The Sidekick Support Group Meets Tuesdays

• Chapter 1: Decaf for the Damaged
• Chapter 2: Folding Chairs and Former Glory
• Chapter 3: The Collateral Damage Fund
• Chapter 4: Mask Off, Nametag On
• Chapter 5: The Spandex Retirement Plan
• Chapter 6: Trust Exercises for the Betrayed
• Chapter 7: Left in the Shadow
• Chapter 8: Statutory Heroism
• Chapter 9: The Anatomy of a Throwaway
• Chapter 10: Half-Baked Alibis
• Chapter 11: Coffee Stains and Classified Files
• Chapter 12: What Happened to Kid Velocity?
• Chapter 13: The Utility Belt Hoarders
• Chapter 14: A Modest Pension
• Chapter 15: Therapy in the Church Basement
• Chapter 16: When the Beacon Fails
• Chapter 17: The Arch-Nemesis at the Grocery Store
• Chapter 18: Unpaid Interns of Justice
• Chapter 19: The Monologue Syndrome
• Chapter 20: Second Fiddles
• Chapter 21: The Great Graveyard Shift
• Chapter 22: Side Effects of Super-Serums
• Chapter 23: Breaking the Protocol
• Chapter 24: The Mentor’s Apology
• Chapter 25: Stepping Out of the Frame
• Chapter 26: Main Character Energy

The basement of St. Jude’s Episcopal Church smelled like floor wax, damp masonry, and sixty years of institutional bake sales. It was a subterranean purgatory located three feet below street level, where the high-slitted windows offered a scenic view of muddy flowerbeds and the lower half of passersby’s ankles.

Arthur Pendelton arrived at six-fifteen, as he always did, carrying a cardboard tray from the 24-hour Dunkin’ down on 4th Street. His left knee gave three distinct, wet pops as he descended the stairs. It was an atmospheric knee; it knew when rain was coming, and it certainly knew when it was Tuesday.

He pushed open the heavy double doors, clicked on the flickering fluorescent lights, and listened to the ballast hum its dull, mournful B-flat. In the corner sat the coffee station: an ancient, beige Bunn twelve-cup drip machine perched on a rickety particle-board folding table. Beside it sat a stack of Styrofoam cups, a bowl of yellowed sugar packets, and three canisters of non-dairy creamer that had survived two presidential administrations.

Arthur placed the Dunkin’ box on the table and reached for the orange-handled pot. He paused, stared at it for a moment, and set it down in favor of the brown-handled one.

Decaf. It was a strict rule.

The last time someone had brought fully leaded, high-octane dark roast to the meeting—a well-intentioned mistake by a newcomer who had lasted exactly two weeks—Chloe had accidentally discharged forty thousand volts of residual bio-electricity straight into the basement’s fuse box. The church had spent three days without power, the choir had been forced to rehearse by flashlight, and Father Thomas had politely suggested that future meetings stick to herbal tea or water. They had compromised on decaf. Decaf didn't trigger kinetic spasms. Decaf didn't make your teeth buzz if you had lingering serum toxicity. Decaf was safe, neutered, and thoroughly depressing.

Arthur filled the glass pot from the slop sink in the janitor's closet, poured the water into the reservoir, and dumped a scoop of pre-ground, supermarket-grade decaf into the paper filter. The machine belched a plume of steam and began to gurgle loudly, sounding remarkably like a dying villain in a third-act climax.

"You're brewing that swill too fine, Artie. Tastes like hot dirt."

Arthur turned. Standing in the doorway was Miller, leaning on his aluminum cane. Miller was sixty-two, though he looked seventy, with a thick mustache that hid a faint, silvery scar running from his lip to his jawline. Forty years ago, he had been The Slipstream, the hyper-agile, acrobatic junior partner to Major Justice. Now, he was a retired postal worker with two artificial hips and a mild tremor in his left hand.

"Hot dirt builds character," Arthur said, pulling down six metal folding chairs from the rack against the wall. He unlatched the first one and set it down with a loud, metallic clatter that echoed through the empty basement. "Besides, if we give Chloe actual caffeine, the church ceiling fan will start spinning backward again."

