I had been hoping to have some time to process everything that happened over the weekend. But, thanks to a visit from Panacea, I would only be allowed to stay home from school for one day. I suspected that if that wasn't the minimum time off the Youth Guard mandated after a ward goes through surgery, the PRT would have wanted me to be sent right back to school on Monday to avoid attracting attention.
One thing that was taking time to sink in was the implications of the fact that I had de facto been kicked off the wards team. That didn't really hit me until after I managed to get Piggot to tell me and Aegis that they basically wanted to bribe my sister to spy on the Undersiders for them. The PRT suspected that they were some mystery villain's cats-paw in a master plan to take over Brockton Bay's entire underworld. Which was supremely ironic given their move to counter this was to try and make Taylor their own proxy. And what was I supposed to do upon learning all of this?
Nothing. Just pretend like I hadn't heard any of it.
Being a ward I was used to being sidelined, but this felt different. Maybe it was because Taylor was involved, or that this was potentially the biggest threat Brockton had ever faced. I was pretty skeptical that Taylor would even consider their offer. Even if she was willing to put aside personal feelings, I always considered Taylor too principled to be bribed or bullied into doing something. But I decided not to burst Piggot's or Renick's bubbles. They could figure out that little fact about Taylor for themselves.
Either way after Piggot had explained the general situation me and Aegis were told in no uncertain terms that we weren't allowed to get involved. I'm pretty sure that message was meant for me more than Aegis. On top of that I was told I couldn't tell anyone about what I had learned, not even Dad. Apparently since everything about this was strictly "need to know" he'd only be brought into the loop if Taylor accepted according to Renick ("She's an independent hero, we generally don't contact their families about what they do unless we have their express permission").
After Piggot and Renick had left, I found myself wrestling with a mix of indignation and impotence. As far as they were concerned I was just a dumb child who couldn't be trusted to not fuck up, and the worst part was that because of my misunderstanding earlier they had evidence to back this view up. If they didn't, I wouldn't have had to spend almost an hour getting the confoam I had let myself get sprayed with off of me. One of the agents made a joke at my expense ("So Manes, I hear if you get confoamed one more time you get a free sundae.") which stung more than it should have.
Sadly, while Panacea could heal my injuries, she could not heal me from the verbal lashing Missy gave me when she got to my room and learned what had happened ("So not only did you almost get yourself killed, you got yourself kicked off the team too? Are you trying to screw yourself over?!"). I knew better than to argue back against her, since not only did she have a point, she's much better at arguing than I am.
Thankfully my patience paid off as once Missy had let off some steam, she was wringing her hands about the fact that we wouldn't be working together anymore. I tried to reassure her that we'd still be seeing plenty of each other at school, but I wasn't sure if I believed myself. My main hope right now is that while I wasn't on the team anymore, I would still be on the roster while I did my apprenticeship. So if Piggot ever moved on somewhere else or retired, and she had been at this branch for a while already, the next director could just reverse her decision and bring me back. So if the apprenticeship didn't work out all I had to do was wait.
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was something.
Even less pleased than Missy about the situation was Dad. When he got back and found out that I had gotten Taylor buried in confoam based on a simple misunderstanding, he got very close to losing his temper. While there wasn't any shouting like I got from Missy, I had ended up with a month of what I called "Maximum Grounding". That meant no TV, no friends over, limited computer time, and no going out unsupervised. He even went to the trouble of using the parental controls that were included on my replacement ward's phone to make sure I couldn't surf the web on it by myself ("But what about doing research for homework?" "That's what the home PC is for. I know it's a bit old but it still gets the job done.")
Surprisingly, Dad wasn't so worried about me getting forced off the wards team. The woman who was interested in apprenticing me, a semi-independent cape named Trinket, had taken the initiative of introducing herself to him while he was picking up lunch. She apparently had made a good enough impression that he was willing to sign off on letting her mentor me. I can't say I was especially excited to find out that I'd be working under a cape that I had never heard of before, but pickers can't be choosers.
And as for the situation with Taylor, there was only so much I could get away with telling him. I could have just blown off Director Piggot's warning about not telling anyone, since Dad had every right to know. But then again I was stuck in the PRT's infirmary until Panacea came by, and they were already pretty mad with me. In theory they could even bring up charges about leaking secret information if I told Dad everything.
