bit and took half a step back despite himself.

'Christ, I didn't even see her move,' he thought frantically, looking up at the vast head which was now almost close enough to touch. She'd extended her neck so quickly he'd completely missed it by blinking.

"Oh, my dear Eidolon, that was unwise to say, if you would like some truth. I know for a fact that my littlest sister told Gallant and Vista the very first time she was out looking around the city what would happen if our family was threatened, and that we considered prying into them a threat," the enormous creature said very softly, her voice a rumble like distant thunder. "And I also know that Raptaur told Armsmaster, who she likes a lot, by the way, the same thing and mentioned that it applies to our friends and allies. Armsmaster simply accepted it. I myself told your companion Legend much the same when we had our nice little chat the other day. Yet you have either chosen your words inappropriately, or are for some reason deliberately attempting to provoke me into a reaction. Which is it, I wonder?"

Paul looked up at teeth bigger than he was, and closer than he was even slightly comfortable with, then at his colleagues. There was an air of danger coming from the formerly very laid-back reptile that he wasn't happy about. But he was also very relieved that she didn't seem to have taken offense.

Much.

Looking to the side, he noticed abruptly that there was an extremely large hand there, only feet away. He'd missed her moving it in the shock of seeing her face practically next to his. On the other side, when he looked, there was another one.

'All she had to do is clap,' he sighed internally. 'David, you get us killed and I'm never letting you forget it.' The lack of logic in this thought almost made him smile. He saw the exact moment when his friends noticed the two huge hands on either side by their flinching. Rebecca could undoubtedly survive it, although he was sure she'd feel it even so. If he had time to shift to his breaker state he'd also survive, but David? He'd need to pick the right power very quickly, if he hadn't already done so, and that was assuming Kaiju didn't have some trick up her sleeve other than brute force.

"Kaiju, I apologize for any… accidental insult," he finally said, after the pause grew uncomfortably long.

"I would debate whether it was entirely accidental, bearing in mind that I'm certain all of the information on us will be in your Threat Assessment document, which you will have read before coming here," she replied quietly. "However, if you would like to start again, I'm willing to overlook it. None of us want a fight, right?" There was a warning tone there which strongly implied the correct answer. He glanced at Rebecca who had stiffened in shock.

"How did you know about that?" the woman asked abruptly.

Kaiju chuckled. "We know many things. But this one is simply logic. We are a new factor in play, obviously the PRT will have collated all the information it could about us together, extrapolated as much as it could manage, and attempted to come up with counters for anything we're known to be able to do. Director Piggot has a reputation for competence that even I have heard, I would expect nothing less. After all, it's what I would do in the same place. You will have read the documentation before coming to talk to me because you also have a well-deserved reputation for being careful. Well, most of you."

Paul couldn't fully suppress a snicker, which made David turn to him with an air of irritation. Which made the snicker louder.

"So, based on that, mentioning my family in exactly that manner could well be considered a deliberate attempt to provoke a reaction from me," Kaiju went on after a short pause. "Possibly to see whether you can annoy me enough to make me start something to assess my temper, possibly just because you want some exercise." She was looking directly at David now, her glowing gaze fixed on him. "If it's the former, you'll have to try harder, but I would suggest that it's not in anyone's interests to succeed. If it's the latter, find a good Parahuman gymnasium. Or make an appointment and find somewhere far enough away from people that we can destroy the countryside wholesale. I'm not having a full scale fight with you here, Eidolon, there are too many people around who have nothing to do with it and I won't allow you to cause trouble, no matter who you are."

"You think you can speak like that to us?" David spluttered.

"Yes. As I have just done so, that's obvious." There was a tone of amusement present in her voice now. "I don't want to be insulting, but you started it, although I suppose you might have been offended by my little joke, in which case I apologize. Can I suggest that you also stop it before something happens that nobody really wants?"

Paul sighed. He could tell David was getting worked up, although he wasn't entirely sure why the man was acting this way. Rebecca was now staring at him in a manner that made him certain that if they were alone she'd be berating him for being an idiot. "Eidolon, please stop poking the five hundred ton mega-lizard, will you?" he sighed very quietly, just enough for his friends to hear. And her, of course, but there was no way round that. "She saw through your comment and doesn't want to play. Leave it alone."

"I don't see why we are the ones who should back down," his friend grumbled. "We're the ones who have the authority here. There are way too many things about all this that make no sense, far more questions than answers, and it all makes me wonder what else they're hiding."

