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Summer 2021 Discovery Channel "So that was the secret of the Day of Wrath," said Fast-Forward into the camera, looking rather more serious than his usual mien, a cloud of black smoke rising from the still-smoldering building behind him. "Robot conspiracies, evil dopplegangers, and a plan for Earth that went much deeper than anybody expected it. When we picked this story for our finale, we never imagined we'd find anything like this - perhaps the most shocking moment in the history of...Supercrime!" - A day earlier....

One of the perks of having a show on the Discovery Channel was a generally cordial working relationship with public broadcasting systems all around the world. It was especially nice in cases like this, where instead of doing interviews on the street or in a rented conference room, they were able to line up a cozy little interview space at the FCTV studios right downtown. The SuperCrime crew had piled all their outdoor gear in an unobtrusive corner and taken an hour's break to thaw out, eat lunch and back up footage of the morning's work. Now Paige was redoing her makeup in front of a mirror in the corner, covering up a slight case of windburn with concealer while the crew did light tests and their waited for their guest to arrive. The studio was not very large, a living-room themed stage area big enough for perhaps four or five people maximum. It was set up with two comfortable chairs cheated towards the camera with a low table between them for coffee cups and looked very much like a thousand different news program sets. The crew already had all the cameras set up and ready to go, and the smell of coffee floated invitingly through the warm air.

It was another morning in Freedom City, and the SuperCrime! crew were back at the TV studio. Yesterday's cold, clear weather had turned into miserable, sleety drizzle today, enough that Paige had needed to change her clothes and redo her hair and makeup as soon as she arrived. Since the studio space they'd borrowed didn't include a dressing room, she wound up hiding behind the blue scrim pretending to be the set's side wall while wriggling into a dry SuperCrime jumpsuit. "Okay, I know we've got a bunch of these to run through, remind me who's up first today," she called. "First up this morning is Jill o' Cure," Fred reminded her from the other side of the curtain. "Healer type, local to Freedom City, was on the Interceptors during the infiltration." "Ah, right." Paige paused in her dressing a moment. This interview would be a little bit tricky, just by the nature of secret identities and the super community. Paige Cline knew Ellie Espadas through a score of Nicholson family nights and Saturday field trips over the years, but that was an entirely different thing from Paige Cline the television personality or Hologram knowing Jill o' Cure. That family guarded their identities well enough that Paige only knew because Richard and Will had gone to a party at Fleur de Joie's place once and met Ellie's brother Erik, who was Jack of all Blades. Secret identities could get very confusing but Paige did her best to respect them absolutely, even to the point of concealing them from her crew. Paige stepped out from behind the scrim and finished toweling her hair before going for a quick makeup retouch. "I'm going to keep this interview loose and see what she wants to say, then maybe prompt her a little," she explained to Fred. "Be ready if I call for a break, I don't know if we'll need one, but this stuff can be difficult. We all ready to go?" "Sure, just don't make us go outside again," Dave called from his camera. "We're ready to go whenever."

A few weeks after the events of Everything They're Asking For And More It had been an eventful few weeks of show prep, interrupted by chaperoning Holly's very first trip to Sanctuary with the rest of her Claremont class and Bryant waking up with one of those high fevers that goes and comes quickly in small children. But Richard and Paige had gotten a lot done despite all of that. They'd talked a little bit about their respective interviews, but they had been too busy to do their usual repeated comparing of notes. Some of what Richard had heard and seen had stuck with him, hanging like a dark cloud around his head as he sat at the dining room table, coffee in one hand and yellow legal pad with giveaway ballpoint pens in the other, writing names and question marks, a frown on his face.

January 2021 FCTV Studios Richard had honestly been a little surprised when Kinsley and Darin York had agreed to meet with him at the FCTV Studios instead of the home studio-cum-library where they usually shot their Tiktok videos. Normally conspiracy theory types liked the homey atmosphere of where they usually did their work, and got nervous about coming into the lion's den of a professional television studio, particularly the types who were worried about mind control rays on the television (which was BS, Paige had checked) or secret conspiracies in the media (which was right but they usually had no idea about who was conspiring to do what). Of course, that didn't apply to the two young Millennials who were out there in the studio getting set up with the crew right now. As they'd mentioned on the way in, they didn't even have a television. They were a married couple, a couple of years older than Will, who favored the sort of casual business attire (Darin, for example, was in white dress shirt and red tie) that made them look ready to work in one of the TV offices rather than be interviewed in it. Karen the social media girl (as Richard called her in his head) had sent their messages to the show's staff for years and Richard had found some of it, well, some of it interesting! For two kids who didn't have powers themselves, they'd figured out at least a few things that Richard knew for a fact were true. When his own makeup and hair were done, he thanked the staff because only an asshole doesn't do that, zipped out to the seat he preferred, in front of the green screen background that would provide color for the kids, then waited for them to make their appearance.

