Prologue 01.03
[X] Try to communicate.
What defined the next few days for Taylor Hebert, quite naturally, was experimenting with her power.
She did run into a problem rather immediately. Two, in fact.
The first being that it was hard to do anything with the giant projection(?) she made from within her home. She couldn't easily measure his height but he was tall enough he couldn't stand up in her bedroom.
The second curtailed the first, namely that after a few minutes of the giant being present, she had a terrible headache and she had to stop, causing him to once more become an ever-present shadow to her.
Several tylenols later—all of which did nothing to alleviate the building pressure – and half a day later she was able to figure out that time did help the pressure- some kind of limit to her power, perhaps?
It was around this time that she started to keep notes on her ability; no reason to half-ass it. Plus it seemed prudent given that her power came with zero instructions, just a faint sense of a non-real muscle. Maybe this is what it had been like for other heroes? Maybe even Alexandria?
She could be hopeful.
The next day found her sitting at the computer, idly wiggling a pencil as she waited for the family desktop to load a webpage.
Her results for the day had been… middling.
Not in power experimentation, rather in where to do it.
As she saw it, there were basically three places she could think of to summon the giant and see what he could do; the boat graveyard, an abandoned building (there wasn't a lack of derelict ones within the city) or outside the city.
The boat graveyard was unique and interesting and… also highly visible. It might have been paranoia, but the idea that going out there seemed an easy way to get found out before she had even started her cape career wouldn't go away. Finding an abandoned building was dangerous, on the other hand. While no one lived in the boat graveyard, all sorts of druggies squatted in abandoned buildings. The kinds of people who do stupid things. Living in Brockton Bay for fifteen years had given Taylor a healthy respect for staying away from the truly desperate.
That left outside the city and her conundrum. She was trying to find a place that was hidden but accessible enough she would not need to go hiking. Especially in the middle of January. It was cold out there.
Hence why she was looking up nearby parks. Or the closest forest.
She wasn't picky.
Taylor looked at her notes she'd collected.
For the most part they were recordings of how long the giant could manifest. He hadn't moved when he materialized- whether that was due to her saying as such or for some other reason, she didn't know.
At present she was able to get a few minutes before she really started to get a headache. Hopefully she could get used to it… or the giant was going to have to be really useful else she got stiffed in the power lottery.
...she really hoped it wasn't that.
It was now Friday, three days left till she had to return to school.
That was far from the forefront of her mind, however. Rather she was thinking about how she was freezing her butt off in the middle of a forest. She should have brought a thermos. Tea would have been nice. Thoughts for next time.
After spending an inordinate amount of time checking to make sure nothing was around, that no one was following her, she tensed that muscle.
Blue-yellow motes fluttered down revealing the giant, his yellow eyes focused on her.
"You're my power, right? Do you listen to me or do I control you…" The words slowly trailed off.
Well there was one way to test this.
Bluntly.
She pointed to a tree near the giant. "Hit that tree… please." Even if he only resembled a man, it felt weird to be ordering around something that looked human-ish on a surface level.
WHAM
It was so quick, she missed the motion, only catching the sound of wood shredding under a greater force, as the top half of the tree went sailing several yards from where he had backhanded the middle of the tree out of existence.
The snow crunched under the wood's weight, as birds cawed in protest at the sudden violence and flew out of nearby branches.
Green eyes blinked as she stared at it.
It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for Taylor's mind to reboot and go 'oh right, he's a literal superpower. He's supposed to be able to do that.'
Well, super strength was one of her power's… powers.
Though just to be sure…
It was dumb. Taylor could admit it was dumb. It still didn't change the fact that she went over to make sure the tree wasn't rotten or made of balsa wood.
One slightly bruised set of toes later from an ill-advised kick, and Taylor was one hundred percent sure that it wasn't fake.
Well, when in Rome...
She gestured to a much older tree.
"Can you pick it up?" The giant stared at her. "Please?"
No response.
She blinked long before it did.
"Pick it up, please?" A different wording perhaps?
It wasn't fast this time, the giant's hands gripped the tree, ignoring the pine needles, before it's bark gave way to ten indents from his fingers digging in with a loud crunch. A crunch that reverberated down it, the ground shifting as the tree was pulled out, roots and all, a mass of dirt coming up with the old roots.
Part of the research Taylor had done the previous day was to find something to give a vague estimate on how to benchmark the giant's abilities. Doing some quick and dirty math, it was at least a few tons. Possibly more with the dirt the roots had pulled up. At least more now that she thought about it, since pulling it up with the roots entrenched as deep as they had been required more effort than if the tree was just lying on the ground like lumber.