Miller scoffed softly, shuffling into the room. He hung his coat—a worn, beige windbreaker that looked like it had been bought at a Sears in 1994—on the back of a chair. "Chloe needs to learn self-control. Back in '84, when we were chasing the Iron Cadre through the sewer system, we lived on Vivarin and gas station coffee. No bio-spasms. No complaining. You just chewed the pills and kept running until the Major told you to stop."

"And look how well that turned out," Arthur replied smoothly, unfolding the third chair. "You have no cartilage in your ankles, Miller, and your heart beats like an irregular telegraph machine."

"It was a noble service," Miller muttered, though there was no conviction in his voice. He sat down heavily in his designated chair—the one closest to the door, because his hips couldn't handle sitting in one place too long if he needed to get up fast. "We kept the city safe."

"The city got a parade," Arthur said. "You got a twenty-percent discount on prescription eyeglasses and a knee that screeches when the humidity hits eighty percent."

"Seventy-five percent discount," Miller corrected, tapping his cane against the linoleum. "And the glasses frames were limited to the bottom shelf."

Arthur smiled faintly, though it didn't reach his eyes. He set up the remaining chairs in a loose, imperfect circle. Five chairs for the regulars, plus one extra in case someone new showed up. New people were rare these days. The modern hero leagues didn't really do "sidekicks" anymore; they called them Junior Associates or Operational Support Interns. They had contracts, legal representation, and nondisclosure agreements that paid out six figures if the primary hero accidentally threw them through a brick wall.

The five people in this room hadn't had contracts. They had possessed colorful spandex, boundless enthusiasm, and an utterly catastrophic belief that their mentors actually cared about them.

The heavy basement doors swung open again, letting in a gust of cold autumn air and the sharp, distinct smell of motor oil and burnt sugar.

Chloe walked in, her damp leather jacket squeaking with every step. She was thirty-two, possessed an asymmetrical hair-cut that looked like it had been executed with pinking shears, and wore fingerless gloves to hide the faint blue veins that hummed beneath the skin of her wrists. During her mid-teens, she had been Static Kid, second-in-command to The Voltmancer. These days, she managed the night shift at an auto parts warehouse down by the docks.

"Tell me nobody touched the donuts," Chloe said without a greeting, dropping her heavy canvas messenger bag onto the floor with a thud.

"They're safe," Arthur said, pointing toward the Dunkin' box. "Glazed and jelly. No chocolate. I know how you feel about cocoa processing."

"Cocoa harvesting uses heavy machinery that emits low-frequency hums," Chloe said, flipping open the cardboard box and inspecting the contents with the scrutiny of a bomb-squad technician. She selected a powdered jelly donut and took a massive bite. "It ruins the palate. Also, the guy behind the counter at Dunkin' looked at me weird."

"He looks at everyone weird, Chloe. He has an astigmatism," Arthur said, pouring her a cup of the steaming brown decaf. He passed it to her in a Styrofoam cup.

She took it, sniffed it suspiciously, and took a sip. Her upper lip curled. "God, Arthur. This tastes like an apology from a corporation."

"It’s decaf. It’s supposed to taste like broken dreams."

"It tastes like water that once heard a rumor about a coffee bean," she countered, but she didn't set it down. She wrapped her gloved hands around the warm cup, letting the heat seep into her palms. The faint, blue hue of her wrist-veins flickered once, like a dying lightbulb, then went dark.

By six-twenty-five, the rest of the group had trickled in.

Diego arrived next. Diego was thirty-eight, built like a brick retaining wall that had survived a wrecking ball, and walked with a slow, deliberate shuffle that suggested his center of gravity was somewhere eighteen inches below the floorboards. In the early 2000s, he had been Gargoyle, the heavy-hitter sidekick to Apex. When Apex needed someone to absorb a falling girder or take a hit from an anti-tank missile, Diego had been pushed into the frame. His skin was still subtly grey in certain lighting, a permanent side effect of the kinetic-density treatments Apex's private lab had forced on him when he was seventeen.

Diego didn't talk much. He sat down in his chair, which groaned ominously under his three-hundred-pound frame, accepted a cup of decaf from Arthur with a nod, and pulled a small plastic container of homemade empanadas from his coat pocket. He placed them in the center of the circle without a word. It was his weekly contribution. They were always slightly overcooked, but nobody ever complained.

