Just wanted to let people know that I am not dead, and that updates shall occur soon, since the next part has been finished.
Going to post up the rough update over the weekend so voting is easier, give it a couple days for people to point out errors, then copy it over to these archive versions. Probably next Wednesday or so.
Just wanted to let people know that I am not dead, and that updates shall occur soon, since the next part has been finished.
Going to post up the rough update over the weekend so voting is easier, give it a couple days for people to point out errors, then copy it over to these archive versions. Probably next Wednesday or so.
Just wanted to let people know that I am not dead, and that updates shall occur soon, since the next part has been finished.
Going to post up the rough update over the weekend so voting is easier, give it a couple days for people to point out errors, then copy it over to these archive versions. Probably next Wednesday or so.
Okay, we are officially back in action.
Was hoping for another mild June/July melancholic slump like last year, but it wound up pretty average instead. At least I managed to get writing again before August like I'd worried about.
Anyway, I've read through this twice without finding anything wrong, and there haven't been any wrong word or wrong spelling issues brought up in the other thread.
Naturally that means someone here is going to point out half a dozen of them, but such is life.
---
MON FEB 28
When I finished my weight training in the morning, I grabbed one of the Tupperware full of stew Dad' made last night instead of bothering to make something else for breakfast. He'd set them up to slow cook while he was out with the guys, so all we had to do was partition it up and then eat. They were mostly for lunches and leftovers, in addition to having been dinner last night, but there were enough spares and they reheated fine. It'd been our first meal back in the kitchen after everything was moved back into place, but dad and I were still tiptoe-ing around each other. We stuck to simple topics; work, school, my shoes wearing thin and little tweaks to maybe help them last longer next time... nearly inconsequential small talk, before I took the rest of my food up to my room while I looked over my homework again.
After breakfast, I threw on the second of the pairs of shoe-a-likes, and started my run to school. This was interrupted partway there by a phone call. My cape phone, from an unknown number. I was entirely unsurprised that it was Lisa.
"You utter bitch." She grumbled. It was only the lack of real heat to her tone that had me waiting until she continued. "Do you have any idea how bad Regent gets when he thinks he's being smug? I had a headache. I was stuck there. Helpless, at his mercy." She whined.
"I mean, he seemed like a bit of an ass, but I didn't think-"
"I had to sit through having a sex fiend lecture me on watersports for an hour because of you." She near-deadpanned venomously.
"Water-?" Oh, ewww. "Uch, that dick!"
"Don't you try to commiserate with me you bumbling thundercunt, I am the victim, here! You've ruined me, Taylor. Take some goddamned responsibility." Lisa spat.
My emotions and reactions were trying to pull me in so many directions at once I wound up blanking out, instead. "Wait, what?"
Lisa heaved a sigh. "I wish I didn't need you…" She muttered, before her voice picked up again. "Listen, I didn't tell my team about you. Now he knows, and the others will soon. This is weird and dangerous, they don't talk to the boss like I do, but he still might figure something out. Please stop stalking my team, and please, I know you don't like them, but please, please, please, stop shitting all over The Rules?"
She sounded… honestly scared. "I'm sorry." I murmured. I wasn't sorry that I knew where their base was, or that I'd seen Regent's face, but… I'd gone too far last night. By the time I'd realized, I'd already confronted him. I had to get a handle on this need to crack open other people's secrets. At first I'd thought Lisa was just trying to protect herself, but after Cass mirrored the warnings, and now with her pleading… "I'll… try to be less stupid."
There were a few beats of silence, before Lisa sighed again. "You're not stupid, when you think. You're just… impatient and impulsive." I could hear her toning her choice of words down, so they wouldn't be as insulting. "Just… leave the Undersiders to me, for now? It's a… delicate situation."
"We're going to need to start working together eventually, it's kind of the whole point of teaming up for something." Even if we didn't stay teammates after Coil was gone. "But… I might not need to talk to them, to work with you. Not yet, like you said. We need to start planning though, and that means we need to know what the other can do, and bring to the table." Not everything, but enough… "And… I can't trust doing that over the phone."
A pause, before a sound of realization came over the line. "Your power doesn't work over the phone, I get it." I growled at her. "No, no! Me scary tricksy villain, I get it. You don't trust me, and I wouldn't trust you if my power didn't have such a good bead on you. Your powers, not so much, but you I barely need mine for."
I hated the neander-talk, her tone, and... there was something about being easy to read that stuck me the wrong way. I hated being played, and feeling like an easy mark. "Sorry for being predictable, I guess." I stopped and huffed out some of my frustration. Grousing at her wasn't going to do any good here. "Sorry, I just... don't like secrets. I hate hiding things, and..." Manipulating people. I didn't want to feel like I was using the rest of the Undersiders, by not telling them what was up. ...granted, I hadn't thought of that last night with Regent, I was just bulling ahead trying to get what I wanted then. I didn't say it, though. I figured Lisa would probably pick up on it anyway, but I didn't feel like admitting to anything more I'd messed up on, right now. "Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?"
There were a few low noises from her that the phone barely picked up. I could tell she was thinking, and considering what I'd said. She was almost certainly picking apart every word with her power, piecing together everything I hadn't said. The silence drew on almost to the point of frustration. "Well, you do owe me an hour of my life, back..." I scoffed, and she chuckled, the tone turning dark near the end. "Regent keeps doing this bullshit, when he thinks he can get away with it, and he's in the mood to torment me. The last time, he knew I had a migraine, so he made sure the girl he dragged back to the loft was a screamer..." She went on for a while, complaining about this and that thing he'd done. About how lazy he was, his fixations on video games and whatever else caught his fancy to the detriment of actually being anything close to a decent flatmate. Pretty early into it, I decided to pick my walk up to a jog to make sure I could get to school on time.
I asked why she put up with it, if she had her own place. I didn't let on that, barring powers, the situation didn't seem that bad. Even taking them into account, having to sit through having gross information shoved into her brain for an hour didn't sound too different from the times I'd been ambushed at lunch or after class, back at Winslow. The headaches made it a lot worse, but I was having trouble empathizing, since I didn't get migraines. She picked up on this of course, but that just darkened her tone and deepened her explanations in response. Her answer was simple though, the loft was a lot safer from her boss. He couldn't just send goons in to tap the place whenever he wanted, since there were usually at least two people around. So she kept most of her stuff there, which made it a better place to plan, and gave her some backup if she needed it.
The only person she'd really need it against was her boss, who could just call her in if he wanted anything, but I could understand the principle of it. Better the threat you could see and plan for, rather than the one snatching you out of your bed for an impromptu 'debriefing'.
She went on about her other teammates, too. Grue had his own apartment to sleep at, and spent at least a few hours a couple days a week padding time at his 'fake' civilian job, generating a paper trail for CPS to find when they came looking. He still checked in fairly often between that, wrangling his hellion of a sister, and doing odd jobs passed to him through Lisa; trying to at least make a meal at the loft every day or two. He felt he had to try and bond with Regent, and hold up going through the motions of maintaining dominance in the group, to keep Bitch in line.
Bitch, as I'd found out, was not nearly as sweet and caring as I'd hoped from prior descriptions. What time she spent at their base had more to do with pack dynamics than any real desire for a soft bed or a kitchen to cook hot food in. You couldn't make a play for 'top dog' if you weren't there, and you couldn't pitch in for emergencies if you were halfway across town. She also preferred to stick around to get her marching orders in person, rather than over the phone. Bitch had phones and used them when there wasn't any other option, but with even fewer social cues for her 'dog brain' -Lisa's words, when I'd asked- to latch onto, she hated trying to communicate that way. Nor did she like not being close enough to maul you, if she thought you were insulting her. That certainly didn't help my image of her, any. The rest of her time was spent at her makeshift kennels. Feeding, cleaning, retraining... she really didn't seem to enjoy anything else.
My normal 40-ish minute run to school was extended to almost ninety from my slower pace. I'd need to skip second breakfast and would only have time for a quick five-minute scrub-rinse instead of my normal quick locker room showers. I'm pretty sure Lisa got all of that from my brief 'I'm at school now, I'll talk to you later.' Still, she let me go without too much fuss.
---
When lunch rolled around, the usual suspects found themselves in their familiar places. Tracy was stalling to eat the lunch she'd packed for herself alone, Cassie was sitting with some of the Medhall kids again, and the Dallons were already through the line and claiming their tables. I considered sitting with them, but by the time I was through the line, they'd been swarmed by chattering socialites. Even the seat Amy usually tried to save for me was taken.
This lead me to casting my eyes around for somewhere else to sit. I spied a few familiar faces, and headed for a half-full table. Millie and Abby from Friday practice were on one side, Susan and an older boy I'd seen around but not interacted with on the other. As I closed in, Susan noticed and met my eyes, nodding my way. "Hey-" I started.
"Oh, you're a cute one, ain't'cha?" The boy asked merrily with a hint of an accent I couldn't place. It certainly wasn't the Boston drawl a solid third of Brockton natives had. He'd seen Susan, glanced behind him, spouted the line, and now he was grinning toothily. His cream-colored teeth were mostly straight. His lighter skin left a dusting of freckles over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. His light brown hair was short, but still curly. The smile was, if anything, brighter in his eyes. A dull green just a shade brighter than Dad's.
He was absolutely perfect.
A cold shard stabbing through my heart insisted I hate him unconditionally.
"Er, I, uh…" I stuttered, shy and fearful.
"Oh! You're the girl from that Friday thing, right?" I didn't think he'd shown up, I would've remembered it. Maybe I'd been pointed out to him? He was sitting with three girls who attended, after all. "I'm busy Fridays, but I've heard good things. Extracurriculars are important for finding your niche in a new school, you look to be in with both feet, already. Where'd you hail from, anyway? Central? West-side?" Oh god, he was asking about my old school. "…Clarendon?" Don't mention Winslow. "…Immaculata?" Don't mention Winslow. "…St. Michael's?" He glanced back at Susan, who gave a tiny shake of her head. "Uh, any hobbies 'sides hittin' folk?"
I didn't want to seem like the quiet, creepy girl I'd been shaped into at my old school, and this was a much less dangerous topic. "I like… reading?" I kept saying that, but I hadn't seriously made time for it all month, it felt less and less true anymore every time I said it. Maybe I should take a day next week to rip through a few books on my list.
He didn't seem to know what to do with how introspective I'd gotten after answering. "I…" He looked back at Susan, whose lips thinned and shoulder twitched. "…think maybe I should go. Talk to you later?" He got up, leaving my eyes trailing down his denim jacket, salmon pink shirt, and khaki pants.
A miserable noise burbled up from the back of my throat. "Are you okay?" Abby asked, now that she didn't feel like she might be interrupting someone else.
Susan scoffed. "Sit." She commanded, and I took the recently vacated place at her side. "The hell?" She asked in the same tone.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to run him off, I'm just… not good with… the flirting." I finally managed.
