"Wow," Taylor said, paging through the threat reports. "There's loads of information here. I'm surprised the PRT has so much about the heroes and villains here."

"Way more than on PHO, huh?" Gallant replied. "Yeah, that's a huge amount of what the PRT actually does – gather information on capes so they know how to react. It's a lot more variable than with guys with guns, where at most the question is how committed they are – with capes it goes up to if they can do stuff like, tell you something is purple, or if it's more like someone who can flood an entire town with horrible monsters."

Taylor shuddered. "I dread to think," she admitted. "Do I really need to read all of these before I go out on patrol?"

"Honestly, no," Gallant told her. "It's best to get a good idea about the active capes of the main gangs, so you know if you should be calling for backup or running as fast as you can in the other direction… of course, with your power, you'll probably be the one doing the coordination."

He shrugged. "Which only means your name makes way more sense, mind you. A weaver of plans, not just of costumes! Though I'm… not looking forward to the fitting."

Taylor chuckled. "Yeah," she agreed. "It was weird enough for me, at first…"

She paged down again. "Wow. Shadow Stalker's on here as an independent villain already? That was fast."

"I heard you two had something bad going on?" Gallant said, hesitantly, then took a step back. "Okay, wow, heavy rage… you don't need to tell me-"

"It's not rage about you, it's rage about her," Taylor replied. "So, I may as well tell you… she was the one who caused my trigger event. I didn't figure out she was Shadow Stalker until I was most of the way done with my costume, one thing led to another and I went out on patrol anyway to do some good-"

"-and you beat Lung," Gallant said.

"And I beat Lung," Taylor confirmed. "And I asked Armsmaster why the fuck I should be on a team with a bully like her, and… yeah."

"I guess that explains why she rabbited," Gallant decided. "She must have caught wind. Rumour mill in a place like this is faster than light sometimes. Still… I'm glad you gave us a second chance."

Taylor looked down. "I nearly didn't," she admitted.

"Nearly-didn't doesn't matter," Gallant told her. "Nearly-did can matter. But the thing happened, and that's the important thing here."

He nodded. "Anyway, that got off track a bit… like I say, you'll be doing coordination and oversight most of the time, since you can actually do it without getting close to danger. The whole, massive swarm of insects thing, is a bit creepy – but coordination means you're not doing that, and you've still got the massive swarm as a backup."

Taylor made a non-committal noise, paging down again. "I wonder if I could get some bees," she said. "Or something else that's less… immediately viscerally horrifying."

"Weaver, I have known you less than a day and I'm surprised you said that," Gallant replied. "It doesn't seem like your thing."

"Oh, I'd still use the Swarm," she replied. "I'd just also stick to bees and wasps and butterflies sometimes, so people always know the Swarm is… a possibility."

Gallant winced. "Okay, never mind," he admitted. "I should have realized you'd go straight to psychological warfare… seriously, we do have to worry about image a bit, so don't go overboard, okay?"

"No promises," Taylor said, but she was grinning, and Gallant could see that under her mask. "How do patrols normally work, anyway? Am I likely to need a Swarm?"

The older boy considered.

"Well… in this city, it's always worth being ready," he hedged. "But like I implied, normally if you run into a serious threat your job is going to be to keep track of it while we run for it. I'm actually considering who to partner you with with that in mind – Vista can get you both out of danger very quickly, and Kid Win could give you a lift, but Clockblocker might not be as good a choice."

Taylor paged down again, then blinked. "Uh."

"Something wrong?" Gallant checked.

"Yes?" Taylor replied. "I just – how the heck is Leet a Tinker nine? I've seen what he does, and it's mostly make other things that turn out to actually be impromptu bombs."

"Oh, I remember this came up last year," Gallant answered. "And yes, that's… normal. Now. But cape threat ratings are based on how threatening they could be, and he's a special case. Check the bracketed number."

"Okay, that one's more reasonable," Taylor admitted. "But still. Nine?"

"I heard this from Velocity, so, grain of salt," Gallant replied. "Smaller grain than with Assault, but still a grain. But back when he got started, Leet was more mobile, and he went through… a different phase. He's not just a weird gimmick tinker, he's a biotinker and a robotics tinker and he was using hard light. All at the same time. There was a giant fire breathing turtle in Boston that got blamed on Blasto, then if I remember right he built a robot scorpion that held a bank in Portland hostage until Uber fought it with a giant sword and made off with the contents of the vault as loot… he doesn't do that kind of thing any more, but there's always this worry that he could do it again."

"Ouch," Taylor winced. "Is there anyone else like that in Brockton Bay?"

"I think most of the other big threats are at least obvious," Gallant said, thinking about it. "But, yeah, watch out for those two. Nine times out of ten everything goes horribly wrong for them eventually, but we don't exactly want to accidentally encourage them to go back to the kind of hard-light holograms that let them play Tetris with the ships in Providence harbour."

AN:

So if Leet canonically burned out entire tech trees making video game enemies, he must have had a really good few years first.

I may as well also mention – I've done NaNoWriMo three times over November. It has been a productive month.