They watched with excruciating patience. For one of them anyway. Lycosidae did not appear bothered by the ever increasing wave of destruction the ungifted were causing as they swept through the streets. The matter was considered civil, and fell within the jurisdiction of policemen. So barricades and men in riot shields stood as the guard, protecting the city from itself. It was an unresolved paradox.

The child managed to free himself from the crowd mostly unscathed. Now he was missing a mother. Lyssa began searching without thinking about it, casting her mental net wide.

“Don’t pay attention to it,” Lycosidae said.

Lyssa didn’t question how the hero knew what she was doing. She was however, becoming increasingly furious.

“What is the point of this?” She asked testily.

“There are a hundred people who need help down there,” Lycosidae said. “We would be here all night helping every single one. This matter is for law enforcement.”

“Then what are-”

“Watch,” Lycosidae said again.

Lyssa wanted to reach into her thoughts, to pull out the reasoning for this by force. She turned away instead, looking but not seeing.

Audible pops echoed through the streets. White smoke began to fill the area, suffusing through the boulevard’s shrubbery and climbing up the walls. Lyssa could only imagine the glee news agencies were feeling to have such a continuous drip of content.

The horde staggered but lost little cohesion. Some left, eyes watering intensely. Many stayed. Those were the mentally affected.

“The groupmind is real,” Jackson had said to her. “Convince the louder mouth, and others will follow of their own volition. It is the path of least resistance.”

She watched the crowd coalesce again after losing its less committed members. They left through the seams, disappearing back into the city, running, tripping, moving awkwardly. Some stayed, loitering, watching the riot take place. Lyssa squinted.

“Do you see it?” Lycosidae said. “Discontinuity.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Lyssa asked.

“Follow them.”

It was subtle, but there were a couple of people who were all too calm about the events taking place.

Lyssa followed the hero along the rooftops, avoiding the searchlights of the helicopters. She briefly read the surface thoughts of the reporters on those vehicles hovering safely above the ground. Excitement, accomplishment, recognition. The currency of the journalist.

The whole thing stank. Where once she had no opinion at all of matters such as this, she felt pitiless anger.

The work at hand drew her attention back; the suspicious individuals disappeared into an office building. Lyssa paused by the rooftop entrance.

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“There’s a teleporter among them,” she said.

“Show me,” Lycosidae said without missing a beat.

Clumsily, Lyssa projected an image of a man waiting in what looked like a board room, arms crossed and impatient. There was an old man in that room as well as a large, furred humanoid. The creature looked like a man seamlessly integrated with a bear, standing as tall as the ceiling itself. She had seen them before.

She did not have time to warn Lycosidae; the hero had leapt off the roof and begun to crawl down the walls. Verticality was arbitrary to her. Lyssa had not been told what to do next. So she knelt on the floor of the roof and peered through the storeys. It was a difficult task. She could concentrate and project a cone of vision through matter accurately. Bildungsroman had been practically omniscient within a volume of space.

All things with time.

“Is it done?” Someone was saying.

“Yes,” said the old man. “There is enough momentum now. His hand ought to be forced.”

“Ought?”

“Can any of us truly predict the whims of that tyrant?”

“So I’ve been told. Come back, and good work.”

It had been a call. They had made it through the machine in the office. It was likely received in an equally innocuous place elsewhere in the city. They had hid in plain sight, meeting using unsophisticated, innocent means. The two individuals who had just entered the building were on their way to the meeting room.

Lyssa watched as the teleporter prepared to use his gift. Theirs were obvious to glean; the mind of a teleporter was always wandering, as if in multiple places at once.

A look of alarm appeared on the old man’s face.

“Get us out now!” He shouted.

The wall to their meeting place came apart. The teleporter was swatted aside, landing in a heap on the other side of the room, unconscious. That had been Lycosidae. She appeared as a shadowy image in her mental sight.

The bear-man sprung into motion, roaring as he swatted at the agile hero. Lyssa saw his body flung through the wall in a shower of rubble. A fourth occupant suddenly appeared: a girl, dressed in a skirt and dress shirt, with a sweater tied at the waist. She had been invisible until the moment she appeared out of the wall, injecting a syringe of something into Lycosidae’s neck. The hero struck the chameleon in the stomach, causing the girl to yelp in pain and collapse onto the floor.

The damage was done. Lycosidae’s image was sharpening by the second. Her gift was being suppressed and Lyssa could see her clearly. Which meant that old man could as well. He was a telepath as well, and he would not have the same restraints heroes had. Lyssa twitched to the rooftop door and kicked it open, shattering the lock. She ran down the stairs, her armor forming as she moved, until it covered her to completion. She flexed her arms by her hips, claws formed and hot, and took a shortcut through the thin walls of the office complex straight into the meeting room itself, arriving in a shower of glass and burning drywall.

The bear-man had recovered himself from the rubble at that point. Lyssa used her momentum to strike him in the chest, pulling back her scales to add her force-fire into the blow. The creature released an animalistic roar as he was returned back onto the floor.

“Girl, what are you doing?” Lycosidae said tiredly, bracing against the wall for support.

“Helping you, what does it look like?” Lyssa said.

“I don’t need-”

“We meet again so soon,” the old man said.

A name was projected into Lyssa’s mind. Oscar Landry. She had dealt with him before. The encounter should have left him brain-dead. Yet here he was.

“You don’t quite have the bite you had last time,” he said. “More control, less raw power. Our offer still stands.”

Two more members of their group appeared in a rush by the gaping hole in the meeting room. A man and a woman. They were dressed in hoodies and scarves, the battle gear of the delinquent. But they were far more dangerous.

Lyssa glanced at the hands of the woman, where iron fillings gathered in a thin, torus shape. The man’s skin silvered, becoming like steel.

“You won’t win this one, not without the help of your friend,” Oscar said. “There are better ways to help people other than being Whitworth’s lapdog.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Lyssa said, scowling. She raised her hands, extending her claws to their full length.