Excitement started to build in her. At the minimum it was looking like her power had some super-strength to it. That was good. Something to make notes on after she dismissed it because she sure wasn't going to do that with the limited time she hit the boundary of her power.
In truth it was something of a worry- that the power she got was only good for making her have an imaginary friend that was strong enough to move a bed. Fear never had to be rational.
"You can put it down now."
The tree did not go back into the hole as well as it came out, but that was the price of testing it seems. The tree would be fine. Probably.
With that taken care of, time for the next phase.
"Can you talk?"
It had been bugging her.
For some reason she got the vague idea that it was sentient. There wasn't much in the way she could do to check if others with a similar power felt the same way. Heck, she didn't know of any heroes or villains that had a similar power.
Sadly, nothing greeted her audibly, merely amber eyes.
Never was that easy, was it?
"You can hear me, right?"
She knew it could, else how else would it have been able to commit arboreal-based violence.
No response.
Taylor reviewed her options in her head; the giant listened to direct commands and ignored rhetorical responses. It was very possible it was… unintelligent. Which was on one hand somewhat relieving- she didn't want to be commanding a possible sentient life form. On the other hand… she would have no insight into how its thought processes worked. Like a blackbox.
She hemmed and hawed for a few more moments. What if it lacked the capacity to verbalize?
"Are you able to- please respond in writing to me."
Nothing. Which made sense since she didn't give him anything to respond to.
"Write…" she tried to think of something easy to spell, "...'Bob' in the snow using your finger."
The moment the words left her mouth, the unreal muscle started to strain- similar to how someone would add a ton of weights in the gym to the unlucky person mid-rep.
Taylor felt her eyes start to close unconsciously as she gritted through the rapidly ballooning headache. When she opened them again, the giant was drawing something into the snow. Excitement burst through the pain as she walked up beside him to read it.
...those weren't letters. They were just… squiggles. Similar to letters but letters they were not. Nor did the word 'Bob' contain ten additional letters last time she checked. Another dud. Maybe he was just mimicking human writing? One would think that if the power could understand English it could write in it- maybe it only understood commands as long as she verbalized them?
Take a step forwards please.
After a few minutes of thinking that and nothing happening, that ruled out that out. Which was going to make any heroics the giant was part of require that she was present. Maybe there was a workaround?
Her left eye twitched.
The action made her realize that the headache that had come from the muscle was still building from when she had asked him to write- even if its rate of increase had slowed after he finished with the scribble.
The muscle relaxed.
Blue-gold motes of light covered the giant as he disappeared from view, leaving Taylor with a headache and several notes to make.
Saturday had not been conducive to any further power experimentation.
On the one hand, she had been able to identify that the giant listened to her commands and had some manner of super-strength. That meant the only further testing she could think of was to find his limits for strength or presumably durability, unless he had a more esoteric ability that she had yet to find.
Sadly this could not be done at home as her dad had made sure he was around for a discussion that had been put off for a few days.
Past Taylor had offloaded the decision on transferring to future Taylor. The proverbial future Taylor from a few days ago was now preset Taylor.
Past Taylor was a bitch.
There were a couple of options her dad had presented.
Arcadia High would be her dream pick, the school the Wards supposedly go to, but there was a reason they went there. It was the best school within several counties, a school choice for many. Which was the problem; Taylor's grades weren't… great. Before high school, she could have swung it. Easily. Even before the end of the first semester last year. But now…
She couldn't even be hopeful, truthfully.
At most they might accept her as a pity case.
Clarendon High was the next best option. Physically it was far, far away. Just to get there, she would have to take a bus, or more likely a ride from her dad, past Arcadia. She… didn't know a great deal about it. It was in the nicer neighbourhoods of the southern downtown area, though.
Immaculata was… the most likely to take her. The problem was it was a private Christian school and a school for rich kids, which on some level made Taylor more nervous about it than Winslow. It would also eat through whatever leftover money they had and then some. Her dad would have to get… creative. In his own words.
He didn't seem particularly receptive about this option when they talked about it.
Transferring would end one set of problems, admittedly a horrid set of problems, but cause a new set to emerge. Taylor just knew it as well as knowing that gravity pulled down.
Perhaps the devil you know was better than being thrust into the unknown?
Should Taylor try to get a school transfer?
[] Yes – Into the Unknown
[] No – the Devil you know
Author's Note: To pull back the curtain a bit, what this vote signifies is how much do we want to mess around with canon and win stupid prizes. If the yes option wins, I'll do a roll to see where she goes. Within the roll, it is possible for her to fail and no one accepts her and/or the inertia of her situation causes it to fail.
There will be fallout if the roll fails.
Outside of that, I've loved the response from everyone- I was scared I wouldn't even get five votes and I'm at many times that. Worst part is holding myself back from the discussion so I do not spoil something.