So until I got some privacy with him I towed a middle course by keeping things very vague, and just told him that the PRT wanted to talk to Taylor about something and that he should ask her about it when he saw her again. If anyone at the PRT but Piggot and Renick asked I could just claim it was about the confoaming incident. I suspected Taylor could get away with saying more since she was an independent hero the PRT was trying to woo. Besides this seemed like something Taylor would be in a better position to explain anyways, given that she was getting the PRT's sales pitch and not me.
That didn't make things any less frustrating for Dad of course. He could obviously tell I knew more than I was letting on (though I wasn't trying to hide it that hard). But after pressing me on the details he did seem to catch on that I wasn't at liberty to tell the whole story.
However things got a bit complicated when we learned that Taylor had chosen to leave the PRT HQ as soon as she could ("I guess she didn't want to take the chance she'd be confoamed again"). Once we learned that it took a while for Dad to get in touch with Taylor (on account of me accidentally busting her burner phone of course), but he eventually managed to get in touch with her. I don't know exactly what they said, but they evidently agreed to have a family meeting on Tuesday night after Dad finished work ("I'd have done it tomorrow, but I had to schedule a meeting Monday afternoon with Mrs Houlihan to talk to her about your apprenticeship").
By the time I had been released from the infirmary on Monday, he at least seemed clued in about the offer Taylor had been made. He insisted that we hold off on discussing it until our family meeting. I considered texting Taylor about it but then thought better of it when I realized that I still had to make up the whole confoam incident to her. With nothing better to do on Monday I caught up on my homework.
Today however I was back in school, and whatever hope I had harbored that it would be a simple straightforward school day was almost immediately dashed in my first period history class. Because Raymond Torres, slowly becoming the bane of my existence at school, had been bragging before class about witnessing part of the fight between Dr Jurassic and Lung. And not only did he have a story, but he had taken some video on his phone as well. It didn't help that Jenny was absent today so I was stuck being the only halfway reasonable person in the group.
As the teacher let us break up into our project groups, Raymond was almost immediately in my face as I sat down. "Hey Sammy, have you heard about that video I made of the fight between Lung and Dr Jurassic? It's already got like two hundred thousand views online since I posted it. It's practically viral."
Trying to tap into my very small reserve of patience I answered "Raymond I am not in the mood. We only have a few more days before Spring Break starts and I am not spending it doing make-up work because you can't focus on a deadline."
"But it's got Lungs dick getting blown off! How could you not want to see that?" he almost whined.
Despite how annoying he was, that detail piqued my interest. Not because I wanted to relive that moment (having to explain to the PRT that it was an accident was its own ordeal), but because that suggested something very concerning. By that point in the fight everyone in the neighborhood should have been sheltering in place. Only a colossal idiot would be out and taking a video.
"Hold on, you were out recording the whole fight?" I asked in a bit of disbelief.
"Well… not the whole fight. Mostly just the beginning. I lost track of them before it was over. The video from the end of the fight I got from a friend I met online. We sent each other copies of our videos, so between the two of us we have the most video of the fight around right on our phones." He held up his smartphone proudly, as if he had gotten some great treasure. "We could've made a killing selling our videos to the news. But they wouldn't take me seriously for some reason."
Might have something to do with him being in middle school probably. That and they were probably underestimating how many traffic cameras there were in Brockton, so the news media usually had plenty of fight footage to work with.
Clayton vouched for him "Yeah, it's crazy. I thought he was full of it until he showed the videos to me. Have you really not seen it?"
"I've uh... been grounded. No internet and all that jazz." I said, exaggerating a bit so he'd get off my back.
"Oh, I didn't know you still knew how to get in trouble. What did you even do?" Raymond teased.
I was a bit put off by that for some reason, like my credibility was in question somehow "That's none of your business. And what do you mean by that?"
Raymond shrugged a bit and said "Well ever since we got into middle school you've been little miss goody two shoes. I mean, when was the last time you got put in detention?"
"I do plenty of stuff that could get me in trouble." I claimed. "I'm just better at not getting caught than you are. It's not like you can get a hundred detentions and expect to get into a good college you know?"
"Oh, so mature." Clayton said. "Already trying to get into Harvard or something?"
"No, I just have better things to do than keep dinguses like you company in detention."
"Oooo, you hear that Clay? We're dinguses. Last week we were dumbasses in her book."
"You're still a dumbass. Like what were you even doing taking a video? Shouldn't you have been, I don't know... taking shelter?" I asked.