"Would you like to tell me your real name and show me your face?" Kaiju asked calmly.

"No, I would not," David snapped. Paul stared at her, then him, while Rebecca looked thoughtful.

"Would you like it if I went to some trouble to determine those things for myself?"

"No!"

"Precisely. Even asking is somewhat of a breach of the Rules you people have come up with to handle the Parahuman situation. We respect those Rules, at least as far as that sort of thing goes, as they provide protection for everyone." Kaiju's voice was still calm and reasonable. "We draw the line at deliberate attacks on us and ours, of course. Those will be responded to in a manner that ensures they're not repeated. However, what you asked is basically exactly the same thing I just said. None of us are particularly interested in divulging any information we might or might not have on Parahuman identities, including our own, except under very specific and unusual circumstances. Your curiosity isn't one of those circumstances. You have no need to know, as I believe the phrase has it."

"I think Kaiju is right and we should start again," Rebecca said, giving David a warning look, which he clearly noticed but just as clearly wasn't happy about. Paul studied him, thinking that his behavior was puzzling even considering the man's tendencies. Her joking nickname wasn't the reason behind his sudden mood change, he had a much better sense of humor under normal circumstances than that would require. Was he so intent on proving himself that he'd keep pushing? Kaiju had allowed them a chance to backtrack without losing face simply by admitting that he'd accidentally misspoken, something he was more than quick enough to have realized, yet he was still standing in an aggressive manner and radiating irritation. Rebecca obviously saw the same thing, as she put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. The man made a very faint pained sound.

She was apparently squeezing quite hard.

"Please accept my apologies as well, Kaiju, and those of my friend here. He's simply worried about the… oddities… of the entire Family situation, which you must agree is somewhat unusual, and may have been a little… hasty… in what he said. He meant no insult or threat." Paul could hear from the slight pauses that she was picking her words extremely carefully. "Did you, Eidolon?" Her hand moved a little on his shoulder and David twitched.

"No, Alexandria is correct, I wasn't trying to be deliberately insulting." Paul could hear the reluctance in his voice in admitting this, and wasn't at all sure he was being totally honest. He was damn certain that Kaiju also picked up on it but she seemed more amused than anything else.

"Great. No harm done, then." The baring of teeth somehow became a smile rather than a warning without anything else moving. "So all things considered, it would probably be best that we just have a nice talk, rather than take some sort of direct action that could embarrass the Protectorate," Kaiju chuckled. "There's no need for such things, is there?"

"You actually think you could take us?" David demanded.

Paul put his hand over his face and sighed, then looked at the other man with vast irritation. He just wouldn't stop.

Dragon noticed, in her digital mindscape, a specific alert had just triggered. Worried, she quickly connected to the relevant system and checked what had caused it. After a moment, she thought, 'That is… odd.'

"Colin, Leviathan is on the move, but there's something very weird about how he's doing it," she said out loud to her friend, who was currently studying one of her probe power systems with an eye towards making it smaller. He snapped erect, whirling to look at her.

"Move? Heading where? And what's weird about it?" he asked with alarm in his voice. She put the relevant data up on one of his high resolution monitors, then walked over and pointed at the screen.

"He's where he's been for nearly seven weeks now, damn near on the exact opposite side of the planet from here at the bottom of the Indian Ocean off the south western tip of Australia, but he just started heading south-west. Much more slowly than he normally moves, and a little erratically, like he's zigzagging back and forth." They watched the trace extend out from the huge mass of squiggles created by logging all the Endbringer's movements in almost the same place for weeks. "He's sticking to the bottom, I think, and following the topography, which is why the trace looks so weird. Why on earth would he do that?"

"I have no idea," Colin replied, rubbing his chin. "You're right, that's not normal behavior. Where is he heading?"

She extended a vector from the average direction of movement, which had settled down to about a hundred and twenty miles an hour, only perhaps twenty percent of the normal speed the thing typically traveled at when moving from place to place or attacking. The line tracked south past Antarctica, through the Antarctic Ocean, up through the South Atlantic, to ultimately make landfall after nearly twelve and a half thousand miles.

"Here."

"WHAT!"

"Exactly here. That vector crosses right through the center of the bay."

They stared at each other in horror.

"It's a great circle shortest path that ends right in the bay. At the speed he's moving it will take over four days for him to arrive. Assuming he doesn't change direction, of course."

