They bring nine cameras for a Level 6 Neighborhood Hazard.
I count them because counting is what I do when I can’t do anything else. Nine cameras, four lighting rigs, a sound operator with a boom mic that costs more than my lair’s quarterly upkeep, and Vantage, who comes through the door carrying a warrant in one hand and a protein shake in the other.
“Hey, man,” he says.
Grady Pell. Level 21. Tier 3 Licensed Hero. He’s got shoulders like load-bearing walls and a smile that’s been focus-grouped into the exact frequency of trustworthiness — warm enough to feel personal, broad enough to play in the cheap seats. He looks around my pump house the way a homeowner looks at a fixer-upper: interested, optimistic, already remodeling in his head.
“I’ve seized this building,” I say.
“Absolutely. We love that.” He hands me the warrant. Three pages. My father’s warrants were always seven. Three pages means someone’s in a hurry to get to the part with the cameras. “We’re just going to do a quick inventory, standard stuff. You don’t even have to move.”
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF ENFORCEMENT ACTION
TYPE: Licensed Hero Engagement (Sponsored)
WARRANT: Provisional Lair Seizure, Class IV
AUTHORITY: Municipal League Oversight Board
CAMERAS PRESENT: 9
STATUS: In progress.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I’ve been dreading this for three weeks, since the parking garage. A villain who fixes infrastructure on camera generates what the industry calls “narrative engagement.” I know this because Wendell intercepted a Vantage Media Group memo that used those words seventeen times in four pages, and every time it used them it was talking about me.
I’m a story they’ve decided to tell. Nobody asked me what story. Nobody called. Nobody sent a form or a proposal or a courtesy notification that my life was about to be reclassified from “active villain career” to “content.” The memo went from Vantage’s sponsors to Vantage’s production team to Tamara, and somewhere in that chain a decision was made about my narrative arc, and I wasn’t consulted, because you don’t consult the material. You film it.
“This is Tamara,” Vantage says, gesturing at a woman with a tablet, a headset, and a clipboard. She treats eye contact like a production note — something to schedule, not something to have. “She’s producing.”
“I have seized this building.”
“And we love the energy. We really do.” He gives me a thumbs-up. It’s sincere. Everything Grady Pell does is sincere, which is the engineering equivalent of a load-bearing wall that’s also on fire — it’s doing its job perfectly and it’s going to destroy everything it’s touching.
Rampart comes through the east entrance. Level 18. She bench-presses municipal vehicles for branded content, and she’s already unplugging my conduit array — the primary one, the one I spent eleven days calibrating — with one hand while scrolling her phone with the other. The power coupling takes me two hours to seat. She pulls it out like a weed from wet soil.
“That’s a precision instrument,” I say.
“Mm-hm.” She drops it in a crate.
I step forward. This is instinct, not strategy. MIGHT 4 doesn’t have strategies for physical confrontation. MIGHT 4 has opinions about physical confrontation that it can’t enforce, which is most of my opinions about most things, and I’m stepping toward a woman who can lift a bus because she’s just dropped something I built with bare hands and exhausted math into a plastic crate lined with packing foam that isn’t even the right density.
The hero by the door — visor, sponsorship patch for a shipping company, name I never learn — puts one hand on my chest and redirects me into the wall. It’s not a hit. It’s not even hostile. It’s the amount of force you’d use to close a cabinet that’s drifted open, and it takes nine hit points off me because I am not a cabinet and my VITALITY doesn’t support being closed.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF PHYSICAL ENGAGEMENT
SOURCE: Licensed Hero (Tier 2, unidentified)
DAMAGE: 9
HP: 40 → 31
CLASSIFICATION: Incidental contact.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Incidental contact. He pushed me into a wall hard enough to leave a bruise shaped like his palm and the Registry filed it under the same category as brushing past someone on the subway.
I stay against the wall. Not a choice. Arithmetic. MIGHT 4 against Tier 2 Licensed Hero is an equation that solves itself, and the solution is the wall, and the wall is where I stay.
They’re efficient. I’ll give them that, because I don’t have anything else to give them, and because efficiency is the one quality I can’t resent without being a hypocrite. Four heroes move through the pump house in a grid pattern while Tamara coordinates camera angles and a sound tech holds a boom mic over a crate of my resonance couplers as if they might say something worth recording.
Vantage stands next to me being warm.
“I want you to know,” he says, and he puts his hand on my shoulder, and it’s a kind hand, “this isn’t personal. Your stuff’s being inventoried under standard League protocol. You’ll get a receipt.”
A receipt. For my life’s work. I built everything in this room. The conduit array took eleven days. The resonance couplers took three weeks each because the harmonic tolerances require a calibration process I had to invent. The backup power system — three months, because the junction box needed a tolerance so fine I had to build a tool to build the tool that achieved it. The secondary array in the floor crawlspace. The emergency kit behind the false panel. The Wendell Intercom, which is what I call the short-range communication device I built so Wendell wouldn’t have to shout across the pump house, because Wendell doesn’t shout. Wendell speaks at the volume he speaks at and the world can accommodate or miss what he says, and I built a device to accommodate, and they’re putting it in a crate.