Raymond waved his hand dismissively "You wouldn't understand. A fight between Dr Jurassic and Lung is like one of the top ten fantasy matchups on PHO. Getting a video of that is absolutely worth it."
"So you risked your life for some internet points then?"
"Hardly. I was using the maximum zoom on my phone so I was at least a block away. Makes the video shakier but I think that makes it more real."
Seeing this was going nowhere I tried to put us back on topic "Well that's nice for you and all, but we still need to figure out how to present our project."
Raymond looked up a bit and tapped his chin in an exaggerated way, pretending like he was in deep thought "Well… we could fit a video into our presentation. I've been working on my editing skills and if we can get some footage of some trains I could work on that pretty easily. Dub in some narration and we can just sit back for half the presentation while it plays."
Clayton seemed to like this idea "Yeah that sounds like a good idea. We can even make our own footage. There's lots of train tracks around Brockton we could film."
"But no trains." I noted. "According to my dad the closest train tracks still being used are outside city limits."
"Then I can edit them in. There, problem solved." Raymond said, a little smugness in his voice.
I had to resist knocking him upside the head.
"Seems good to me. Speaking of trains, I heard some rumors that there's a new cape near the old train-yard. Maybe if we hang around there we could spot them." Clayton suggested.
"Really? You gotta fill me in because that's news to me." Raymond said.
Nodding, Clayton launched into an explanation about a mysterious cape called Trainwreck. I didn't see much of a point trying to work on the project any more while Jenny was absent, so I mostly tuned him out. Instead I turned my thoughts to how Raymond seemed be at two cape fights within a week of each other. That couldn't be a coincidence, he had to have been looking for them.
Then it dawned on me. With a growing sense of horror I realized that Raymond was a budding "Cape Chaser". Of all the people in the cape scene they were probably the most obnoxious we had to deal with. Because these are the idiots who ran towards a fight, not to help, but to take pictures and videos to build their own clout. Just the kind of attention seeking stuff that someone like Raymond would love.
Plus, not only were they the most likely to get themselves into trouble, they also had the potential to ruin a hero's reputation since they always seemed to have a camera on them. This was a lesson quite a few heroes have learned the hard way, such as a certain one down in Boston who couldn't stop himself from saying slurs in public (Sucks to suck Bastion, you racist jerk). I suddenly had visions of Raymond following me around while I was in costume with his smartphone out, waiting for me to screw up somehow.
Granted if he was telling the truth about that video then that had sort of already happened, even if it was that friend of his and not him. But I benefited from being in Bakuda's body at the time, so it wasn't immediately obvious that it was me firing the grenade launcher. It probably wouldn't stay a secret from the wider public forever, but by the time that became widely known it'd be old news. Of course that wasn't something I always could count on if I ever messed up in public again.
It occurred to me that maybe I should do something, to persuade Raymond somehow that he should stop chasing capes. Even if Raymond was an idiot, it would still be sad to show up to school one day to find out he had been killed because he tried to take a close up picture of Hookwolf.
However I already had enough on my plate, between the potential apprenticeship and the situation with Taylor. Should I really be meddling in Raymond's business? I considered my options and it was obvious that the most straightforward solution was just telling Raymond's parents what he was up to. It was low risk and he was their responsibility.
But doing that felt underhanded somehow, like I was being a snitch. Maybe I was just gun-shy after getting burned for sticking my neck out one too many times over the weekend. Maybe I just felt uneasy about revealing someone else's secrets when I had more than my fair share of them. And besides it wasn't like I had their contact info, so even if I wanted to I couldn't tell them anything.
Before I could wring my hands any more about what I should do, Raymond tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey Sam, I was just thinking. If we're going to do a video we're going to need a narrator. Since Jenny's not here right now I was thinking you could do it."
"Uh.. are you sure?" I asked. I knew my own voice and I knew that it wasn't exactly Grammy worthy.
"Of course. I got some recording equipment at my house we could use. If you could come over we could get all your lines knocked out over the weekend."
I stared at him for a second, and could hardly believe what he was saying. So I tried to clarify "Your house? You want us to work on the project at your house?"
"Yeah, I got a pretty good computer rig set up so we can edit the video together. Shouldn't take more than two or three hours once we pick out some clips." he said.
"I don't think I can do that. I'm kind of grounded right now." Because if I did go to his house I'd have to meet his parents. And I wasn't sure if I wanted to tell them about what Raymond was up to or not.
