-
Going forward, links to content from Twitter (now X) will no longer be embedded. Pre-existing links should not be affected.
- Location
- Indiana, US
Three corona pollentias and Taylor's currently burrowing to the center of the Earth. I think she may be going to pick up the eldest of her three foster children.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Firebug
Geas
Meat Thing
I'm not dead.
February 25th, 2011
Brockton Bay
It had been four days since Father had bailed me out of jail and things were still awkwardly and rather uncomfortably chilly between us. It didn't help that he was still absolutely furious… and maybe part of the problem was that rather than try to explain my side of things, I instead was relying on what had become a cornerstone of my daily routine. I had my hands and bare feet wrapped in athletic tape, and was hammering the hell out of an old forty-pound training bag that I had liberated from an abandoned and dilapidated gym mere days after I had gotten out of the hospital and realized that the tools I had at my disposal for getting myself into proper shape were tragically lacking. It hadn't been in good condition when I found it and hauled it home, but that sort of thing is merely one of the reasons why humans invented duct tape.
The end result was a horrific eyesore, of course. However I swallowed my revulsion because until I managed to increase the resources at my disposal, I would have to make due with whatever I had available. Sometimes, striving for perfection demanded accepting indignities and mediocrity.
The new memories that cluttered the back of my mind made that easy to understand, despite how much they initially and still do confuse me.
On one hand, it was easy to want to believe that getting powers had done something to me that I had no context to understand. It wasn't as if I could just walk up to a Cape and ask them if they also got an entire lifespan's worth of memories that didn't seem to have anything to do with whatever powers that they have.
On the other hand, it was just as easy to want to believe that yet again, some ancient and unfathomably powerful spirit had chosen to - for reasons that I couldn't even begin to understand - meddle with my life. After all, meddling in the affairs of humans is simply what spirits did, especially the old and powerful ones. I had an entire set of memories - a complete second lifetime in fact - that proved that.
Was I even Taylor Hebert still? Did the new memories come from some ancient past on Earth-Bet, if not some other Earth? Or did I somehow awaken memories that had always been lurking inside of me at the same time I suddenly found myself with the power to control bugs? The former implied something meddling with my head. The latter suggested that reincarnation was not solely the purview of one of the most powerful beings to ever live on any world.
Neither possibility was especially comforting, partly because neither actually precluded the other.
I very deliberately did not let myself frown, but instead forced my body to move, etching the techniques from my memories into my muscles with rote repetition. I knew the myriad stances, strikes and techniques, but I
I did not know them. Or rather, my body, Taylor Hebert's body, didn't know.
The me that was Taylor Hebert had been pitifully out of shape and scrawny and weak. However, the one advantage that that me had undeniably had over the other me (if she in fact actually had also been me) was that despite the best efforts of Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and Madison Clements, she was still very much sane or close enough that it still counted.
I couldn't say the same about the other me, as much as I wished otherwise.
I had no problems letting her memories train my (our?) body to her brutally unrelenting standards. She had been a monster - my other memories made that abundantly clear - but when it came to fighting she'd been an unrivaled prodigy, even after she had slipped into a deranged madness that quietly terrified me whenever I delved too deeply into her memories. How she had even functioned as a person afterwards, much less clawed her way back to something resembling sanity… I couldn't fathom it.
I didn't want to.
So instead I drilled the many forms of hand-to-hand that the other me had mastered and in a handful of cases outright invented into my muscle memory, and desperately hoped that the madness that had plagued the other me remained firmly in my memories (and occasionally my nightmares). After over a month of intensive exercise, my paunch was all but gone and I was finally putting a semi-acceptable amount of muscle onto my limbs and core, but I wouldn't - couldn't - be satisfied until I'd managed to put on at least thirty pounds of solid muscle. Maybe more if I ended up growing as tall as I thought I might.
The cold didn't bother me. I didn't permit it to, despite only being clad in sweat pants and a ripped old t-shirt as I danced across the cold and brittle grass in the backyard and forced my aching body to finish the set of one hundred high kicks that I'd been working through to improve my flexibility, stamina and strength, as well as toughen up my feet. At the same time it was good practice for my breath control, which was even more important for my powers than it was for the fighting styles that I was training myself in.
That was another thing that confused me; my powers. As in powers, plural, that didn't seem to have anything to do with each other.
I could control insects. Even in winter, the number of bugs that I felt around me was alarming; as it turned out, there were ants that were plenty active during the winter. Also flies, cockroaches, beetles, and more. So many bugs, and I could feel them all as surely as I could feel my fingers and toes.
But then there was the Fire burning in my chest and in my gut. The me that was Taylor Hebert would call it pyrokinesis like something from that really old movie from the 80s, I think it was called Firemaster or Firestarter or something. The other me called it Firebending.
My power to control bugs was something that I did and did not understand; it was weirdly intuitive, like flexing a finger or blinking. The Fire, however?
