Thanks for the reviews, once again. I had intended for the tenth chapter to feature Joaquin and Edna, but it seemed that no matter how many times I wrote it, it never turned out right, so I wrote about Aisling instead. When it came time to start writing this chapter, I realized that I couldn't put off the composition of this scene any longer, so I tried again. I hope it's alright.

Also, if you'd like to see more of a certain character, let me know, okay? All kinds of feedback are appreciated.

As Joaquin was doing a bit of shading on one of the sketches that he worked on to pass the time between taking phone calls, one of Edna Mode's many security guards walked into his office room, tossed an envelope onto the desk, and said unnecessarily,

"You got a letter."

Joaquin waited until the man had left before examining the envelope. It was a letter from Aisling. He bit his lip apprehensively, wondering if the letter would be better off unopened. Aisling had sent him letters from Chicago twice before, but he hadn't answered either of them, and was afraid that he would have to answer this one. After staring at it for a minute, he ripped the left edge of the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of loose-leaf paper, which was covered front and back by Aisling's at-times illegible handwriting. He smiled as he read it, thinking that he had gotten lucky again, until he came to the last full paragraph. Is living with Edna Mode any fun? she had written, I've heard that she's kind of eccentric.

When he read that, Joaquin gritted his teeth, not so much from anger as from discomfort. He knew that he would have to answer this letter; she had finally asked him a direct question about the state of his life. When Aisling had written to him before, as had Patrick and Vasilisa, she had explained details of her own life, and hadn't offered him anything to respond to. The three of them had talked about their wonderful new parents, their great new homes, their exciting new lives as normal children who went to school every day and came home to a loving family. Thinking about those details made him alternately feel depressed and bitter. He didn't have any wonderful new parents, a great place that felt like home, or an exciting new life as a normal teenager—all he had was a boring secretarial job and a mentor whom the word "eccentric" did not even begin to describe.

"Joaquin, Miss Mode wants to talk to you in the gallery room," another intruding guard said, poking his head into the room and making Joaquin jump out of his reverie.

"Oh, okay," he muttered, slipping the letter into one of his desk drawers before pulling himself up. He walked rather slowly to the gallery room, taking time to admire the shiny articles that sat in the numerous alcoves in the wall. He always walked to his audiences with Edna with something related to dread. As he entered the enormous, silvery bright room at the center of the building, he wished that he could turn his head and run his eyes over the vast frieze with the Greek warriors on it, but he knew that it was a bad idea to dawdle while he was within eyesight of his mentor, who was perched on one of the box-shaped chairs that were arranged in a square in the middle of the huge room. She looked much the same as she always did; slightly sour, with eyes that narrowed increasingly when Joaquin entered the room. Joaquin made an effort to keep his face expressionless as he walked up to her. As he approached, she hopped lightly off of her chair and sighed.

"Come, we will try this again," she said, the nasal nature of her voice making her "w"s sound like "v"s and "th"s sound like "z"s.

"Alright," Joaquin said indifferently, following the tiny figure of his mentor through a hallway and down a staircase, and then through another hallway, which had alcoves like the ones upstairs, but which were occupied by super-suited mannequins instead of shiny, exotic artifacts. At the end of the hallway there was a fortified door, and on the wall next to the door were a number of gadgets that acted as locks. She strode up to them, tapped in a code on the key-pad, pressed her hand against the fingerprinting device, pulled her spectacles down for a retinal scan, and then said her name in an overtly clear manner into the microphone. Immediately after she did, a panel in the ceiling whipped back to reveal a sinister-looking gun that promptly pointed itself at Joaquin's head. Joaquin didn't flinch at the appearance of the gun, though, only because he had watched this ritual many times before. Edna spoke into the microphone again, as if stating an afterthought:

". . . and guest."

The gun disappeared back into the ceiling.

The steel door opened, revealing a room that contrasted directly with the light and airy rooms above; it was the laboratory where the super-suits like the ones on the mannequins in the outside hallway were drawn out, created, and tested for durability. Joaquin watched dully as his diminutive mentor walked over to one of her cabinets and poked through its contents.

Edna didn't invite him to sit down (she never did), but he chose a chair and sat down anyway. As he watched her poke through the innards of her cabinet, his mind began to wander. He remembered that Aisling had said in her letter that she had discovered some great way to make money. He wondered what it was. As he was theorizing, his mentor came back, the limp shape of a suit draped across her arms. She tossed the thing into his lap, tilted her head, and asked sharply,

"What are the qualities of this material?"

Joaquin did all he could to stifle a sigh; this ritual was tiresome. Asking him to identify the abilities of certain fabrics was one of her most common demands, but he was hardly ever able to say what she seemed to want him to say. He did his best though, and took the limp suit into his hands, attempting to examine it.

