“Alright, here’s what I was thinking for the base layer. Strictly functional, gets your power where it needs to go,” Leah explained. “Yeah?”

“Mm-hm,” Rolo hummed, signing off on the design. It was a full-body suit, one piece that zipped up in the back, like the green screen suits they sometimes used to erase crew members from a shot. The most obvious difference was that the gloves of the suit offered incomplete coverage, leaving the palms and fingers exposed and only covering a triangular section of the back of the hand, which looped around the middle finger.

“Okay, great,” Leah said. “How do we feel about the mask, huh? With your costume indestructible, the pragmatic answer is to keep the whole thing all sealed up, but I know a lot of you hero types can’t resist showing off the jawline.”

Rolo shook his head. “No jaw. Most of the reason I’m agreeing to the costume is for effective armor.”

Yeah, right.

“Now, you wanted a two-color design, so what’s dominant?” Leah asked. “Blue suit, or black suit?”

“Black.”

“I can’t recommend that in good conscience,” I chipped in.

“And why not?” Rolo shot a glare my way.

“Because you live in a damn desert, pal. Wearing all black is going to roast you alive. You wanna die for a fashion statement?”

“…No.”

“Blue suit,” Leah said, jotting down a note. “And then there’s the highlights. If I embroider this all properly, I can just drag one long thread through the inside of the costume like this, see?”

Leah traced the back of her pen over a sketched diagram, showing the external designs in black and the string connecting them all as dotted lines going up the sleeves and neck. A domino-mask-style outline on the face gave the costume a bit more definition than the flat blue mask would otherwise have, and a kite shield design covered the chest.

“That’s not a pavise,” I pointed out.

“I tried a design with an actual pavise shape,” Leah complained. She flipped to another page in her sketchbook. “It looks really stupid.”

Rolo peered at the alternate sketch. “I wouldn’t wear that,” he agreed.

“Just saying,” I shrugged.

“Can you add pockets?” Rolo asked.

“Huh?” Leah flipped back to the page with the updated sketches. “Sure, I can see about working in a bit of storage here. How about a nice belt, too? Well, a belt-evoking stripe, with the embroidery. Split up your top and bottom halves, since they’re just blue for now.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“You’re going to want some shoes, right? Any major requests on that front?”

“Expediency,” Rolo said.

“…What?”

“Like ‘expedited shipping’?” I asked.

“Yes,” Rolo said.

“Then the word is ‘expeditiousness’, not expediency.”

Rolo sighed for a solid five or six seconds.

“Whatever shoes get here fastest without looking stupid on the rest of the outfit,” Leah said, scribbling into her book.

“How long until you have the costume done?”

“I can probably get a functional prototype put together in a couple days,” Leah said. “I’ll sew on fabric cutouts for the designs here and here and here, so those won’t be indestructible, but it’ll look right and armor you up for the interim period while I put together the final version. Which, given the amount of embroidery involved, is going to be… well, if I only work on the one order, that’d be a different story, but-“

“Placeholder costume the day after tomorrow, proper version sometime after that,” Rolo summarized.

“Yeah, count on that much,” Leah said.

“Well, it’s been fascinating to make your acquaintance, Rolando,” I said. “It seems our business for the evening is at an end, but I trust that you intend to keep what we discussed in mind going forward?”

“Whatever.”

“Excellent. The peace agreement between Pavise and Boggart shall be most fruitful for all involved parties, I assure you.”

“Don’t push your luck, rat man,” Rolo said.

“Who, me? Am I known to push my luck, Leah?”

“One hundred percent,” she answered without hesitation.

“Well, there you go,” I said, patting Rolo on the shoulder. “Take care, hero.”

He gave a puff of a sigh, then turned and walked to the door.

“Feel free to request the other half of the tour when you get the chance,” I called after him.

“Won’t be soon,” Rolo shouted back as the door swung closed behind him.

I smiled. “All as well. I’m going to be busy for a while.”

♜

With my escortee turned loose, I was free to head to the meeting place ahead of schedule, which gave me time to chat with Zachary Palmer, the owner of the establishment.