Finally, Penny arrived, brushing rain from her yellow raincoat. Penny was twenty-eight, the youngest of the group, and easily the most jumpy. She had been Lady-Bug, the aerial scout and stealth specialist for The Falcon. Her mentor had dropped her—literally—during an interception over the West Side Highway six years ago. The suit’s wing-glider mechanism had failed, The Falcon had been too busy posing for a news helicopter to notice her free-falling, and Penny had spent fourteen months in spinal rehab before receiving a formal letter from the hero’s legal team informing her that her services were no longer required due to "liability concerns."

She set her wet umbrella in the corner, double-checked the latch on the basement door, scanned the ceiling corners for hidden cameras—a habit she couldn't break—and finally took her seat next to Chloe.

"Traffic on the bridge was a nightmare," Penny said, her voice thin and high-pitched. She unbuttoned her coat, revealing a faded corporate polo shirt from a local logistics firm. "Some guy in a modified Honda was trying to weave through lanes like he had a jet engine attached to his bumper. I almost pulled my line-gun out of habit before I remembered I don't have a line-gun anymore. Or a holster. Or a reason to care."

"It's better not to care," Miller said from across the circle, leaning his chin on his hands over his cane. "Caring gets you a fractured pelvis and a thirty-year mortgage on a two-bedroom condo in Staten Island."

"All right," Arthur said, taking his seat in the circle. He set his own cup of decaf down on the floor beside his chair. "Let's get started. It's six-thirty."

The room quieted down. The hum of the fluorescent lights suddenly seemed much louder, competing with the rhythmic drip-drip-drip of a leaky pipe somewhere in the boiler room behind the wall.

Arthur cleared his throat. He had been running the group for three years now, ever since the city’s formal "Superhero Veterans' Assistance Program" had been quietly defunded during a municipal budget crisis. The city had decided that while former primary heroes were entitled to tax breaks, public monuments, and lucrative security consulting gigs, former sidekicks were categorized as "voluntary civilian contractors" and were thus entitled to absolutely nothing.

"Welcome back, everyone," Arthur said, his voice flat, steady, and entirely devoid of the theatrical booming tone he had been trained to use during his eight years as Impact Boy. "Standard reminders before we open the floor. What is said in the church basement stays in the church basement. We don't talk about civilian identities outside the room unless given permission. No powered demonstrations inside the perimeter. And please, if you're taking the subway home, do not use the emergency exits just because you still remember the override codes."

Chloe raised a gloved hand slightly. "I only did that once."

"You fried the turnstile, Chloe," Arthur noted. "The Transit Authority had to dispatch a repair crew."

"The turnstile stole my MetroCard," she muttered, taking another small bite of her jelly donut. "It was an act of legitimate self-defense."

"Moving on," Arthur said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Check-ins. How was everyone’s week? Any incidents? Any contact with former associates?"

The word associates hung in the damp air like heavy smoke. Nobody liked using the word mentors. Mentors implied guidance, care, and wisdom. Associates sounded like people you used to share an office with before they stole your pension and dumped your desk supplies in the trash.

Miller tapped his foot. "I got a letter from the Heroes' Benevolent Association on Thursday," he offered.

Diego tilted his head slightly. Penny stopped chewing her lip. Even Chloe paused, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth.

"And?" Arthur asked.

"And," Miller said, pulling a folded, rumpled piece of paper from his windbreaker, "they have officially denied my claim for secondary auditory damage caused by the Major’s sonic gauntlets."

"On what grounds?" Penny asked, her fingers twitching near her lap.

"Grounds that the sound waves were technically 'environmental collateral' rather than a direct occupational hazard," Miller read, his voice dripping with dry, acidic sarcasm. "They suggested I apply for standard Medicare, provided I can prove the hearing loss wasn't caused by my six months working in a bowling alley in 1979."

"Unbelievable," Chloe spat. "The Major used those gauntlets to blow up a tank three feet away from you!"

"Four feet," Miller corrected grimly. "I was holding his spare batteries."

