Wyrm (A Worm Quest)

Alright, second quest, hopefully with shorter replies, a better upgrade schedule and various other improvements. I haven't abandoned the other one, but I am stuck and looking for something slightly less taxing.

No, this is not Lung's power, but it may be related. It also isn't quite Crouching Tiger, although it was probably inspired by it.

It is not an incredibly dark quest either, despite the start.


With that out of the way...



Cracks 1.1



When I woke up in the hospital they told me it was a miracle.

Some kind of miracle, sure.

Got me out of the hospital, but Dad was still gone. I'd seen the news. They were still reporting on it a week later. I'd seen the bodies. I wanted to tell myself I was dreaming. Everything was a dream. The truck, the pain, the screaming and buzzing noise I could never forget. More pain than I'd ever felt before, like thing I could remember. Dad screaming.

But he was still gone. I was still standing in Kurt and Lacey's bathroom while social services were trying to decide where to put me. Emma's dad had offered, but I don't know what happened. Emma was making me into a joke at school or just ignored me altogether. She'd just dropped me for Sophia like I was nothing. Like I meant nothing, like all of those years meant absolutely nothing at all! Even if I hadn't talked to Kurt and Lacey for years before the accident, they were better than that.

Which was why I was standing in their bathroom now.

Staring at myself in the mirror, at my old self like I'd always been. Like nothing was wrong at all. Like I wasn't starving every minute of the day now, like Dad was still there about to come in and take me home, like I hadn't eaten half the contents of Kurt and Lacey's fridge only to feel like I'd barely consumed a few bites, if that. Like trying to fill a bucket with a teaspoon. Just little old me. Even my hair was just fine. Just as if nothing ever happened. I didn't even have scars.

I'm sure the people in the hospital had to be suspicious. There was no little red dot when they pulled the IV. I'd felt it, bit it was just gone. No aches, no pains, no nothing, just hunger.

Hunger and the people at the hospital staring at me, like I was about to go off and slaughter them all like they said Dad had. He'd been in the union his whole life! Dad had turned down jobs, money, everything just to make this city a better place and everyone thought he was a villain now anyway. One of the worst the Bay had ever seen. Like nothing he'd done mattered. Sure, maybe we hadn't been talking ever since Mom died, maybe Dad had had problems, but dammit it was just getting better! They'd almost had a real conversation! Sure. They told me they had tried to just talk him down or take him down with containment foam if that didn't work, but Dad was still dead. The car had burned. I didn't even have a body to bury.

Taylor Hebert. Daughter of a supervillain. Even Lung didn't have kill order on him, but Dad might as well have had. Or maybe he did. The most feared Master since Heartbreaker. Including Heartbreaker.

I didn't even think he'd been conscious. Not really. I could still remember his screams, but it didn't matter.

300 people dead. Just like Dad. Just because some idiot decided he couldn't wait for a green light, but at least he was dead too. And I still had no idea what happened apart from something called a 'trigger event'. I wasn't even sure I wanted to know. I didn't even know whether I could afford a funeral or whether there was anything left to bury at all. They were trying to contact family, but Dad's parents were dead and Mom's didn't want to have anything to do with us. Not after what Dad had done. Maybe they would take me. Sell our house. Sell whatever was left of Dad now, whatever he'd owned, because if there was anything else left over of him at all, no one had told me. And even Kurt and Lacey were hesitant about a funeral, because people were still angry.

I wasn't sure his name had been leaked. I was afraid to ask.

They said Dad still had friends. We still had friends. That I might be able to keep the house, but I wasn't sure.

Nothing was sure.

The sink cracked under my fingers.

The sink cracked under my fingers and I'd barely felt it. I was still so hungry, I just felt numb, but Kurt and Lacey had been nice. They were trying. I shouldn't be breaking their sink. Not even if I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and if it had broken almost on its own.

I stepped back and stared at my hand. It wasn't even red. And when I tried to concentrate, touched the sink again, it felt brittle. Hard, but more like ice, thin ice. I felt the resistance. It wasn't easy, but when I tried, when I really tried, it cracked the same way it had before. Sending spiderwebs out from my hand, fragments of it coming off with my fingers when I lifted my hand to stare.

The remaining reddness faded into nothing in front of my eyes. Bits of ceramic fell to the ground and while it had been effort, while I had felt that, it should never just have gone away this fast. It shouldn't, but it did.

And I suddenly had another suspicion, why the people at the hospital had been staring, but I would need to test that.

Something inside me felt warm.


[ ] It might hurt, but right now I didn't care. If I could heal, I needed to test it, which meant I needed to go to the kitchen and grab a knife

[ ] I'd just cracked the sink with my bare hand. I had to either go come up with some kind of excuse or apologize or both, but Kurt and Lacey wouldn't be back for a while and there were some building materials in the shed outside. If I had some kind of super strength, I needed to test that.


Hunger: 10/100
Humanity: 70/100

Cracks 1.2


[X] I'd just cracked the sink with my bare hand. I had to either go come up with some kind of excuse or apologize or both, but Kurt and Lacey wouldn't be back for a while and there were some building materials in the shed outside. If I had some kind of super strength, I needed to test that.



I looked down at the small pieces of ceramic on the floor and nudged them under the bathmat, for all the good that would do. It at least looked a little less messy, even if I felt guilty anyway.

