She sniffed. “Not so bad?”

“Yep. And we have a really good healthcare package. It has dental. And it even fully covers transitions, if that’s what you need.”

“Well, I…” She looked down and yelped. “I’m naked!”

“Um, yeah,” he said as she tried to cover her lower half. He looked around, but nothing nearby was clothing. “Sorry, but I don’t have any spare clothes for you. Angelica will, though.” A shadow passed overhead. “Oh, here she is. Good timing.”

Angelica dropped to the ground and stood up, brushing herself off. “I take it you’re the shifter?” she said, taking her trenchcoat off and handing it to the girl. She nodded as she put the coat on.

“Yes, ma’am. She is completely back to normal,” Enmachina said, placing just a tiny bit of emphasis on the she part of it.

Angelica raised an eyebrow, probably at the emphasis, and then she nodded. “Good. Now, I’m afraid I have to take you in,” Angelica said to the girl. “We’ll go to the police station first for a report, but then we’ll take you back to headquarters and keep you there.”

“Okay,” the girl said, curling up within the coat.

“Don’t worry,” Angelica said, her voice gentle. “I’ll be there with you. And I know something about facing the police while being trans.” She put an arm around the girl’s shoulder and looked up at Enmachina. “As for you, good work talking her down. Go back to HQ for a break and wait there.”

“Understood,” Enmachina said. He glanced down Main Street. Plenty of wreckage, but insurance would deal with it. He waited just long enough to see Angelica guiding the girl to a nearby police car, and then took off.

Hopefully, the girl would be all right. The legal system did tend to let people off the hook for the first time, but mostly because of sheer practicality. Prisons simply weren’t capable of holding supers for long, and spending time in prison increased the chances of becoming a villain. That was especially true of people who accidentally caused trouble: they felt victimized by the system, partly because they were.

Further complicating matters was that there was a chronic lack of power for most superteams. If someone remembered the superteam as someone who rescued them from their own power, then they’d be much more likely to join up. Plus, community service could be served working for the Corps, even if they weren’t active team members, so they had a chance to get a good feel for what it’d be like working there. For people who didn’t mean to do whatever they did, it was a good solution.

If someone did happen to cause trouble on purpose, the only choices were to keep them locked up or to execute them. Even then, execution had an annoying habit of failing because villains kept coming back from the dead. At least with prison, you knew when someone broke out and could take the proper precautions. You couldn’t prepare for someone returning to life. Besides, very few supervillains committed crimes that actually carried the death penalty, and nobody wanted to encourage the vigilante heroes to start murdering any harmless villains.

And so the heroes banded together to force lawmakers to focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment for borderline cases. Unfortunately, there wasn’t nearly as much support for doing it with the non-super part of the population. That was probably because there weren’t nearly as many consequences for letting them rot than with powered people. The prison system really was ridiculous in general. From for-profit prisons to the inhumane conditions, they were just--

A burst of pain, followed by numbness. Everything went dark, or was that just his systems? He was falling. The systems rebooted, just long enough for him to see the cameras and think, oh, that’s the ground, before they shut off again from the impact. He felt dizzy. Wait. Had that been an electric shock? His pacemaker! He tried to feel for it, but the suit was in the way. Would feeling it even help? He doubted it would.

Someone flipped him onto his back. Good. Someone was there to help. “I have a pacemaker,” he tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. Was his voice modulator even working? Hopefully they would just call an ambulance. But whoever it was began dragging him by the legs. That was wrong. Weren’t you supposed to leave someone in place for… a reason?

His camera flickered back on. The person holding his legs was dressed in a white robe with a gold cross on the front.

The world went dark again, and this time, it wasn’t the cameras shutting off.