I was hyper aware of the way my chi flowed through my body, emanating from the roiling furnace in my stomach. The memories of that other me and the literal lifetime of training she had done to master her Fire to an unrivaled degree made keeping my body temperature comfortable despite the winter chill as simple as breathing. Simpler, even. I wasn't as capable physically as the other me had been, which was… irksome… but using the memories of the other me as a guide, I knew how to use my Fire very, very well. The only problem was that my body wasn't nearly strong enough for some of the things that the other me had done so easily.
Not yet.
But it helped that it felt as if I was always filled to near-bursting with chi every waking moment.
Father was furious that I'd been attacked outright at school despite assurances that something like the Locker would never happen again, furious that I'd been arrested by the police just because in defending myself I just so happened to have injured most of the boys that Sophia had set on me and a few of their friends, and furious that some of the parents of said boys were attempting to press charges just because I hospitalized their precious widdle boys. That I had also been suspended from school for two weeks as well…
Hmph.
If any of them asked me, I'd have cheerfully told them that they should be grateful that in my unparalleled generosity, I had only broken four of those seven boys badly enough to need to be taken to Brockton Bay General Hospital. Of those four, only two needed an overnight stay - one for a shattered knee and the other due to a significant neck injury, both of which necessitated surgery. But no, apparently 'enthusiastic self-defense' is apparently perfectly justified grounds for arresting - and suspending - a teenage girl in Brockton Bay.
I let a little too much of my irritation bleed into my training; my next kick was appallingly sloppy by my other self's standards and as such was absolutely unacceptable. If I was going to make use of these new memories - and I certainly intended to - then I would have to be no less than perfect. That I was very, very new to my self-inflicted training regimen was no excuse. So what if I'd only been training myself for a month?
The skills that my other memories were carving into my muscle and bones demanded nothing less than constant and absolute perfection.
I was just deciding on how to punish myself for the lapse when Father strode out of the back door. For a brief moment I was taken aback; the thunderous expression on his face, the flared nostrils, the look in his eyes… But no, Father wasn't… Dad wasn't Father. He was just Danny Hebert, no matter that he had the same look in his eyes that spoke of a temper being very carefully leashed, nevermind that they were green instead of gold.
He was just Dad.
More importantly, Dad showed that he genuinely cared far more than Father had ever had.
"Taylor, we need to talk." None of the usual pathetic exchanges that had been the staple of our father-daughter communications and interactions since M- … since 2008. The old me would've immediately been on the defensive at his tone and pasture, and admittedly a part of me still wanted to avoid talking seriously to him about anything.
"Hello Father, you're home earlier than expected," I instead nonchalantly commented as I turned back to my heavy bag and began practicing sidekicks. My right leg thudded twice into the bag, first low then at just shy of chest height. "Hope you don't mind me continuing my training while we talk?" I asked as I rechambered and kicked twice again.
"Are you a Cape?" Dad asked me outright.
To my credit I didn't freeze or stumble but it was definitely a near-thing to keep the pace of my kicks going.
"Really, Father?" I asked with a carefully feigned blend of exasperation and embarrassment. "Do I look like I'm about to go put on a Halloween costume and beat people up?" I finished my set of kicks and smoothly switched legs, starting a new set.
"The way that you beat the hell out of those boys has me wondering," he said evenly. "Not to mention how hard you've been training lately or how strong you're suddenly getting."
"I'm training because I'm not about to end up in another l-locker," I all but hissed out, then I bit my lip before too much emotion crept into my tone. My Fire tended to respond a little too readily when my blood ran hot; no pun intended. I stopped my set to reign in both my temper and my breath.
"As for what I did to those boys?" I took a deep, calming breath then turned to meet his steady gaze. "Two of them have reputations, Father. I might be a social pariah at school, but from the rumors I'm pretty sure that at least one of them was the reason that a girl last year committed suicide. He compared her hair to mine… If anything, I should've broken more than his neck."
As he briefly turned grey I made a show of turning my attention back to the heavy bag, and as smoothly and swiftly as I could manage, went from standing nonchalantly to chambering and unleashing as high a side kick as I could currently manage. While I was easily nearly a foot taller than the girl from my other memories, I still wasn't nearly as flexible… not yet anyways.
I still managed to drive the heel of my right foot into my punching bag high enough and hard enough that I would have crushed the throat of anyone roughly my height.
See?
Progress!
"Did one of them try to…" Father trailed off, but I still caught a hint of something dangerous slithering in his tone that I would have compared to her Father (if the man had ever in his life been capable of that much empathy), though when I turned back to him his face was as controlled as my own.
"Touch me? No, but I wasn't about to let them even try," I said perhaps a little more defiantly than I meant to, but her anger at someone daring to even presume to lay hands on her kept bubbling up when I thought about that day. I had to keep reminding myself that I was Taylor Hebert, not her, just to keep my temper in check. It helped that Dad's quiet sigh of relief was far different than how Father would have reacted.
