[ The tiny, hidden, fixed smile on Trickster's face doesn't so much as twitch at Riz's initial assessment, until Riz gets to the part about himself. It falters, then, and disappears, leaving his eyes nothing but intent and focused. That deep, sharp focus, always a little too much for the story of the kind of guy he was pretending to be, the flicker of his attention from one thing to another too swift and practised for someone who'd done all his conflict resolution at a keyboard.

He holds Riz's luminous, incisive gaze without flinching, sitting up straighter on his prison cot underneath the bright warning painted on the wall above him. ]

You're not like them.

[ It's a quick, almost dismissive assessment, something he says like he's sweeping it out of the way. Like he'd prefer they not linger on that judgment call, with all the things it might imply about Trickster's opinion of Riz.

He's a liar, and a manipulator, and a fraud. And he's not going to try to tug on the strings of a nascent friendship built on him lying to Riz since the moment he typed his first reply to him on the network to try to mitigate this. He's not willing to call it a scruple. It's just not his play. ]

And there are two answers to that. The first one, local? High hero population. Not exactly conducive to promoting teamwork if they found out what my old gig used to be. I prefer to stay under the radar.

[ He flexes his hands, sliding them up to rest on his thighs, the movement slow and telegraphed. Riz might not be pointing a gun at him anymore, but Trickster isn't interested in making him twitchy. Not that Riz seems twitchy. He seems like a compressed spring in a clockwork mechanism, wound tight, poised for motion under a hard metal shell of control. Trickster knows what that's like. ]

Second answer? Money. Resources. Access to things I couldn't get access to without this. And I had this thing about not wanting to be locked up under government quarantine for the rest of my life.

[ He doesn't have to nod at the words behind him. Riz is, again, a smart guy. ]

I wasn't lying about getting my power during a disaster. I just left out what it was. There are these things called Endbringers, back where I came from. City destroyers, superpowered giants that show up to kill everything they can reach before they're pushed back. She's one of them. And her trick is cause and effect. Precognition and setting up...cascades. It's not the initial attack, with her. It's how everyone who spends too long in the area and lives through it could be a bomb. Implanted conditioning, subtle nudges, and then one day some of the survivors start snapping. Assassinate a politician, poison a water supply, walk out into the street and start killing people. Always something with ripple effects.

So. Quarantine. They keep you isolated for a few months, monitoring. Put you on a list, make sure anyone you interact with longer than a bus ride is informed. They used to do tattoos. White birds. That didn't pan out, long term.

[ He delivers all of this almost nonchalantly, ending with a shrug. Purposeful defensive distance. ]

I wasn't interested in that lifestyle. Neither was my team. So we broke out. Took up the masks, made ourselves into a mercenary group. You'd be surprised how much of being an e-sports team transferred, actually. And there's your second answer.

[ It's a neat, plausible explanation. It's true, in the details. And it's leaving something out. There's a hole in it, an absence of an explanation for how deeply personal Krouse's antipathy for heroes seems to be. ]

It's Trickster in the mask, by the way. Not that I particularly care -

[ A low battery alarm beeps, somewhere not in the cell. Trickster tenses, his eyes strained at the corners in the holes of his mask.

And somewhere behind the walls, buried in concrete, something massive and organic thuds against solid, unyielding metal. Krouse flinches as tiny particles of grey dust shake off the wall at the back of the cell. ]

Don't worry about that. [ He says, quickly, his voice tight. ] It's - ambient.