"Come on, this project is like a quarter of our grade. Don't tell me you want to bail on us." Clay chided.
Feeling a bit insulted by that I retorted "I didn't say I wasn't going to, I just need to run this by my Dad."
"All the more reason to come. It'll be an excuse to get out of the house. It'll be fun." Raymond pleaded.
"Let me just ask my dad and I'll give you an answer tomorrow. How does that sound?" I told him.
The way I figured it, Dad would tell me no and I'd be able to avoid the temptation of taking the easy solution and ratting out Raymond's cape chasing to his parents.
"Good enough I guess." Raymond accepted before moving on. "Now what we really need to do is find some train videos we can use."
As the discussion proceeded along those lines the teacher gave a warning that we had five minutes left before we had to finish our discussion. Me, Clayton, and Raymond hammered out a few more details about the meeting at Raymond's house. I volunteered to keep Jenny in the loop right before the bell rang, which signaled our regular mad scramble to get out into the hallways.
The rest of the school day was thankfully pretty tame. I did convince Missy to let me watch Raymond's video on her phone during lunch as we ate in an empty classroom. Apparently the universe had decided to cut me a small break, because the video was titled "Bakuda's Epic Fail". In a way it wasn't entirely incorrect, since she had been dumb enough not to realize what my power was. It had the two parts edited together, with a few minutes of Lung wrestling with Dr Jurassic early on, and the second half showing Lung when Taylor confronted him right up until Armsmater showed up. When the video got to where I had entered the fight with the grenade launcher, Missy couldn't resist giving me a hard time.
"So, I guess you're the reason why that memo about 'reasonable use of force' got sent out." she commented in a low voice as the video played out me shooting at Lung with the grenade launcher.
"I swear to god, I was trying to aim for his center of gravity. It's not my fault nobody trains us on grenade launchers." I said in a low voice.
Missy just gave me a look for that response "I'm not an expert on this stuff, but that was practically point blank range. Your aim just sucks."
"Hey, my aim is fine. How about you try and fire something that weighs like half your body weight?"
"So is that going to be the story you're going with?"
"Missy if I have my way, I would rather have everyone just think Bakuda did it. The only ones who need to know the truth are us, her, and the PRT."
"What, scared Lung will get out and want payback?"
"Oh no! Don't you dare tempt the universe like that! I have enough problems in my life right now!" Then out of the blue my phone vibrated. A bit confused who it could be I fished it out of my pocket. As I checked it I was surprised to find that it was a message from Director Piggot, marked urgent. I remarked "…and speaking of problems…"
It was odd and concerning, because the PRT usually didn't message me during school hours. Stuff like that tended to be reserved for real emergencies. Quickly I opened my phone to find the message she had sent me.
TRINKET IS IN BROCKTON BAY. RENDEZVOUS WITH HER AT 1600 AT LOCATION SOURDOUGH PEN FOR AN INTRODUCTORY MEETING. AGENT DAVIS CAN TRANSPORT YOU TO THE LOCATION IF NECESSARY, WHICH YOU SHOULD CONFIRM WITH US WITHIN ONE HOUR. THE MEETING IS TO BE DONE IN CIVILIAN CLOTHES. YOU WILL NOT BE REQUIRED TO REPORT FOR YOUR SCHEDULED SHIFT TODAY. PLEASE CONDUCT YOURSELF TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY DURING THIS MEETING. WHETHER SHE ACCEPTS OR REJECTS YOU AS HER APPRENTICE IS ENTIRELY AT HER DISCRETION, SO ACT ACCORDINGLY.
DIRECTOR PIGGOT
Looking over my shoulder at the message Missy commented "So I guess they're not wasting much time making you someone else's problem."
"Yeah, I guess so." I said. Looking at my phone's clock to confirm we still had a few minutes in lunch, I then asked Missy "Hey could you do a search on Trinket real quick? There's a few things I've been meaning to check since Dad told me about her. I didn't realize the meeting would be so soon."
Picking up her phone she agreed "Sure, what do you want to know?"
"Does she have a wiki page?"
Typing quickly, Missy gave me her result "Eeeh, there is one but it's got like a grand total of one paragraph of basic info. She's a Boston cape and she's been active for ages, since like 1990. All it lists for her power is possible thinker or striker. Nothing else."
"Well dad did say she was pretty low profile. Apparently her specialty is intel gathering, so being a thinker makes sense. Not sure where the striker part fits in though. Do the arrest databases say anything?"