"And just who's been teaching you all of… this, anyways?" He gestured to the gently swaying heavy bag.
"I've partly been figuring things out on my own," I replied, which wasn't exactly a lie, obviously. "I … didn't want to ask you for money to take proper classes." Partly because we weren't Asian but mostly because I very sincerely doubted that anyone in Brockton Bay could hold a candle to my other self, talent-wise. Even without her powers, she had been a rare prodigy when it came to breaking people; not just with her hands and feet but also her silver tongue.
"So far, most of this has just been me trying to get into better shape and also figure out how much talent I might actually have." Technically also not a lie, probably. If you squint. "Plus, I'm pretty sure that I'd surprised those boys; they weren't actually looking for or expecting a fight when they tried it, and by the time they realized it, it was already half over." Not that that would've helped them; even that annoying idiot with the boomerang could've probably crushed them with little effort, and he had been a moronic, oafish peasant with delusions of significan-...
No.
That's what she had thought of him. He might not have had powers, but that boy had been scarily clever. I could admit that, even if she couldn't.
He had still been an oafish peasant, though.
For a moment, Dad was quiet and thoughtful and simply stared, and rather than waste time and a perfectly good layer of sweat, with silence, I turned back to my heavy bag and worked through a relatively simple set of punches and kicks, the sort of stuff that someone with a decent grasp of fighting might do, but nothing that should have given Dad clues that I knew a hell of a lot more about fighting than I should have.
"There's probably plenty of room down in the basement for you to be doing this there instead of the backyard," he finally said after nearly a minute of silence.
"Thought about that," I replied just after finishing a simple combination of punches. "It's a mess down there though, and it'd be cramped."
"Then we'll make a weekend of cleaning it out so you can use it as a workout space," he retorted. "Anything you need room for… Well, I'll ask around. I'm pretty sure that I can find a good and trustworthy gym."
I quietly sighed.
"Father," I began as I turned away from my bag and that was when he threw the punch, crisp and fast and aimed right at my nose.
I didn't think, just reacted and my body moved before I could tell myself not to react; my arm snapped up to deflect his punch away with the edge of my hand but his other fist was already moving. I guided it past me and slid behind him in the same motion, my body instinctively shifting to a stance that I wasn't quite fully comfortable with because it was for a body that had been easily a foot shorter with limbs that weren't as long as mine.
He was taller than me and had more reach, but I was younger and faster and he was already slowing and exposed in so many different places. I was already moving to crush his throat with a burning stiff-fingered strike when I remembered that this was my dad and I was about to kill him.
Somehow, I halted the strike at the very last minute, my stiffened fingers - wreathed in fire as brilliantly blue as a butane torch - stopped scant inches from his throat. Panic clawed at my throat as I struggled not to suddenly hyperventilate as my heart thudded painfully against my ribs.
The flames shrouding my hand winked out as Dad gave me a sad and disappointed but most of all knowing look.
"I… H-how?" I wasn't sure just what I was even asking at that moment.
"You've almost constantly been calling me 'Father' instead of 'Dad' ever since you woke up in the hospital," he quietly said as he stared sadly at me. "Second, you don't talk like you used to, either. You also walk differently, act differently. Third, it's thirty-five degrees out here and despite being drenched in sweat, you haven't shivered even once. Which leads me to four. Never in your entire fifteen years of life on this Earth have I ever seen you willingly wear anything that shows your belly. And five-"
He pointed at me with a long finger as I kept blinking in speechless surprise and fought the sudden urge to try and cover my belly, the old instinct to keep myself as far from vulnerability as possible warring with my other self's deep-seated need to never give so much as an inch and allow others to see me as weak.
Not even Fath-... Dad.
"I'd thought, wanted to think that maybe you were just angry with me or blamed me for you getting bullied for so long and ending up in the hospital. Then for a while I began to think that maybe you weren't my daughter at all, that maybe you were some unknown cape copycat from the E88 or someone else pulling some kind of sick scheme to get leverage on the Association. Wouldn't be the first time capes did that."
"I'm not… I mean, I'm still me, Father. I-I mean, Dad." I winced when he raised an eyebrow at my verbal slip. I had no idea that he'd been watching me so intently… I'd just thought that once things would just go back to the way they'd always been after… after Mom. He shouldn't have noticed anything. He wasn't supposed to, because he'd always been so wrapped up in himself since Mom. Especially not with the knowledge and talents that my other memories had given me. The thought that I'd been making mistakes without realizing it… I had trouble just wrapping my head around it. "And I am definitely not Empire!"
"... That might be the most honest thing that you've said to me since this conversation began," he softly replied.
I winced again. Then I scowled, turned and punched my heavy bag as hard as I could.
You always lie, a familiar voice from my other memories whispered in my thoughts.
"I didn't lie," I all but hissed out, suddenly irrationally angry. "I didn't."