But even if I wanted to say something, Kurt and Lacey weren't there right now. Work to do, while I got some time off from school. At least no one had told me to go and I had no idea what I had to go back to anyway. Emma had told me to leave her alone and made sure I knew she meant it. I'd asked why she looked tired, what had happened to her and why she'd stopped answering my calls, but she and her new friend just got worse if I kept trying. I barely knew anyone else at Winslow and it wasn't as if classes were difficult or anything.

Which meant it was just before noon, I had spent half the morning asleep, and I would have plenty of time left over to do some testing.

It might help. Thinking about anything but Dad.

With one more look at my now completely unharmed hand, I went downstairs and grabbed the keys to the garden shed. I'd had to search for a while, they might have said their home was mine, but it wasn't. Not really. I still had no idea where anything was, but at least I found the keys. And said keys plus house keys in hand, I was staring into a garden that had seen better days. Much like most of the city, even if the coloured leaves piling up all over hid some of the neglect, the grass was still long and interspersed with random other plants. The flowerbeds were still filled with something or other in no particular order, overflowing and partially spreading out onto the lawn. It wasn't a very big lawn either, but it was there, between me and the slightly run down shed. The by far newest and best maintained part of which was a heavy padlock.

I probably shouldn't be surprised about that.

Some part of me wanted to try cracking the lock open with my bare hands, but I'd damaged enough of their stuff and was enough of a burden on Kurt and Lacey already. Pushing the deadbolt aside was remarkably easy despite a small patina of rust and hopefully I would find some better target for testing inside. If I were at home, I would just have gone down to the basement, but Kurt and Lacey didn't have one and I only knew there were some building supplies in the shed because they had mentioned postponing some project just after I got here.

From the looks of it, they had been postponing it for a while. There was a thin layer of dust on everything, thicker in some places and it was dark, but not too dark to see properly, so I didn't bother with the lights.

Instead I looked around. Planks of wood, a shelf filled with tools, a workbench, gardening tools, an ancient lawnmower, buckets, bags, a grill, saws, chisels, old bricks, long metal rods that looked like they had been salvaged from something or other, and a few full bags of what was either cement or sand or something similar on the floor. At least the topmost one did contain cement. There was barely any room to walk.

But I didn't have to walk far to grab a plank leaning against the wall. Looked like it had been burned at some point but I didn't think it had been damaged very much. I really hoped they wouldn't mind. Or that I could somehow buy them a replacement in time, because when I tried pulling it towards me, my fingers seemed to interpret 'getting a good grip' as digging themselves into the wood. Not far and I definitely felt the resistance, but far enough to leave dents. And when I tried to concentrate, they dug in a lot further. Until I was basically holding a cylinder of splintering, compressed wood in one hand and couldn't press it down any further.

At least the wood had some cohesion left over. Enough to pull the surprisingly light plank over and stare at the damage I'd done to it. I definitely wasn't Alexandria, but there was absolutely no way I could have done that before. The wood just broke under my fingers, stiff, but not stiff enough until I saw splinters. I didn't even try breaking it over my knee, the result would be obvious. But on the other hand, my palm did hurt a bit, at least for a while and it was red for some seconds afterwards, so I definitely wasn't invulnerable. It had been effort to crush the plank and Glory Girl could do this to doorknobs without trying.

Not to mention I was still starving, to the point where even the wood in my hands looked tasty. There was still something inside the fridge but…

I would think about that when I got done testing and put the plank away before I had any ore weird thoughts of taking a bite out of it. There was no way wood had any part in a healthy diet.

Instead I reached in a bit further and after about a minute of manoeuvring, I had one of the metal rods in my hands, longer than I was tall, but still pretty light. Because I couldn't just be that strong, this felt like weighed as much as a toy! Like some kind of foam bat but not a steel rod thicker than my thumb. Well maybe not a foam bat but still. This was easy. It was light and if I took it between two hands, placing them maybe a foot apart, near the middle…
Okay, that was not easy. This time, I definitely felt my muscles pushing and pulling against the metal and the way the grooves all along the rod dug themselves into my fingers. But little by little it bent. And when I strained myself, I could make it bend a bit faster too. Just like I could bend it back into shape. Or mostly into shape anyway, it still looked a bit off when I put the thing back. The grooves looked slightly off and I could still see where I had bent it. My arms didn't hurt, I wasn't even winded, but I had to sit down for a bit.

I knew exactly how I had survived that car crash now. What kind of miracle had saved me.

Even if it made metal rods seem like food items and made me want to take a bit out of that too. As if the wood wasn't a bad enough idea already. I was hungry, but that couldn't possibly be a good idea.

I stepped over the bricks – maybe I should try punching some at some point but I would have to stack them up somewhere. Or just find an abandoned building with enough damage that no one would notice or care. My target was the cement bag instead. I had to swallow and tell myself it would be fine. The thing weighed a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds I also wanted to eat, why did absolutely everything start looking like food now? I grabbed it before I could have any more stupid ideas, picked it off the ground and almost fell over.

Bricks scattered over the floor and I was desperately trying to hold my balance for a moment before I figured it out. The bag might only feel kind of weighty, maybe like a big jug of milk, but it was very obviously throwing my balance way off anyway.

Possibly because it weighed about as much as I did.

I really didn't think this through. I needed something to eat, but…


[ ] The rest of the fridge it was. I felt bad, I shouldn't, and the pain helped distract me from other things but I was only getting hungrier. I had to go talk to them too. They should be home soon.
[ ] I needed to go out. Distract myself, maybe buy something with what little money I did have and then I had no idea. But they would be home soon and I didn't think I could make it back in time.
[ ] Write in


Hunger: 5/100
Humanity: 70/100