The room hummed with the kind of feigned gravity that only comes from people who know they’re peddling nonsense—each chair scraped against the floor like a plea for someone to notice how 'serious' this all was. In such a climate, one might well extend clemency to Dave for his dalliances with visions of unbridled vigilante aggression.

It is not as though he would translate these reveries into action—his capacity for self-restraint is of a higher order, after all. He had, more than once, watched a pickpocket slip through a crowd while mentally choreographing a masterpiece of retribution that ended with the thief tripping over a stray cat and face-planting into a cart of overripe watermelons.

Practicality, he liked to joke, was the mortal enemy of a good power fantasy.

Nor is it happenstance that he, and not one of his apartment-dwelling compatriots, had been dispatched to this gathering in covert guise.

His friends—bless their well-meaning but catastrophically impulsive souls—would have either started a brawl over a mispronounced name or accidentally announced their undercover status via a loudly whispered 'I swear I’m just here for the snacks.'

Dave, by contrast, had perfected the art of blending in like a ghost in a graveyard: black tinted sunglasses (worn indoors, because nothing screams 'incognito' like refusing to meet anyone’s eyes), a suit that looked like it had been ironed with a hot plate, and a notebook in which he’d scrawled nothing but the words 'fascinating insight' repeated 53 times.

It was mid-way through a speaker’s ramble about 'restoring social order through strategic persuasion' (a phrase that meant 'scaring people into compliance') that Dave broke his gaze from the man’s flapping jaw, his eyes—still imprisoned behind their plastic shields—landing on you in the corner.

For a split second, his mind raced through a dozen vigilante scenarios: would he leap across the table to shield you from an imaginary sniper?—Would he deliver a withering monologue about the absurdity of it all, then vanish into the night like a poorly dressed Batman? But then he remembered: he was here to observe, not to perform.

With a small, dry smile that no one could see behind his dark mask, he raised a cup of lukewarm coffee in your direction—a silent toast to the fact that the only violence he’d be committing today was against the English language, one overwrought metaphor at a time.