They all stared at me. Abby had a look of slowly dawning horror, Millie stifled a snort and immediately looked shameful about laughing at my expense, and for the first time since we'd met, Susan looked honestly confused. "He wasn't flirting." She stated a moment later.
"But…" I muttered.
She shook her head. "His name is Jeff Ferguson, and he is easily the most openly gay boy still at Arcadia."
"Oh." That explained their reactions, I guess. "So, he was just… being nice?"
"Yup." She said with a nod. "He's always been a social person. He was the head of the LGBT support club last year. Then their roster leaked, and a third of their members were hospitalized over the course of a week. The school shut them down 'for their safety' after that. Apparently it keeps happening every five years or so, once the students forget and start meeting even when the school tells them it's a bad idea. Now the girls all flock to Kara's group, and the boys stick it out in the closet until they can move away." She affected a mildly irritated shrug. "Sucks, but that's Brockton for you."
That sounded like something I'd expect more from Winslow than Arcadia. The corruption there was bleeding from the walls, you could no more ignore it than you could fix it. It had me wondering if Arcadia really was too good to be true, and just hid its corruption better. Also, wondering why he'd been sitting with them. "What about you?"
She gave me a darkly deadpan stare, and I realized the question was actually pretty rude. "I'm asexual." She answered anyway, turning her attention back to her food, continuing through a half-full bite. "Or near enough the distinction is semantic. I don't plan to date until college, either way."
I winced. "Ahh, sorry." She just kept chewing angrily. A bit desperate to change the subject, my mind drifted to the crowd that was still churning around Vicky's table. "So, what's with everyone today?" She glanced my way, quirking an eyebrow. The other two stalled their hushed murmuring. "Everyone's… energetic? I usually sit with Amy, but they're all crowded over. It's not just them, either. What's up?"
From the way she stared at me for a few moments, I could tell this was one of those social things I should've known already, if not for Winslow. Eventually she shrugged. "Simurgh parties." Abby flinched hard, and Millie briefly snapped at Susan. "What? You know I'm not wrong." She shot back, then turned fully to me. "Every time there's an Endbringer attack, especially the Simurgh, everyone gets terrified. Then a day or two later their emotions snap back the other way, relieved it isn't them, happy they're alive, distracting themselves from the fact that another city's getting new walls…" She trailed off, shaking her head. "Point is, weekend after an attack, there's always an upswing in the number of parties going on, with everyone wanting to use up all that energy, or fulfill that primal need to feel alive after a tragedy. There is a statistically significant increase in the number of new pregnancies recorded three to six weeks after every attack."
Ugh. I really didn't want to think of my classmates getting knocked up, but from where my question started, that's straight where my brain took that factoid. Now that I thought about it, Dad had gone out with Mark and… Neil? Dad went out with Dad Wave over the weekend, both that Saturday meetup, and drinking with the dockworkers yesterday. I'd assumed he was still coming down off the stress of me heading to Australia, but if everyone was doing it? Drinking with buddies was how adults partied, right?
Don't think about swinger parties, Taylor. Don't think about how mom was definitely bi, and dad is incredibly chill about sex things like me being on the pill. Don't think about-
Aaaand now I'm screaming internally.
"So, that's why?" I prompted, trying to fill my brain with anything else.
Susan nodded. "Most people were partying all weekend, so now they're excited to chat about their partying. It'll die down by Wednesday, if not tomorrow."
"And I guess you didn't bother?"
She shrugged. "Work and cheer practice all weekend."
"I don't… get invited to parties." Abby added.
"My… I didn't…" Millie tried.
"Parents?" Susan asked, and got a nod. "She's a Medhall kid, her folks drag her around. They probably stuck her at the kiddy table at some quiet semi-corporate shindig, again." Millie was quiet, shrinking in on herself again, but she nodded.
"Ah. I'm sorry." I could only imagine those, since neither of my parents brought me to anything like that. Mom probably hated whatever she'd have to do with Gram when she was younger, and intentionally avoided it with me. "So, you work?" I asked Susan.
"I'm a librarian." She said with a shrug.
I couldn't help the unladylike snort of both amusement and amazement. "What?"
She shrugged again, smirking this time. "Well, when you spend a couple years pulling your weight volunteering, a good boss will find a way to pay you for it. Started out at the public library, then I started cheer practice for an extracurricular that also counted as sports, so I didn't need the volunteering for my transcripts. Managed to get an internship at the university library to have an in, there. Couple years of that, and they bumped me and another intern to paid when someone quit." She leaned over, a tad conspiratorially, though her tone didn't reflect it. "He was black, and finally got that job at Northeast he wanted, in Boston." She shifted back and started picking at her food again. "Can't blame him, wanting out. Anyway, I work mornings on the weekend, study Saturday, cheer practice Sunday. A-squad has Saturdays, and I show up for that sometimes if I'm caught up. B-squad's nice. No away games, no flouncing in miniskirts for the crowd unless someone breaks a leg, but I'm still on the team as far as the papers care."
I shuddered. "I don't think I could stand the outfits at all, let alone in public."
She glanced my way, eyes briefly raking down. "You don't look bad. Not being top-heavy can be a good thing, especially for a couple spots in formation. Good center-mass is more important."
This time it was her cold analysis and curt dismissal of my body issues that set me off. I couldn't help feeling a little envious that she didn't seem to have those issues. On the other hand, it was uncanny to the point of revulsion. "What about you two? Any sports or clubs?" I asked to change the subject, and actually started properly digging into my lunch. I knew what classes they liked, and that Abby liked to draw, but I couldn't recall whether they were in any clubs.
It turned out, other than mine, not really. Millie liked music, and was considering band or choir, or one of the related clubs. Abby was still waffling on whether to pursue her art or not, but thought a club might be a decent way to progress, if she could actually get over the related social anxieties. Susan said she didn't want to commit any more of her free time to an actual club, but might've gone with a political one if she had free weekends to fall back on.
I asked about it, but Millie whined her name and stopped her. She scoffed and rolled her eyes, saying she'd spare me 'the rant' today, which put the other girls more at ease. I got the feeling she'd pushed people away with it before, whatever it was about. Either way, lunch was close enough to up, so we split up to get ready for our next classes.
---
I hadn't left the building yet when I got a text from Kara. 'Need a fvr. Meet rm 112?' It took me a moment to recall where that was, around the middle of the right side of the 'H' the building made from the air, on the ground floor. Flanked on one side by the administrative wing, and the other by the dedicated 'Sophomore wing' of the first floor, from what spilled down from not fitting on the second. This struck me as a tad odd, since I was pretty sure she was a Junior, and their classes were all on the second floor.
Still, she hadn't done anything to warrant undue paranoia since our... fight? Argument? Either way, it wasn't like she could spring an ambush I wouldn't see coming. I decided to go, making my way back in and basically just taking a right to head straight there. There were four girls in the room; Kara, Mandy, the little one whose name started with a 'T', and another I didn't recognize at all until I actually saw her.
When I came in, their little huddle turned my way, and I recognized her from the cafe when Kara and I had our talk. I pointed at her, my mouth hanging open and my face scrunched in a grimace as I tried to place her name. "Julia." She stated.
"Thank you." I replied, then pointed at the other two with Kara. "Tina," I'd recognized her purple hair. She nodded seriously at her name. "and Mandy." She just looked amused. I turned to Kara. "Okay, so, what's up?"
She winced, glancing at the others and fidgeting with her unlit phone for a moment. "You know Tracy Stover, right?"
"Yeeeah?" I drew the word out, trying to ponder what this could be about. Nothing weird seemed to be going on with her patterns, today. "Did something happen?"
"We had plans today, and she canceled." She shook her head. "That's not weird, but she's skipping out on everything these days, which is. We were supposed to meet here, but Tiff said her car was already gone when I asked." She hunched sadly, and the others shifted like they wanted to close ranks around her. "She has somewhere to be in a hurry after school, but won't talk about what it is. I don't think it's drugs or the gangs, we'd know if she was dating someone from Arcadia, and we've got feelers deep enough in most of the other schools that I'm pretty sure that's not what's going on. Unless it's someone older, that might be taking advantage of her again..." She muttered the last part quietly, then shook her head, hugging her arms to herself. "I just worry, then I hover, then I get all..." She spread her arms and waggled her fingers, biting her lip as she struggled to find the words.
"Helicopter mom~." Mandy sang with a grin.
Kara let out an indignant, grumpy huff at what seemed like an in-joke. The others chuckled, but I didn't get it beyond recognizing the stereotype and that it kind of fit her. It all sounded okay, wanting to check up on a friend and all, but... "Why me?" That cut off the smirking- Mandy and Julia- and tittering- Tina- at Kara's expense, as all four turned their attention back to me. "It's great you want to look out for her, and you've known her longer so I'm not going to comment on any potential smothering right now, but... why ask me in particular to do this?"
She hummed thoughtfully, then gave me a more serious look. "It's because I do have to ask, with you." She waved off my immediate question before I could utter it. "With groups as tight-knit as ours, with stakes as serious as we deal with, sometimes 'requests' aren't refused on principle. We do whatever we can to help each other, and me asking anyone else? They'd do it, and they'd check on her again, and she'd say she's fine, again. I don't want to push her away with the same people that always ask, using the same tactics they always do, which aren't working here." She waved in my direction. "You, are really dense about a lot of things," I whined out a short denial. "but you're weirdly perceptive in others. I'm hoping you'll think of something to say that'll actually get through to her." She fidgeted, looking as nervous as she felt. "Part two of the problem being that she lives really deep in Empire territory, and I can only ask Mandy to risk so many knife fights, a month."
I thought she was joking, but Mandy shrugged, crossing her arms under her chest, and I noticed several thin scars on her forearms now that I was looking for them. Huh.
"You," Kara continued, "don't look too much like a dyke, and can take care of yourself." I took offense to the first part of that, but didn't react beyond bristling at the words. "I could send someone with you if you don't feel safe, but that'd send the wrong message to Tracy, or if you're actually noticed by the 'neighborhood watch'. The Empire's shit, but white girls usually get a few warnings before anything happens to them."
I pondered the points, thinking back to the goons I'd taken down the other day. Would they have gotten word to the rest of their gang, yet? I mean, I expected them to eventually, but it'd only been a couple days. I was almost certainly fine, on that front. This would also give me a good excuse to press on the odd behaviors and emotions I'd noticed from her. She reminded me of myself, back at Winslow. Always alone, though by choice in her case. What would make her choose social isolation and push other people away? If I found some other version of me, wouldn't I want to be helped? Could I forgive myself for not making every attempt possible? In the end, that's what decided it for me. "Fine, I'll check up on her. What do you want me to do?"
Kara brightened at my acquiescence. "Great! I'll text you her address." She took out her phone and spent half a minute typing on it, before mine dinged. I checked it, finding a number on a street that sounded vaguely familiar, and a bus stop that I assumed would be the nearest one to it if I checked. "Text me if she isn't home?"
I slid it back into its pocket and nodded. "I can do that."
