"You wanted to see me, sir?" Jocelyn Smith said as she entered the office.

"Ah, thank you," Stanley Alexander, Editor In Chief of the Austin-American Statesman, said. "Take a seat, I'm afraid I have some bad news."

"I was about to say it's always bad news, but now that I think about it, you did call me in here last year to hand me an Employee of the Month award," Jocelyn said.

"Indeed, I did," Stanley said, nodding. "I'm very careful to not let bad news be the only thing people hear from me. Creates a poor impression, makes them stressed out. But, well, I do still have bad news."

"Lay it on me," Jocelyn said, sitting down across the desk from Stanley. "Am I getting laid off?"

"Nothing like that," Stanley said, shaking his head. Stanley Alexander himself was a short, round, nebbishy man, with coke-bottle glasses and the most pathetic facial hair you'd ever see after graduating high school. "Well. Sort of like that? I should cut to the chase. The article you submitted about last month's cape scene paradigm was excellent, well-researched, and persuasive. However. Our biggest contributors were unhappy with the article, for reasons that no amount of editing can fix; you'd have to start it over again, with completely the opposite slant. We can't publish it as-is."

"Fucking Vegans," Jocelyn muttered.

"I know," Stanley said. "I'll still pay you for the article, but I'm afraid it'll have to be at a reduced rate. Only 20% your normal rate."

"How do they think this is going to help them?" Jocelyn asked. "My article wasn't well-researched, it just cited its sources. This was all public record, just pulled into one place!"

"You and I know quite well that, one, you did not 'just' pull publicly-available information into one place," Stanley said. "You provided context and drew a meaningful, persuasive conclusion from it. And two... we are both well aware that there is a difference between 'public knowledge' and 'common knowledge.'"

"...This sucks," Jocelyn muttered. "Of course the fucking Vegans who larp as royalty don't want anyone calling them out on how all this superhero shit is just more warrior cop bullshit with a shinier wrapper that's easier to use for copaganda. They think it's good that we're seeing a modern revival of warrior-aristocrats."

"It is bad, but... unfortunately, they're the ones who keep the lights on, around here," Stanley said gently. "I'm not any happier about this than you are. My own integrity aches about letting that puff piece through, but not your actual, proper journalism. Unfortunately... my hands are tied. I'm sorry."

"...Fuck a duck," Jocelyn muttered, standing up. "If that's all, I'll see myself out."

"Take care."

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

"This sucks," Jocelyn complained. "I can't believe they can just get away with this shit."

"You're going to have to be more specific, Little Miss White Knight," Clark said. "Which Windmill of Injustice are you tilting at this time?"

"Eat shit, you spineless bottom-feeder," Jocelyn said, without any particular heat. It was lunchtime at the Austin-American Statesman, and among these particular journalists, this degree of slander, character assassination, and general verbal abuse was simply how you knew they were fully awake and cognizant of who they were talking to. "I'm talking about those supposed half-extraterrestrial idiots calling themselves 'House Vega,' with fucking Princess Vega, and her idiot son Prince Valiant."

"Oh, those idiots," James said.

"Sure, they're stupid," Clark added. "But, well, their money spends like anyone else's, so I'm not sure I really see the point in complaining. Unless they did something particularly stupid this time?"

"I spent two whole weeks working on that fucking article about that shit Ophiuchus did last month, with all the supervillains," Jocelyn said. "How she ended up openly admitting to treating citizens of Austin like hunters treat deer. And then, after I spent all this time writing an article about how hey, superhero culture is actually pretty fucked up if people can just say these things in public and expect to be hailed as heroes... fucking House Vega put their foot down and refused to let it see print. Because anything even slightly critical of the institution of modern-day warrior aristocrats will hurt their widdwe feewings and they'll piss and shit and thwow up and cwy."

"Evocative," Clark said.

"It's a fucking perversion of justice is what it is," Jocelyn said. "So fucking much for freedom of the press, if House Vega can throw money around and stop anything even mildly critical of them from seeing print."

"First of all, I've met you," James said. "You aren't mildly anything. Second, I think you need to accept that the age of muckrakers is more or less over. The Jungle was published a hundred and sixteen years ago."

"We'll stop living in an age of muckrakers when there stops being muck to rake," Jocelyn said. "Things might've improved a bit since the Gilded Age, but considering our recent backsliding, I wouldn't consider us to be anywhere near out of the woods."

"Hey, at least we don't work at the Washington Post," Clark said.

"God, we should've raked them over more coals than we did when they came out with that 'yes, there's such a thing as too much democracy' bullshit," Jocelyn muttered.

"That's about when I left the Washington Post," James said. "Personally, as much as it might be annoying to cater to the Vegans and their obsession with making sure everyone loves superheroes, at least here at the Statesman, they're not making me do stochastic union-busting." He shuddered. "They actually invited the actual Pinkertons to a work function, can you fucking believe that? I put in my two week's notice the next day."

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"I'd like to point out that, as monarchists who larp as a royal family, I wouldn't be so sure about the Vegans not making us do stochastic union-busting anytime soon," Jocelyn said. "I'm willing to bet you diamonds to donuts that they aren't huge fans of democracy."

"Eh, I'm not sure they're actually monarchists," James said. "'Princess' is just her stage name. It's part of her brand."

"Her oldest son calls himself Prince Valiant and both her daughters call themselves Lady something or other- Virtue and Venus, if memory serves."

"You know a lot of trivia about capes," Clark pointed out, scrolling through something on his phone.