What defined the next few days for Taylor Hebert, quite naturally, was experimenting with her power.
She did run into a problem rather immediately. Two, in fact.
The first being that it was hard to do anything with the giant projection(?) she made from within her home. She couldn't easily measure his height but he was tall enough he couldn't stand up in her bedroom.
The second curtailed the first, namely that after a few minutes of the giant being present, she had a terrible headache and she had to stop, causing him to once more become an ever-present shadow to her.
Several tylenols later—all of which did nothing to alleviate the building pressure – and half a day later she was able to figure out that time did help the pressure- some kind of limit to her power, perhaps?
It was around this time that she started to keep notes on her ability; no reason to half-ass it. Plus it seemed prudent given that her power came with zero instructions, just a faint sense of a non-real muscle. Maybe this is what it had been like for other heroes? Maybe even Alexandria?
She could be hopeful.
The next day found her sitting at the computer, idly wiggling a pencil as she waited for the family desktop to load a webpage.
Her results for the day had been… middling.
Not in power experimentation, rather in where to do it.
As she saw it, there were basically three places she could think of to summon the giant and see what he could do; the boat graveyard, an abandoned building (there wasn't a lack of derelict ones within the city) or outside the city.
The boat graveyard was unique and interesting and… also highly visible. It might have been paranoia, but the idea that going out there seemed an easy way to get found out before she had even started her cape career wouldn't go away. Finding an abandoned building was dangerous, on the other hand. While no one lived in the boat graveyard, all sorts of druggies squatted in abandoned buildings. The kinds of people who do stupid things. Living in Brockton Bay for fifteen years had given Taylor a healthy respect for staying away from the truly desperate.
That left outside the city and her conundrum. She was trying to find a place that was hidden but accessible enough she would not need to go hiking. Especially in the middle of January. It was cold out there.
Hence why she was looking up nearby parks. Or the closest forest.
She wasn't picky.
Taylor looked at her notes she'd collected.
For the most part they were recordings of how long the giant could manifest. He hadn't moved when he materialized- whether that was due to her saying as such or for some other reason, she didn't know.
At present she was able to get a few minutes before she really started to get a headache. Hopefully she could get used to it… or the giant was going to have to be really useful else she got stiffed in the power lottery.
...she really hoped it wasn't that.
It was now Friday, three days left till she had to return to school.
That was far from the forefront of her mind, however. Rather she was thinking about how she was freezing her butt off in the middle of a forest. She should have brought a thermos. Tea would have been nice. Thoughts for next time.
After spending an inordinate amount of time checking to make sure nothing was around, that no one was following her, she tensed that muscle.
Blue-yellow motes fluttered down revealing the giant, his yellow eyes focused on her.
"You're my power, right? Do you listen to me or do I control you…" The words slowly trailed off.
Well there was one way to test this.
Bluntly.
She pointed to a tree near the giant. "Hit that tree… please." Even if he only resembled a man, it felt weird to be ordering around something that looked human-ish on a surface level.
WHAM
It was so quick, she missed the motion, only catching the sound of wood shredding under a greater force, as the top half of the tree went sailing several yards from where he had backhanded the middle of the tree out of existence.
The snow crunched under the wood's weight, as birds cawed in protest at the sudden violence and flew out of nearby branches.
Green eyes blinked as she stared at it.
It took an embarrassingly long amount of time for Taylor's mind to reboot and go 'oh right, he's a literal superpower. He's supposed to be able to do that.'
Well, super strength was one of her power's… powers.
Though just to be sure…
It was dumb. Taylor could admit it was dumb. It still didn't change the fact that she went over to make sure the tree wasn't rotten or made of balsa wood.
One slightly bruised set of toes later from an ill-advised kick, and Taylor was one hundred percent sure that it wasn't fake.
Well, when in Rome...
She gestured to a much older tree.
"Can you pick it up?" The giant stared at her. "Please?"
No response.
She blinked long before it did.
"Pick it up, please?" A different wording perhaps?
It wasn't fast this time, the giant's hands gripped the tree, ignoring the pine needles, before it's bark gave way to ten indents from his fingers digging in with a loud crunch. A crunch that reverberated down it, the ground shifting as the tree was pulled out, roots and all, a mass of dirt coming up with the old roots.
Part of the research Taylor had done the previous day was to find something to give a vague estimate on how to benchmark the giant's abilities. Doing some quick and dirty math, it was at least a few tons. Possibly more with the dirt the roots had pulled up. At least more now that she thought about it, since pulling it up with the roots entrenched as deep as they had been required more effort than if the tree was just lying on the ground like lumber.
Excitement started to build in her. At the minimum it was looking like her power had some super-strength to it. That was good. Something to make notes on after she dismissed it because she sure wasn't going to do that with the limited time she hit the boundary of her power.