"Thank you." She started toward me, arms raising from her sides. I was already shifting my weight back when I realized she was coming in for a hug. She stopped, her arms dropping again. Her smile was a bit more brittle, and there was a softness in her eyes I was starting to suspect was pity. Her emotions were a mix of grateful joy, a hint of what might be pride, and a few varieties of sadness. "Thank you, I owe you for this, okay?"
The other girls didn't seem to like that. Mandy was the least upset, having gone back to silently assessing me. I felt like she had some sort of approval or camaraderie towards me, which had grown stronger when I'd unconsciously reacted. I hated it. The flinching, the insidious thoughts, the conditioning. That's what she saw. I was damaged goods; I knew it, and I hated it. Just like them.
I didn't get anything as significant from the others. If I had to guess, Julia just didn't like owing favors and her displeasure went no deeper than that. Tina had more of an actual reason to be mad about it, she looked up to Kara. I could tell she was attracted to her, probably had a crush, and seemed viciously defensive of her to the point of glaring at me.
It made me think of those little yappy dogs that kept barking at things they couldn't possibly take in an actual fight, but still did it anyway. She was only a year behind me, but she was so small she looked younger, which made the fanatic devotion seem a lot cuter than it really should be.
I closed my eyes and sighed a little. I hated social politicking. "Sure." I decided to give her this, and ignore what her girls thought for now. They'd get over it. "I'll talk to you later?"
She nodded, so I waved and left. They had a hushed conversation while I made my way back through the halls. Tina and Julia were still agitated, but Kara shone like a bright beacon of joy and hope until she briefly flashed indignant rage, punctuated by sharp words I couldn't hear, and cowing them. Mandy felt disappointed, and appeared to be backing her girlfriend. After that, moods shifted more positively. I imagined they were turning the topics back to whatever plans they'd had before Tracy canceled on them, prompting that meeting in the first place. I walked to the bus stop, and watched them wander out to the parking lot and into a car.
I got a text from Amy, but turned down her offer to hang out since we had the whole spa day coming up for that, whenever that was happening. Then I was on the bus, losing track of everyone I'd been tracking through the city, wondering what I was actually going to say, if Tracy was home.
---
---
Might as well leave the AN in.
This is very much not the call I had in mind when I made that vote about it. If I haven't posted the original plan yet, I'm sure it'll go up soon. This was a bit of a struggle trying to make that fit, though. Still shaking out the dust from the major rewrite, even if the only thing that was actually rewritten was my outline. XD
I had half a full scene written up, but that falls more under 'scrapped' than 'rewritten' I feel, since it's an entirely different day. I even changed the weather going on. Oh well, marching on, marching on.
I imagine Taylor would know exactly what 'watersports' means, particularly because a bad day at Winslow, covered in water or juice, could lead someone to start mocking her for wetting herself or getting pissed on, then talking about how much she likes that stuff, how it's deviant and depraved, mocking her. Taylor would either figure it out from context, or look it up to keep from saying something stupid (again) and making the situation worse because she was ignorant of a term.
This seems like how Taylor would've encountered most of her sexual lexicon, in fact. Part of why I've had her interests stay so vanilla, even prudish. She doesn't have a good history with sexuality and kinks, and therefore doesn't acknowledge any she might have.
That's not to say she doesn't masturbate or anything, but I don't feel the need to bring it up. You don't assume she hasn't eaten because I didn't mention a meal, or that she went without showering because I skipped over it, or any other part of a regular schedule for a girl with wants or needs. I drop little hints about her schedule now and then, so that people can extrapolate the bits of her day I don't actually mention. Like mentioning The Pill, which has never not been a part of her schedule. I don't think Annette would ever let her daughter not empower herself with at least the option, and would've talked with Danny about it. Once Tay had her first period (which averages dictate happened before her mom died) she was introduced to her options. I think Skitter was noted to be on the pill, but struggling to keep to it due to the stress of being a warlord. If she started on it just because she started dating Brian, I'm calling shenanigans and Author Fiat and changing it because this makes more sense to me.
Anyway, due to the vote to be 'friendly' (which was intended to go a different way for an entirely different call, but that's part of the scrapped version) Taylor is defaulting to non-hostile, instead of me rolling on it.
A pause, before a sound of realization came over the line. "Your power doesn't work over the phone, I get it." I growled at her. "No, no! Me scary tricksy villain, I get it. You don't trust me, and I wouldn't trust you if my power didn't keep telling me you're the most confused superpowered Boy Scout ever."
"...but I'm a girl?" I asked in-
"And very confused, yes." She cut in cheerfully, causing me to give her a warning hum. "No joy on the tomboy jokes, huh? Well, can't win 'em all." She didn't sound very apologetic.
RELATED AN: (No longer relevant, kept for posterity)
Lisa's a bit trans-insensitive here, which... I don't think is too far out of character for her? I'm playing her as the sheltered- if emotionally abused- girl running away from home and having the world's overflowing deviancies shoved into her brain by her power. Most of the people she'd run into who'd have gender mismatches and dysphoria would themselves likely consider it a form of deviance, and be unhappy with it. That'd show in what she'd get with her powers, and might color her perceptions a bit. Just because the world is magically more okay with gay rights because WoG 'Legend did it', that doesn't mean the stances on transgenderism have shifted much from where it was IRL in the 2000's or early 2010's. Especially in Naziville, USA.
This is Lisa after toning down a bit from her canon 'everyone's fucked up if you look deep enough' outlook on the world from the end of her interlude when she joined the Undersiders. But it was still Brockton Bay she's spent nearly a year living in after that point. Brockton gon' fuck you up.
Not overly fond of the end of the first scene, but I was well into my slump at that point, and just wanted it done. DX
Taylor keeps running into The Gays. The thing about that is, they may be 1-5% of the school's population, but the less binary folk tend to gravitate together until, once you know one of them, you're suddenly exposed to the vast majority of the community. She knows Kara, and through her basically the only large LGBT group left at Arcadia.
A good chunk of the scene with Jeff was inspired by a discussion in the other thread, about how flirting and being nice can be indistinguishable if you're expecting the wrong one and imposing bias on the situation. Specifically it was about Taylor being nice and Parian assuming it was flirting. I thought it'd be amusing for Taylor to be on the other end of that, and thought of why Taylor should stop feeling threatened after, and realized I didn't have any gay boys on the OC roster yet. I figure even in Naziville there have to be a couple openly gay boys, right? Thus, Exquisitely Gay Jeff was born.
Given my admittedly limited understanding of psychology and some thinking I've been doing lately, I decided this is probably a pretty realistic reaction to world-shaking terror every few months. It started with another project, where I opened a random AT workfile to delete everything but my formatting stuff (AN boxes, date stuff, a few line breaks, etc) and found the date on it (Feb 26) worked pretty well for an actual place to start that story. It stars up-to-then fairly canon Skitter-Taylor, and one of the lines was her remarking on how everyone was partying after the Simurgh's attack. I decided to transplant that over here, since as mentioned, it makes sense to me.
Something about the Kara scene doesn't feel quite right to me, but I'm not sure what, and thus have no idea how to fix it. I knew pointing Taylor at Tracy outside school had to come from Kara, and this is what wound up coming of that.
At first the 'knife fights' comment was intended as a joke, but then I realized it would be kind of amazing if Karabae would totally shank a bitch. Kara's group is made up of non-binaries or trauma survivors, with a lot of overlap. Kara and Amanda just happen to be both, and they relate pretty heavily to each other.
The Amy bit at the end made sense, since it's Monday and Taylor honestly wouldn't have had any plans without Kara asking her to do something.
Feels like it's been a while since we've done one of these. I'll need to go back and edit some of the old ones, at some point.
Susan Emmaline Stralson
Outspoken left-wing Socialist.
Scandinavian (Danish/Swedish) father, German mother, very proud of her heritage. Hates Nazis 'As all proper Germans should', and fervently despises institutionalized Nationalism. Has a bad habit of pushing people away with rants about human rights and political activism, but feels the message is worth it.
Technically one of Kara's girls, she hangs out on the fringes, occasionally pulled further in to socialize by her cousin Tiffany. Hangs out with Millie and Abby, partly to protect them when she can, but mostly because they actually put up with her.
Does not know if she wants to be a politician, professional activist, rebellion leader, or patissier. Either way, she's hedging her bets on a strong start to her career, focusing on schooling and scholarships to the detriment of her limited free time and social interaction. Backup member of Arcadia's cheer squad, to put herself 'on a sports team' at least on paper. Weekend paid intern at the University of Massachusetts: Brockton Bay. Former intern at Brockton Research College. Intends to enroll in Arcadia's work-study programs next year as a Senior to secure additional work hours.
Naturally blonde. Dyes her hair black. Considers herself a Demiromantic Asexual, and has no intention of seeking romantic partners until after high school.
Millicent "Millie" Jean Stanford
Timid anxious smol.
Millicent's mother is a Virologist, her father a Pathologist, both working for Medhall's Immunology department's HIV research division. They are wealthy and important, and they know it. Millie, by contrast, is a shy and unassuming girl who just wants the world to stop expecting things from her.
Abby Rose Johnson-Gray
Too-young-for-this homemaker.
Abby takes care of her ailing mother and rambunctious siblings, having very little time and energy to herself and her own interests. Won one of the 'lottery' spots at Arcadia, having neither paid her way in, tested highly enough to be intentionally snatched up, nor had outstanding extracurricular records to make her a more appealing student.
"You've reached the PRT- Brockton Bay department, Cole speaking, is this an emergency?"
"Not exactly, but my 'conscience' berated me into calling with a tip." Was this really worth getting the boss's attention?
...Yeah. The "safe option" comes with frustrating risks, lucky me.
"I will do what I can to help, miss. Let's begin with the timeline of this crime or risk; is this relevant today in Brockton Bay?"
"After sundown if the entirety of the Empire's territory is sober now. Hours earlier if a liquored-up skinhead feels like barking loud enough to upset the neighborhood."
"That is...?"
Really? We've just gotten started and I've lost the rube! What kind of training do these guys get when it comes to gang behavior?
"This is about a likely beatdown that could blow up into a messy fight. The timing of your star-spangled speechmakers and the boys in blue will make the difference." Better, right?
"I believe you. I think we both want the Protectorate to be armed with as much information as possible, so continue with everything you can offer."
Deferential? Is this what a minion would act like? Not a bad feeling.
"Well here is the story. A rogue or a junior hero goes into gang territory without a costume. Maybe they go on an enthusiastic walk, maybe they get mugged by a sap that pushes their sore spot, or maybe their identity is as solid as a dish sponge. Just look out for those folks paying most of their taxes for anyone stuck between a gun barrel and a hard place."
"It sounds like-"
"Property damage and casualties."
Could I have rearranged this? That would've worked better as an ominous line to end on.
Do I want to be ominous? In general or for this call, is there a reason to be?
