But someone wanted the badge gone. A startup founder from the city called, politely at first, then with veiled threats, claiming an algorithm had glitched and that the marker belonged to their community manager. When legal notices followed, the town rallied. At the hearing, a hall full of neighbors testified: the gardener who'd learned to file a permit because of Renaetom's post, the teen who secured an internship after a critique Renaetom had tweeted, Mira the lighthouse keeper who swore Renaetom had saved her from a bad decision. The judge—tired of digital squabbles—ruled the badge could stay if Renaetom accepted no payment or formal endorsements because a symbol carries weight beyond its origin.
At first she tried to ignore it. She continued to feed her philodendron and to show up at the market. But the badge was a seed that sprouted assumptions: expertise where there was none, authority where there was only curiosity. People hung on sentences she hadn't even finished typing. Her landlord started screening tenants based on whether they had "influential contacts." The local café put her picture on a wall of "Notable Patrons," though she'd never been their regular.
Renaetom started treating the verification as a responsibility instead of an emblem. If people expected wisdom, she would learn to be wiser. She began attending town council meetings, listening to debates about the harbor dredging, the preservation of dunes, the elderly neighbor struggling with his bills. She wrote careful threads about local issues and started a small weekly column in the paper explaining municipal decisions in plain language. The more she used the badge to lift others' voices, the less it felt like theft.
Renaetom agreed. She kept the badge and became, in the town's odd way, a custodian of attention. People no longer believed every claim she made, but they trusted that when she spotlighted a problem, she would bring clarity, not noise. The blue check remained on her profile like a small lantern: not proof of perfection, but a promise that someone would listen.