"Did you appeal?" Arthur asked.

"With what lawyer, Artie? The ones who specialize in cape-law charge five hundred an hour just to answer the phone. The ones who work pro bono are all fresh out of NYU and think 'The Slipstream' was a bad Saturday morning cartoon from the dark ages. One kid asked me if I had any selfie footage from the battle of Midtown. I told him in 1981 we didn't have smartphones, we had concussion grenades and bad judgment."

Miller folded the letter back up and stuffed it deep into his pocket, out of sight. He took a long drink of his decaf, his face hardening into a familiar mask of stoic resignation. "It doesn't matter. I can still hear enough to know when the rain's coming. That's all a retired man needs."

Arthur looked around the circle. This was how every meeting started: the slow, grinding realization that the world had moved on, leaving them behind like obsolete machinery in an overgrown field.

When you were fifteen, wearing bright yellow Kevlar and standing on a rooftop beside a person who could fly or bend steel with their bare hands, you felt immortal. You believed the speeches about justice, duty, and the greater good. You didn't think about what happened when you turned thirty and your lumbar spine gave out from carrying three hundred pounds of tactical gear. You didn't think about what happened when your mentor decided you were getting too tall, too old, or too cynical to fit the brand, and quietly replaced you with a brighter, younger teenager who still believed the hype.

"Diego?" Arthur turned his head. "How's the arm?"

Diego slowly raised his right arm. He flexed his fingers. The skin on his forearm didn't wrinkle like normal skin; it shifted with a stiff, heavy drag, like wet clay being pushed through a mold.

"Stiff," Diego said, his deep voice rattling the loose metal latches on the folding chairs. "The weather."

"Are the density suppressors holding?" Arthur asked, referring to the heavy, silver wristbands Diego wore beneath his long sleeves—salvaged tech that Arthur and Chloe had cobbled together two years ago from spare parts to keep Diego's skin from becoming so heavy that his arm pulled itself out of its socket.

"Holding," Diego said. He paused, then added quietly, "Apex was on TV yesterday."

The basement fell completely silent. Even the leaky pipe in the back seemed to pause its dripping for a fraction of a second.

"What was he doing?" Penny asked softly.

"Opening a new youth center downtown," Diego said. He looked down at his grey, calloused hands resting on his knees. "He wore the red suit. The one with the gold trim."

"The suit you bought with your own stipend money back in '04?" Chloe snapped, her eyes flashing dangerous sparks of violet energy for a fraction of a second before she clamped her teeth together and forced her breathing to slow. "The one he took credit for commissioning?"

"He looked... good," Diego said plainly, without anger, without bitterness. That was the scariest thing about Diego. He wasn't angry anymore. He was just heavy. "He didn't look eighty. He looked fifty. The anti-aging serum he took in '08 is still working."

"Must be nice," Miller muttered into his coffee cup. "Some people get immortal. Some people get a walker."

"Did he mention you?" Penny asked gently.

Diego looked up at her, his dark eyes dull beneath his thick brow. "No. The reporter asked him about his early team. He said he always worked alone. Said it was safer that way. Less... baggage."

Chloe let out a sharp, nasty laugh that echoed off the damp concrete walls. "Baggage. Right. You took a plasma grenade for that man in Chicago, Diego. You spent three weeks in an induced coma while he was doing photo ops with the mayor."

"It's fine," Diego said, though his hand tightened into a massive fist, the density-suppressor on his wrist whining softly as the metal strained against his surging mass. "It was... a long time ago."

Arthur reached down and picked up his cup of coffee. He took a sip, swallowing the bland, lukewarm liquid. It offered no heat, no jolt, no comfort. It was just wet decaf in a cheap cup.

"It wasn't fine," Arthur said calmly, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. "None of it was fine, Diego. That's why we're sitting in a church basement on a Tuesday night drinking terrible coffee instead of lying to ourselves. He lied to you. The Sentinel lied to Chloe. The Falcon dropped Penny. The Major broke Miller’s hips and walked away with a pension from the Department of Defense. And Solarian..."

Arthur paused. He didn't speak about Solarian often.

"What about Solarian, Artie?" Miller asked quietly.