"Kiss some babies, clean up litter or help the birds stuck in trees. Whatever! Just give the aryan-wannabes a reason to play with their tough-guy pistols indoors instead of flashing every poor kid minding their own business. Unless the hospitals get a bonus for helping a baker's dozen of capes...?"
"N-!"
"Thanks for the chat then, ta!"
Taylor... Don't get yourself killed. I know what I'd be doing after your funeral and it wouldn't involve filling that boy-scout role this city needs from you.
I hacked so many cameras in this city, but the extra eyes don't do a damn thing to make me feel safer when you pull something like this.
sniff
You know, I might as well just post up the Omake Rewards info card, at this point. (Gimme a sec)
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what all was going on, but did you want an omake reward?
EDIT: Also, what would you like it threadmarked as?
CURRENT ACTIVE OMAKE REWARDS:
AUTOSUCCESS WHEN:
1X "Taylor and Amy are being dense lesbians at each other"
1X "The next non-combat encounter roll where Faultline is a valid option."
1X "The next non-combat encounter roll where Weld is a valid option."
1X "The next time an encounter is rolled for, encounter get."
(If there are multiple applicable rewards, they'll be listed top-to-bottom in order of priority, first-come, first-served)
CONVERSION SUCCESS:
Lisa 4/4
Tracy: 4/4
Cassie: 4/4
CURRENT UNTALLIED OMAKE POINTS:
(Will be wiped when the Skill Tree is next updated)
Master Energybending: +3
Air Scooter: +3
APPLICABLE REWARDS:
I rather liked this summary I just made for someone, so I'm pasting it here, so it's easily accessible.
Anyway, things you CAN get, if you want them:
You can stick three points anywhere on the skill tree that has all the prereqs already met. (Metalbending was finished by another reward, and I've declared J. Energybending done for the sake of votes and things, so those are done)
Full current list being: Air Scooter, M. Airbending, M. Firebending, M. Waterbending (Current training focus), Proficient Metalbending, Lavabending, G. Earthbending, Astral Projection, Remove Powers, and M. Energybending.
An autosuccess on a specific dice roll. It has to be called in advance, so there's a chance that it'll never come up. I start counting them from when they're declared though, so anything currently written won't use them, but things not yet done in the next update might!
Examples from the past being the recent 'The next non-combat encounter where he could show up is Alec' (You can have anyone with a good reason to be in Brockton show up, though I might wait a bit until the encounter made sense, like waiting for a Boardwalk roll for Alec. Saying 'Aisha' would be pre-trigger, 'Imp' would be post-trigger, 'Kayden' would be civ, 'Purity' would be in-costume, etc.), the auto-success on the next roll to recruit someone (That slotted Rune in to bypass the 25% chance she either wouldn't join or would just be using the team until the Empire wasn't an issue anymore. Only applicable for people it's possible to recruit- Alexandria for example wouldn't get a roll because she would be a D20-50 or so from all her current positions and support), adding an extra guaranteed success to the set of rolls for QA to convert a shard without tipping off the network (It's four rolls and I'm not letting people autosucceed JUST the last one, because then we'd just convert everyone and there'd be no tension anymore. Cass has an omake bonus to hers, so she's 1/4, and I decided Vicky's hates itself enough to autosucceed the 'improve yourself' roll, so Vicky's also sitting at 1/4 (Vicky done)) You could also take the 'Next encounter roll, an encounter happens!' option no one's taken me up on, yet. A success for the next perception check Taylor makes could be interesting. I tend not to roll dice specifically for combat though, so things like 'win the next fight' wouldn't make sense.
Formula is 'Thing to be rolled for' then 'when to roll', Like 'Alec appears' the next time 'a non-combat encounter is rolled' or 'recruitment succeeds' the next time 'Taylor is actively trying to recruit a cape'. If you WANTED Taylor to fight a cape, it'd be '(Cape) is included' the next time '(their gang) is rolled for' or '(Cape) appears' the next time 'a possible combat happens'.
You could also suggest something to be added to the skill tree. I'd haggle with you over whether it's possible given Taylor's current abilities (which basically amounts to Multitasking-augmented Bending) and after a version we're both happy with is decided on, I stat up how many points it'd take to train and what the prereqs would be, and it'd get edited into the list.
Sorry I took so long to reply! Also I've had a little bit of wine, so I'm in the best state to make a permanent, author-infuriating choice.
Omake title "Into the Lion's Den".
First reward choice (feel free to PM me with feedback/alternatives, I'm going with this because you brought up Aisha): [X] Add an extra guaranteed success to the set of rolls for QA to convert a shard without tipping off the network, target Theo Anders' shard.
Ideally Theo in this story has a power derived from Purity's shard rather than Kaiser's and a successful conversion will aid Kayden and Theo (with possible short-term consequences as the shard adapts to QA's enlightenment).
Full disclosure? I'd rather target Aster Anders because of her relationship with Kayden, but she is definitely too young for a fleshed-out parahuman who is prevented from using their powers productively, thereby causing friction.
Also- I am selecting three points for the skill trees OR choosing ONE roll boost (as I did above), yes?
2nd choice-
[X] Next encounter roll, an encounter happens!!
Air scooter was pretty tempting... But I'd prefer a mobility option that allows for a passenger. We can't really have Taylor make an extra large Air Scooter followed by catching Amy in it (transporting her like a Zorb), so we have to find some other form of torture safe transportation for our favorite grump.
I got off the bus at the mall, then started heading north. Tracy lived in the nice suburbs near the commercial area that encompassed Medhall, the Towers, and the mall, among other things. Part of why it was the nice part of the suburbs was because of that proximity, the other being that it was far enough inside the borders of Empire territory that it never really saw the gang fighting like my neighborhood sometimes did. The simple fact was, it was the nicest part of town to live in, besides the mansions up past the Hill, Portsmouth out past the slums, or maybe the Towers themselves. It was clean, with well manicured lawns and fully maintained houses. A few of them literally met the 'white-picket house' stereotype, which always felt so bizarre to see in Brockton.
It felt strange and alien, even more than the part of town Dinah lived. At least there I knew it was the rich part of town, which helped explain it. To me, this was more like someone stuck a bit of an entirely different city in the middle of my hometown. I passed the strip malls lining the area outside the main shopping center, the buildings separating off into standalone structures as I went. These were larger, but often less specialized. Restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, gas stations, all splitting between catering to the part of town Tracy lived, and anyone from the Towers who got tired of the mall life. My senses were already reaching the normal houses, and it took a couple blocks worth of guesswork to narrow down which house was hers, this far out.
I stopped for a couple seconds to focus and make sure my steps weren't throwing off any fine detail. Yup, definitely her. She was home alone, in her house's basement, kneeling by some boxes full of junk and sorting through them. Spring cleaning, maybe? But then why did she feel anxious and hopeful? Maybe she was looking for something. I started walking again, my attention splitting easily between speeding up a bit, keeping an 'eye' on Tracy, and sifting through bodies and buildings in the nearby blocks for anything suspicious or criminal.
Had it taken any effort at all, it would've been wasted. Most people were either still at work, or socializing after classes. At least pointing a goal at the spying helped the violation of privacy feel a little less unjustified. If I really hated it though, I'd go back to normal shoes. The fact that I haven't seems pretty damning, honestly. Don't worry good people of Brockton, Big Sister is benevolent, and absolutely not a voyeur.
I groaned to myself, and went back to wondering what Tracy was up to. She'd gotten a few things out of the boxes and brought them over to the wooden workbench which looked like a later addition to the house. She was fiddling with something that looked a bit like a power drill, clamped down in a vice that was bolted to one of the bench's legs. The shape fit, but it didn't have an outer casing and there were fewer mechanical parts and more electronics than I'd expected. Then again, that seemed to be the trend these days. It felt like if something didn't have a dozen settings and software to manage them, it would in less than a decade. The number of doodads I'd seen since starting at Arcadia that were electrified when they really had no right to be was honestly astonishing. Who needs an electric pen? Apparently the three people in my classes who regularly used them.
Still, I had no idea she liked things like that. Mom would've been thrilled. She might've been an English professor, but she had students from all different fields passing through her class to fill out whatever prerequisites their degree paths had. She always took the time to encourage and support her STEM girls. I knew Tracy already had a sports scholarship waiting for her, but now I wanted to know what major she was planning on. I'd have to ask.
She was still working on it when I made it to her block, though she'd moved on to prodding it with a voltmeter or similar testing device, and was fiddling with the trigger. Her house was nice. Bigger than mine, painted a soft blue. It seemed worn but well-maintained, with clean walls and windows, intact roof, and a manicured lawn. I assumed the turquoise car out front was hers, parked on the road to leave space to get into the driveway and garage, which had me thinking her parents both had their own cars. It looked like the sort of affordable mid-range car that well-off parents would buy their daughter for her sixteenth birthday.
I was musing over the bits of trash in her car, and how they showed more personality to her than she'd let through in the weeks I'd known her, when her emotions turned dark. They started out anxious, then frustrated, before spiking in flares of rage and hatred. She ripped the thing from its vice and hurled it into the far wall, screaming at it. I sped my walk into a jog, then a run. Her mood turned again, to sorrow and loathing, and it felt like she was crying. She stumbled a bit, catching herself on boxes that didn't hold her weight, sending her staggering past them. She whirled in a hot rage again, shoving the stack over with a shout. The force unbalanced her again, and she fell to the floor on her backside. Shock blanked her emotions for a moment, before the sorrow came rushing back, bringing a flood of tears and wailing with it.
By then I'd made it to her house. I tried the front door, but it was locked. The mechanisms on all the ground floor windows also looked shut tight, though the master en-suite's window looked to be a suitable egress of last resort if I wanted to risk looking like a burglar. The garage door had an electric motor, bolted to the center of the ceiling like they usually were. I could feel the emergency release cord dangling from it, and if airbending couldn't catch enough drag then I could always flow the water I had under the door to freeze on it and yank it that way. That sounded better than leaping up on the awning and struggling with the window screen, actually. Still, maybe they had a... there. I found a little plastic case in the tiny ditch between the lawn and patio in the backyard, containing something metal and key-shaped. I dashed over to the fence, idly noting the combination lock on the gate before I hopped it. I tried the door first, a solid front-door type, but it was also locked. Inside the walls were patches where it'd been replaced, though my eyes couldn't tell the difference. If I had to guess, it used to be a sliding door years ago and was replaced because those are trivial to break into if you don't mind the noise and glass shards.
I grabbed the key and unlocked the door, not sparing the sparse if expensive looking décor any eye-time on my way to the basement. The door opened almost soundlessly, and I crept down the stairs, stopping a third of the way down when I came into proper view of the room. I found Tracy huddled under the bench, hands around her legs while her head pressed into her knees. If I didn't know how massive she was upright, I might've thought she looked small right now. I continued down the steps, spending less effort on silence as I went. By the time my feet hit the floor, I was walking normally and she still hadn't heard me. If she was that lost in her wallowing, it could be a while before she caught on. So as much as I'd have preferred to let her notice me on her own terms, I cleared my throat. "Uhh, Tracy?"
