The event is called a hero showcase.
That word — *showcase* — told me everything I needed to know about who it was actually for. Not the public. Not the districts still running on half-grid power and rationed water. It was for the licensing boards, the PR firms, the corporate sponsors quietly testing which post-war heroes were still marketable. Recovery sells. Resilience sells. Youth with a clean face and a functional Quirk sells especially well.
"Heroes and villans are eventually two different sides of the coin"
I went because information density is highest wherever people are trying to be seen.
The venue was a repurposed transit hub in the Western District — high ceilings, cracked tile floor patched with temporary paneling, portable lighting rigs that turned everyone slightly gold. Maybe two hundred people. Security at the door was contract work, not agency. I clocked two exits besides the main entrance, noted which of the stationed guards were watching the crowd and which were watching each other, and moved inside.
I wasn't there for any of the heroes on the official roster. I'm not sure if my time here is worth it
I was there because Matsuda had mentioned, offhand, that coordination offices sometimes sent junior liaisons to these events to maintain visibility. Junior liaisons carried transit vouchers and scheduling documents. Scheduling documents told me which routes were active, which sectors were being serviced, and when. I'd been building that map for three months. One more data point and it would be sellable.
The contact I was looking for was a mid-level logistics coordinator named Hayashi. Forty-two, wore the same three jackets in rotation, always stood near the food. I found him in under four minutes. Confirmed his presence. Confirmed he had his work bag.
"Looks like I'm done early I should head home"
Then I moved to a position with good sightlines and waited.
That was when I noticed her.
She was standing near the demonstration area, slightly apart from the cluster of attendees, watching one of the junior heroes run a mobility drill. Not the way most people watched — not entertained, not bored. She was *assessing*. Her head tilted just slightly to the left. Her arms were crossed but loose, not defensive.
Tall. Athletic build under a jacket that probably cost more than my monthly training budget. She seemed richer than me.Her Hair that fell in a way that suggested either natural luck or significant investment in making it look that way. She had the kind of face that made people assume she wasn't paying attention.
That was the mistake. She was paying very close attention.
I ran the surface profile: mid-twenties, conditioning that went beyond casual gym work, posture trained rather than inherited. The jacket had a Shiketsu alumni pin on the lapel — small, silver, worn low where most people wouldn't catch it. Not hidden. Just not displayed.
I cross-referenced. Post-war Shiketsu graduates. Female. Quirk-active. Hero or former hero.
It took less than thirty seconds.
*Utsushimi Camie. Glamour Quirk. Shiketsu class, graduated post-war. No current agency affiliation on public record. Last confirmed activity: freelance hero work, Western District relief corridors, eight months ago.*
No current affiliation.
That was "hmmm"
I didn't approach immediately. That would have been a mistake — moving too fast signals need, and need is a negotiating liability. Instead I tracked her loosely while keeping Hayashi in peripheral view. She moved through the crowd the way someone moves when they've learned to take up the right amount of space — enough to be noticed, not enough to invite approach.She obviously might easily get suspicious of me.She declined two conversations without seeming to. She accepted a drink from a passing tray, tasted it, set it down.
She looked bored. I'm not entirely sure
Not visibly. But the assessment in her eyes had shifted to something flatter. She wasn't finding what she was looking for here. I understood the feeling.
Hayashi moved toward the food table.
I made a decision.
I would spend couple of minutes on Utsushimi Camie before completing the Hayashi approach. Few minutes was a low-cost investment with asymmetric upside. I was looking at a potential asset with a deception-class Quirk and an existing familiarity with post-war field conditions.
Toga could impersonate. But Toga was volatile and her range was limited to people whose blood she'd collected.
Camie could do something different.
I walked over.
The approach vector mattered. Coming from behind signals intent to corner. Coming from the front signals confrontation. I came from a forty-degree angle to her left, moving at an easy pace, stopping just inside conversational range but not so close she'd read it as a pressure tactic.
"The footwork is wrong," I said.
She turned her head. Unhurried. Already assessing me the same way she'd been assessing the drill.
"Excuse me?"
I nodded toward the junior hero running the mobility demonstration. "He's loading his front foot before the pivot. It works until someone reads the tell. Then it becomes a liability."