Colin was pale. "Oh, god, this is bad," he muttered. She nodded soberly. Both of them looked at the emergency Endbringer siren activation button he had in the lab, under a breakable glass panel on the wall. "Too early for that," he said. "We need more information first, before we cause total panic. This might be a coincidence."

"I agree, but the trace is very distinctive," she replied. "It's definitely Leviathan, and at the moment he's definitely coming this way."

"But why so slowly?"

"I have no idea," she sighed. "None at all."

"And more to the point, what about the Simurgh? She's next in the rotation. They've never changed the pattern before, if this is a new behavior, all our models are useless. The prediction programs you've been working on will have to be completely redone."

"That had occurred to me, yes," Dragon grumbled. "I'm going to check on the Simurgh. I'm tracking her in orbit, she's in a high polar one at the moment, she's been there for weeks. Hold on while I get the right satellite telescope aligned."

A few minutes later she made an involuntary sound of shock. "That is… disconcerting," she said slowly.

"What is?"

"Look." Having routed the satellite camera feed to another monitor, they could both see the multi-winged figure of the third Endbringer floating in space. The odd thing was that instead of her normal orbital configuration, her many misshapen wings curled protectively around her torso, they were half-opened to allow her face to be seen. It was still serene and expressionless, cold and frightening, but the whole posture of the figure also somehow expressed apprehension more than anything else.

"She's watching something on the surface," Colin said after a moment. "Can you triangulate on the direction her eyes are looking in?"

"There's another camera satellite coming over the horizon in just under five minutes," Dragon replied after a quick check. They waited silently until the satellite was in position. "OK, I've got her on this one as well," she said. "I'm resolving the two images to determine an approximate vector..."

It took a few seconds of calculation, but she worked out the general area of the planet that the Simurgh was staring at. It almost didn't surprise her.

"Damn," she said softly, bringing up an image of the Earth on a third monitor, then overlaying a large circle on it.

Brockton Bay was right in the middle of that circle.

They exchanged a glance, by now not only worried, but extremely puzzled.

Kaiju regarded David, the smile going away. After a moment, she softly replied, "Eidolon, top level Trump, power set variable depending on requirements. Highly experienced in combat, successfully fought Endbringers to standstill on multiple occasions. Threat level medium. Alexandria, top level Brute, Mover, high level Thinker. Highly experienced in combat, has survived encounters with Endbringers on multiple occasions. Threat level low. Legend, high level Blaster, Breaker, top level Mover. Highly experienced in combat, has survived encounters with Endbringers on multiple occasions. Threat level medium."

They looked at each other while she paused. "We also do threat assessments. Restricted to what is available publicly, of course, as we don't have the resources of the PRT, but you'd possibly be surprised what can be derived from information on PHO, direct observation, and some careful thought."

Feeling a slight chill go through him at her words, curiosity nevertheless made Paul ask, "Why is Alexandria rated a low threat while both of us are medium?" He wasn't sure if he should be insulted or worried that none of them rated anything higher to her.

"Alexandria is ridiculously strong, fast and hard to damage. Invulnerable, in theory, although now that I have met her, I see some neutralization methods that would work. However, contain her, and she is no longer a threat. Both of you are more difficult to restrain without damage. You due to your raw speed and Breaker state, your friend here due to the sheer versatility of his powers. That doesn't mean it's impossible, of course, just more difficult to do without harming you."

"How do you propose that you could 'contain' me?" Rebecca demanded, hands on hips and radiating disapproval.

"I would encapsulate you in a quantity of EDM, with a mass sufficient to prevent you from moving, as one possible solution," Kaiju replied mildly. "As you have no ranged powers other than throwing things, that would do the job quite neatly."

Paul could tell that the answer made his friend somewhat uneasy, and also think hard. It sounded entirely plausible.

"And you think you could do that quickly enough that I couldn't escape?" she asked, now sounding a bit wary, but very curious.

"Look down."

They all did exactly that. Paul's eyes widened. Around Rebecca's feet there was now a gray metallic surface which covered her boots and half-way up her shins. "You are currently standing in about two cubic feet of EDM, which even you stand no hope of damaging. I could make it revert to normal mass with a thought which would make it weigh over twenty million tons. I imagine you would disappear downwards at a fairly significant speed."

A second later the material vanished, Rebecca immediately lifting off and hovering out of reach of the ground. "Don't worry, that was only to answer your question, Alexandria. You and your colleague here seem to need more direct demonstrations than Legend did. I'm not your enemy, none of us are. But at the same time we're not going to be pushed around by you or anyone else. We'll answer polite questions where they won't cause issues for us or our friends, we won't answer ones that we don't like, and attempting to force us to do so won't end well. So, if you actually have any real questions that you would like to ask that don't fall under the second classification, ask away. Otherwise, I do have people waiting on me, and I don't want to let them down."