"But you do have powers, don't you," Fath-Dad retorted, again with that odd sadness in his voice.
I bit down hard on my lower lip, then with a breath, forced myself to meet his gaze. "This isn't a conversation that we should be having outside."
Bizarrely, making tea was calming and soothing, which was something that I very much appreciated and needed at that moment. It gave me the time to put my thoughts into order. That I wasn't as fond of most tea as I used to be was a moot point; the other me was very discerning when it came to tea, and it made it much harder to enjoy tea that didn't live up to her standards. This meant that the only way I've been able to even slightly enjoy tea lately was to take apart the prepacked tea bags we had and make my own loose-leaf blends accentuated by whatever caught my interest at the time. At that particular moment, I was experimenting with dried strawberries.
I'm certain that Uncle would have found this hilarious.
Less hilarious was learning that Fath-Dad definitely had put a lot of thought into confronting me about my powers. Learning that he'd had one of his Dockworkers positioned with a rifle in an attic window a few houses down, ready and waiting to put a bullet in me had been both jarring and frightening, yet to the other me was something to be expected. The bizarre dichotomy of my feelings regarding Dad preparing to have me killed if he'd been convinced that I wasn't his daughter (and that came with feelings that I was not ready to unpack yet) was enough to make my head spin.
I had two very separate ideas of Dad in my head, and that the two of them intersected and overlapped so neatly in this one instance was deeply unsettling to both of the young women that made me me. So I tried not to think about how much Danny Hebert was or wasn't like Ozai, which might have been easier were it not for the way he coolly stared at me with a raised eyebrow as I brewed my tea while using the time it was buying me to try to get my thoughts into order and devise a plan to placate him.
It then occurred to me that he was probably staring as much as he was because of the vibrant blue flames wreathing the teapot that was carefully cradled in my bare hands.
I was still trying to figure out where to even begin when he quietly said, "Taylor, if this is you showing off with your powers to try to prove something, I'm going to get very annoyed with you very quickly."
"It's training, Dad," I retorted with a calm that I didn't quite yet feel. "You can't play with fire like a toy; that's stupid and gets people hurt or worse. Fire demands discipline, because Fire is alive. It breathes, it grows. It demands that I pay attention to it, otherwise it acts according to its nature and will attempt to consume and destroy everything that it touches until there's nothing left!"
The kettle resting in my hands began noisily whistling, faster than it should have; blue flames were licking almost angrily up its sides. I took a breath to calm and center myself, then pulled my fire back into my core, banking the writhing blue flames back down into a barely-there corona.
"Something like heating a kettle? This is a very careful and cautious method to practice using precisely how much Fire I need for a given task, no more and no less. Not only am I heating the kettle to get the water at the ideal temperature to brew the leaves, but simultaneously I'm also bending the heat radiating from the kettle away before it can burn my hands."
As I spoke the words, I couldn't help but frown. The girl who's memories that I now possessed hadn't cared much for that particular lesson. She hadn't really understood or internalized the importance of restraint, or how it subtly differed from self control that she normally excelled at. I was lucky that she remembered those lessons all the same.
"Not really liking you practicing that sort of thing in our kitchen, Taylor," Dad coolly said with a certain tightness in his tone and around his eyes.
"Would you prefer that I was sneaking out in the middle of the night wearing a costume and picking fights with psychos like some kind of suicidal idiot?" I retorted.
"I don't know, were you about to?"
I froze and didn't quite wince, but that was more than enough for Dad's eyes to widen in alarm.
"At first, yes," I forced myself to admit just as he began to open his mouth. "Then I realized how stupid that kind of thinking was, and how likely I'd be that I'd probably seriously hurt or even kill someone by accident when I began to really grasp what I can do now."
Dad wasn't quite glaring, if only because he was making a clear effort to keep his temper in check.
"Or," he bit out between clenched teeth, "You could have gotten yourself hurt or killed."
As I finally poured steaming water from our kettle into my mug - having finally judged the temperature to be acceptable - I immediately wanted to refute that.
But that was her arrogance and pride rearing its head; I was self-aware enough to acknowledge that unlike her, I hadn't been trained in Firebending by some of the best living Masters of the art since I was old enough to walk. Oh, I had all of the knowledge and skill and power. But when it came to pure physical conditioning?
The other me would have mopped the floor with me without even breaking a sweat… at nine years old, no less.
Were it somehow possible to face her as she was at my age, crazy or not, it wouldn't have been a fight. She would have destroyed me, plain and simple.
"That is another part of the reason why I didn't do anything," I grudgingly conceded as I allowed her disgust to slide across my face, even as I carefully set the kettle down onto the stove. Then I sat at the kitchen table across from Dad and began steeping my tea leaves. "To put it bluntly I'm in terrible shape, Dad. To really master my Fire to the degree that I know I can, I need a lot more work before I'm even acceptable. And that's not even taking into account that I'm still figuring out how to use my actual powers with my Fire."
