My sincere thanks go out to Gremblin, marco2050, TheWhiteMonk, Trugeta, AlchemistKosame, the real Violet Parr, Maculata, Trekkie in a TruckerHat, Lesalanna, and crystalwish for their reviews. You've all been very kind.

A little while after the meeting about the kids had concluded, the only people left in the fluorescently-lit room were Rick Dicker and Bob. As Dicker was slipping some papers into his briefcase, he said,

"You know, Bob, I'm not sure why I even asked you to come to this meeting. After all, you're busy with your daughter, and Helen is busy with Dash, and obviously they won't be needing sidekicks for a while."

"Yeah, well, it was still nice to come out here and get a glimpse of the people I might be seeing in the future," Bob said good-naturedly. Dicker smiled and snapped his briefcase shut.

"But, are you sure it's a good idea to send that boy to Edna?" Bob asked, "I mean, you know how, er, touchy, she gets when people ask if they can work with her." Dicker only shrugged and said,

"I can only hope that she'll respect my decision. I think that working alongside Edna in designing super-suits will be an excellent way for the boy to develop his abilities,"

Bob shrugged his enormous shoulders. "Well, Edna has to accept help some time. I mean, she's the only super-suit designer in the whole country, now that that other guy's dead. What was his name?"

"Pierre Prévert," Dicker answered.

"Well, anyway," Bob said, "she must be really over-worked these days."

Dicker nodded. "I realize that. She's working as efficiently as she possibly can, considering the circumstances."

"Yeah," Bob said as the two exited the room. They left the police station together, and then they parted. "Take care, Bob," Dicker said.

"You too, Rick."

Meanwhile, in the back seat of a little blue car that was nosing its way through Clearwater's congested downtown area, Aisling and Bella-Jane were both staring at their feet, wondering if it would be better to try to talk to this new lady or to just bear the silence. They were afraid to ask any questions, because they didn't know how to address her, and neither did they have anything to say to each other, because each knew how uncomfortable the other felt. After they had left the downtown area, it became clear to Aisling that the lady was heading for the airport, and, finally, she couldn't resist asking a question.

"Um, Miss Stephanie?" she said tremulously. Stephanie turned her head very slightly and looked at Aisling through the corner of her eye.

"What is it, sweetheart?" she asked, her already highly-placed eyebrows rising higher onto her forehead.

"Where are we going?"

Stephanie smiled and said, "To Chicago. It's one of the greatest cities on Earth."

"Where's Chicago?" Bella-Jane asked, leaning over to whisper to Aisling.

"It's in Illinois. Pretty far away from here," Aisling answered, speaking softly into Janie's ear.

"It's really different from this city," Miss Stephanie said, guiding the small car into a parking lot that was full of cars almost identical to the one she was driving, "but I think you'll like it." She was still smiling.

She stopped the car by the wall of the building that bordered one side of the parking lot, then stepped out and indicated that the girls should follow her. They did, trailing slightly behind their brand-new guardian as she walked into the spacious building and strode up to a desk that had a bored-looking man seated behind it. The man grunted something that may have been a greeting, then pushed some papers across the desktop. Stephanie leaned over the desk and scribbled on the forms for a few minutes, while Aisling and Janie stood mutely behind her, each shifting from one foot to the other.

After a few minutes, Stephanie scrawled her name at the bottom of the last paper and shoved the documents back across the desktop. The traces of her smile still hadn't left her face.

"Thanks. Are we good to go?" she asked the man. He nodded, then returned to whatever boring task he had been performing prior to her arrival.

Stephanie then strode back to the place where Aisling and Bell-Bell were standing. Aisling took note of way the heels of her patent leather shoes tapped smartly as she walked, and the confident way she held her head, occasionally reaching up to push strands of her shiny, wavy hair away from her face. She smiled at her two new charges, and almost to their surprise, they found themselves smiling back.

"Come on, girls, we're going home."

While all of that was happening, two policemen were trying, with very limited success, to frog-march Joaquin to Rick Dicker's car. Dicker had planned to take the boy to San Francisco himself to attempt to reason with Edna, but presently he found himself trying to reason with the stubborn boy.

"This is unwarranted!" the boy was saying. He wasn't quite shouting, but he was talking quite a bit louder than necessary, considering that the person he was accusing of being irrational was only four feet away from him. "This is unfair, unprecedented, unconstitutional—"

Dicker, who normally had an interminable supply of patience, found himself feeling frustrated. The police officers gave up trying to lead Joaquin and began to force him along. Dicker walked beside them as they made their very slow way down to the rented car at the curb. Joaquin didn't cease his rant, however.

