T.C. Elston, a low-level superhero, spooks her downstairs neighbor, Celia, by jumping out a window.
She falls past Celia's floor but swoops up and away while she's out of sight.
The terrified Celia reports an emergency but of course there's no body to be found.
So it takes fifteen minutes to figure out what happened.
Celia had no idea that TC lived one floor above her, and windows were open up and down the building, so they started at the top, knocking on windows and hovering down one by one. And they ended up having to talk to everybody in the window column, until TC's UPSTAIRS neighbor was able to guess what happened. Then they were able to justify a neighborhood scan, but that came up empty, so they escalated to a city scan! And there she was, hanging out at an ice cream shop, because that's all she had left to do. Get some ice cream.
If T.C. had been leaping out to pursue a bad guy it would be a blameless non-event, there would be no question. But she was just screwing around! There was no reason to rush out so quickly that she needed to go through the window, and even if the ice cream had been melting and she needed to hurry, there was no need for her to fall past anyone's field of vision. It's her responsibility not to scare people with her uncommon abilities. Fifteen minutes of making Celia think she had witnessed a suicide -- essentially a cruel prank. Too long, too weak to just wipe out and call a blank. But not intentional. And not a repeat, or at risk of repeats. Right, TC?
A week later Celia is still thinking about it so she goes to a therapist to have the memory removed entirely. Then all she remembers is that she met her upstairs neighbor once, somehow, and the next time she runs into TC in the building, she thinks "How come I didn't try to fuck her?" And TC, by that point, had forgotten naturally. You can guess what happened next. Most people never mod their memory at all -- but sometimes a pair of people end up meeting and sleeping together and breaking up many, many times in a row and they never even know it.
In the distance we can see the dominating FnissCo towers putting out an unusual amount of pollution. They must have had an incident on the factory floor. But they haven't registered any emergency? That's normal. Wavefront municipal stays out of Fniss affairs.