Dad started to open his mouth.
Then he closed it and stared at me with a confused expression.
"Nevermind that that sounds like something that the Wards would be really helpful for," he said in a way that I chose to ignore, "you're making sound like the fire stuff isn't your power."
I sighed, then I very calmly pointed at the kitchen ceiling. Part of the reason why I'd distracted Dad with my little trick with the tea kettle was to give him an idea of what I was now capable of. The other reason was to give myself time to adequately demonstrate what else I could do.
When Dad's gaze followed my finger, he very nearly fell out of his chair at the sight of thirty-one thousand, five hundred and eighty-two insects of various species skittering about in perfect synchronization across our kitchen ceiling. To give Dad credit, it only took a few seconds for him to transition from horror and disgust to confusion and disgust to disgusted exasperation.
It probably had a lot to do with me directing the bugs skittering across the kitchen ceiling - a roiling swarm of silverfish, flies, ants, spiders, and centipedes all moving in concerted unison - to depict a moving image in real-time of myself just as I raised my cup of tea to my lips for a careful sip.
Dad's eyes flicked back to the ceiling, then me, then the ceiling again. He took a slow, calming breath and raised a hand to adjust his glasses.
Then he calmly looked me in the eyes and said, "You're grounded for another week."
The only reason I didn't choke on my tea is because I hadn't taken a second sip yet.
"Daaaaad!"
So, I'm gonna be honest; I've had this snippet mostly done - like 99.9% done - for months but I've been distracted with work and lazy and a little more stressed the hell out than I usually am. Time to see if I can get back on the horse for realsies.
Also maybe I should finally cross-post this thread to SB?
February 25th, 2011
Brockton Bay
It had been four days since Father had bailed me out of jail and things were still awkwardly and rather uncomfortably chilly between us. It didn't help that he was still absolutely furious… and maybe part of the problem was that rather than try to explain my side of things, I instead was relying on what had become a cornerstone of my daily routine. I had my hands and bare feet wrapped in athletic tape, and was hammering the hell out of an old forty-pound training bag that I had liberated from an abandoned and dilapidated gym mere days after I had gotten out of the hospital and realized that the tools I had at my disposal for getting myself into proper shape were tragically lacking. It hadn't been in good condition when I found it and hauled it home, but that sort of thing is merely one of the reasons why humans invented duct tape.
The end result was a horrific eyesore, of course. However I swallowed my revulsion because until I managed to increase the resources at my disposal, I would have to make due with whatever I had available. Sometimes, striving for perfection demanded accepting indignities and mediocrity.
The new memories that cluttered the back of my mind made that easy to understand, despite how much they initially and still do confuse me.
On one hand, it was easy to want to believe that getting powers had done something to me that I had no context to understand. It wasn't as if I could just walk up to a Cape and ask them if they also got an entire lifespan's worth of memories that didn't seem to have anything to do with whatever powers that they have.
On the other hand, it was just as easy to want to believe that yet again, some ancient and unfathomably powerful spirit had chosen to - for reasons that I couldn't even begin to understand - meddle with my life. After all, meddling in the affairs of humans is simply what spirits did, especially the old and powerful ones. I had an entire set of memories - a complete second lifetime in fact - that proved that.
Was I even Taylor Hebert still? Did the new memories come from some ancient past on Earth-Bet, if not some other Earth? Or did I somehow awaken memories that had always been lurking inside of me at the same time I suddenly found myself with the power to control bugs? The former implied something meddling with my head. The latter suggested that reincarnation was not solely the purview of one of the most powerful beings to ever live on any world.
Neither possibility was especially comforting, partly because neither actually precluded the other.
I very deliberately did not let myself frown, but instead forced my body to move, etching the techniques from my memories into my muscles with rote repetition. I knew the myriad stances, strikes and techniques, but I
I did not know them. Or rather, my body, Taylor Hebert's body, didn't know.
The me that was Taylor Hebert had been pitifully out of shape and scrawny and weak. However, the one advantage that that me had undeniably had over the other me (if she in fact actually had also been me) was that despite the best efforts of Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess and Madison Clements, she was still very much sane or close enough that it still counted.
I couldn't say the same about the other me, as much as I wished otherwise.
I had no problems letting her memories train my (our?) body to her brutally unrelenting standards. She had been a monster - my other memories made that abundantly clear - but when it came to fighting she'd been an unrivaled prodigy, even after she had slipped into a deranged madness that quietly terrified me whenever I delved too deeply into her memories. How she had even functioned as a person afterwards, much less clawed her way back to something resembling sanity… I couldn't fathom it.
I didn't want to.