"This is a deliberate affront to my masculinity!"

In spite of his frustration with the boy's lack of cooperation, Dicker was impressed with his vocabulary. He opened the back door of the car.

"You can't force me to perform demeaning tasks just because I'm not white!" Joaquin said, trying once again to wrench himself out of the hands of the policemen, who did not yield. "That's what this is about, isn't it? You're trying to degrade me because I'm—"

At that point, Dicker felt the need to interrupt. "Joaquin, I'm not doing this because I want to humiliate you. Miss Mode needs someone to help her design costumes for supers, and I think that your unique talents would be useful to her."

After Joaquin heard the phrase "design costumes for supers", he stopped his diatribe. He looked at Dicker incredulously.

"She makes costumes for superheroes?" At this point, he had become docile enough to allow the police officers to shove him into the car, and they did so. Now fairly sure that Joaquin would come with him quietly, Dicker circled around to the other side of the car and got into the driver's seat. Joaquin began to ask questions, now in a much more civil manner.

"Why are you assigning me to help her, anyway? I don't know how I could."

"Your powers don't lend themselves to traditional hero work, so I think it would be better for you to—" Joaquin interrupted him.

"Powers? I don't have any powers. The rest do, but I don't."

"You have more talents than you think you do," Dicker answered cryptically.

"But, anyway, I've never heard that she was the one who made the costumes for the superheroes."

"Oh, she's been doing it for years. She's mostly known as an ordinary fashion designer, but aside from that, she designs and distributes the super-suits that all of the country's heroes wear. There used to another person, Pierre Prévert, who designed super-suits, but he's dead now, so the burden is all on Edna. Since she had so much work to do, and you seem to have the ideal powers to help her out---"

"I already told you, I don't have any powers."

"You do, but they're not very obvious. Doing this might help to bring them out."

Joaquin was not convinced, but he didn't say anything.

At the same time, Patrick was sitting in the passenger seat of a car, beside Mr. Daniel Copperton, who was known to the world as "Spike". Patrick was staring sullenly out the window (he was incapably of staring any way but sullenly), as he didn't have anything to say. Daniel was a cheerful man, though, and tried to get the dreadfully morose Patrick to talk.

"So, are you excited?" he asked, smiling at the boy.

"Yeah." Patrick said, but the tone of the single syllable spoke for itself.

"We're going to Houston, down in Texas. You ever been down there?"

"No."

"No? Got any family down there?"

"No."

"I play the guitar. Did you ever play any instruments?"

"No."

Daniel knew that he wasn't getting anywhere.

"Do you like animals?"

"Uh-huh."

Satisfied by the fact that he had gotten an answer that was more than one syllable, Daniel continued. "I've got a ranch down there, you know. It's got some cows, and a few horses, and a whole bunch of dogs. It's a great place."

Patrick brightened at the mention of dogs; he actually turned his head to look at Daniel. "Dogs?" he asked, "How many? What kind?"

"'Bout twelve, last I counted. They're all kinds of dogs, good, lovable mutts. You like dogs a lot, don't you?"

"Yup. And they usually like me, too. I hope your dogs will like me."

Now that he had coaxed a few complete sentences from Patrick, Daniel felt confident that he could make more progress. He began to whistle to himself, glad to see that the corners of the sad boy's mouth were curving up.

As Daniel and Patrick carried on their conversation, Vasilisa sat in the front passenger seat of a different car, this one being driven by Lucius Best. Vasilisa looked at the index card that she still had in her hand:

Vasilisa Kolosov

Powers: ability to displace particles (pseudo-teleportation, pseudo-invisibility, pseudo-telekinesis)

To be apprenticed to: Aquaria (aka Henrietta "Honey" Best)

Remembering the question that she had asked the large-nosed man and gotten no answer to, she turned to Lucius and asked,

"Seriously, how did you know all of this stuff about us?" she indicated the card.

Lucius grinned and answered, "Hey, we're superheroes. We know everything."

"No you don't!" Vasilisa said, but it wasn't an accusation, because she smiled as she said it. Then, for a reason she couldn't identify, she began to laugh. Not long after she started, Lucius started too, and Vasilisa knew that this wasn't going to be a bad experience at all.