Following up on the Full House will have to wait, there's a major robbery!

It was a pleasure to listen to Julia awkwardly flirting with the scraggly, slacker-looking small-time guitar player that she had invited up under the pretense of needing help moving furniture. She was naturally shy, but she was willing to do this for you without hesitation just to make sure you were spared some awkward parental smothering... she was a true friend. Sometimes you wondered if she secretly had a crush on you... part of you hoped she actually did. For the sake of your new career as Nightingale, though, she had no problem shacking up with other people. In fact, judging by the length of time that your super-sensitive hearing could hear the bedsprings squeaking and the three separate times Julia gave shrill cries of pleasure, you were almost a little jealous.

And better yet, using Julia as a lure paid dividends. While Julia alternated between working on articles and playing games on her computer, her boy toy strummed his guitar (poorly) in the bed... and when the phone rang, he picked it up and reported that the person on the other line had hung up.

Your own, more serious work came along well also. Power armor was the easiest to prepare for - you'd already had something in the works for mechanized threats, a special shuriken made of solidified ferrofluid that would splatter over a hard target like a paintball, then stubbornly cling with a powerful magnetic field - that could disable eyepieces, gum up **** joints, and seal up gun barrels. Once defanged, a mechanical threat could be taken down with old fashioned explosives or trip-lines.

Holograms were easily countered by your powerset, but still needed a little gadgetry assistance. You had a special set of goggles that you and Julia had been working on that used ultrasonic vibration to see, which in addition to letting you see without light, also gave you very cool glowy white eyes when you wore them! The downside was that they were incredibly fragile.

Physical powerhouses you knew how to deal with; they could be brought down with gas, evasiveness, and a little patience. That left the ferrokinesis issue to deal with. That was the hardest nut to crack; although you could certainly fight just fine with your hands and feet and could pack a spare set of polymer fighting sticks that couldn't be turned against you, opponents who could throw a big unavoidable cloud of projectiles at you all at once were a major vulnerability of yours. You resolved to keep thinking about a way to counter that ability... maybe a creative use of your ferrofluid shuriken, or a modification of them, could shut his or her powers down somehow?

Then you went on to looking at the pattern of their crimes. After nearly five hours analyzing the places they'd hit, you came to the conclusion that they didn't have a pattern, or if they did, it was based on some variable you had no way of knowing. Considering their poker motif, they might very well be picking the targets at random. That meant that instead of setting up an ambush, you had **** but to try and confront them reactively when they happened to show their faces (err, masks). There was no way around that problem, so you were going to have to find a faster way to respond to their raids than running and grappling your way across rooftops. Although you were pretty well off financially, you weren't "casually buy a prototype VTOL jet aircraft and build a hidden urban hangar for it" rich. Perhaps some kind of collapsible ultralight aircraft? Ugh - your mother would definitely notice such a large withdrawal being made all at once on top of your regular living expenses, though.

When nighttime rolled around and you suited up as Nightingale once again, you decided that you hoped the Full House gang wasn't quite ready for their next heist either. Interestingly, your contacts said that Diamond-Nine, who you'd already beaten up once, was still imprisoned for the moment... but you couldn't rely on that meaning they weren't going to go ahead with their next hit.

The evening started out well, with you making your mark by trouncing a couple of rowdy drunken bikers trying to abduct a female office worker into a dark alleyway. Then a few groups of young hoods hotwiring cars that turned and ran or gave up at the first sign of you. Towards midnight, you foiled an all-female gang dressed in flamboyant punk attire breaking into and trying to vandalize a corporate headquarters - as you left them tied up, they shouted that you were a part of the "whore-logarchy", whatever that meant.

Just as you were about to take a break from gang-busting, you got a very interesting alert on the police scanner forwarded to you; major robbery at a luxury car dealership, multiple perpetrators and possible masked villains involved. Now that was the kind of daring, 'sexy' crime that ended up on the news whether it was stopped or not. Dropping into a convertible or the moon-roof of a limo in the midst of a high speed chase? You'd always wanted to try that.

Grappling up to the highest vantage point you could find and unfolding your zipline launcher (it was loaded with micro-wire, which was hard to see, would cut unprotected hands that tried to use it, and gave the zipline phenomenal range of over 100 meters in a compact package), you caught sight of several pairs of flashing police lights, and ahead of them, a convoy of stolen cars gradually leaving them in the dust. Whistling to yourself with prideful anticipation, you waited for them to enter onto the street you were watching over so that you could dramatically zipline down onto one of them... but just as you hopped off the building and began your descent, you saw an erratically moving object in the distance on an intercept course with the cars. It looked a bit like a motorcycle but it was too small and blurry to make out - a super? Could be that was a villain.

You had to make a split second decision; would you go with your initial plan to drop onto one of the stolen convertibles, or would you take the 'safe' option and throw down some caltrops, hopefully both flattening tires and tripping up the mysterious interloper?