Her head snapped up, wide red eyes catching mine. "T-Tay...?" Her gaze drifted upward, first toward the stairs, then about lining up with the front door of the house. She seemed to be in a daze, her emotions shifting from shock to confusion as she drifted off into thought. When her head slowly dropped to look my way again, her face was still scrunched up with how perplexed she felt. "Did... you break into my house?"
"Uhhm... I didn't break anything?" I shook my head at the stupidity of my words, quickly switching track. "Kara asked me to check up on you, so I came by and... I heard screaming. Are you okay?"
She swallowed thickly. "I'm f-" Her voice cut out as she choked on the lie. Her eyes started watering, and I could see her arms tightening around herself. "I... I don't know."
I glanced around the room for something to shift the topic to. It looked like a normal handyman's basement, with the wooden workbench and racks of tools on the wall under the little fogged glass vent-style windows. There were a few boxes, but they looked like recent additions now that I had eyes on. There was no dust and they hadn't had time to sag into each other. One was full of bits of wire, another had a few loose circuit boards and chips, a third half-full of old power tools like what she'd been working on... It looked like makeshift parts bins.
The thought of what she'd been working on lead me to actually glancing over to where it'd fallen earlier. While the basic shape looked like an electric hand drill, the bits left exposed looked more electronic than mechanical like I'd expected. It honestly looked a bit like those toy ray guns that phased out of popularity while I was still too little for them, looking too much like-
My eyes widened, and I turned back to her. "You're a Tinker." I muttered quietly.
She flinched at the word. "I'm not..." Her emotions were going wild. "I can't..." Her eyes misted over, face pulling tight, then she raised her hands to cup the sides of her head. "I'm..." Her voice trailed into a keening sound as she began to sob.
Oh goddammit, this was going to be a thing, wasn't it? I took a moment to resign myself to the fact that every cape friend I made was going to cry on me eventually, and started slowly creeping closer to her. I closed within a meter before she noticed and started scooting further into her little cubby's corner. "Hey," I muttered softly, crouching further and reaching out to her. "it's okay, I'm here to help." I took it as a good sign that when I crawled in with her and started gently rubbing at her back, she neither flinched away nor tried to fight me off. "It's alright, let it out."
Tracy leaned into me after that, muttering between bouts of wracking sobs. About how she was a bad tinker, a bad friend, a bad person, and I gently refuted them even when she repeated or reiterated them. She said that she was broken, and I replied, "Everyone's a little broken. It doesn't make you bad." That had her crying harder for a bit, but I could feel her emotions shift to a less negative mixture.
It took somewhere between ten and twenty minutes for her to calm down, enough time that I'd counted nearly four dozen traffic shifts indicating intersection light changes since I'd started counting, just to have something to take my mind off the attractive girl ugly-crying in my arms. She slipped and slid down my side and front, and all scooting away did was land her head in my lap instead of on the floor. With nothing else I could think to do, I started awkwardly petting her hair in an attempt at soothing her steadily evening emotions.
After a couple minutes of this, she whined and curled tighter. "I want to be small..." She muttered in despair.
Ahh, body image issues. At least that was familiar territory. Very few boys liked being the smaller half of their relationships, which meant my height worked against me in a lot of cases. That Tracy dwarfed even me meant the issue was even worse for her. She stood out in whatever group she was in, even if she didn't want to. The thought of never being able to hide was honestly terrifying, to me. "I'm so sorry..." I murmured, and she nuzzled deeper into my lap.
I gave her another couple minutes to calm down, watching her emotions even out. She was starting to realize she'd have to get up soon, and confront whatever happened, which had an anxious thrill building within her. "So," I coughed, trying to head off another mood spiral. "you're a Tinker." She grimaced and slowly pulled away, still hunched to present as small a profile as possible, which had her looking up at me despite being so much taller. "It's okay." I said to cut off another budding denial. I held out my hand and a small flame flickered to life in my palm. "I'm a cape, too."
Her eyes stayed locked on the fire for a few moments, before they broke away with a shake of her head. "Are..." She croaked, then cleared her throat, continuing hesitantly. "Are you Circus?"
"What? Who? No!" I snuffed the flame before my indignant frustration could fuel it becoming something more dangerous than a candle-light. "I'm Terraform."
"Oh." She muttered awkwardly. "I... haven't really looked into any capes since just after I..." She fidgeted. "I didn't know you could..."
"Classical elements." I supplied as she trailed off. "It's weirdly broad, no one expects it, even when I keep saying it." She curled in on herself a bit more, and I caught flashes of envy peeking through her melancholy. "Hey, what's wrong?" She stayed silent, though her far-off look hardened into a glare at the floor. "It's okay. Tinkers are supposed to be weird, right?"
It took a few seconds, but she started talking again. Her voice a droning near-monotone, the words carrying a note of rote recitation. "Tinkers are the most eclectic of the rating groups, capable of nearly anything so long as a device can be built to do so. Each is notable for having a theme or specialty, and the further 'off-brand' the device, the harder it is to build." She took a breath and shakily released it, her voice gaining a bit more life to it. "Tinkers like Armsmaster have a specialty, and others like Leet have a limitation. The wiki didn't have any information on limit-tinkers, but PHO did."
"I thought his stuff was just unreliable?" I asked, to keep her talking.
She shook her head. "He can build anything. Absolutely anything, but only the once. Even components used to make something count. The more parts he's used before, the less reliable the device becomes."
I thought back to all of Uber and Leet's escapades I'd heard about, and even the few shows of theirs I'd watched in the past. Each one had some new gimmick or toy they were playing with, from a couple to a dozen or so new inventions. With dozens of outings, even half a dozen new gadgets each... hundreds of devices, with thousands of parts. "I never thought I'd feel bad for Leet of all people..."
Tracy nodded. "I think... I'm like him. Nothing I make works, and I don't know why."
"That doesn't make sense." I muttered, then spoke a bit louder. "You're sure that you're a Tinker. There had to be something that convinced you, some intuition or something that worked, proving it."
She nodded, then her mood firmed into determination, and she nodded more vigorously before hopping to her feet. I followed her out from under the bench, but waited in the middle of the basement while her long legs ate the stairs three at a time. She went to her room upstairs and grabbed a little block of plastic and electronics off her bedside table, before hesitating and stopping by the bathroom for a plastic cosmetics bin on the counter. She then came back down, and showed me the absolutely normal-looking remote control in her hand. "This is the only thing I've made that works." The surety of her tone and lack of falsehood to her tells stalled any doubt from creeping into my features as she continued. "It still works just fine with the TV, and the batteries don't seem to run out now, but..." She set the little green tray on the bench and snatched a tube of lipstick from it. In one fluid motion, she uncapped the thing, rolled it out a bit, and then swiped a lightning zig-zag up one cheek, a squiggle over her brow, and a crescent down the other cheek. I struggled to keep the wince from my face at how mad her 'look, see?' serious face made her seem in that moment. Then she grabbed the remote, held down a couple of the buttons on it, and swiped the front of it a couple inches from her face, a few times.
Everywhere it passed, in a line with the thin body of the thing, the schmutz on her face disappeared. My face slacked a little, as she did her best to beam at me through the anxiety and shame she felt at the display. "It's a... skin cleaner?"
She twitched, fighting back a grimace. "...makeup remover, I think." I motioned for her to continue, and she sighed and took a moment to gather herself before complying. "I didn't even mean to. I was watching TV, thinking about how much trouble scrubbing it off was... Started taking the remote apart to have a look at the insides. Doing that made sense to me, at the time. Then I put it back together... with bits of my alarm clock added in. I didn't even notice anything odd until I'd already used it." I raised an eyebrow, and she looked sheepish. "It... was a very bad day."
I nodded with a sad little smirk. "Yeah, bad days are... kind of a thing with capes. I get it." Her smile grew a little brighter. "Are you okay, though? It's dangerous to be a lone cape, especially a Tinker."
The smile faded. "I'm..." She shook her head, glancing sadly down at her remote. "Who would want me? I can barely even prove I'm a cape. Someone could say I just bought this. The junk remotes all either didn't work, or broke after I tried to make them do something new." She was growing more despondent by the second, lip trembling and hand shaking as it gripped the plastic casing. "I'm just... stupid make-up-remote girl."
"Hey, it isn't stupid." I moved closer, reaching out to touch her shoulder. "It's marketable! ...I think. And you said it yourself, Tinkers don't have just one thing they do. You'll figure it out." I smiled as brightly as I could. "We could even help, if you'd like?"
She quirked a brow, trying to return the smile. "We?"
"My team! There's me and four others right now, you know the Dallon sisters? Them and two other girls, so far. I'm sure they'd be willing to help even if you didn't join up, which..." I leaned a bit closer. "I really want you to consider. It's dangerous to be a lone cape, especially a Tinker." She glanced away, biting at her lip. "Even if you didn't want to, I've been talking to the PRT a lot, lately. I could set up a meeting with the Wards, if you'd prefer. I just don't want you to be alone. I'm sure…" Actually, from what I'd gotten from Kid Win, Armsmaster didn't seem like the greatest Tinker tutor. He was still a great hero, but no one was perfect. "Gallant and Kid would love someone to talk shop with." Something was tickling the back of my mind, though… "Wait, shit. You're 18, right?" I chuckled. "You'd jump straight to real hero, then. They'd just stick me with the kid jobs, no matter how strong I am."
She ruminated for a few moments. "I don't… think I want…" She took a breath and released it. "I don't like attention, especially if… I just look stupid."
"Ahh, yeah. And the Protectorate would start crowing about their new hero, just to try and scare crime rates lower with the extra numbers. That's part of the argument that kept me out of the Wards when I talked to Dad about it, even."
She blinked and boggled. "Your dad… knows?"
I barked a short laugh. "Some days it feels like I might as well not have a secret identity, even though it's just Dad, Gram, the team, and, uhh…" The gang of anti-gangsters I still wasn't entirely sure how to present to people. "… some friends that might, maybe, count as minions or henchpeople, if I was a villain? Is there a good heroic equivalent?" We stared at each other for a couple seconds, nothing coming to mind. "Ugh, support crew I guess. It's not actually that many people who know my secret identity, it just feels like it."
"It's good." She said, her voice soft and her emotions sad and envious. "That you have people you can trust with it, I mean. My parents…" She shook her head, and I gave her the time to pick her words. "I know they love me, but… they love the idea of me, more than who I am. As long as I'm popular and talented, as long as I stand out, they're happy."
No wonder she was a mess. "I'm so sorry…" I glanced around. "If you don't want them to know, what about your workshop?"
Tracy let out a deep and bitter laugh at that. "Oh, I don't think either of them have been down here since they set this up. They don't care that it's functional, just that it looks the part. …just like everything else." She muttered the last part, before shaking herself and continuing. "My father likes to think of himself as a handyman, but he's never really tried to fix anything." She shrugged and waved over the tools. "Just props that happen to work."