In truth it was something of a worry- that the power she got was only good for making her have an imaginary friend that was strong enough to move a bed. Fear never had to be rational.
"You can put it down now."
The tree did not go back into the hole as well as it came out, but that was the price of testing it seems. The tree would be fine. Probably.
With that taken care of, time for the next phase.
"Can you talk?"
It had been bugging her.
For some reason she got the vague idea that it was sentient. There wasn't much in the way she could do to check if others with a similar power felt the same way. Heck, she didn't know of any heroes or villains that had a similar power.
Sadly, nothing greeted her audibly, merely amber eyes.
Never was that easy, was it?
"You can hear me, right?"
She knew it could, else how else would it have been able to commit arboreal-based violence.
No response.
Taylor reviewed her options in her head; the giant listened to direct commands and ignored rhetorical responses. It was very possible it was… unintelligent. Which was on one hand somewhat relieving- she didn't want to be commanding a possible sentient life form. On the other hand… she would have no insight into how its thought processes worked. Like a blackbox.
She hemmed and hawed for a few more moments. What if it lacked the capacity to verbalize?
"Are you able to- please respond in writing to me."
Nothing. Which made sense since she didn't give him anything to respond to.
"Write…" she tried to think of something easy to spell, "...'Bob' in the snow using your finger."
The moment the words left her mouth, the unreal muscle started to strain- similar to how someone would add a ton of weights in the gym to the unlucky person mid-rep.
Taylor felt her eyes start to close unconsciously as she gritted through the rapidly ballooning headache. When she opened them again, the giant was drawing something into the snow. Excitement burst through the pain as she walked up beside him to read it.
...those weren't letters. They were just… squiggles. Similar to letters but letters they were not. Nor did the word 'Bob' contain ten additional letters last time she checked. Another dud. Maybe he was just mimicking human writing? One would think that if the power could understand English it could write in it- maybe it only understood commands as long as she verbalized them?
Take a step forwards please.
After a few minutes of thinking that and nothing happening, that ruled out that out. Which was going to make any heroics the giant was part of require that she was present. Maybe there was a workaround?
Her left eye twitched.
The action made her realize that the headache that had come from the muscle was still building from when she had asked him to write- even if its rate of increase had slowed after he finished with the scribble.
The muscle relaxed.
Blue-gold motes of light covered the giant as he disappeared from view, leaving Taylor with a headache and several notes to make.
Saturday had not been conducive to any further power experimentation.
On the one hand, she had been able to identify that the giant listened to her commands and had some manner of super-strength. That meant the only further testing she could think of was to find his limits for strength or presumably durability, unless he had a more esoteric ability that she had yet to find.
Sadly this could not be done at home as her dad had made sure he was around for a discussion that had been put off for a few days.
Past Taylor had offloaded the decision on transferring to future Taylor. The proverbial future Taylor from a few days ago was now preset Taylor.
Past Taylor was a bitch.
There were a couple of options her dad had presented.
Arcadia High would be her dream pick, the school the Wards supposedly go to, but there was a reason they went there. It was the best school within several counties, a school choice for many. Which was the problem; Taylor's grades weren't… great. Before high school, she could have swung it. Easily. Even before the end of the first semester last year. But now…
She couldn't even be hopeful, truthfully.
At most they might accept her as a pity case.
Clarendon High was the next best option. Physically it was far, far away. Just to get there, she would have to take a bus, or more likely a ride from her dad, past Arcadia. She… didn't know a great deal about it. It was in the nicer neighbourhoods of the southern downtown area, though.
Immaculata was… the most likely to take her. The problem was it was a private Christian school and a school for rich kids, which on some level made Taylor more nervous about it than Winslow. It would also eat through whatever leftover money they had and then some. Her dad would have to get… creative. In his own words.
He didn't seem particularly receptive about this option when they talked about it.
Transferring would end one set of problems, admittedly a horrid set of problems, but cause a new set to emerge. Taylor just knew it as well as knowing that gravity pulled down.
Perhaps the devil you know was better than being thrust into the unknown?
Should Taylor try to get a school transfer?
[] Yes – Into the Unknown
[] No – the Devil you know
Author's Note: To pull back the curtain a bit, what this vote signifies is how much do we want to mess around with canon and win stupid prizes. If the yes option wins, I'll do a roll to see where she goes. Within the roll, it is possible for her to fail and no one accepts her and/or the inertia of her situation causes it to fail.
There will be fallout if the roll fails.
Outside of that, I've loved the response from everyone- I was scared I wouldn't even get five votes and I'm at many times that. Worst part is holding myself back from the discussion so I do not spoil something.
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