"The PRT's or the FBI's?"
"Check the PRT's first. I'm curious how many capes she's taken down."
"Hhm, let's see." Missy typed quickly into her phone, only for her expression to fall when the results came back. "Three arrests. It only lists her having three parahuman arrests over two whole decades."
"What? That can't be right." I said.
I looked at Missy's phone only to see she was telling the truth. One arrest in 1990, another in 1991, and the most recent in 1993. And after that nothing. And in all three cases the villains she arrested were low level street capes. The most impressive of the three was some nobody who called himself Hobo King.
"So either she isn't that active or she isn't big on claiming credit. Maybe the FBI's database has something." Missy suggested.
I nodded and Missy navigated her phone's browser over to the FBI's website. Bringing up the database for police records across the country, the results we got checking for Trinket couldn't have been more different.
"Okay, so I guess she does take credit after all…" I said.
Where the PRT had barely anything attributed to Trinket, the FBI's database had hundreds of results. And to add to the confusion, they weren't just in New England near Boston. Instead almost half the records were scattered across the country, even as far as Alaska. It didn't have anything more recent then five years for security reasons, but that only made it even more impressive. Even more weird was that I noticed on the first page of results that two arrests attributed to her assistance were in two completely different cities (St Louis and Miami), but listed as occurring on the same day.
"Okay something is up here. Unless she's secretly paying Strider's mortgage or something, I don't see how a thinker or striker power could get her halfway across the country in time to do two separate arrests in a day."
"Yeah it's really weird. Maybe she's consulting or something?"
"I'm pretty sure they're pretty stingy about giving credit for an arrest if you weren't there. I remember when Headline was on the team she complained a lot about not getting enough credit for arrests. She even once ranted about how much she hated Minority Report because it made a lot of departments really gun-shy about giving precogs exclusive credit for arrests."
"Well I doubt Trinket is a precog. Watchdog would have recruited her ages ago." Missy suggested.
"I don't know, there's lots of reasons she could have had for not joining them. Maybe she did at some point. It's not like they advertise which capes work for them after all."
Before we could debate further the lunch bell rang, and the countdown to get to our next classes had begun. I internally groaned, with my phone locked out of the internet I wouldn't be able to do anymore research before I could get home. There was the school computer lab, but classes for that didn't happen on Tuesdays.
Missy grabbed her bag and slung the strap over her shoulder. "Well maybe you could ask her about it when you meet up."
"Somehow I doubt it'll be that easy." Because when has anything been easy for me lately?
After that Missy promised to text me if she found out anything important about Trinket before our meeting today. But between classes and having to do her shift over at the wards, she wouldn't have that much time to research. For various reasons access to the school computer lab was tightly controlled, so I doubted I could sneak in unnoticed. I considered the merits of swinging over to the Brockton Bay Library after school, but the meeting place Piggot had given me was in the opposite direction, and I couldn't afford to be late.
The remaining classes were thankfully uneventful, since only Raymond had still been excited by what had happened over the weekend. Instead my class time was more focused on the tests that were inevitably scheduled before our upcoming spring break. As if I didn't have enough crap to stress me out.
As the final bell rang just before 3 o'clock, I made my way over to one of the pre-arranged pick up points around the school. Since I had chosen to take the PRT's ride over to my meeting, I was greeted by Agent Davis in one of the nondescript vans the PRT kept around. I mused that for someone watching me without any context, a young girl getting into an adult man's white van, it looked like I was falling for the most stereotypical kidnapping attempt of all time.
Of course I was in good hands, since Davis was one of the most 'by the book' agents in the department. Granted that meant we made slow time to the rendezvous point, as he was a stickler for the rules of the road. I don't think I even saw the speedometer go over the 35 mph speed limit once, which by Brockton Bay driving standards marked him as a "cupcake" driver. For conversation, he talked about his two kids and their disastrous attempt at doing laundry by themselves when he had to do an overtime shift ("Never crossed their minds to check their pants pockets. Thanks to one pen we had to spend half a day getting ink stains out of a half dozen pairs of pants.")
After a half hour of occasionally getting cussed at by other drivers for Davis's 'slow' driving we finally reached the meeting point, Seaside Park. It was a half acre of grass and picnic tables on a short span of the coast separated from the boardwalk by about a half mile. I think at one point it had been a helicopter pad for the Coast Guard before they had downsized due to the lack of sea traffic. Since there wasn't enough nearby business to justify commercially developing it, the city had just done a bit of landscaping to make it into a neighborhood park.