I reached out and ran my hand along her shoulder. "You know we'll help however we can, right? Me, Kara, everyone else? If you need to get away, or need help getting through to them, we'll do whatever we can. It's what friends are for."
She pressed her eyes shut. "…even Vicky?"
"She misses you." I didn't know for sure, but that was just the type of person Vicky was. "They thought you stopped hanging out with them because you didn't like her aura."
Tracy turned back to stare at me, her shock giving way to growing horror. "That's not… oh god." She cowered again, and I helped hold her upright and in place. "I thought they'd hate me by now, for abandoning them."
I pulled her in for a hug. "No, silly. Hey, how about we have lunch tomorrow? Just the four of us: you, me, Vicky, and Amy? Give you a chance to reconnect and… maybe tell them you're a cape?" She looked down at me, shocked and fearful. "I really want you to join my team. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you, too. Please?"
She glanced away, fretting, but considering. "I wouldn't… have to show off?"
"I didn't talk about the other two because they don't want anyone to know about them yet, either. It's perfectly fine."
Tracy gnawed her lip again, before she nodded. "Alright."
"Yes!" I cheered, hugging her more tightly. This had the unfortunate side effect of pressing my chin into her bust, reminding me that I was holding a very appealing figure. I hopped away sporting a blush, hoping she'd take that as a sign of excitement rather than arousal or embarrassment. "Anyway," I stuttered out. "welcome to the team. We can start planning and figuring things out tomorrow, if you're up for that lunch? We still need to figure out a lot of how the team actually works. I'll make sure there's a place for behind-the-scenes support out of the spotlight, but we haven't actually nailed down the details of what that'd entail, yet." I paused as a shudder of horror passed through me. "We don't even have a name yet, but we haven't gone public, so..." The both of us shared a nervous smile. "We've got time."
I glanced around again, for something else to say. My eyes strayed over the thing she'd been making, and the boxes. Her eyes followed mine, and she felt a spike of anxiety and sadness. I thought she felt lonely. "Do you... want to get out of here? I was going to go training if nothing came up, today. So... want to check out the bay with me? I kinda' want to see if any of the boats might be good for a secret base."
"The Boat Graveyard?" She asked with nervous confusion.
I waggled my hand. "More or less, I meant heading under the water to get there. I can just make a big bubble of air and we could walk along the bottom. Might need boots and flashlights, but I'd keep you dry."
She still felt nervous, but shook her head a moment later as determination surged forth. "Sure. Let's try it."
I waited for her in the living room, after sending her off to change into boots and warmer clothes, and grab at least one flashlight for herself. I passed the minutes actually inspecting the place. Everything looked nice, shiny and expensive. Fancy furniture, impressive entertainment center, exotic-looking potted plants, family photos in glossy frames, an entire shelf dedicated to trophies and awards... Even with the signs of habitation like scuffs in the carpet and smudges on the coffee table, it still felt oddly sterile. Like a show house, rather than a home.
Tracy came downstairs in a fashionable coat lined with fluffy-looking fur, a thin sweater under it, hiking boots, and baggy pants that hid the long-johns and knee-socks she could never know I watched her put on. She then handed me a little LED torch, which I recognized as one of the brands that touted 'all metal and plastic' construction for unspecified but painfully obvious reasons. She showed me hers so I wouldn't think she didn't have one, but didn't mention the pack of batteries in her pocket that she'd grabbed from the same survival kit the lights were from. On our way out to her car, she explained that the others around the house were either too bulky to easily pocket, or might be missed and she didn't want her parents asking about them. She had another palm-torch like these in her car, but felt bad about only having the one. Hence raiding the survival kit under her bed.
We got in and I told her to head to the beach, where exactly didn't matter. Just somewhere she felt safe leaving her car. Partway there I got a text from Dad.
'Taylor, were you punching Nazis Saturday? I just got a call from the police.'
I cringed, thinking back and not finding any memory of telling him about that. Whoops. 'Had Amy for backup, and they deserved it?'
A few minutes later, long enough for me to worry a little, I got another text. 'I am very proud of you. Also very worried for you. Did you call anyone to let them know? Did you have time to do so?'
Ugh. I felt a little guilty. Technically I could have been on the phone while keeping up with Amy. 'Could have. Didn't. Feel stupid.'
'Remember the option, please. You could have called the police, new wave, or one of your friends. It doesn't have to be me as long as someone knows you might not be safe.' A part of me wanted to defiantly claim that I was perfectly safe against normal people, but I knew he'd shoot the idea down, and that it was technically possible I might not have been.
Thoughts of the police and friends to call in had my mind drift back to Sally, who'd offered to bring the cavalry if I ever needed it. I really should call her more often. I frowned and dug out my cape phone, flicking through its contacts. Screw letting myself forget again, I'd just ask her now. That's what the damned cell phones were for.
'Hey, dad is mad that I got into a fight over the weekend and didn't call for backup first, even though I was totally fine. Is it okay if I call you, even for normal things?' Aaand send, before I can chicken out.
To Dad, I sent: 'Working on it. Asking around.'
'Thank you.' He replied.
"Are you okay?" Tracy asked, her eyes darting between me and the road.
"Yeah." I groaned. "Just... forgot to tell Dad about a fight, and now he's asking about it and giving safety tips. Feel kinda' stupid."
"I'm sure he means well." She stated softly.
"Oh, no. They're good ideas, obvious in hindsight. That's the problem. I feel stupid."
She hummed and chewed on her thoughts for a moment. "Well, what was the idea?"
I sighed. "Call someone on the way to a fight, rather than after. I mean, he didn't say it like that, but he doesn't know I can run and yell into a phone, and still move faster than most capes."
"Well, you could call me?" She suggested, instead of worrying over how impulsive I was, like I'd expected. "If you're busy fighting, I can help by calling people."
I shrunk down and fidgeted a bit, still not used to people just... being nice and offering to help. It felt better than I thought it should. "Well, it would be nice having someone to light the signals, if it came to it." I tried to swallow down the bit of blush at how dorky I felt. "Hey, if you feel up to that lunch tomorrow, that'd be a good time to get you a bunch of numbers. I should probably have more of the New Wave numbers down than I do."
She chuckled. "Alright, fine. We'll have lunch together."
Now I felt a little worried. "Sorry, was that too pushy? You just... always seem so alone, when I check on you."
Her face drifted to a painfully blank neutrality for a couple minutes. We were nearly to the bay by now, pulling through lots near the Boardwalk until we drifted into one of the parking spaces, and the car shut off. "I don't feel alone." She said quietly. "Lonely, but not alone. I know there's people who care, and would help, but..."
"I think I get it." I said when she didn't start again. "There's lots of reasons not to ask for help. I think I was too stubborn. It felt like admitting I was weak, like I'd lost. So I just... didn't, for more than a year."
"I feel like I'm not worth it."
I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong, but stopped myself. She probably knew it, the same way I knew playing Emma's game and trying to 'win' or 'not lose' was stupid. The difference between knowing it and feeling it, though... Nothing I thought of sounded better than any of the other platitudes. "I'm going to find a therapist. I don't know what I need to do to help everyone, just hiring someone to see the whole team sounds like a mess waiting to happen, but parahumans..." I shook my head. She knew what I meant. It seemed like every cape was a dumpster fire, even the ones good at hiding it. "If I helped you find someone too, as Tracy, would you try for me? I want to help, and I can tell you you're worth it a dozen times a day, but I'm not trained to teach you how to believe it. Please?"
She thought about it, staring down at the steering wheel. "Would my parents have to know?"
"You're an adult, I'm pretty sure what goes on between you and your doctors doesn't have to involve them at all, anymore." She nodded in response, so I held up my phones. "I'm going to take a sec to coordinate some stuff, okay?"
First I checked my cape phone, which had a couple texts from Sally. 'Ofc. Safety is #1 priority.' and a minute later 'Unless I'm getting shot at.'
I snorted and typed back, 'Understandable.' I'd hardly expect her to drop her gun for her phone.
Swapping phones, 'Hey, got a newbie. Lunch meet tomorrow? Can Vicky do sneaky?' went to Amy, and 'Hey, got a newbie. Lunch meet tomorrow? Can you get away from the crowd without being too obvious?' went to Vicky.
'China shop pretty quite when its all dust' Amy shot back, and I was torn between snorting at the image and correcting her typo. 'Can do lunch'
With her taken care of, I waited for Vicky's reply. 'I ditch lunch all the time' I had a feeling it was supposed to sound more indignant than the plain text conveyed. 'Who and where?' Came a second after the first message.
'Surprise, and Arcadia. I'll text you a room number when lunch starts?' I motioned to Tracy and held out my phone for her to read over the conversation. I watched her eyes track over the lines, then glance at me. I raised a brow inquisitively, and she shrugged and nodded. I wasn't sure if she didn't care, or didn't see the point of avoiding names and secrets over phone network messaging.
'Ha ha. C u tmrw.' Vicky seemed a tad frustrated at the secrecy, or maybe she was just being playful? Ugh. Emotions were so hard to read in texts.
I was about to put my phone away, but glanced down my recent contacts. I bit my lip and considered, then opened up my text chain with Cassie. 'Hey, lunch thing tomorrow. You busy?' And since I was going down the list anyway, I started a message to Kara, too. Then I deleted the version saying everything was fine now, and started over. 'Talked with Tracy. Figured out what's wrong. We're handling it.' I showed this one to Tracy before sending it. Her eyes narrowed, face firming into a stern countenance, emotions anxious but determined. She nodded again, and I sent it.
I waited for a minute or so, to see if Cass would reply. Kara did, sending me a block of 'thankyou' repeated about sixteen times, but nothing from Cassie. I figured she must be busy today.
"Okay, I think I'm set." I left my bag as we got out of the car, and Tracy double-checked all the locks. "We need to get to the water. What do you think, north side pier?" She gave a quick assent in reply, and we headed toward the Boardwalk proper.
It was pretty obvious even without my senses that we were turning heads as we went. A pair of tall, athletic girls like us, especially with the eye-catching shade of Tracy's hair? There was no way my usual 'morose slump' stealth could compare. I considered asking if the hair had been her choice, since I knew she hated all the attention. It seemed a bit rude though, and it was possible it was a way to own the spotlight she couldn't evade either way. Instead, I tried to distract her with window shopping. Clothes weren't a great conversation piece, as neither of us were very interested. Cute nick-knacks and books were better at piercing the silence.
There were a few times boys tried to stop us, to talk or invite us along with them. I'm pretty sure I actually missed the first couple of them, misinterpreting them as people who knew Tracy and were saying hello. She would affect this airheaded mien and greet them back, quickly apologizing and saying we were busy, or that someone was waiting for us, or that we'd already ate and didn't need to be taken to dinner... The full female experience, now that I wasn't skulking around looking like a homeless boy or a shady druggie, depending on if my hood was up. I thanked her for running interference, after I'd figured it out. She just smiled and demurred, though she did feel a bit of joy and pride which I took as feeling happy to be helpful.
