Aftermath of your mission and back to being Miss Drakeson

As it so happened, you managed to spot a small-time purse snatching on the way back for the hat trick - but since you were still feeling rather sore, you chased the thug off with some throwing knives from a nearby rooftop rather than running him down and leaving him cuffed to a fire hydrant.

Unlike heroes with telepathy or x-ray vision, the more down-to-earth types like yourself needed to become aware of ongoing crimes the hard way, and the sluggish police couldn't be relied on for timely notice of even the most serious incidents. Therefore, a part of your patrol - usually in the second or third hour, when the hoods have gotten wise there's a heroine about and gone to ground - is dedicated to scattering more bugs and motion detectors in likely places to overhear trouble. In her memoirs, your mother, the original Nightingale, had always stressed that careful reconnaissance and alertness were every bit as important in foiling crimes as power and intimidation. You think you appreciated that lesson a little bit more.

As you leapt from rooftop to rooftop, approaching your penthouse hideout, you thought about what Molly - your mother - would think about this as a first patrol. She'd been pretty set against you moving here to Acropolis City. The cover story that you were a part-time freelance tech columnist filling your evenings with volunteering for charity work was little more than a polite fiction, and once the superheroine gossip columns started buzzing about the return of Nightingale's midnight crusading, Molly would be upset but not surprised.

You'd been inseparable from her when you were a child - after all, you were all she had left of the love of her life, Victor - but when you got into your rebellious teenage years, you'd begun drifting apart. She'd grown paranoid, and the influence of your snobbish, respectability-obsessed stepfather certainly didn't help. At first, the two of them had been cautiously, grudgingly allowing you to pursue martial arts and crime-fighting training... but you couldn't bear their incessant micromanaging, and it hadn't been too long before you broke off an went your own way, going to an out-of-state college and learning the ropes under some retired heroes (by trading on your mom's reputation, ironically).

Sometimes you wondered if it wasn't just the criminal underworld that was keeping secrets about your past and family from you. A ****, after all, is tragic, but most people would have gotten over it after twenty years. Sometimes you just think that it's a matter of your mother being a naturally morose, pessimistic personality. A few of the old capes you'd talked to said that she was prone to sulking and drama even during the 'golden years'. But... you had a feeling. Like a distant birdsong you couldn't separate from the white noise of the night-time breeze. Somehow you suspected there were things she hadn't been telling you.

Well; time enough for that later. You tapped in a code in a hidden entrance disguised as an air conditioner and dropped back down to your headquarters - you still hadn't decided if calling it your 'nest' was too corny. It was a standard high-tech command center, more compact than the sorts that an experienced hero would have, but still more than some of the more lazy and straightforward heroes would bother with. There was a large computer for analyzing evidence and monitoring tracking devices, a couple racks of specialized gadgets, a few training devices, and of course, first aid equipment.

More important than all that, however, was the sound of someone coming up behind you and rubbing a warm towel over your shoulders. Your good friend and collaborator Julia, a foreign student from Spain who you'd met in college and had managed to plead her way into becoming your mission control... setting up this command center had taken nearly six months even WITH her help. She was still learning the ropes too, but it was a lot better than nothing.

"Ohmigoodness, hold on there, Rikki." she said excitedly. "I'll get some bandages on that. Did... I mean... was there a bad guy?"

You turned to face Julia, smiling confidently. "A major brawl broken up, a wanted thief apprehended... not bad for a first night's flight." She was a little shorter and more petite than you, with wavy black hair tied back in a loose ponytail and thick-rimmed black glasses, usually dressed in an unassuming, librarian-style blouse with cravat and pencil skirt. Julia was a damn fine programmer, but more importantly, she was somebody to talk to without having to be "in character".

At the moment, your 'secret identity' as Rikki Drakeson was pretty thin. You submitted maybe one or two columns a month for your "job", and most of those were ghostwritten by Julia. That was how it had to be; as a low powered hero, most of your edge came from training and staying ahead of the curve of gadgetry. It was a good thing you had a tidy family fortune to call upon - placed into a trust fund long before your mom had remarried, fortunately, so there was no way to stop you using it on smoke bombs and tracking devices even if she or your stepfather disapproved.

Needless to say, as she patched up your back, Julia pumped you for every detail of your brush with danger. At first you tried to skip over what happened between going up to the VIP room and confronting Diamond, but she teased it out of you.

"Ooookay..." you sigh to her, emerging from behind a partition changed into an open-backed nightie, "so maybe things didn't go completely flawlessly. I wouldn't say that it was forcible or anything but... ahem. Sex was had. Couldn't have stopped the villainess any other way, you know? That's why I spent a few minutes 'cleaning up' in the bathroom as soon as I got here. But the way I see it... nobody is going to believe those two guys when they said they got to fuck me, right?"

When Julia stopped giggling and **** herself to look you in the eyes again, she shrugged. "Well, I figure most heroines will get themselves in a situation like that sooner or later. Maybe now that you've gotten it out of the way first, everything in your next fifty patrols will go perfectly smoothly and, ah, cleanly?"

You give a nervous laugh in return. "Time will tell, I guess. I swear I still see the tabloids doing the same time-worn slut shaming routine all the time, but I'm not sure anybody cares anymore. I'm sure I can get away with more than they could in the 'good old days', at least."

"Oh, that reminds me!" Julia raised a finger. "Mrs. Drakeson left another message while you were out. Said she just wanted to 'check up' on you again."

Sighing, you wave dismissively. "Ahhh... Time for some more phone tag. I'll call after she's gone to bed and put her off a couple more days while I come up with something convincing. Maybe I should start seeing someone so that I can claim he's keeping me busy..."

Julia cleared her throat. "Um... Isn't she going to figure out that you've put on the tights the first time one of those nightingale stickers shows up on the news?"

You just roll your eyes, though it's really directed at your family, not at Julia. "She already knows, Julia, but asking me about it directly isn't how she does these kinds of things. I'm _convinced _she wants me to give her the runaround." You go over to the headquarters' small sick-bed and lay down on it stomach-down. "Once the League accepts me as a full member, mom will gradually get used to the idea again once she sees I can handle it. And speaking of handling it - put Rikki Drakeson's latest computer reviews on the back burner. I'm going to need you to start digging up everything you can on a 'Full House Gang', and a figure called 'Sour Will'. These 'Full House' jokers seem pretty amateurish if the first one was anything to go by, but they're costumed, not common street thugs. When you've busted a whole group, who can still rightly call you a novice?" You stretch out, trying to get comfortable.

"Oh," you say as an afterthought, "and monitor the skin-mike on that guy I left in lockup. You may want to fast forward through the parts where he's talking about what he got to do with me," you add with a wry smile and a blush, "but I want to know if they have any more influential bosses that I might be able to follow up on."