Arthur looked down at his left knee. Beneath his worn blue jeans, a jagged scar ran from his mid-thigh down to his shin—the result of being caught in the wake of Solarian’s atmospheric reentry maneuver when Arthur had been seventeen. Solarian hadn't checked to see if his sidekick was out of the drop zone before he broke the sound barrier. He had just wanted to make a grand entrance at the rally.

"Solarian sent me a Christmas card last year," Arthur said, a dry, humorless smile touching his lips. "It was pre-printed. His assistant signed it with an autopen. It included a coupon for ten percent off his signature line of protein powder."

Penny let out a small, quiet gasp. Chloe threw her half-eaten donut back into the box with a look of profound disgust.

"Ten percent?" Miller snorted. "Cheap bastard. The Major used to give me fruit baskets. Expiration dates were always three days away."

"The point," Arthur said, raising his voice slightly to bring the room back, "is that we are the ones left behind to put the pieces back together. They got the statues. They got the toy lines. They got the glowing obituaries in the Times when they finally kick the bucket. We got bad backs, unpayable medical debt, and lingering neurological quirks."

He held up his Styrofoam cup.

"So we drink decaf," Arthur continued. "Because if we drink the real stuff, we start thinking we can still fly. We start thinking we can run up the side of a building or jump in front of a bus for somebody who won't even remember our name ten years from now. Decaf keeps us grounded. Decaf reminds us that we are human now."

Silence settled over the basement once more. But this time, it felt slightly less cold. It was a shared silence, thick and protective, built from years of mutual endurance.

Diego nodded slowly, his fist unclenching. The metal suppressor on his wrist stopped whining. He reached down, picked up one of his homemade empanadas, and offered it across the circle to Arthur.

"Eat," Diego said simply. "It's beef."

Arthur took the empanada. It was heavy, dense, and slightly burnt on the edges, but it was warm. He took a bite. It tasted like cumin, onions, and far too much salt, but it was real.

"Thanks, Diego," Arthur said, chewing slowly. "It's good."

"It's dry," Chloe said, reaching over to grab one for herself anyway. "Pass the napkins, Penny."

Penny grabbed the paper napkins from the center table and passed them around. For the next ten minutes, nobody talked about heroes, leagues, or pensions. They sat in their circle of mismatched folding chairs, eating dense empanadas and drinking weak decaf while the rain began to patter against the high, narrow basement windows.

Outside, high above the city skyline, bright searchlights cut through the low-hanging clouds, painting the glowing, heroic insignia of the city's current protectors across the night sky.

Down in the basement, nobody looked up. Nobody cared. Arthur swallowed the last of his empanada, set his cup on the floor, and looked at his watch.

"All right," Arthur said, clearing his throat. "Who wants to go next? Penny? How's the job search going?"

Penny straightened up, took a deep breath, and began to speak. And for the next hour, in the quiet, damp gloom beneath St. Jude’s Church, the world’s most forgotten people listened to each other.

The metal storage unit smelled like copper, ozone, and seventy years of forgotten foam padding. It sat on the third floor of a windowless concrete monolith near the canal, tucked between a unit holding three generations of Christmas decorations and another jammed to the ceiling with court records from a bankrupt logistics firm.

Arthur unlocked the padlock with a brass key that had lost half its teeth to ignition tumblers thirty years ago. The corrugated door screeched upward on rusty rollers, letting in the dim orange haze of the hallway’s motion-activated sodium lights.

Inside sat the physical evidence of Impact Boy’s seven-year career.

There were no velvet display cases or spotlights. Solarian had taken those for the corporate headquarters in Midtown, where a glass box in the lobby held the prototype flight-harness Arthur had nearly drowned in during the Hudson Harbor crisis of 2002. What remained in Unit 314 was the scrap—the functional, non-licensed clutter that the legal department hadn't felt like cataloging.

Four crates of reinforced utility pouches, their nylon faded from bright crimson to the color of dried brick. Two broken grappling winches with stripped gears. A stack of laminated tactical maps covering tri-state transit lines that had been decommissioned before the turn of the century. And, tucked behind a stack of back-issue trade magazines Arthur had been featured in exactly twice, three extra metal folding chairs he had scavenged from the basement of the old Municipal Annex before it was demolished to make way for a luxury high-rise.