She retracted her hands and pulled her head back a little. "Oh, by the way, just in case you find yourself overcome with excessive interest in such details and can't restrain yourself from such questions again, may I point out that if you look to your right you'll see a reporter and her camera crew recording all of us from over by the Admin building?"

There was a long pause, then all three of them looked. Sure enough, there were a number of people standing in the indicated spot, along with dozens of DWU workers, many of whom had their phones out and were taking pictures. Paul could see a face very familiar to him from the TV watching them while saying something to the camera which was being wielded by a tall man absolutely festooned with equipment. The reporter, her camera guy, and another shorter man carrying more equipment, were all wearing WCVB TV logos on their clothing.

He sighed slightly.

"How long were they there for?" he asked in a resigned tone.

"Pretty much the entire time," Kaiju replied. "They came outside shortly after you landed, I guess they were told that the Triumvirate was here. They've been around half the afternoon interviewing Mr Hebert, Mayor Christner, and even me. Some sort of special report they're working on."

"Damn it," he heard Rebecca said under her breath.

David, based on his posture, was glaring at her, but she ignored him. After a moment, Paul realized that the news crew wouldn't have seen what just happened as her left hand had been in the way. Inspecting her, he was pretty sure that had been deliberate. She'd made a point without publicly embarrassing them. Nodding to her, he smiled a little when there was the hint of a wink on the eye away from the reporter. Despite David's inexplicably constant probing, the huge reptile was showing a lot of restraint. Kaiju obviously didn't want a fight any more than he did, something he was very grateful for.

Especially if her threat rating for them was anywhere near accurate.

"OK," he said with a deliberately bright smile. "Let's start again. Again. Could you tell us what you're doing here, Kaiju?"

"Sure. At the moment I'm resurfacing this entire area in a granite-like stone which is very hard-wearing," she replied, sounding somewhat relieved herself that all the posturing was over. "The original concrete was a mess and it would have taken weeks for it to be replaced in the normal manner. I can do it in hours. I've already made the large filter units which will be used to clean the water the guys will be pumping from inside the tanker. It's heavily contaminated with various hydrocarbons, of course, and other chemicals." She indicated the four shiny towers near the water's edge. "I'll make some holes in the deck before I leave and put some hoses in, the workers here will then spend a couple of days pumping everything out."

"Presumably then they will remove any other contamination, like asbestos, by hand?" he asked, genuinely interested. David and Rebecca were having a whispered conversation behind him which he was going out of his way to ignore. Kaiju nodded, moving away slowly and heading toward the towers, while he took to the air and floated next to her.

"Now what?" Dragon muttered. She pointed. Colin followed her finger, to see the trace of Leviathan's path had stopped approaching and was meandering back and forth in the new location he'd ended up in, about ten miles from where he'd started from.

"That's… very strange," he slowly said.

She nodded, equally slowly.

"I would have to agree. What the hell is he doing? That vector was way too neatly aimed to be a coincidence, I'd have thought, but I guess it has to have been. He just moved a bit further south."

Checking the other monitor, Colin pointed out, "The Simurgh is still looking this way, though."

Looking at each other, both shrugged, then went back to monitoring the situation to see what happened next.

"Basically, yes. Saurial and Raptaur will probably help with the more dangerous parts of that if needed, I'm a little too big, of course," she smiled. "I've also got to cut the deck open when that's done and remove the driveshafts, the metal they're made of is particularly expensive, and I can lift out the engines at the same time. Then I cut the entire thing into slices and pile them on the shore. The scrapping teams can take as long as they need to cut them up and ship them out, while I go out and start cleaning up the bay itself." She shook her head sadly. "You wouldn't believe the amount of garbage out there."

"How long will that take?" he asked.

"Cleaning up the bay? Hmm, at least a month, I think. I could do it quicker but there isn't the capacity here to store it all and I've got other things to do anyway. I'll put in a day here and there as needed."

He nodded, listening, and smiling at the enthusiasm in her voice. She'd gone from sounding very serious and mature when dealing with David to sounding like a cheerful young woman now. A preposterously big one, of course, but that was the impression he got, which made him smile a bit. He wondered how old she actually was, but was pretty certain that came under the heading of questions that wouldn't be answered.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Rebecca and David were still talking, while the news crew seemed to be following Kaiju with the camera. "Thank you for not overreacting back there," he said in a very low voice. "I apologize for both my friends, although mostly Eidolon. I'm not sure why he was pushing so hard, we'd already discussed our approach to you and I told him he should be polite."

