"Everybody freeze!"

Akane's moms were lovely houseguests, and had all sorts of interesting things to talk about. Haruna, for one, was one of the ten other people in the world who knew and cared who Ken Isaacs was, and had somehow not conveyed this knowledge to her daughter at any point because while Akane was very emotionally open, Haruna still had not yet managed to kill the part of her that cringes, and did not talk her daughter's ear off about Grid Beam and the design ecosystem it was thickly enmeshed in.

The upshot of this was that I had a helping hand in talking Akane into replacing her bed frame with a four foot high loft, creating a quartet of four foot cubes she could use for all sorts of things like clothes storage, desk-based workspace, and an enlarged version of the chair I'd built for Lisa.

"Roxy," Lisa hissed.

"Oh, right," I said, before my eyes glowed green. "You're under arrest."

They were gone, it was Monday, and I'd taken Lisa bounty hunting with me, for reasons I promise aren't hypocritical.

"Let me get this out of your way," I said to the clerk, grabbing the glowing-eyed, insensate supervillain and dragging them towards the door. Usually they had higher targets than liquor stores, but incidents like this were hardly unheard of.

"I don't understand why you couldn't just shoot this asshole the moment they walked in," Lisa said, once we were outside, and I silently called the police to come pick up This Asshole. "Hell, you went down a list, scrying on supervillains and remotely reading their minds to see who planned on robbing a place today, but you could've also just figured out where they lived and taken them down there."

"Well, it's because the justice system is so unreasonably concerned with this thing called evidence," I said. "Sure, my own personal standards accept my scanners as strong enough evidence to go after someone, but a well-run court of law will generally require evidence that this person actually did something illegal on purpose before throwing them in jail."

"Counterpoint," Lisa said. "When you went after Hordemaster, you just broke into his apartment, kicked his ass, and handed him off to the police."

"Well, sure, because that apartment had all kinds of evidence establishing that this particular asshole was Hordemaster, the supervillain they all knew did all those crimes. Hordemaster was distinctive, and also sloppy. But villains like... whoever the fuck this guy is, I don't remember or care, villains like This Asshole need to be caught in the act, so that there's a solid chain of evidence connecting him to at least one illegal act, and probably more as it's established more and more firmly that this guy isn't just an unlucky copycat."

"I see," Lisa said quietly. "So... how's the law interact with you using those scanners in the first place?"

"Mostly, it doesn't," I said with a shrug. "I'm a bounty hunter, not a cop. The rules are different for me. Not more permissive, but different. Cops have a lot more leeway on the use of lethal force."

"So, what's stopping you from passing this information on to the cops?" Lisa asked.

"Well, for one, I don't get paid for that," I said. "Two, cops still need warrants. Bounty hunters don't, due to some disgusting chicanery I'm reluctantly taking advantage of."

"Walk me through it," Lisa said. "I don't have anything better to do."

"Right, so. In America, when someone is arrested, they go to jail- which is not prison- to ensure they show up to the trial," I said. "They have the option of posting bail, which is to say, giving the state cash, a bond, or some sort of valuable collateral to, again, ensure they show up to the trial. Now! Posting bail isn't unique to America, but what is unique is the institution of bail bondsmen, who will post bail on your behalf... for a price. And if you don't show up to court, they are legally allowed to arrest you and drag you to court, despite not being agents of the state, because they had a contractual agreement with you. That's what bounty hunters were on B-944 before superpowers came about. Then superpowers happened, and some ethically bankrupt asshole managed to convince the state's legal apparatus that all that precedent conceived for bail bondsmen should apply to what are basically profiteering vigilantes, because both are called bounty hunters."

"...You're right, that is disgusting," Lisa said. "I mean, as a werefox, I appreciate some good trickery, but that... That's not even all that clever. That's just abusive."

"Mhm."

We stood there, still waiting. Cops took a while.

"...Why am I here?" Lisa said. "You told Akane she wasn't ready, but... I am?"

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"Akane doesn't need to be involved in this," I said. "As far as this business is concerned, there's nothing she can do that I can't do better. You, though, need to immerse yourself in the hunt, develop spirits of the hunt, and gain abilities for the hunt."

"Why do I need that?" Lisa asked.

"Because you learning to hunt like a druid is my best bet of finding Doctor Skinner before she breaks this world over her knee," I said. "If you like living on this planet, where the population isn't brainwashed to serve her, then going along with this is in your best interests."

"...What's it mean that I'm a little excited about this?" Lisa asked.

"Means you're a fox," I said, as the sirens finally became audible. "Foxes aren't just weird-looking dogs whose ears look good on cute anime girls. Foxes are hunters. And now? So are you."