"Well. . ." he began, rubbing a bit of the material between his thumb and index finger. "It's slick, so it's probably water-proof."

"All of my materials are water-proof, darling. Be more specific." She still had her eyes narrowed, as if she were a large housecat stalking a tiny, helpless insect. Joaquin grew a bit nervous under her gaze. He pulled on the fabric of the suit, and watched as it stretched like a piece of chewing gum.

"It's one of the fabrics that can stretch a lot and still keep its shape," he said as he released his hold on the stretched-out suit and it snapped back to its original size.

"Yes. What else?" Edna was still glaring at him through her spectacles, her eyes seeming to grow larger and narrower simultaneously. Joaquin swallowed hard, growing more nervous.

"It's, um, well. . ." he sputtered, and the look on Edna's face grew worse. Joaquin felt a drop of cold sweat run down the back of his neck. He imagined how odd this might look to an outside observer---a miniscule, graying lady with unfortunately thick spectacles intimidating an adolescent boy who was more than twice her size. Joaquin desperately groped for some bit of information that would satisfy his glaring mentor. "I, I think. . ."

"Do not think!" she said, seeming to explode with frustration. She waved her arms in front of her face like an insane windmill, and Joaquin felt his hands begin to shake. "You are supposed to know! Do not think!" Then, as suddenly as she had exploded, she settled down again. "Very well, we will try something else."

She strode over to the broad glass case that she used when demonstrating the exploits of her products, and sat down in one of the chairs on the platform that slid back and forth in front of it. Joaquin sat down in the chair next to her, and at the touch of a button the door inside opened and a mannequin decked out in one of Edna's super-suits came forth. The thing moved very slowly to the right, and the moving platform followed it.

"Now," she said, turning toward Joaquin, "If this suit is meant to protect the wearer from lasers and other extremely concentrated forms of energy, and contains picofillaments, what materials must be present to compliment it?"

Joaquin bit his lip, calling on memories of her teaching him the advantages of various kinds of synthetic fibers. "Something larger than picofillaments. Ultrastrands, maybe."

He thought he had given a satisfactory answer, but, much to his horror, she blew up again.

"I tell you once, I tell you hundreds of times, do not guess! You do not need to guess! You know these things, and you will show me that you do!"

Joaquin felt his hands begin to quiver again, and, completely against his will, he felt the beginnings of hot tears form in his eyes. He stared into his lap, not daring to respond.

"Go back upstairs," she said, the metal in her voice bringing the tears out of his eyes. He kept his gaze on the floor to keep her from seeing his shameful expression, and left the laboratory, breaking into a run as soon as the steel door closed behind him, more tears falling from his eyes as he ran back to his office room.

Several hours later, Joaquin was seated at his desk again, completing the shading on his sketch. He had been sent to this place to help the brilliant, famous, prestigious Edna Mode design super-suits, yet she wouldn't even let him near the lab by himself. Sometimes, he felt that he made up for it by making sketches like this one, of famous supers wearing his ideas for designs. He laid his cheek down on the desktop and continued to swish his pencil across the page, darkening the curves on the figure's cape. Just as he was coming to the end of a line, he heard someone in front of him clear their throat. He looked up sharply, and saw, right in front of his desk, his mentor. He adopted his expressionless face again, but noticed immediately that her whole facial affect was different. She didn't look nearly as sour as usual, and her eyes weren't narrowed at all. She looked up at Joaquin, and said,

"You were right. It was ultrastrands."

Joaquin blinked, surprised, and managed to mumble, "Oh, thank you."

After Joaquin had mumbled his thanks, something happened that changed the atmosphere of the room completely. In a fraction of a second, the relaxed aura in the room disappeared as Edna cast her eyes across the top of Joaquin's desk and caught sight of one particular item. No sooner had she seen it than she had snatched it up, leapt onto Joaquin's desk, and begun to shake it in front of his face, shouting like a madwoman.

"WHAT IS THIS?" she yelled, waving Joaquin's own drawing in front of his face. Joaquin was too shocked to do anything but lean as far back as possible in his chair while shielding his face with one hand. The yelling didn't stop.

"Do you even know what you have drawn" she demanded, holding the paper still now and jabbing her finger into it like a rapier. Joaquin still didn't say anything. The yelling didn't stop.

"Don't you remember Stratogale?"

Stratogale. . . He had definitely heard that name before, but he couldn't remember anything about her, except that Aisling had said that she had once collected pictures of her. As Joaquin sat there mutely, staring at the crazy woman whose face he suddenly had to look up into, she calmed down. Her arms fell to her sides, and a miffed but strangely defeated expression crossed her face.

"Well, I suppose not."

And, leaving Joaquin slightly stunned in his chair, she turned around, hopped off the desk, and walked smartly out of the room, the drawing still clutched in her left hand.