January 2021 The same message had gone out both electronically and mentally to the whole family - Hi, everybody. We need everyone who can make it home tonight for a family announcement. This is important; not a drill, 616. In other words, by words and the numeric code at the end, this wasn't a life-or-death immediate emergency -but it was certainly something serious. Downstairs in the living room, Holly Cline focused on the act of psionic creation while watching her stepbrother watch Daniel Tiger while sending a message out to her brother. I don't know what it is either; they're both locked down tight. But it must be something. Nana is here. Her eyes flicked over to her father, who with his eyebrows set and his arms folded across his chest, had that look that meant he wasn't talking about anything more serious than the weather. In the kitchen, Anna Cline was honestly looking better than Paige had seen her in years - she'd found a shade of blonde for her hair that wasn't quite so obviously a dye job, and her complexion had improved now that she was living somewhere that she didn't get quite so much sun. She had arrived not long after her summoning and had proceeded to pop a tater tot casserole in the oven freshly after walking in the door. It was - well, it was more grandmotherly than she usually acted.

Archetech February 2021 The meeting with Miss Americana's people had gone smoothly. They were professionals, she was a media icon; everybody knew how the game worked and how nobody was going to try and make her look stupid. She'd been the right person to call; a synthetic heroine who herself had been instrumental in defeating a robot invasion, and someone who had been on the show before and knew the ropes. And talking to her was certainly always very pleasant. "It's the damndest thing," Richard had warned his intern Terry, who was new to this particular heroine. "Paige swears it's not anything psychic, and it's not anything biochemical or magic either. Maybe it's just, you know, all that smartness being used to figure out how to talk to people, or...I don't know! Anyway, she's something else." They'd agreed to meet outside of Miss Americana's office, in a small gardened atrium on the Archetech campus that bore the name of a staffer killed in the Deep One attack a few years back. Richard had stopped to smell the flowers already though and was tossing a ball to himself, back and forth, as he kibitzed with the crew in between letting them get set up for the shoot. Miss A's intern was already there, but the grumpy-looking girl with the green and black hair was mostly observing.

February 2021 DuTemps Building "She's a great kid, really," Richard was commenting to David Longfellow as they waited for the arrival of their interview subject. Richard was standing, leaning against the wall and occasionally tossing a tennis ball across the room to himself and back again, trusting the crew to do their jobs and do them well. "She and Will were in the same class back in high school. Which means...she must be, what, almost thirty now? Jeez." He zipped over when his intern Terry arrived with coffee and gave him a million-dollar grin. "Thanks Ter!" A quick sip and "Triple sugar, niiice. " He had learned, a long time ago, under very different circumstances, that you were always, always nice to the people who worked for you, because they were the ones who watched your ass. He zipped back to the windows, looking out from their thirty-story height, and said, "I remember when this place was under construction, back in the day. They tore down a whole block that was mostly these little TV repair shops, but the...jeez." He shook his head. "Damn, I sound like an old fart. Sure, sound check," he said as Kelsey approached with the boom mike. "Let's do this." He was dressed for work, hair slicked back with just a few streaks of grey showing, sunglasses in his hand, wearing a safari vest over a black dress shirt and jeans. "You're not that old," Kelsey commented with a cheeky smile once they were done, "not as long as you sign my paychecks anyway!" He laughed as a ripple of laughter ran through the crew, and watched as the crew finished setting up, trusting them to do their jobs - and sure enough, with the windows behind him shaded enough that he wouldn't be backlit, he waited for Mali's arrival.

Under the circumstances, it was a beautiful day. The circumstances being Freedom City in early February, that meant clear skies and biting cold air that kept the SuperCrime crew of five huddled around their portable heater whenever they could get a break from setting up the outside shoot. It definitely wasn't the weirdest or most uncomfortable circumstances they'd shot in over the past fifteen years, but they were none of them as young as they used to be, not even Paige herself. They'd set up a small working area in a quiet park, a couple of portable chairs, several cameras, and a little canopy over a knot of equipment and monitors. "All right," Paige began, checking things off on her tablet as she spoke. "This looks like a standard two-camera interview, over the shoulder and with the overhead boom plus lavs. Is that all set to go, Fred?" The second unit director nodded, barely looking up from his own tablet. "I'm going to be doubling Kelsey on sound to try and kill some of this wind noise, but we'll have to handle it in post. It's too bad there aren't fifty thousand buildings in this city we could've gone inside for this..." Paige laughed. "His first suggestion was on a rooftop of one of those buildings; this was a compromise. Speaking of which, what's the hot dog situation?" "I sent Vivi to the cart," Fred confirmed, "they'll be back any minute. We'll have to keep this tight," he reminded her, "we still have that other one this afternoon." "No problem," Paige assured him blithely. "We've done this a million times."

(Shortly after "The Old Girl is Dying on Her Feet") Later that night, with all the dinner dishes done and the guests settled and the kids long asleep, Paige settled herself at the vanity table in the master bedroom. Richard's powers may have kept them both young, but that didn't mean she could afford to skimp on the moisturizing routine. "So," she began, looking at Richard in the mirror as she began unscrewing jars, "we've reassured everybody that the world's not ending. We've told the kids and your mom that nothing's going to change, we've told the crew we're not laying anybody off. I guess it's time for us to figure out what we're actually going to do."