Arthur picked up one of the folding chairs. It had a squeaky rivet on the left cross-brace and a faded green vinyl seat with a three-inch tear taped over with duct tape. It was heavy, awkward, and completely lacking in narrative weight.

That was the thing about former glory: it was rarely made of silver or gold. Mostly, it was made of cold-rolled steel and bad vinyl.

He carried the chair out to the hallway, his left knee popping in rhythm with his steps. Behind him, down the hall, a elevator door chimed.

Miller stepped out, leaning heavily on his aluminum cane. He was wearing his postal windbreaker over a plaid flannel shirt, carrying a greasy paper bag from the deli on the corner.

"I figured I'd find you here," Miller said, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. "You've been missing from the diner for two hours. Sarah thought you fell down an escalator again."

"I was securing spare seating," Arthur said, setting the folding chair against the corrugated wall. "The hinge on the fourth chair in the basement is giving out. If Diego sits on it again, he’s going through the linoleum."

Miller shuffled forward, stopping to inspect the chair with the critical eye of a man who had spent forty years evaluating government-issue furniture. He poked the vinyl with the rubber tip of his cane. "This is from the Annex. They bought these back in '78. Cheap tubing. Frame will twist if you put more than two hundred pounds on it."

"It's better than the church's plastic ones," Arthur countered. "The plastic ones bow under ambient heat."

Miller grunted, leaning his shoulder against the storage unit frame and peering into the dark interior. His eyes lingered on a dull silver helmet sitting atop a box of cracked leather boots. The helmet had no visor, just a pair of narrow eye-slits and a dent on the crown where a kinetic blast had sheared off the antenna.

"You still got the original helmet," Miller said softly.

"It's not original," Arthur replied, leaning against the doorframe. "It's the mark-three. The mark-one shattered when Solarian miscalculated the drag radius during the Newark intercept. The mark-two was seized as evidence by the SEC during the accounting audit of '06."

"Still," Miller muttered, pulling a cold pastrami sandwich from his paper bag and tearing off a piece of the crust. "Looks better than mine. The Major's estate lawyers made me return the Slipstream visor. Said the optic array contained proprietary head-up display tech that belonged to the trust. Left me with the leather cap and the goggles from the pilot phase. I look like an extra from a silent movie about barnstormers."

"You looked like an extra back then, too," Arthur noted without malice. "We all did. That was the point. Bright colors so the press photographers could tell who was taking the punch and who was delivering it."

Miller chewed slowly, his gaze fixed on the back wall of the storage locker. "We had five thousand people at the Municipal Plaza parade after the Iron Cadre raid. Five thousand. The Mayor gave me a key to the city. It wasn't even a real key. It was a piece of painted brass that turned my thumb green if I held it longer than five minutes."

"Where is it now?"

"Pawned it in '92," Miller said, swallowing. "Got forty bucks for it. Used it to buy a new alternator for my Buick."

Arthur didn't answer. He turned back into the unit, shifting a box of faded blueprints to expose a low wooden chest. He popped the latches with a dull snap. Inside lay his original shoulder guards—heavy plates of high-impact composite painted in the high-visibility yellow and deep blue of Solarian’s primary color scheme. The paint was spider-webbed with fine cracks, yellowed by age and exposure to urban smog.

When you were sixteen and standing under the stadium lights at a victory rally, those shoulder guards felt like armor forged by gods. You stood three inches taller. You held your chin up because the collar forced your head back, ensuring that every camera angle caught the jawline of the junior hero standing dutifully two paces behind the main event.

Now, holding the left guard in his hand, Arthur was struck by how light it was. It wasn't mythical alloy. It was injection-molded plastic lined with three-quarter-inch closed-cell foam—the same stuff they used to make high-end goalie pads for high school hockey players.

"You ever think about selling the rest of it?" Miller asked, nodding toward the chest. "There's collectors on the internet now. Weird kids who weren't even born when the Major retired. They buy up the old sidekick stuff. Call it 'bronze-age memorabilia.' Saw a pair of static-dampening boots from the mid-nineties go for twelve hundred bucks on an auction site last month."

