Well, this is going to be awful

Jude grimaced at the mention. A part of him wondered if Broen was just doing it for shock value, but it was easy enough to push that away. He was serious. He'd thought about it.

"I kind of wondered about that with the hero stuff. Only, you know, the opposite direction."

He wouldn't be a cop, that was for sure.

Broen's question was easy enough. One really, really obvious screwup.

"You know how Diadem's blind? That's because I left him in a hallway where there was one of Glister's big explosives. I didn't think about it. Totally slipped my mind. And now he's... that."

Blind.

Or dead, technically.

It was a simple way of looking at things, but in a lot of ways Broen was a simple person. He wanted simple things. He wanted money. He wanted freedom. Really, he wanted money because money allowed for freedom.

He was simple.

Jude wished he was half as simple.

"Did you want a coffee?" Jude said with a glance over his shoulder, trying to make himself just work up to it. "And is this going to be an extended... lifecoaching?"

That was what it was, wasn't it?

It was almost, if you squinted and looked at it just right, kind of nice. Which initially made Jude feel suspicious, and then Jude felt bad about feeling suspicious, and then Jude felt bad about feeling bad for following his instincts, and then Jude just cut himself off entirely before he could go any farther down that line of thought.

"I had another thing," Jude said before he could start second guessing himself on that. "But the cafe probably isn't the place for that."

There went the good mood, and for a moment he wavered. Only you're not going to have a one hundred percent track record ringing in his ears kept him from backing off entirely.

"Just somewhere private. My place, your place. Somewhere not in the middle of a cafe." Jude's drink was still sitting there, but it was goooood and cold, more or less untouched.

Jude had thought--somewhat stupidly--that Broen would just teleport them. He had hsi belt, after all. Only now that he thought about it? The belt only seemed to work on him. Whether it'd been damaged or something else didn't matter, but apparently it was a one-person-thing.

Jude abandoned his coffee as he opted to simply, you know, head back to the house the old fashioned way.

—-

The scoutmaster in question's house was pretty nice. It wasn't fancy. It wasn't like something Gallant or even Basilio would have picked out. It was homey, and a bit too cramped for the number of people it was supposed to contain, but running at half capacity there was plenty of room. A year in, it showed obvious signs of being lived in, rather than just being a big house that was mostly there for decoration. Past the entrance way there was carpet for one, and Jude kicked his shoes off, almost immediately turning to head up the stairs.

"It's me, other me, Roa, Janelle, and Rory. We've got two hedgehogs that get their own rooms as well. Not sapient hedgehogs... just hedgehogs in a house with room to spare."