"That's all right, Legend," she replied equally quietly, although her voice still made his chest vibrate a little. "Some people are just a little too aggressive at times. I've run into that before. I didn't take it personally, and I honestly didn't mean to insult him with a nickname. Like I said, we take threats against our family very seriously, but that wasn't really a threat, just a badly-worded question. I hope I didn't come off too aggressively or arrogantly myself, but your friends seemed like they needed something a little more obvious than just some talking. And Alexandria almost dared me to prove it, anyway."

"It was both a little amusing and a little scary," he chuckled. "And rather impressive. Have you rated the threat presented by a lot of Parahumans?"

"Not quite like that," she admitted, smiling for a moment. "Most of them that we've met have actually been very friendly, to tell the truth. Lung was an exception, but then he's Lung. I had to be quite firm with him. Raptaur had issues with Hookwolf of course, the man is a hyper-aggressive idiot, although in the end he wasn't that dangerous. No one else has pushed as hard yet." She shrugged. "I doubt we'll be that lucky forever but so far nothing serious has happened."

"What will you do if you do run into a serious threat?" he asked.

"Deal with it, I guess," she sighed. "I don't want to fight, I'd rather build things, but if I have to I will. Same goes for the rest of us. We'll do what we need to, to make sure the threat goes away for good. Hopefully that will just require some carefully worded threats, but of course you can only make threats you intend to carry out, or it's a waste of time."

"Once is an accident, twice is a pattern, three times..." Paul mused.

"...Is the last time," she finished flatly. "Most people, I won't allow it to get that far. You guys may treat a lot of this as black and white, cops and robbers, like I've seen it referred to. When people get hurt, it's not a game any more. Hookwolf hurt people here. If Raptaur hadn't been available he could well have killed them. He certainly intended to, and has done something similar many times before. If he wasn't a Parahuman he'd have been in jail years ago, or dead. For whatever reason he was allowed to run around on the street. We've looked it up, he's killed at least forty people over the years, many of them simply because he wanted to."

She glanced at him. "Before Parahumans came along, people called someone like him a sadistic serial killer and hunted them down. But now? They let them run free. Or look at Lung. Body count seventy-three confirmed kills. The ABB as a whole, several hundred in the last decade. E88, even more. Merchants, if you take overdoses on the crap they sell into account, at least twice that combined total. Brockton Bay has a higher death rate per capita than almost anywhere in the country, and is way out in front if you bring Parahuman crime into it." She indicated over her shoulder with a huge thumb. "You, and those guys back there, could have stopped all this years ago, before it got this bad. You still could, despite what I said the three of you together are almost unbeatable for normal capes. I have to wonder why you haven't."

He was silent for a few seconds. She raised some uncomfortable points.

"There are political issues with some of that, but I agree the situation isn't ideal," he admitted. "Do you and your family intend to do that?"

"Not by jumping in and going after every Parahuman in the city, no," she replied. "We could, obviously. If they come after us first, we will. But we have no wish to kick the entire thing over. Unlike you guys, it's not actually our job, and there are other problems as well. If we take out the E88, the ABB and Merchants expand into the vacuum. Take out the ABB, the E88 benefits, and so on. Take out all of them, and there's a better than even chance that either some new gang pops up to fill the hole, or someone from outside comes in. We'd be chasing them down forever, unless we get really serious, and none of us have any wish to run the place. The better solution is to do what we're doing right now. Build up the bottom and a lot of the support for the gangs withers away, reducing the problem. With some luck they'll go away without having to be kicked out."

"With all due respect, that may be wishful thinking," he said. "Although I agree with a lot of it."

"I know, and you're right. But it's worth doing for more reasons than just that, it helps a lot of people, and we enjoy it," she told him, looking over at him for a second. "If it doesn't do the job, one day we may have to take more direct action. But none of us want to dive in at the end labeled 'kick the shit out of everyone in the way' which seems to be the more common approach." She smiled slightly as he chuckled. "You have to build up to that. We're starting at the less damaging end of the scale. And it gives Saurial something interesting to do, going after all the street thugs, which also reduces the problem at least a little."

Paul grinned at her tone of amusement, following her as she kept moving, while the argument behind him became less audible.