"Who bought them?"

"Some guy in Ohio who runs a mid-tier tech blog," Miller said, taking another bite of pastrami. "He's got a basement full of it. Keeps them in glass boxes with humidity controls."

Arthur laid the shoulder guard back into the chest and lowered the lid. "That sounds worse than this."

"At least his basement has heating," Miller pointed out. "This place smells like a damp basement that gave up."

They stood in silence for a moment while the hallway light timed out, plunging them into grey darkness until Arthur waved a hand to re-trigger the infrared sensor. The sodium tube flickered back to life with a buzz that vibrated straight into the metal of Arthur's knee pin.

"Penny called me this morning," Miller said, changing the subject.

Arthur looked up. "Is she okay?"

"She's having trouble with her landlord. He found her old line-gun launcher in the back of her closet during a plumbing inspection. He's threatening to report her to the Municipal Safety Board for housing unregistered tactical hardware."

"The line-gun isn't tactical," Arthur said, his voice flat. "It's a spring-loaded piton thrower. It has less force than a commercial nail gun."

"Doesn't matter to a landlord who wants an excuse to raise the rent by three hundred dollars," Miller said. "She was crying, Artie. She thinks they're going to put her on the registry again."

The registry. The word carried a chill that no storage unit hallway could match. In the late eighties, after the Third City Accord, the government had decreed that anyone who had undergone kinetic enhancement, serum exposure, or tactical training under a licensed hero had to maintain a active address with the Department of Heroic Logistics. If you were an active hero, the city paid your registration fees. If you were a retired sidekick, you paid fifty dollars a year for the privilege of letting the police know exactly where you were sleeping in case a rogue meta-human broke out of the local maximum-security facility and needed a hostage with historical value.

"I'll call her," Arthur said, picking up the folding chair again. "I still have the registration exemption form from '12. The one that clarifies that sub-tier support staff without active bio-enhancements are exempt from tactical hardware surcharges."

"She had the gliders," Miller reminded him. "They'll argue the gliders count as specialized aerial equipment."

"The gliders were made of fiberglass and kite string," Arthur said, locking the storage unit door with a decisive click. "I'll handle it."

They walked toward the elevator, Miller’s cane making a steady, metallic clack-tap against the polished concrete floor. Behind them, the sodium lights flickered off one by one, returning Unit 314 to the quiet dark.

By three o'clock that afternoon, Arthur was sitting in a booth at the back of Carl’s Diner, three blocks down from the transit terminal. The diner was a relics showcase of its own: formica counters worn down to the grey substrate where thousands of elbows had rested, an jukebox that played only country tracks from 1988, and a coffee pot that tasted faintly of dish soap.

Across from him sat Penny, her hands tightly wrapped around a mug of lukewarm chamomile tea. She was wearing three layers of sweaters despite the mild autumn weather outside, her shoulders pulled tight toward her ears like a bird trying to pull its head into its feathers.

"He said he was going to call the building inspector," Penny whispered, her eyes darting toward the counter where Carl was wiping down the pie case. "He said the line-gun constituted a 'class-two mechanical hazard.'"

Arthur set a red-backed plastic folder on the table between them. He slid it across the formica with one finger.

"Page three," Arthur said. "Section four, paragraph B. Municipal Code 44-A regarding decommissioned personal mobility devices. If the propellant charge has been removed—which yours was six years ago when Chloe used the compressed air canister to clean her computer keyboard—it’s legally classified as athletic equipment. Same as a pair of old skis or a mountain bike."

Penny picked up the paper, her fingers trembling slightly. She scanned the text, her lips moving as she read. "Are you sure? He looked really confident. He had a clip-board."

"Landlords always have clipboards," Arthur said, taking a sip of his black coffee—the real stuff, because he wasn't at the church and he needed the caffeine to deal with municipal paperwork. "It’s part of the uniform. It makes them look like inspectors. He doesn't want to call the Board, Penny. If he calls the Board, they have to inspect the building's wiring, and I know for a fact that his electrical boxes haven't been updated since Solarian flew over the neighborhood during the Bicentennial."

