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The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

One of the many things I'm really fixating on in the City Seventeam dynamics is this vibe of like, Gordon constantly running after Stain and trying to teach him how to be in the world while almost without him noticing Xar is doing a very similar thing to him. It's just oriented more towards trying to teach him to chill out and better adapt to the way things work in the gameworld rather than the more straightforward protectiveness Gordon has shown toward Stain.

It's really interesting too, bc you'd think that this would be the kind of dynamic where there might be competition of some kind (especially since Xar seems to want Gordon to think he's cool), but instead Xar seems to find Stain interesting in his own right and just sort of seamlessly adds guiding Gordon's behavior toward Stain to his aloof genius role model repertoire