So instead I drilled the many forms of hand-to-hand that the other me had mastered and in a handful of cases outright invented into my muscle memory, and desperately hoped that the madness that had plagued the other me remained firmly in my memories (and occasionally my nightmares). After over a month of intensive exercise, my paunch was all but gone and I was finally putting a semi-acceptable amount of muscle onto my limbs and core, but I wouldn't - couldn't - be satisfied until I'd managed to put on at least thirty pounds of solid muscle. Maybe more if I ended up growing as tall as I thought I might.
The cold didn't bother me. I didn't permit it to, despite only being clad in sweat pants and a ripped old t-shirt as I danced across the cold and brittle grass in the backyard and forced my aching body to finish the set of one hundred high kicks that I'd been working through to improve my flexibility, stamina and strength, as well as toughen up my feet. At the same time it was good practice for my breath control, which was even more important for my powers than it was for the fighting styles that I was training myself in.
That was another thing that confused me; my powers. As in powers, plural, that didn't seem to have anything to do with each other.
I could control insects. Even in winter, the number of bugs that I felt around me was alarming; as it turned out, there were ants that were plenty active during the winter. Also flies, cockroaches, beetles, and more. So many bugs, and I could feel them all as surely as I could feel my fingers and toes.
But then there was the Fire burning in my chest and in my gut. The me that was Taylor Hebert would call it pyrokinesis like something from that really old movie from the 80s, I think it was called Firemaster or Firestarter or something. The other me called it Firebending.
My power to control bugs was something that I did and did not understand; it was weirdly intuitive, like flexing a finger or blinking. The Fire, however?
I was hyper aware of the way my chi flowed through my body, emanating from the roiling furnace in my stomach. The memories of that other me and the literal lifetime of training she had done to master her Fire to an unrivaled degree made keeping my body temperature comfortable despite the winter chill as simple as breathing. Simpler, even. I wasn't as capable physically as the other me had been, which was… irksome… but using the memories of the other me as a guide, I knew how to use my Fire very, very well. The only problem was that my body wasn't nearly strong enough for some of the things that the other me had done so easily.
Not yet.
But it helped that it felt as if I was always filled to near-bursting with chi every waking moment.
Father was furious that I'd been attacked outright at school despite assurances that something like the Locker would never happen again, furious that I'd been arrested by the police just because in defending myself I just so happened to have injured most of the boys that Sophia had set on me and a few of their friends, and furious that some of the parents of said boys were attempting to press charges just because I hospitalized their precious widdle boys. That I had also been suspended from school for two weeks as well…
Hmph.
If any of them asked me, I'd have cheerfully told them that they should be grateful that in my unparalleled generosity, I had only broken four of those seven boys badly enough to need to be taken to Brockton Bay General Hospital. Of those four, only two needed an overnight stay - one for a shattered knee and the other due to a significant neck injury, both of which necessitated surgery. But no, apparently 'enthusiastic self-defense' is apparently perfectly justified grounds for arresting - and suspending - a teenage girl in Brockton Bay.
I let a little too much of my irritation bleed into my training; my next kick was appallingly sloppy by my other self's standards and as such was absolutely unacceptable. If I was going to make use of these new memories - and I certainly intended to - then I would have to be no less than perfect. That I was very, very new to my self-inflicted training regimen was no excuse. So what if I'd only been training myself for a month?
The skills that my other memories were carving into my muscle and bones demanded nothing less than constant and absolute perfection.
I was just deciding on how to punish myself for the lapse when Father strode out of the back door. For a brief moment I was taken aback; the thunderous expression on his face, the flared nostrils, the look in his eyes… But no, Father wasn't… Dad wasn't Father. He was just Danny Hebert, no matter that he had the same look in his eyes that spoke of a temper being very carefully leashed, nevermind that they were green instead of gold.
He was just Dad.
More importantly, Dad showed that he genuinely cared far more than Father had ever had.
"Taylor, we need to talk." None of the usual pathetic exchanges that had been the staple of our father-daughter communications and interactions since M- … since 2008. The old me would've immediately been on the defensive at his tone and pasture, and admittedly a part of me still wanted to avoid talking seriously to him about anything.
"Hello Father, you're home earlier than expected," I instead nonchalantly commented as I turned back to my heavy bag and began practicing sidekicks. My right leg thudded twice into the bag, first low then at just shy of chest height. "Hope you don't mind me continuing my training while we talk?" I asked as I rechambered and kicked twice again.
"Are you a Cape?" Dad asked me outright.
To my credit I didn't freeze or stumble but it was definitely a near-thing to keep the pace of my kicks going.
"Really, Father?" I asked with a carefully feigned blend of exasperation and embarrassment. "Do I look like I'm about to go put on a Halloween costume and beat people up?" I finished my set of kicks and smoothly switched legs, starting a new set.
"The way that you beat the hell out of those boys has me wondering," he said evenly. "Not to mention how hard you've been training lately or how strong you're suddenly getting."