A pause. She looked back at the demonstration, then at me.
"You're not press," she said. Statement, not question.
"No."
"Hero industry?"
"Adjacent," I said. "I run a small creative consultancy. Brand development, image architecture. Mostly working with post-war talent trying to find footing in the current market."
All of that was fabricated and none of it was implausible. I had a business card in my jacket that matched the story. I'd had three versions printed two months ago, for exactly this kind of soft contact scenario.
She took the card when I offered it. Read it. *Meridian Creative. Kuroda Shin, Director.* The address was a mail drop, but it was a real address in a building with legitimate tenants.
"Image architecture," she repeated. The words were careful. Testing the phrase.
"It sounds cleaner than it is," I said. "Mostly it's helping people figure out what they're actually selling, rather than what they think they're selling."
She looked at me for a moment. Direct. The kind of look that, from most people, would mean suspicion. From her it seemed more like she was deciding whether to be interested.
"What do you think *I'm* selling?" she asked.
There it was. Not vanity. Genuine curiosity about whether I'd been paying attention.
I had been paying attention.
---
I used the Quirk once.
Not aggressively — nothing like the blunt application I'd used in the early months, nothing that would register as foreign influence. I'd refined the theory by now. Pre-conscious attention. Guiding what the brain chose to notice before the conscious mind made a decision. It was a nudge, not a push. It cost me almost nothing and left no headache. It also left no evidence.
I directed her attention to the fact that I hadn't tried to flatter her yet. Most people in her position — attractive, ex-hero, clearly being scoped by half the room — opened conversations with compliments. I hadn't. The absence would register, below the surface, as something that made me different.
That was all I needed. The rest was real.
"You're selling proof of concept," I said. "That a certain kind of hero — trained before the war ended, without a legacy agency behind them — can still operate at a high level in the current market. But you haven't found the right frame for it yet. So it's not selling."
The silence lasted three seconds.
"That's a cold read from a stranger at a press event," she said.
"It's an accurate one."
Another pause. Shorter this time.
"What would the right frame be?"
"That depends on what you actually want," I said. "Not what you think you should want. What you *want.*"
She uncrossed her arms. A small tell. The conversation had shifted from assessment to something she was genuinely engaging with. I noted it and kept my expression neutral.
"Most consultants lead with a pitch," she said.
"I'm not pitching you. I don't take clients I haven't talked to." I checked my watch. "I have another meeting in about eight minutes. But if you want to continue this conversation, I'm available Thursday afternoon."
I said it the way I said most things — flat, factual, not inflected with hope or pressure. Because I didn't feel hope or pressure. I felt the calculation: four minutes spent, potential value identified, next contact scheduled pending her response. Clean.
She looked at me for a moment longer than was neutral.
"Thursday," she said.
I named a café in the Central District. Public, well-lit, easy egress. I always picked the location.
"Two o'clock," I said. "If that works."
"It works."
I nodded once, the way you nod when a meeting is confirmed rather than when something good has happened, and I walked back toward the food table where Hayashi was loading a plate.
The Hayashi contact took couple of minutes and yielded a partial route document that I photographed with a secondary phone while we talked about post-war infrastructure development. He was lonely and glad to have someone ask him professional questions. It was almost too easy.
On the way out, I ran the night's numbers.
One logistics document, partial. Sellable to the route-tracking buyer for approximately sixty percent of a full document's value. A confirmed Thursday meeting with an ex-hero who had a deception-class Quirk, no current agency, and genuine curiosity about her own positioning.
The Hayashi contact had been the reason I came. But I thought about Camie on the walk back through the dark streets, not with warmth — I didn't do warmth anymore, it cost too much and paid too little — but with the particular quality of focus I reserved for things that might matter later.
A Glamour Quirk meant she could alter how she appeared to others. Selective. Adjustable. Not a blunt disguise but a precise manipulation of perception.
I knew something about that.
I filed her under *active development* and let the thought settle into the architecture of what I was building.
The city was still half-dark. Someone in a third-floor window above me had strung yellow lights along the frame, and they buzzed faintly against the quiet. I walked under them without looking up.
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