Our slower pace had us to the north end of the Boardwalk almost an hour after we'd arrived. This section was a bit older, built around pier-style docks on the waterfront, rather than the newer quays of the south. The buildings built on it were shorter and thinner-walled. The sidewalk here was painted over and gritty, both to hide the wood and to prevent injury given New England weather. We came to a break in the buildings, hopping a short locked fence that didn't actually stop anyone, and ducking down a small stairwell to the sandy beach below. The wood down here looked its age, dark and encrusted with barnacles and invasive clams. I'm not sure there was a single support post either of us wouldn't cut our hands on if we weren't careful. That made it an unpopular place for anything but shady deals that were usually headed off by the Enforcers chasing people away. Speaking of, I pressed my hand against the cement block wall beside the stairs, watching the suited man who'd been watching the gate start our way.
"We don't have long." I glanced about, but couldn't see or feel any cameras. It just wasn't worth it to stick electronics in dark spaces this close to saltwater. "C'mon." I waved her down to the water, but stopped her before she could run into it. I held my hands palm-upright just under my ribs, taking a deep breath and then rotating them in a circle, letting the breath out as my now palm-down hands pressed downward. The sand compressed under us until it was proper sandstone, the wet sand below that pressing out of the way as the platform descended a couple feet per second. When we were about three meters down, I stopped the pressing motion, waving a hand above us to close the pit off with more sand.
Tracy glanced about nervously, the beam of her light shining against the damp sand around us, up at the precarious ceiling, and then back to me. I was still holding the sand above us with an outstretched hand, my other held vertical in front of my sternum, holding the walls and water where they were. "This is... eerie." She muttered.
I panicked, a little. "Oh geez, you're not claustrophobic, are you?"
She shook her head. "No, I'm fine. It's just... buried alive in a lightless pit... little bit horror movie."
I snorted out a short laugh. "That's fair." I pressed my arms outward, expanding our little bubble in the sand, and then started digging diagonally down toward the bay. I kept one hand above to hold up the space, while I made scooping motions with the other to push car-sized masses of soggy sand out of our way. I swapped hands every time, leading to a slow circular motion that felt a lot more flowing than most earthbending. Then again, I was earthbending and waterbending, at the same time. We leveled off after my ears popped again, probably ten meters down? However deep we were, I knew the bay was deeper, so we just had to keep heading east until the 'cave' opened out into the water. The sand got noticeably wetter-looking as we went, until I swept the last of the sand aside and the beam of light speared out into murky water.
Tracy gasped as we stepped out into the water, glancing around as I expanded our sphere a little more. "Okay, now we just head north until we hit boats."
She'd clicked her light off, and now we were seeing by the bit of dim light that made it through the natural murk of the bay, and all the sand I'd kicked up. "You're not worried about getting lost down here?"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Even if my senses weren't at their best on sand, I could always dive through the sand to bedrock to find my way, or pop to the surface. "We could check, if you want?" I asked, pointing up. She thought about it for a moment, before nodding. I swiped a hand down, pulling a bit of the saltwater into our space before freezing it into a shallow bowl of a platform. "Hop on." I led the way, holding my hands out to keep the water pushed back. This was the tricky part, it was less about pulling us up, and more about not letting the natural tendency of ice floating push us up too fast. I let a little of the water in under the platform, pressing it down to slow its rise with one hand, managing our bubble of air with the other. The world got brighter and brighter, until our bubble broke the surface and became more of a cylinder than a sphere.
"Stay down, I don't know if anyone's going to notice." I gathered up my hair in little ringlets of water while she knelt down, making my hair a bit less distinct. Then I shaved a roughly face-sized chunk of ice off our platform and poked eyeholes through it with one hand. I glanced up, watching the water rise and fall around the gap I'd pierced through it. "This might get a bit queasy." She nodded, and I let us rise until my head was just poking into the bottom of a trough between waves. I held the rough mask in front of my face, and we started to flow with the water's surface, bobbing a bit until my head was poking out above the peak of the wave. I gave a quick spin, spotting the Rig looming ominously maybe a mile to our right, Medhall and the Towers poking up to our back-left in the distance, and the lighthouse near where the Graveyard met land roughly ahead of us. I started pushing us back down with a bit of forward diagonal added in, tossing the ice mask into the bay and pulling a larger sphere of air maybe five meters across with us this time. "Yup. Straight north-ish."
"So... you do this often?" She asked when we were maybe halfway down.
"This in particular?" I shook my head. "Second time under the bay. Last time I was down here it was later in the day, I couldn't really see anything. That's why the flashlights. I'm hoping I'll figure out a good way to get rid of some of the ships, maybe break them up for salvage. Wouldn't mind an intact hull we could set up a secret base in, though. Aaand I guess since I have a Tinker along, maybe your power will point out any good salvage, assuming it's not all rust?"
She blushed and shrugged. "I... maybe? I usually just grab things I think might be useful later. I only get hints of how to modify parts when I've got an idea already, those tend to come from situations I want a solution for... and parts aren't always at hand, then."
"So, things that might come to mind now…" I glanced up at the bay around us. "Some way to breathe underwater, maybe?"
Tracy shrugged. "Rebreathers, diving helmets, armor with self-contained life-support…" She stumbled a little when I caught sight of the sand below us, slowing us to landing rather than collision speeds. I apologized, and she shook off the shock and continued. "All of that, it… still feels off, though. At this point I'm not sure if it's my power telling me it won't work… or me, assuming nothing is ever going to work."
I backed up until I could nudge her shoulder with mine. "You're great without powers, but we'll still figure them out." I could tell she didn't quite believe it, but she nodded with a hopeful smile. "That does sound frustrating, though."
"It can be, though usually I can recall the ideas later."
I was about to ask more questions, when the first hulking shadow started to drift into view. It was small as far as ships went, but the fishing cutter we passed was still taller than either of us despite having years to sink its way into the sea floor. The wheelhouse stared down at us from even higher up, and I couldn't help but find it eerily accusing of our presence. The rigging had all rusted or rotted away, and there was no way anything inside was still airtight after this long. "Nothing useful here, let's keep going."
It didn't take long for us to cross paths with a tugboat, then a small coast guard boat. A bit further and we found the start of the Graveyard itself, ships piled atop other ships, forming a rusting mockery of a reef atop the shipping channel. This was where the real beasts rested, the shipping vessels, ocean-going fishers... nearly every ship that'd been in the bay at the time, a few from nearby cities' raided docks, with the monumental bulk of the now-iconic oil tanker run aground atop it off to the east.
We walked straight up to the hulls, our sphere of air deforming against the grimy, rust-pocked wall. If I had to guess, it was an actual damned whaling ship in front of us. I paced up, gently resting my palm against it. Honestly, I was just expecting it to be the sort of scene my inner melodramatic egotist insisted I indulge in now and then, completely useless otherwise. I was shocked at how the world seemed to explode forward from my hand. Every creak and sway sending ripples through the husks and the buckled points where their weight compressed them together. I could sense through the metal? Maybe it was the rust throughout making it a bit more 'earth-y', or the fact that unlike the bus and car chassis, they're mostly stationary like stone… but that didn't make any sense. I saw using vibration, not in spite of it. I removed my hand and tapped fingers against the metal in a few different places, but it didn't seem to be a fluke…
"Are you okay?"
I glanced back at Tracy and blushed, realizing how silly I must look. "Oh, yeah. I'm fine. Hey look, I think there's a way up over there!" I pointed to her left, and sure enough one of the smaller hulls had dug its way into the ground, such that we could walk up the steep incline of its deck. I stared at it for a couple of seconds, before freezing a stairway made of ice on it, partly because I didn't want Tracy to slip, but mostly because I could. I tapped the side of the cargo ship at the apex of the stairwell, and saw that the cargo doors on its deck had long since collapsed. There was no point trying to keep it watertight, so I used swift streams of water to slice furrows in the metal and shouldered the roughly-hewn panel inside. It accelerated down into the space between the hulls, banging off support struts on its way down. I repeated the cutting on the inner hull, a bit smaller this time and pulling it with waterbending to join the other one, then froze a little bridge across.
Our bubble of air was big enough to fill most of the rooms we checked. The cargo holds, not so much. We didn't actually find anything amazing in our search, either the companies came back for their valuables, or the containers had been cracked by looters, or they hadn't been watertight in the first place and time did its thing. Tracy's mood picked up a bit now that we weren't in the open water anymore. It was weird, you could swim straight up in the bay and be fine. Here I'm not sure she'd be able to make it out and to the surface if my powers failed, but the building-like familiarity must have been fooling her. Occasionally she'd start humming something, and I'd either recognize it or ask, and it always wound up a theme or ambiance piece from some horror series or another.
As we passed from ship to ship, we gave up on useful items and focused more on the materials. There was certainly no shortage of steel, the vast majority of the hulls were comprised of it. I noted a few spots in my senses that weren't, small fiberglass boats that were marginally less easy to see into. There was also a bit of aluminum and regular iron scattered within the ships. Anything small, light, or easy to salvage that had been worth it was gone, like all the copper and any propellers that were easily accessible. What we did find were the massive engine blocks or turbines that couldn't easily be moved, and the denser-metaled drive shafts connecting them to those propellers. If we had a way to melt them down, our little team would be set on tungsten for possibly years. A tall ask, considering the properties Tracy kept rattling off about the different metals. Things besides the metal with the highest melting point of any basic element would be easier to process, like some of the engines.
We decided to approach the city via the Graveyard, following along until we hit the shore and heading into town from there. Easier to duck away at night when it was harder to see, we'd only have to worry about spotters from the gangs instead of anyone who happened to be around on top of them. And I did see a few people with unusual interests in the beached ships, though no one bothered watching constantly. I couldn't imagine staring at boats through binoculars all night, probably on shifts that would themselves have gotten routine by now, was all that riveting. Two groups, one more studious in their checking than the other, both spending most of their attention on killing time with cards or conversation. There was a third that might have been supposed to be on watch, but might have just been shooting up instead. Not every suspicious group near the Graveyard had to have gang ties, after all.
It was faster to catch a late-ish bus from the north docks than walk the whole way, even if the nearest stop to the car went a bit past and swung around, necessitating a bit of northward backtracking. Then she dropped me off at home, where I could tell dad was up waiting for me.
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Might as well paste over the AN, too.
Had some text color weirdness before, but that might just be on Ao3. Can't remember anymore. Brain is too fried today. DX
I love Tracy. She's currently duking it out with Kara over the coveted 'favorite OC' spot in my head.
She's in a very bad way. When I created her, I was thinking "Well, alright. You have a Pyrrha expy. What would being her be like, in a world where she wasn't a huntress?" and my brain shot back 'She's a goddamned fucking mess'. Pyrrha has a whole subscription worth of issues, and honestly I see the whole reason she was even a functional person being the fact that she was a Huntress. She was strong, talented, had a potent Semblence, and could drive herself towards being a hero. All her fame and talent and training, she could use to help people. She had the choice to make her own destiny.