Ever the professional, Davis made sure there weren't any loose ends before he left. "Are you sure you don't need a ride home after your meeting?"
"Nah, I'll be fine taking the bus home" Even with the wait for the bus, I'd definitely make better time getting home then if I got another ride with Davis.
Acknowledging with a nod he responded "Okay then. If you need help don't hesitate to use the panic button on your phone."
"Sure, I'll do that." I nodded back. I wondered if Davis having kids himself made him like this or if he was just a natural mother hen.
Satisfied I wasn't going to immediately get into trouble the second I left his sight, he drove off, leaving me to try and find a way to pass the time. Looking around the park there wasn't much in the way of amenities. A few benches by the path, a small public restroom, and some trees that had clearly only been planted a few years ago. Whoever had planned this park had clearly been on a tight budget.
In the end I ended up going to the railing dividing the park from the beach. It gave a nice little view of the Bay, murky ocean water and all. Being a weekday afternoon there were only a few stray joggers and dog walkers around. Dropping my backpack beside me I leaned over the railing and looked at the shoreline. It was chilly for a spring day and my hoodie was earning its keep. Watching the waves come in and hit the beach with a smattering of seagull calls was relaxing at least. But then out of the corner of my eye I noticed a familiar face approaching.
"I'm glad you could make it Sam." Mrs Houlihan said as she walked up to me. She was wearing one of her blue fleece jackets and some slacks, which was much more casual than her usual work outfit.
"Mrs Houlihan? I didn't realize you'd be here." I said.
"Oh yes, it was a bit last minute. When I met with your father yesterday we agreed it would be best if this meeting happened today, and when I called Trinket about it she agreed. We didn't want to leave you in limbo for too long."
"Yeah that makes sense." I looked around for a minute "Do you know if she'll be here soon?"
"Hard to tell. She's trying to use the intercity buses to get here since her son is busy today. She's not that familiar with the routes for the city buses here so she might be a bit late. I figured it would be a good idea to sit in on your first meeting to make sure things go smoothly."
"I appreciate that. Would have felt pretty dumb waiting around otherwise." I noted. When I checked the time I saw that we still had ten minutes until the meeting time, so I decided to see if Ms Houlihan could fill me in about my new mentor "So Dad says you've known her for a long time."
She brightened "Yes, around a quarter of a century I'd say. Still remember the day I met her. She was still learning English and it took ages to find a Latvian translator, so we ended up spending the first day drawing pictures on scrap paper to get our meaning across."
I nodded a bit to show I was listening and asked "Sounds interesting. What would you say she's like?"
For a second Mrs Houlihan made a strange face, as if she remembered something. Then, seeming to choose her words carefully, she said "Well… she's a real one of a kind person. Very driven and strong willed, as well as being quite clever. Believe me, you'll have a lot to learn from her."
Before we could continue though, on the other side of the park I noticed a city bus driving up the street beside the park, and pointed out, "Hey, maybe that's her bus."
Then, as the bus came to a stop at the bus shelter the doors opened, and an old woman with a scarf on her head emerged. But just as the doors opened, we could both hear indiscernible yelling coming out of the bus. The woman then shouted back in.
"I DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE ALLOWED TO PLAY YOUR MUSIC ON THE BUS, IT IS SHIT! YOU BOMZIS! YOU ARE LUCKY I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN TEACH A CIRVIS LIKE YOU A LESSON!" she shouted into the bus.
My stomach began to drop. That couldn't possibly be who I thought it could be, could it? However, looking over to Mrs Houlihan I could see her pinching the bridge of her nose in resignation.
"Can't even watch her mouth on day one…" she muttered under her breath.
The old woman, who was almost certainly Trinket, then blew a giant raspberry towards the bus driver. Needless to say my expectations for this apprenticeship were dropping by the minute.
A/N
-Getting this chapter out was hard. I had to completely rewrite my first draft because after writing it I felt like it didn't really move the plot forward like I thought it should. I know this one is a bit exposition heavy but at least it's not 90% arguments like my first draft (I have a natural bias for my conversations to turn into arguments for some reason).
-I'd say I'm probably near the midpoint of where I'd want to write this story. I don't think I can make myself write all of the canon, but honestly trying to cram all the canon plots into this story probably wouldn't add much. Might do some distant epilogue chapters if I get around to it.