Penny let out a long, slow breath, her shoulders dropping half an inch. She set the folder down and leaned back against the vinyl booth. "I just... I can't go back to the office downtown, Arthur. You know how it is down there. You sit in that waiting room on the fourth floor for three hours while some twenty-two-year-old clerk with a degree in Heroic Communications looks at your file and asks why you didn't 'maintain your operational readiness.'"

"They're trained to say that," Arthur said. "It cuts down on pension inquiries."

"I was nineteen when I fell," Penny said quietly, looking down into her tea. "I wasn't an 'operational asset.' I was a kid who was good at gymnastics and thought the Falcon was the coolest guy on television. I thought if I worked hard enough, he'd let me design my own suit color scheme. I wanted blue. He said blue didn't test well with suburban focus groups."

"Yellow is more visible against asphalt," Arthur noted pragmatically. "Better for search-and-rescue."

"Better for television," Penny corrected. "Yellow stands out against the dark red of his cape."

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, circular object no larger than a silver dollar. She set it on the table. It was a brass emblem—a stylized bird’s wing with a tiny notch missing near the tip where a piece of shrapnel had clipped it during the 2017 harbor defense.

"I found this in my laundry basket on Sunday," she said. "I thought I threw all of them away after the hospital."

"Why didn't you?"

"I don't know," she said, her voice dropping so low it was almost lost beneath the hum of the diner's refrigerator. "Sometimes I pick it up and I remember what it felt like to be three hundred feet in the air. Before the harness snapped. Just for five seconds, when the wind hit the wings and you weren't on the ground. It was... it was loud, Arthur. But it was clean."

Arthur looked at the brass wing. He remembered the feeling. It wasn't the flying—Solarian did the flying, while Arthur hung from a reinforced leather tether six feet below him, clutching a directional tracker and trying not to vomit into his face mask. It was the moment right after the crisis was over, when the smoke cleared and the crowd down on the street started to roar.

For about thirty seconds, before the PR handlers moved in to push the sidekicks out of the camera frame, you felt like you were part of something that mattered. You weren't just a kid from Queens with a bad knee and a father who worked three jobs; you were part of the sky.

"It wasn't clean," Arthur said softly, his voice firm. "It was just high up."

Penny looked at him, then down at the emblem. Slowly, she picked it up and dropped it back into her pocket.

"Miller said you were moving furniture today," she said, her voice returning to its normal, jumpy cadence.

"Just chairs," Arthur said. "We need extra seating for next week. Chloe thinks a guy who used to work with The Vanguard might show up."

Penny perked up slightly. "The Vanguard? Which one? The guy with the shield or the one who had the kinetic boots?"

"The kinetic boots," Arthur said. "Word is he's living out of his van near the docks. Chloe saw him trying to sell his old shock-absorbers to a scrap yard."

"God," Penny whispered. "Kinetic boots kill the ankles by forty. He must be in terrible shape."

"He is," Arthur said. "Which means he’s going to need a chair with good lumbar support."

He reached for his coffee cup, found it empty, and set it back down in the saucer with a small, metallic click that sounded remarkably like the latch on a broken utility belt.

"Finish your tea, Penny," Arthur said, sliding the red folder closer to her side of the table. "Then we're going to take this down to your landlord's office and show him section four, paragraph B. And if he gives us any trouble, I'll tell him about the illegal junction box in his basement."

Penny offered a tiny, genuine smile—the first one Arthur had seen on her face in three weeks. "You're really good at the paperwork part of this, Arthur."

"I had eight years of training," Arthur said, getting up from the booth and reaching for his coat. "Solarian never signed his own tax forms. Somebody had to know where the receipts were buried."

He put his jacket on, adjusted the collar to hide the faint grey line where his old mask-strap had rubbed the skin raw twenty years ago, and held the door open for her as they stepped out into the cold autumn wind.

Down the block, a city bus rolled by, its side painted with a massive, fifty-foot advertisement for the latest superhero film. A man in a shining blue suit stood heroically atop a burning building, his teeth gleaming, his eyes fixed on a horizon that didn't exist.

Arthur didn't look at the bus. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk, watching for ice patches and cracked concrete, ensuring his boots found solid ground with every step.