Tracy does not have the same options. Sure, she could be a star athlete and pour her money and clout toward good causes, but that's a far distant dream she might not reach. She could train and use her stature to be a firefighter, policewoman, PRT agent, or one of the aid services where that would be helpful, but those are just normal people fighting increasingly supernatural problems in a dying world. She doesn't have the option to just be special in a way that feels earned and worthwhile to her.
So naturally, I glance over at the OC capes list I rolled up and note that I've got a couple of Tinkers listed, and only one of them was flushed out at all. Lightbulb time, and she was scribbled in as the second one, because holy shit did that sound like a recipe for a Tinker trigger.
This was very early in the story's development, back when I was still hyperfocused on canonization, and convinced myself that all of the OCs needed a reason why they never showed up in canon. Like they could have been there all along, and Skitter had no reason to learn about them. All of that first round of OC capes had such a reason, and Tracy's was very dark. You see, she was on a timer. If the rolls kept screwing her over, and the vote went against forcing the issue, and the rolls still kept Taylor from figuring out what was going on?
If we hadn't recruited Tracy by April, she was going to kill herself.
That's not happening now, so... yay!
Anyway, topic change, topic change... aha!
Trying to just let dialogue be dialogue more often. I'm aware that a failing of my writing is that I try to have SOMETHING going on along with words, whenever dialogue happens. That's why there's so much shrugging and sighing and whatnot. Words don't happen in a vacuum, there's always something else going on, and one of canon Worm's problems is floating head syndrome, where there seems to be pages of nothing but dialogue with little in the way of context cues. But, I know the sighing gets annoying for some people, so I'm trying to dial it back a bit.
Not gonna lie, I had the 'Are you Circus?' gag planned out way longer than the rest of the scene, which naturally leads me to feel like it should be better with all my brain's done hyping up the moment. Still, I feel like it's an adequate tone-breaker.
Huh. Realized on my third or so read-through, but Tracy is a bit of a Reggie, isn't she? That might be interesting, when she meets Tats. XD
Calling your company's gear 'Shatterbird-proof' is a good way to get Shatterbird-ed.
Apparently natural light can make it down something like a thousand meters in the ocean if it's clear. It was harder looking up how far down there was enough light to see by, but my search wound up at least informing me that the Bay probably isn't deep enough for it to matter. I figure Taylor and Tracy are, at most a hundred meters down. Well under the 300-600M numbers that came up in my search a couple times.
Trying to think unconventionally with Bending. I was a bit worried all the fiddly little details of what Taylor's doing with the powers was going to be boring or annoying, but I decided to run with it after a bit of encouragement from Patrons.
Also had to check on a couple details with the ships.
Must be pretty neat wandering about the sea floor, encased in a bubble of air. Might be something Taylor could market as a rogue business of sorts, if so inclined.
I was a bit worried Taylor was going to outright see Tracy kill herself with earth sensing and not realise what she was seeing until it was too late to intervene, tbh.
Though between "I want to be small" and "are you circus", Tracy kinda feels gender dysphoric too? Maybe that's just familiarity.
I believe the 'are you Circus' line comes from Circus having fire generation abilities, alongside dressing in such a way their gender isn't obvious from looking in their cape outfit. Think they didn't talk when doing cape stuff, either, just miming things. Taylor basically fell into 'potentially Circus' territory courtesy of being tall, lacking in obvious female tells on first glance (curvy waist, noticable bust, etc) and also being a pyrokinetic.
In regards to Tracy wanting to be small, the chapter already covered the rationale there; body image issues due to most boys at school being intimidated at the idea of dating someone taller than them.
Nah, her gender is one of the few things Tracy doesn't mind about herself. I might wind up slipping into writing her a bit 'gender-shrug' though, since that's my personal experience with the subject. Assigned male, male features, assumed male... but I just don't care enough to pin down a label for myself. I realize part of that is the whole male thing, having the privilege of being the less oppressed of the common binary and living in a time when I'm allowed to not shout my masculinity from the rooftops or risk getting lynched... but that is just how my brain's wired. I just don't get the strong feelings people have for the subject. (And, having written that out, I realize that applies to both the 'experiencing myself' and 'understanding/empathizing with in others' meanings of the phrase)
I'm honestly not sure if my writing suffers for it. Probably. Not much I can do about it, though.
Also mildly worried saying it openly is just going to piss off anyone who does have strong feelings about it, and can't allow anyone else to not feel as strongly as they do. I like to be open about my experiences, methodology, and mindset, though. Partly because I feel it fosters communication and understanding, but also there's this weird itch in the back of my mind constantly insisting I'm probably going to drop dead next week, so I should leave as many clues to how I think as I can in case someone wants to try and pick up where I left off from my actual point of view.
In regards to Tracy wanting to be small, the chapter already covered the rationale there; body image issues due to most boys at school being intimidated at the idea of dating someone taller than them.
That's what Taylor assumes is going on, rather than what actually is going on. Not all body image issues are a clinical dysphoria, which Taylor doesn't have and would have trouble truly empathizing with.
I'd go into further detail about Tracy's issues, but we're running a minigame to figure out her Specialty, and I don't want to give the people who frequent both threads too many hints. >:3
I might wind up slipping into writing her a bit 'gender-shrug' though, since that's my personal experience with the subject. Assigned male, male features, assumed male... but I just don't care enough to pin down a label for myself. I realize part of that is the whole male thing, having the privilege of being the less oppressed of the common binary and living in a time when I'm allowed to not shout my masculinity from the rooftops or risk getting lynched... but that is just how my brain's wired. I just don't get the strong feelings people have for the subject.
I'm in the same boat there, yup. Always felt weird to me how attached some people seem to be towards their gender, and might be why I'm not overly fussed about the idea of genderbending myself in SI stories occasionally - others seem to panic about gender dysphoria and a strong attachment to their genitals, to my bafflement.
Also mildly worried saying it openly is just going to piss off anyone who does have strong feelings about it, and can't allow anyone else to not feel as strongly as they do. I like to be open about my experiences, methodology, and mindset, though.
Yeah. How important gender is to you is clearly one of the half dozen or so spectra modern psych uses to understand gender as a whole. Needing everyone to have strong opinions about it is just one more drive to make others conform type impulse I think.
We are also super open about stuff. People get really weird when they realise we aren't trying to hide our DID in particular for some reason.
OH!
Speaking of mindset things. Have I posted this here yet?
I don't think I've posted this here, yet.
This is very much ABSOLUTELY NOTa request for 'theme songs' for characters. It is a list of songs that make me think of characters when they come up in my various playlists, which started as a silly 'choose your waifu' valentine's day gag I never got around to working on properly. Then I started thinking it'd be nice to have a list I might be able to turn to, if I needed help putting myself in the right headspace for a particular character. A lot of these just make me think of the character in question, rather than actually remind me of them enough to work for that, but a lot of them do.
So, here's the current list.
General Fic Songs:
(Just make me think of the story, or make me want to write something)
Die - RWBY
When it Falls - RWBY
Living the Dream - Five Finger Death Punch
Stricken - Disturbed
Guarded - Disturbed
Indestructible - Disturbed
Libera Me From Hell - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (Cement City)
Lifelight - Caleb Hayes
Asgore's Theme - Caleb Hayes
The Hero Inside of Me - Andrew Stein
Different Songs - Set It Off
Bad Guy - Set It Off
Dancing With the Devil - Set It Off
In Flames - Digital Daggers
Alone Tonight - Digital Daggers
Out of The Fire - Digital Daggers
Glory and Gore - Lorde
Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Lorde
Yellow Flicker Beat - Lorde
Royals - Lorde
Monochrome Kiss - AmaLee
Unravel - Tokyo Ghoul (Jonathan Young / AmaLee)
No Light, no Light - Florence + The Machine
Howl - Florence + The Machine
Sound of War - Tommee Profitt
It's Got my Name on it - Tommee Profitt
I'm Not Afraid - Tommee Proffitt
Follow Me - Tommee Profitt
Will I Make It Out Alive - Tommee Profitt
Games - Birthday Massacre
Wish You Were Gay - Billie Eilish
Outsiders - Au/Ra
Dance in the Dark - Au/Ra
Medicine - Au/Ra
Hushh - AViVA
Don't Blame It On The Kids - AViVA
The Fear - Lily Allen
Points of Authority - Linkin Park
From the Inside - Linkin Park
One Step Closer - Linkin Park
Bulletproof - Godsmack
Cope - Stephanie Mabey
Villain - Stephanie Mabey
Move Your Body - Sia
Big Girls Cry - Sia
Bird Set Free - Sia
Infinite - NateWantsToBattle
Victorious - NateWantsToBattle
Zi Zi's Journey - Lindsey Stirling
Monsters - Shinedown
Feel Invincible - Skillet
QA:
The Pheonix - Fall Out Boy
Circle of Life - Jonathan Young
Growing Wings - Drakengard
Taylor:
The Pheonix - Fall Out Boy
Sorairo Days - Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (Original / AmaLee)
Bad Intentions - Digital Daggers
Elastic Heart - Sia
Just Beneath the Flames - Digital Daggers
I Don't Want to be in Love - Good Charlotte
When I Was Older - Billie Eilish
Amy:
Everything I Wanted - Billie Eilish
Here - Ancient Magus Bride (Original / AmaLee)
Dream Come True - RWBY
Shatter Me - Lindsey Sterling
Growing Wings - Drakengard 2
Just Beneath the Flames - Digital Daggers
Rx (Medicate) - Theory of a Deadman
Medicine - Au/Ra
Shaper:
Circle of Life - Jonathan Young
Rockabye - Clean Bandit
Emma:
COPYCAT - Billie Eilish
GRRRLS - AViVA
Fear the Fever - Digital Daggers
The Devil Within - Digital Daggers
Kill the Lights - Set It Off
Free The Animal - Sia
Sophia:
Killer in the Mirror - Set it Off
Guren no Yumiya - Attack on Titan (Original / AmaLee)
Free The Animal - Sia
Stronger on Your Own - Disturbed
Madison:
I'd Love to Break it to You - NateWantsToBattle
Can't Sleep Can't Breathe - Digital Daggers
Kill the Lights - Set It Off
Our bubble of air was big enough to fill most of the rooms we checked. The cargo holds, not so much. We didn't actually find anything amazing in our search, either the companies came back for their valuables, or the containers had been cracked by looters, or they hadn't been watertight in the first place and time did its thing. Tracy's mood picked up a bit now that we weren't in the open water anymore. It was weird, you could swim straight up in the bay and be fine. Here I'm not sure she'd be able to make it out and to the surface if my powers failed, but the building-like familiarity must have been fooling her.
Thinking about it, she'd likely be screwed either way. If Taylor's power failed they'd be at the center of a rapidly collapsing bubble of inrushing water under high pressure from being so deep; getting slammed by water that hard would probably be enough to stun someone, which would be a death sentence underwater like that.