----------------------------------------

Our next target was a villain crew called the Console Cowboys, who combined the hacker and cowboy aesthetic, riding around on motorcycles with revolvers. Fully half of their robberies were of Radio Shacks- which were a far more lucrative business in this universe than they had been back home- and this time was no exception.

"Fucking shit that hurts!" I yelled, before breaking the bastard's arm. I'd been trying to throw him into the floor, but as long as he wasn't shooting me, I was fine.

"I thought you were bulletproof!" Lisa shouted, taking down her own Console Cowboy with mad science-enhanced electro-claws.

An interesting little tidbit about druids was that, no matter what their patron animal was, every single one of them had an intermediate 'war form' where they were 50% taller than they were as a human, jacked as hell, and had any and all of their patron animal's traits that would make them more capable in a fight. Nobody really knew why. It sure as fuck was not because of werewolves, though, because even the largest grey wolves are only like six and a half feet from nose to tail and are outmassed by the average human, and the war form made no sense for them either.

"That just means they don't break the skin! They still hit five times harder than a fastball!"

I was a technopath, and that did mean I was the natural predator of any technology-based combatant, but there was a limit to how many firearms I could control into not firing.

A limit currently entirely occupied by some jackass called Billy the Squid, who was wearing a duster, a cowboy hat, and the most obnoxiously quasi-cyberpunk visor I'd ever seen, and had four robot tentacles just like me, except instead of those tentacles being general-purpose limbs, their manipulating ends were replaced with firearms. Specifically, revolvers.

That had to be reloaded manually.

It was common knowledge that superscientists were not statistically any smarter than the rest of humanity, and idiots like Billy the Squid were why.

Billy finally realized that he could just hit me with his tentacles, and launched me across the parking lot- we'd intercepted them out here, in hopes of not trashing the Radio Shack itself in the fight that would surely ensue.

The crunch of glass as I landed in someone's windshield told me that I'd probably miscalculated.

"Hah! You done got pwn'd, pardner!" Billy crowed.

I could control one of his tentacles, make it shoot him in the head. Nobody would be able to prove I'd done it.

"You are just determined to piss me off, aren't you?" I asked, climbing to my feet and extruding my own tentacles.

"You're the one who broke my arm!"

"You shot me!"

Of all the supervillains who proved resistant to mind control, it simply had to be Billy the Fucking Squid. My system was near foolproof; I just had to flare the eye-glow and say 'you're under arrest' and ninety percent of the time they went without a fight.

I still packed more heat than an oven when I went bounty hunting, though, because the ten percent of the time was always with people who had more than just mental resistance to their name, and I didn't feel like dying.

I launched myself at Billy, this time with my tentacles fully in play, taking away all avenues of resistance. He screamed as his broken arm was jostled, but... well, I wasn't terribly empathetic. Dude shot me.

"My hat!" he yelled as the hat came off, and an idea occurred to me. His was a gang of superscientists and gadgeteers, after all.

"You're under arrest," I said, my eyes glowing green. His glowed green as well, and he went limp. "Lisa! Knock their hats off!"

She nodded, beginning to follow my advice, and I brought more and more of them under my thrall, turning the gang against itself until everyone was down, save for a pair of stragglers who managed to get away from Lisa.

"Get back on your pony!" one of them yelled, already kickstarting his own engine and starting to peel off before I could do anything about it. So I put a stop to it by locking the front brakes instead, sending him over the bars, and even pulling the motorcycle up and over itself to land on him.

I frowned slightly under my mask. Yeah, I'd locked the front brakes, but he hadn't been going that fast.

The other one found his motorcycle inoperable, and was caught up with by Lisa, who had him zip tied in a flash.

"Ponies, huh?" I remarked, approaching the groaning, prone man with probably a lot of broken bones. "I'll admit your steel horses aren't on the large side, but they're pretty firmly medium, I'd say."

"Nnnn... nah, see... they're... pwnies," he said. "Cause they pwn."

I should've hit him harder.

"I trust you understand you're under arrest, now?" I said instead.

"Asshole..."

"It pays the bills," I said with a shrug, prying him out from under his motorcycle and zip-tying his wrists, since his arms weren't broken. "Besides, you're the one who brought seven guys to knock over a fucking Radio Shack."

He didn't seem to have a response to that, or maybe I just didn't care enough to listen. The police response time was a lot faster, this time, albeit still taking enough time that I managed to fix the windshield I'd been thrown through before they got here.

"Alright, well," I said, as the cops loaded the Console Cowboys up. "I think we're just about done for the day."

Lisa nodded, still in her war form to avoid showing her face. "Let's go home."