"I'm training because I'm not about to end up in another l-locker," I all but hissed out, then I bit my lip before too much emotion crept into my tone. My Fire tended to respond a little too readily when my blood ran hot; no pun intended. I stopped my set to reign in both my temper and my breath.
"As for what I did to those boys?" I took a deep, calming breath then turned to meet his steady gaze. "Two of them have reputations, Father. I might be a social pariah at school, but from the rumors I'm pretty sure that at least one of them was the reason that a girl last year committed suicide. He compared her hair to mine… If anything, I should've broken more than his neck."
As he briefly turned grey I made a show of turning my attention back to the heavy bag, and as smoothly and swiftly as I could manage, went from standing nonchalantly to chambering and unleashing as high a side kick as I could currently manage. While I was easily nearly a foot taller than the girl from my other memories, I still wasn't nearly as flexible… not yet anyways.
I still managed to drive the heel of my right foot into my punching bag high enough and hard enough that I would have crushed the throat of anyone roughly my height.
See?
Progress!
"Did one of them try to…" Father trailed off, but I still caught a hint of something dangerous slithering in his tone that I would have compared to her Father (if the man had ever in his life been capable of that much empathy), though when I turned back to him his face was as controlled as my own.
"Touch me? No, but I wasn't about to let them even try," I said perhaps a little more defiantly than I meant to, but her anger at someone daring to even presume to lay hands on her kept bubbling up when I thought about that day. I had to keep reminding myself that I was Taylor Hebert, not her, just to keep my temper in check. It helped that Dad's quiet sigh of relief was far different than how Father would have reacted.
"And just who's been teaching you all of… this, anyways?" He gestured to the gently swaying heavy bag.
"I've partly been figuring things out on my own," I replied, which wasn't exactly a lie, obviously. "I … didn't want to ask you for money to take proper classes." Partly because we weren't Asian but mostly because I very sincerely doubted that anyone in Brockton Bay could hold a candle to my other self, talent-wise. Even without her powers, she had been a rare prodigy when it came to breaking people; not just with her hands and feet but also her silver tongue.
"So far, most of this has just been me trying to get into better shape and also figure out how much talent I might actually have." Technically also not a lie, probably. If you squint. "Plus, I'm pretty sure that I'd surprised those boys; they weren't actually looking for or expecting a fight when they tried it, and by the time they realized it, it was already half over." Not that that would've helped them; even that annoying idiot with the boomerang could've probably crushed them with little effort, and he had been a moronic, oafish peasant with delusions of significan-...
No.
That's what she had thought of him. He might not have had powers, but that boy had been scarily clever. I could admit that, even if she couldn't.
He had still been an oafish peasant, though.
For a moment, Dad was quiet and thoughtful and simply stared, and rather than waste time and a perfectly good layer of sweat, with silence, I turned back to my heavy bag and worked through a relatively simple set of punches and kicks, the sort of stuff that someone with a decent grasp of fighting might do, but nothing that should have given Dad clues that I knew a hell of a lot more about fighting than I should have.
"There's probably plenty of room down in the basement for you to be doing this there instead of the backyard," he finally said after nearly a minute of silence.
"Thought about that," I replied just after finishing a simple combination of punches. "It's a mess down there though, and it'd be cramped."
"Then we'll make a weekend of cleaning it out so you can use it as a workout space," he retorted. "Anything you need room for… Well, I'll ask around. I'm pretty sure that I can find a good and trustworthy gym."
I quietly sighed.
"Father," I began as I turned away from my bag and that was when he threw the punch, crisp and fast and aimed right at my nose.
I didn't think, just reacted and my body moved before I could tell myself not to react; my arm snapped up to deflect his punch away with the edge of my hand but his other fist was already moving. I guided it past me and slid behind him in the same motion, my body instinctively shifting to a stance that I wasn't quite fully comfortable with because it was for a body that had been easily a foot shorter with limbs that weren't as long as mine.
He was taller than me and had more reach, but I was younger and faster and he was already slowing and exposed in so many different places. I was already moving to crush his throat with a burning stiff-fingered strike when I remembered that this was my dad and I was about to kill him.
Somehow, I halted the strike at the very last minute, my stiffened fingers - wreathed in fire as brilliantly blue as a butane torch - stopped scant inches from his throat. Panic clawed at my throat as I struggled not to suddenly hyperventilate as my heart thudded painfully against my ribs.
The flames shrouding my hand winked out as Dad gave me a sad and disappointed but most of all knowing look.
"I… H-how?" I wasn't sure just what I was even asking at that moment.
"You've almost constantly been calling me 'Father' instead of 'Dad' ever since you woke up in the hospital," he quietly said as he stared sadly at me. "Second, you don't talk like you used to, either. You also walk differently, act differently. Third, it's thirty-five degrees out here and despite being drenched in sweat, you haven't shivered even once. Which leads me to four. Never in your entire fifteen years of life on this Earth have I ever seen you willingly wear anything that shows your belly. And five-"
He pointed at me with a long finger as I kept blinking in speechless surprise and fought the sudden urge to try and cover my belly, the old instinct to keep myself as far from vulnerability as possible warring with my other self's deep-seated need to never give so much as an inch and allow others to see me as weak.