“Evening, Zach,” I spoke, over the old rock playlist filling the space.

“Well, if isn’t my prodigal boss,” he greeted me with a smirk.

“Missed you too, man. Hey, Liv’s coming in for a discussion in ten or twenty. Whip up the usuals?”

“Should be out on time,” he confirmed, punching the order in on one of the work-phones that waitstaff at his bar used.

“Say, you want to give me some odds?”

“Oh, boy. What is it this time?”

“Boggart versus… Pishon Industries.”

“Huh. I’m going to have to check some things, and I’ll get back to you on that.”

I hadn’t used the passphrase, but I was also me, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Zach’s contribution to the shady side of Bellow Street was a simple bookmaking operation. It was under the table, since Nevada probably wouldn’t be keen on what people were betting on with Zach, which made it “illegal gambling” in the strict sense of the term, but not so much in spirit. The whole thing was all in good fun, as we didn’t incorporate the more severe collection tactics that would typically be expected of this sort of venture. The problem, of course, was that putting money on a supervillain usually meant you were rooting for them to succeed, and the state wouldn’t want to encourage that sort of attitude.

A lot of people had standing bets on matchups that simply hadn’t transpired yet. The largest pot I was aware of when I left for my “ski trip” had been a cumulative $540,000 on both sides of the Triple Threat versus Headhunter. The federal heroes had the three-against-one advantage, and hell, it was hard to beat an invincible speedster, a flying bombardier, or a walking armory by themselves.

Headhunter, though, was exactly the sort of guy who stood a chance against the whole trio. By the time we’d figured out what his whole deal was, power-wise, he’d established a pretty foolproof base of borrowed abilities to keep himself out of trouble while he worked his way up to harder targets.

Headhunter’s actual goal wasn’t really clear, and the consensus was essentially that he just liked hurting people and getting away with it. I had a grand riding on him losing the fight, personally, though it had more to do with what I wanted to happen than what I thought was the better investment. The most financially responsible bet on that fight was to look for something with better short-term prospects, honestly. Headhunter was doing a bang-up job of avoiding the Triple Threat, and no fight meant no payout on either side.

I found the booth that was set aside for meetings. It took a corner of the floor plan, and nobody was ever seated in the adjacent spaces. Those two tables still had signboards up from the pandemic, because it was a very convenient excuse to section off part of the restaurant indefinitely. The handful of times we’d been asked about it, Zach just claimed the booth was intentionally distanced from other guests for the sake of immunocompromised visitors.

I’d told him that didn’t have to be a lie, whenever nobody had a meeting scheduled, but he preferred to keep the booth open as often as possible. And to be fair, if he had to let down either of the populations competing for the booth, the supervillains were definitely more dangerous to piss off.

Olivia showed up at six twenty-four.

“How was your day, officer?”

“Bite me.”

“No need to resort to that,” I said. “Food should be here any minute. I can hold out til then.”

Right on cue, Zach arrived with a tray. Chips and salsa were placed in front of me, followed by a basket of chicken wings. Olivia received a plate of fish and chips. Which, I suppose, made my side dish crisps and salsa, for the sake of disambiguation. She got red wine in a classic wine glass, while I had a vanilla milkshake to take the edge off the wings and salsa.

“I checked out that match-up for you, Lucas,” Zach reported. “I’ll pay out two to seven.”

“Ouch. Well, I’ll toss a hundred down later.”

Zach nodded and took his leave.

“What are you betting on?” Olivia asked.

“We’ve got plenty of time to talk about that,” I said.

“You’re betting on your own heist? Seriously?”

“Hey, at least I’m not betting I’ll fail,” I said, crunching a salsa-laden chip.

“Why are you betting at all? You’d make, what, two-fifty? What does that even cover? A quarter of the fee to launder the actual payment for the job?”

“A penny saved, eh? Brighten up. We’ve got this in the bag.”

“Two to seven says you’re wrong, apparently,” Olivia complained.

“Zach’s full of shit, he doesn’t know my plan.”

“I don’t know your plan.”

I took a sip of my milkshake. “Let’s change that.”

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