“The receipt won’t include specifications,” I say. “I know the protocol. You’ll log it as ‘villain devices, assorted.’ You’ll store it in a League warehouse for ninety days and then auction it under surplus equipment regulations, and whoever buys it won’t know what any of it does, and they’ll strip it for parts, and the parts won’t work because the parts only work in configurations I designed.”
“Buddy, you know I don’t handle the paperwork side.” He squeezes my shoulder. His grip is calibrated — firm enough to register as supportive, light enough that it doesn’t add to the bruise where I hit the wall.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
They find the secondary array in the floor crawlspace. They find the emergency kit behind the false panel. They find the thermal regulator I built for Wendell’s back room because the back room drops below forty degrees in November and Wendell doesn’t complain about temperature because Wendell doesn’t complain about anything, but his hands slow down when they’re cold, and a henchperson’s hands aren’t something you let get cold.
They find three prototypes I haven’t named yet. Two of them would have worked. The third needed six more hours — six hours of calibration on a junction I’d designed specifically for the Ossining water table, and I’ll never finish it now because they’re putting it in a crate with foam that’s the wrong density, and in ninety days it’ll be auctioned as surplus, and the surplus buyer won’t know that the junction was for clean water, and the clean water won’t happen, and nobody will notice it didn’t happen because nobody noticed the water was bad.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF PROPERTY SEIZURE
ITEMS CONFISCATED:
-- Conduit array (primary), 1 unit
-- Conduit array (secondary), 1 unit
-- Resonance coupling devices, 4 units
-- Backup power system, 1 unit
-- Communication device (short-range), 1 unit
-- Unclassified devices, 7 units
-- Components (miscellaneous), 3 crates
RECEIPT: Filed. Available at Municipal League
Oversight Board, Room 411, during business hours.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Unclassified devices, seven units. The Registry doesn’t know what they are. The heroes carrying them don’t know what they are. Nobody will ever know what they are, and they’ll end up in a warehouse and then in a surplus bin and then in a landfill, and the seven answers to seven questions nobody else was asking will decompose in a municipal waste facility next to broken filing cabinets and expired office furniture.
Nobody’s going to tell me I shouldn’t feel this. I know I shouldn’t feel this. I’m a registered villain whose devices have been lawfully confiscated under a valid warrant, and the warrant is valid, and the process is correct, and every single thing happening in this room is happening exactly the way the system says it should happen, and I am watching it happen and I can’t stop it because MIGHT 4 can’t stop anything.
A hero walks past — tall, blond, League-standard jawline — carrying my resonance coupler, and his elbow catches my shoulder. He doesn’t break stride. Twelve hit points.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF PHYSICAL ENGAGEMENT
SOURCE: Licensed Hero (Tier 2, unidentified)
DAMAGE: 12
HP: 31 → 19
CLASSIFICATION: Incidental contact.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Twelve more points of incidental contact. He hit me with a shoulder carrying my own invention and kept walking, and I’m nineteen out of forty, and the floor seems like a reasonable place to be for a while.
I don’t get up immediately.
Not because of the pain. The pain is just data. It’s because I’m nineteen hit points and if one more person treats me like furniture while carrying my furniture, the number goes lower, and that happens on camera, and Tamara will use the footage, and the footage will air under whatever graphic package they’ve designed for the “reform arc” they’ve already named.
* * *
“Can you look more menacing?”
Tamara has her tablet angled toward me. She’s framing a shot. I’m sitting on the floor of my own lair, HP 19, no devices, surrounded by empty tables, and she wants me to look more menacing.
“For the pickup shot,” she says. “We need to establish the threat level before Grady’s B-roll piece. Can you — maybe clench your fist? Or do the thing where you look at the camera like you’re planning something?”
I am planning something. I’m planning to sit here until my hit points recover to a number that doesn’t make me a safety hazard to myself. That’s going to take approximately eleven hours at one per hour, and I don’t have eleven hours, and she’s asking me to clench my fist.
“He’s fine,” Vantage says, crouching next to me. His knees pop. Even that sounds heroic. “Ted. Can I call you Ted?”
“You can call me whatever generates the most ad revenue.”
He laughs. It’s a real laugh. That’s the thing about Grady Pell — it’s all real. The warmth, the concern, the hand on my shoulder while his team carries my work out the door.
(I almost laugh too. I catch it. I can’t afford to find him funny.)
