"We made these kids way back when cause we all needed to work through some shit. Parent bullshit, gender bullshit, brain bullshit... They helped us a lot. We owe it to them to like, not give up right away."
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Be the other girl .
- Pronouns
- she/her
Taylor came to awareness inhaling the smell of burning. Soot clung to the silk mask covering her face, a mask that felt tighter with every breath. Her instincts were shouting at her to just rip the damn thing off before she suffocated, except that would have required movement and frozen as she was, she could only shake in place.
It was April, this was Brockton Bay, Taylor had started a fight with a gangster named Lung and now Rachel's dogs were finishing it. All of this context was something she innately understood as she looked up at Brian. Brian who wore motorcycle leathers and a helmet with a painted skull and who was part of the context of the situation as the experienced supervillain that had ridden in on a monster and asked her if she was okay.
"Brian?" she whispered instead of answering, asking ten different questions in that one word and getting a response for all of them in the way that he was completely frozen in place.
In Taylor's memory, Tattletale was the next one to have a line. Lisa was staring at the fight down below, her eyes wide. Instead of speaking she forced herself to breathe, counting seconds on her fingers like she had done for Taylor on a video call years ago. In for four, held for four, out for four. Taylor could see Lisa's hand from where she was standing, and so she followed along, letting Lisa handle counting.
Inhale, hold, exhale. Another late night of Lisa passing down the lessons she had won in therapy to her far away friend from across the internet. Inhale, hold, exhale. There was too much soot in the air and not enough time to do this properly, but it was enough that Lisa could speak. That Taylor could move. "We need to be somewhere that's not here," she said with forced evenness.
"This is so fucked!" Alec yelled, able to speak now that Lisa's voice had broken the silence. The high pitched hysteria of their voice reverberated against their mask as they stood at the edge of the rooftop, watching the monsters that were also dogs defeat the man they were fighting. "This is a dream right? That's not actually fucking Lung down there? Fuck!"
"I don't know what this is," Brian started, turning to the others. He clenched his fists, standing up straighter and injecting authoritativeness into his voice that could have only come from being a camp counselor or a supervillain. "But Li-" A breath to center himself, to internalize what he knew about the context of the situation they were in. "But Tattletale is right. We need to go, this is a bad place to talk and we all know it. Regent, you ride in the back with me." He started walking towards Rachel.
In making Grue, Brian had put paragraphs of thought into the way he stood, walked and talked. How the boy who had fought to be strong, who had found himself still too weak to protect his sister, had grown into a supervillain that easily commanded respect. It was not just his deep voice nor his height that made him a leader. It was the deliberate choice to carry himself with the confidence of someone that was worth listening to and worth following.
"Bitch," Grue said once he was close enough not to have to shout to give orders, only slightly stumbling over the word Brian didn't have much practice using. "Stay with me."
Rachel, who had ripped the cheap dollar store dog mask off her face and was slowly crushing it in her hands, started shaking her head as if that would somehow deny the reality they'd all found themselves in. Her face had gone incredibly pale. The cheap plastic of the mask cracked, sharp edged dug into Rachel's palms. Brian put his hands around hers and with a gasp she stopped squeezing.
"We're all here, we're all okay, we're all going to be okay," Brian said gently, comforting in all the ways a supervillain wouldn't be. "Right now we need you."
Rachel saw her face reflected in Brian's helmet, saw her terror reflected back in the tightness of her lips and the wideness of her eyes. She nodded all the same. "Freak out later?"
"Promise." Brian let go of her hands and then switched back to speaking like Grue. "Okay three dogs...Weaver," he said, looking at Taylor. "I'm pretty sure the rest of us have muscle memory for how to ride, you ride with Bitch. Regent rides with me, Tattletale, you ride on your own." Brian hadn't left space to argue with his orders (and no-one wanted to, anyway).
Rachel tried whistling, failed to let out more than a puff of air, licked her lips and then tried again. Her second attempt sounded true. One short whistle followed by two long ones followed by thumping impacts as her three dogs returned to their master.
Alec had screamed themself out and was happy to just let Brian pick them up and place them on their assigned dog. Lisa clambered onto hers and gave Taylor a look that Taylor understood instantly. A promise of support once the immediate crisis was done.
For Rachel getting onto her dog was the most natural thing in the world. For all her anxiety and for all the terror that lizard-like monsters of bone and flesh should have inspired, Rachel knew with complete certainty that these dogs were hers.
For Taylor, who had no instinct of ever having been near the dogs before, there was Rachel reaching a calloused hand out to her. She grabbed Taylor by the elbow and pulled, helping Taylor sit up behind her. Even in the dark Taylor couldn't help but notice how well defined the muscles of Rachel's arms were, exaggerated by the sleeveless shirt she was wearing.
With another whistle the dogs jumped off the rooftop, the dog Rachel and Taylor rode using the building's fire escape as a springboard. The metal creaked and groaned, collapsing all together as the dog jumped off, crashing down to street level. Taylor didn't feel at all afraid, clinging to Rachel and pressing herself against her back.