"It's almost like this is my goddamn job," Jocelyn said. "The hell are you doing?"

"Looking for the puff- aha, here we go," Clark said. "Let's see... Ophiuchus was doing her job as a bounty hunter, with an extra fire lit under her ass by Venus... What exactly about this is putting a bug up your ass, Joce?"

"Look, if Ophi was just hunting bounties because it's the only job she can land and she's gotta eat... fine, I'm not gonna hold that against her," Jocelyn said. "We've all gotta eat. But Clark, look at what she said. She wasn't doing this to pay rent. She was doing this to win a bet. She was going out, beating people up, and ruining their lives for money she didn't even need. She was hunting these people like animals just to prove a point. To win an argument with someone who wasn't even involved in the hunt."

"They're supervillains," Clark said. "What, should she have just let them keep running around, robbing banks?"

"She should've maybe joined the fight for reforming our justice system, instead of contributing to its problems," Jocelyn said. "She fucking shot Billy the Squid, because he annoyed her. That's not the sort of thing you do when you're deeply concerned with the dignity and well-being of your fellow man, like an actual hero is. That's the sort of thing you do when you're a half-functional sociopath who's found a socially-acceptable excuse to hurt people, and then you complain on Twitter about running out of acceptable people to hurt."

"That's a bit of an exaggeration," James said.

"Oh? How would you describe someone who's so indifferent to the act of hurting people for personal gain that they'd go out and kick the shit out of three dozen people just to win a bet?"

"Someone who's aware that the people they're beating up are supervillains, who go out and hurt people all the time for personal profit?" Clark said. "I mean, keep in mind, I'm aware of the whole grey morality of doing crime to stay alive and feed your family, but supervillains are really not that. When you get powers, you get options to monetize 'em pretty effectively. The Console Cowboys all chose to rob Radio Shacks instead of any of the other options, because they're selfish assholes."

"Not all of the legal ways to monetize powers are really an option for people," Jocelyn said. "A lot of people distrust the US Government, often for pretty good reasons, or have other reasons why simply being a government contractor won't work for them. And then, of course, we've gotta bear in mind that the fact people talk so much about superheroes and supervillains in pop culture has an impact on what is and isn't an option people will consider when they get superpowers. The fact that someone's an edgy shithead and an adrenaline junkie doesn't justify getting shot in the liver and left to bleed for ten minutes on a dirty warehouse floor."

"Frankly, I'd argue Billy's behavior would've justified getting shot in the head," Clark said. "I was at Radio Shack when they turned up to try to rob it, and Billy the Squid threw Ophiuchus into my fucking car. She at least had the good graces to fix it afterwards."

"Yeah, good for Ophiuchus, she can clean up after herself. Do I need to point you at all the glamorous, collateral damage generators we call every other superhero? They make a mess of the city, they smash cars and make new potholes every time they pick on someone their own size, and a lot of times when they don't- because, oh yes, a lot of those fuckers can't feel like they've accomplished anything this week without ripping the arms off a pickpocket. But because they're doing it to hurt people we don't like, we've decided it's okay when they do it, and more evidence of wrongdoing and evil whenever it's the people we don't like who're doing it, when really, it's just a bunch of selfish, violent, deluded assholes kicking the shit out of each other while the rest of us cheer them on and then foot the bill. The fact that Billy the Squid is in fact an asshole who hurts people for his own selfish gain doesn't make how Ophiuchus treated him okay, let alone good. She's an asshole too, she just has a permission slip from Uncle Sam."

"And how do you feel about the werefox that Ophiuchus was hanging out with?" James asked.

"Copaganda, just like the K-9 units," Jocelyn said, folding her arms. "Cute furry things with pettable ears and wagging tails can still be vicious predators trained to hurt people. I respect Ophi's restraint, though; it probably would've been easy to make her lab-grown werefox look more like just a cute foxgirl like you see on Twitter, and yet she didn't."

"Honestly, you would've just used that as even more ammunition," Clark said. "If that werefox was a cute foxgirl, you would've made a callout post on your Twitter dot com accusing Ophiuchus of fucking the foxgirl."

"I would have," Jocelyn admitted. "Which is small potatoes compared to the problems with superheroes as modern-day warrior aristocrats, but when you're muckraking, you can hope to hit 'em in the heart all you want, but you're more likely to hit 'em in the stomach or the dick. Which fucking sucks, if I'm being honest. We live in a society-"

"Jokerpilled," Clark said.

"I'll kill you. We live in a society where the fact some people live in it differently than we do makes them fair game for a caste of superhuman warrior-aristocrats to beat up for fun and profit, to burnish their own credentials, to win arguments with each other. And despite our society having generally come around on the idea that violence is bad and we should do less of it to each other, and that punishment isn't actually a good or productive thing... these people who exist to do nothing but enact punitive violence are celebrated, because they're violently punishing the right people, as far as we're concerned. And anyone who isn't celebrating them, who's trying to point out how, actually, hey, this is really fucked up? Well, we get actually silenced. My article gets rejected. My perspective doesn't get airtime. I'm not blowing smoke Alex Jones-style about how I'm being silenced, this is the real deal right here." Jocelyn sighed wearily. "And this is just... the world we live in now, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. Because I'm not a superhero, and therefore I don't matter."

She stood up from the table, and trudged back to her cubicle.

"...I'm worried about her," James murmured.

"Worry about yourself, man," Clark said. "Nobody else will."