He’s not performing. He’s being exactly who he is, and his kindness is indistinguishable from demolition. He will dismantle my life and feel good about it and the feeling-good will be genuine and I don’t have a defense against genuine.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF MEDIA CLASSIFICATION
EVENT: Licensed Hero Engagement (Sponsored)
MEDIA DESIGNATION: “Villain Spotlight: Reform Arc”
BROADCAST WINDOW: 48 hours
NOTE: Registered villain is advised that all footage
captured during a licensed engagement may be used
for promotional, educational, or narrative purposes
under League Media Protocol 7.3.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Reform arc. They’ve filed me under reform arc. I haven’t reformed. I haven’t done anything except fix things that were broken and fail to frighten people who were never going to be frightened by me anyway, and the League has decided that this constitutes a narrative and the narrative requires cameras and a three-page warrant and a producer asking a man on the floor to clench his fist.
“Don’t take it personal, buddy.” Vantage stands. Offers me his hand. I don’t take it, because taking it would be the shot Tamara needs, and if I give her the shot she’ll run it with string music and a lower-third that says REDEMPTION? and the question mark will do more damage than any hero ever has.
He understands. He nods. He respects the decision. Even his respect feels like something I didn’t earn and can’t return.
“You’re going to be great for the story.”
He says it warmly. Sincerely. Without any awareness that the story he’s telling is about a loss and the loss is mine.
They finish the inventory. They label the crates. They take B-roll of the empty pump house — the tables, the walls, the bare floor where my primary array used to sit. Tamara gets a close-up of the bolt holes. The bolt holes are good television. Four empty holes in a concrete floor where something used to be fastened and isn’t anymore.
Then they leave. Nine cameras, four lighting rigs, and Grady Pell with his protein shake, filing out through the service entrance because the main door looks better as an establishing shot and they want to save it for the broadcast.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF ENGAGEMENT CONCLUSION
EVENT: Licensed Hero Engagement (Sponsored)
RESULT: Property seizure (complete). No arrest.
NOTE: Registered villain retains provisional lair
status. Lair rating unchanged: 11/14.
No benchmarks affected. No Infamy adjustment.
Current Infamy: 82.
Threat Classification: Neighborhood Hazard.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
No arrest. They didn’t even arrest me. I’m not worth the processing fee. I’m worth nine cameras and a pickup shot and three kinds of sparkling water at craft services.
The pump house is empty. Not abandoned — I’m still here. Wendell’s still here, somewhere in the back, doing something quiet with a pipe wrench because Wendell always has something quiet to do with a pipe wrench. Birdie texted fourteen minutes ago: you ok?? Two question marks, which for Birdie constitutes a formal inquiry.
And Six is in the corner.
They didn’t take Six. I don’t know if that’s mercy or if Six’s assessed value falls below the confiscation threshold. Probably the threshold. Six is a drone I built from a salvaged water-pump casing. Six has a 340-word vocabulary learned from my muttering, an aluminum chassis, and one optical lens that cost me nine dollars at a surplus electronics shop, and right now Six isn’t moving.
Six took damage during the raid. Not from the heroes — from the power surge when they pulled the secondary array. Six was tethered to it for charging, and the surge hit the core processor, and now Six is in a recovery loop that I can hear cycling from across the room.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF SUBORDINATE STATUS
SUBORDINATE: Six (Drone, Fielded)
STATUS: Recovery loop. Functionality impaired.
ESTIMATED RECOVERY: Unknown.
UPKEEP: Unchanged (6 Ingenuity).
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
The lens cycles. On. Off. On. Off. Every ninety seconds, the speaker activates.
“Dad?”
I built that word into its vocabulary. I didn’t mean to. Six learned it from me — from the six hundred hours it’s spent hovering over my shoulder absorbing the way I process the world. I say “Dad” when I’m thinking about my father’s designs. I mutter it. I don’t notice. Six noticed. Six picked it up and stored it and deployed it at catastrophic moments for months, and now the word is stuck in a recovery loop, and every ninety seconds it surfaces like a bubble in a cracked pipe.
“Dad?”
I sit on the floor of my lair. HP 19. Ingenuity 9. No devices. No array. No couplers. No backup power. No prototypes. No answers to questions nobody else was asking. Empty tables and bolt holes and a maintenance log on a clipboard by the door with today’s entry: nine cameras, four lighting rigs, a sound tech, a producer, and six heroes who carried my life’s work out in labeled crates while I sat against the wall and watched.
Ninety seconds.
“Dad?”
“I’m here,” I say.
Six’s lens cycles. Off. On. Off.
“Dad?”
The gap between my current Ingenuity and my maximum is fifty-three points. I’ve been filling that gap with devices — things I build, things I deploy, things that make a man with MIGHT 4 and no physical power into someone who matters. The devices are gone. The gap is the same size. I’m sitting in it.
Ninety seconds.
“Dad?”
I don’t have anything for this. No monologue, no scheme, no mechanism. Just a machine I made asking for someone who isn’t coming, in a room where everything else has been carried out in crates and filed under receipt.