The noise of a motorcycle cut through the quiet of the night. Bugs fell into and out of Taylor's senses as the dogs ran through the streets and jumped onto the rooftops and all Taylor could think about was cherry blossoms. Back when Taylor had first grown out her hair, Rachel had mentioned that was what her preferred shampoo smelled like. Taylor had wanted to meet her in person long before then, but finding out just what cherry blossoms smelled like on Rachel was something she'd yearned for and had never admitted to anyone, not even Lisa. Now, meeting in this impossible way with her face pressed so close to Rachel's hair, Taylor could only smell soot.
Rainbow Squad > The Floating Isles > OOC
[ Sunday, June 11, 2017 3:30 AM ]
ScarletSpider: I hate using this word but that was epic last night and now I can't go to sleep
HarleyMotherFuckinQuinn: i kno rite!!!
HarleyMotherFuckinQuinn: fuck where do we even go after that
SquirrelGal: Yeah, we beat the ten headed tyrant and became gods. I think we're out of plot.
Kal-El: Pretty much yeah
Oracle: Bri, you have work in the morning and you're two timezones ahead, go the fuck to sleep.
Kal-El: >
Kal-El: Fiiiiiiiine.
Kal-El: Night for hopefully real this time.
SquirrelGal: Nini
ScarletSpider: G'night!
HarleyMotherFuckinQuinn: bai
Oracle: Okay thought, we've done the dragon game so many times. Let's switch it up.
HarleyMotherFuckinQuinn: wat u thinkin?
Oracle: Superheroes.
ScarletSpider: ...
HarleyMotherFuckinQuinn: adfhdskjalfa yis
SquirrelGal: Hell yes.
ScarletSpider: Hell.
SquirrelGal: Fucking.
ScarletSpider: Yes.
The bathroom in the loft had filled completely with steam as Taylor showered under the most scalding water she could manage. Once she'd figured out how to stop her hands from shaking by offloading the nervous reactions to the ants that lived under the sidewalk outside, she'd managed to scrub out most of the smells of the fight she hadn't actually been a part of. Her costume lay in a heap where she had peeled herself out of it and she did her best to ignore it while she toweled off.
The moment she was dry there was a knock on the door. "Found pjs for you," Lisa said once Taylor cracked the door opening, passing an aggressively purple and aggressively soft pajama set in. "Sorry, they're a bit small but it was the best I could find."
"It's fine." Taylor said automatically even as she glared at the pajama pants for daring to only barely cover her calves.
"Are you fine?" Lisa asks, opening the door the moment Taylor is decent.
"I mean, we're all in the same boat," Taylor answered, putting up a smile on instinct to hide just how nervous she actually was. Even without superpowers Lisa would have absolutely seen through it but it was the coping mechanism Taylor had so that was what she went with.
Brian meanwhile was part way through the loft's pile of old pizza boxes, emptying each of leftover crusts before flattening them. In the half an hour Taylor had been showered, the trash bin had been completely filled with discarded cans and all of the stray dirty plates had been relocated to the kitchen. In said kitchen was Alec who had chosen to babysit a tea kettle on the stove instead of helping with Brian's compulsive cleaning. It took Taylor a minute to find Rachel. She'd chosen to be on the floor and Brutus was being a very good sport about being her pillow while her other two dogs laid down protectively near her.
"So, talking, we should do that," Taylor started, unsure of what to say next.
Rachel laughed sharply, her pillow's ears perking up from the sudden sound. Nothing was actually funny but the strained sound was still correct for everyone's feelings. "I keep expecting to wake up and this just keeps being real. What the fuck guys?"
"It's a fucking nightmare, yeah," Taylor said, perching herself on the arm of a couch at a calculated distance from Rachel and the dogs. Unspoken feelings could wait until their universe resolved itself into something calmer.
Lisa dragged a whiteboard on wheels out from her room, already filled out with her last half hour of thoughts in purple dry-erase. "Okay, so here are the facts," she said once the board was in front of the tv. She had a collapsible baton she'd taken from Brian's room to use as a pointer. She pointed it to the word 'reality' written in big block letters. "We are going to treat this situation as real because not doing so is a path to madness. Agreed?"
Everyone nodded and Rachel sat up to listen to the lecture properly.
"So this is Brockton Bay on Earth Bet. The year is twenty-eleven and today is the tenth of April-"
"Its the eleventh," Alec interrupted and at Lisa's glare they added defensively, "I mean it's past midnight now and, ummm....Anyone want tea?"
Lisa sighed and allowed an interruption for tea. Alec had remembered everyone's preferences and mint tea would make getting her train of thought derailed more bearable. Once everyone was settled again she restarted, her trusty baton guiding her to her next point. "So we have two sets of memories. Our own and what I'm gonna call 'character memories.' That includes everything from details to muscle memory to knowing how to use the superpowers we all have. It also includes stuff we never wrote."
