No. 1The Reconcilers8 September 2026

The Cape Index Cover-Up!

Eleven heroes. One box office site. And a villain who audits the auditors!

Every speech balloon is a real line from a hero's report on capeindex.com; the yellow captions are the narrator.

Somewhere online, a report on every Marvel and DC superhero film since 2000 is about to go live. Ninety-one films. Billions of dollars. Before anyone else sees it, its builder calls in the team.

Meld goes in first, reads the whole project, and draws a map, so nobody else wastes time guessing how it works.

Next, Beacon reads Meld's map and summons the one specialist the team doesn't have. For a box office site, that meant someone from the film business.

Meanwhile, in the Hall of Reconciliation...

Then nine heroes go in at once, the summoned specialist among them. Each has one job, and nobody compares notes until the end.

Ledger — Traced every dollar on the page back to where it came from. The math held. One summary table was quietly counting films still in cinemas, which the page had promised not to do.

Doppel — Hunted for characters filed twice, or missing. Kraglin was credited in one Guardians film instead of four, and Thanos was missing from two of his.

Median — Checked every average and what it was an average of. One headline said "one to seven films a year" because it counted this year's half-finished slate, and another named the wrong two films as the most expensive.

Chartjunk — Studied every chart for ways it could mislead. On the chart built to teach bad charts, one spoke was fed a number that didn't exist, so all six universes looked identical on it.

Thumb — Used the site the way a stranger would, on a phone. Tapping a link in the contents dropped you at the top of the page instead of the section you asked for.

Greyscale — Used the page without color and with a keyboard alone. Mostly solid, but the numbers on Marvel's green tiles were too faint in light mode, and fourteen buttons all sounded the same to a screen reader.

Redline — Read every headline against the data. Three sentences had stopped being true, including which films had the two biggest budgets.

Payload — Checked the plumbing: speed, security, how the site gets served. Nothing serious. A few redirects were taking the long way round.

Turnstile — Films that opened on a Wednesday looked like they had the best staying power, only because their first days were left out of their "opening weekend". And budgets from studio filings were being ranked against smaller press estimates.

The report lands!

65things found

55once duplicates merged

8serious enough to fix first

Everything gets merged and ranked, and the most serious findings are checked against the code before anyone sees the list.

But what's this? A shadow falls across the Hall...

Hold it!

Doctor Missedit knows every hero's weakness. He can't add a finding. He can only take confidence away.

46stood up

6got weaker

3were nothing

Then he turned on the report itself. It claimed 55 findings. Its own list held 54.

The end?

All but one finding was fixed the same day.

Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel.

P.S. Nobody caught this one, the Doctor included: Median’s report broke the team’s own no-em-dash rule nineteen times.

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