"How do you mean?" Brian asked, his own drink keeping his hands occupied now that he had defeated the pile of pizza boxes.
"I checked my phone, there's a bunch of stuff in there from jobs we never wrote about. Like the Ruby Dreams job is in there but so is us robbing Fischer and Weber. They're a Medhall subsidiary," she added for Taylor's benefit. "This is a whole-ass world, not just the shit that we made up. Plus since we came here instead of Taylor meeting Armsmaster, we probably fucked up the plot already."
"So it's not just all the fucked-up shit Taylor came up with we have to deal with? Great, fucking great," Rachel said. She sighed and started petting Angelica for the sake of her own comfort.
"Hey, not all the bullshit was my idea!" Taylor complained.
Rachel started listing Taylor's ideas on her fingers. "The super Nazis, Bakuda, Noelle, Heartbreaker, Nice Guy, Grey boy, like most of the endbringers..."
"Okay but the rest of the Nine weren't my fault and also you are the one that came up with Ziz," Taylor retorted.
"Oh right, Ziz is real, anyone wanna suicide pact? Maybe it's one of those stories where we get to go back to our bodies after dying."
Brian, Alec and Taylor answered simultaneously with their own variation of "Fuck no!"
"We have no way to tell if that would even work and it's super not worth the risk," Lisa pointed out.
"Okay but I have so many fucking dogs I gotta go deal with on my own, this sucks."
"You love dogs. Besides, other-Rachel knew how to handle that so you do too. I think that's just an instinct we have now. Coil called up right after we got back but I fell into other-Lisa's character really easily."
Everyone snapped to attention, staring at Lisa. "It's fine, he doesn't know anything is wrong with us."
"Next time, lead with the Coil bullshit," Brian said, exhaustion in his voice from thinking about how much of a pain dealing with that was going to be.
"Anyone want more tea?" Alec asked in an attempt to make the conversation about anything else.
Taylor didn't start drinking again right away, instead just holding the mug in her hands and letting the warmth help her think. "So like, did a bunch of teenagers just die and we took over their lives?" Taylor asked to verbalize the final question that everyone was avoiding.
Alec, who was sitting next to Brian and leaning against him, was the first one to speak. "We didn't do anything, this metaphysical bullshit wasn't our fault. None of us are gonna feel guilty about that. We're here."
"We're queer," Taylor said under her breath. Call and response was comforting.
Alec smiled at her. "And we're gonna make the best of it. We made these kids way back when cause we all needed to work through some shit. Parent bullshit, gender bullshit, brain bullshit... They helped us a lot. We owe it to them to like, not give up right away. Agreed?"
All of them found that they did.
---
Taylor sighed and passed the controller back to Alec. On the large tv, skeletal wheels continued to grind the ragdolled corpse of their shared knight to dust, their ai unaware of the knight's health running out. "I'm good at these, the level design is just different!"
"Lol," said Alec out loud, causing Lisa to groan in an entirely affectionate way.
Rachel and Brian had gone out to the one convenience store still open at 2 am. Instead of participating in video games Lisa had taken the other couch for herself to lay down on and was on a laptop. Ostensibly she was doing research but without a single topic to focus on she had ended up just wiki-walking wherever her interests led her. "Okay I know she's an evil bitch and also I made her up one time but damn, lady looks good in a suit."
Lisa turned her laptop screen and to her delight Taylor, as the person in the room most attracted to women, reacted exactly as expected to the image of Rebecca Costa Brown.
"Fuck," was all Taylor could say after a moment to process.
"I know right?" said Lisa, who was very ace but could appreciate a well tailored aesthetic all the same.
"Careful Tay, you're drooling," Alec said, knowing Taylor well enough to know that she'd stick her tongue out at them without even having to turn away from their game to look at her.
The door opened and in entered Angelica, Brutus and Judas, followed by the people that'd accompanied them. Brian had his hands full of groceries while Rachel had something much more important in the hand that wasn't occupied by leashes.
"Beer me!" Taylor was excited in a way that was infectious.
"Thought you were just eh on beer," Brian said, putting down the groceries and grabbing the sixpack from Rachel. It turned out keeping a small bottle opener on his keychain was a trait his character shared with him. He passed the beer to Taylor, who took it happily, and then he went to kiss Alec hello with lips chilled from the night outside. They whined a complaint about how their boyfriend was going to get them killed and then kissed him back.
"Beer is okay but like, guys I never got to underaged-drink the first time!" That got a laugh out of everyone, especially when Taylor actually took a sip and made a face. There was a lot of passing out of snacks and clinking of bottles and the sort of meaningless talk that worked best to try to push away the inevitability of morning.
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So the Undersiders Created a Super Power Based Campaign from a Villain POV, and Most of the Big Threats were the Creation of a Escalation Based DM? All I can say is Nice. Is Aisha "Kal-El"'s IRL Sister, because his Basis for Brian/Grue definitely gives off some inspiration