Not even Fath-... Dad.
"I'd thought, wanted to think that maybe you were just angry with me or blamed me for you getting bullied for so long and ending up in the hospital. Then for a while I began to think that maybe you weren't my daughter at all, that maybe you were some unknown cape copycat from the E88 or someone else pulling some kind of sick scheme to get leverage on the Association. Wouldn't be the first time capes did that."
"I'm not… I mean, I'm still me, Father. I-I mean, Dad." I winced when he raised an eyebrow at my verbal slip. I had no idea that he'd been watching me so intently… I'd just thought that once things would just go back to the way they'd always been after… after Mom. He shouldn't have noticed anything. He wasn't supposed to, because he'd always been so wrapped up in himself since Mom. Especially not with the knowledge and talents that my other memories had given me. The thought that I'd been making mistakes without realizing it… I had trouble just wrapping my head around it. "And I am definitely not Empire!"
"... That might be the most honest thing that you've said to me since this conversation began," he softly replied.
I winced again. Then I scowled, turned and punched my heavy bag as hard as I could.
You always lie, a familiar voice from my other memories whispered in my thoughts.
"I didn't lie," I all but hissed out, suddenly irrationally angry. "I didn't."
"But you do have powers, don't you," Fath-Dad retorted, again with that odd sadness in his voice.
I bit down hard on my lower lip, then with a breath, forced myself to meet his gaze. "This isn't a conversation that we should be having outside."
Bizarrely, making tea was calming and soothing, which was something that I very much appreciated and needed at that moment. It gave me the time to put my thoughts into order. That I wasn't as fond of most tea as I used to be was a moot point; the other me was very discerning when it came to tea, and it made it much harder to enjoy tea that didn't live up to her standards. This meant that the only way I've been able to even slightly enjoy tea lately was to take apart the prepacked tea bags we had and make my own loose-leaf blends accentuated by whatever caught my interest at the time. At that particular moment, I was experimenting with dried strawberries.
I'm certain that Uncle would have found this hilarious.
Less hilarious was learning that Fath-Dad definitely had put a lot of thought into confronting me about my powers. Learning that he'd had one of his Dockworkers positioned with a rifle in an attic window a few houses down, ready and waiting to put a bullet in me had been both jarring and frightening, yet to the other me was something to be expected. The bizarre dichotomy of my feelings regarding Dad preparing to have me killed if he'd been convinced that I wasn't his daughter (and that came with feelings that I was not ready to unpack yet) was enough to make my head spin.
I had two very separate ideas of Dad in my head, and that the two of them intersected and overlapped so neatly in this one instance was deeply unsettling to both of the young women that made me me. So I tried not to think about how much Danny Hebert was or wasn't like Ozai, which might have been easier were it not for the way he coolly stared at me with a raised eyebrow as I brewed my tea while using the time it was buying me to try to get my thoughts into order and devise a plan to placate him.
It then occurred to me that he was probably staring as much as he was because of the vibrant blue flames wreathing the teapot that was carefully cradled in my bare hands.
I was still trying to figure out where to even begin when he quietly said, "Taylor, if this is you showing off with your powers to try to prove something, I'm going to get very annoyed with you very quickly."
"It's training, Dad," I retorted with a calm that I didn't quite yet feel. "You can't play with fire like a toy; that's stupid and gets people hurt or worse. Fire demands discipline, because Fire is alive. It breathes, it grows. It demands that I pay attention to it, otherwise it acts according to its nature and will attempt to consume and destroy everything that it touches until there's nothing left!"
The kettle resting in my hands began noisily whistling, faster than it should have; blue flames were licking almost angrily up its sides. I took a breath to calm and center myself, then pulled my fire back into my core, banking the writhing blue flames back down into a barely-there corona.
"Something like heating a kettle? This is a very careful and cautious method to practice using precisely how much Fire I need for a given task, no more and no less. Not only am I heating the kettle to get the water at the ideal temperature to brew the leaves, but simultaneously I'm also bending the heat radiating from the kettle away before it can burn my hands."
As I spoke the words, I couldn't help but frown. The girl who's memories that I now possessed hadn't cared much for that particular lesson. She hadn't really understood or internalized the importance of restraint, or how it subtly differed from self control that she normally excelled at. I was lucky that she remembered those lessons all the same.
"Not really liking you practicing that sort of thing in our kitchen, Taylor," Dad coolly said with a certain tightness in his tone and around his eyes.
"Would you prefer that I was sneaking out in the middle of the night wearing a costume and picking fights with psychos like some kind of suicidal idiot?" I retorted.
"I don't know, were you about to?"
I froze and didn't quite wince, but that was more than enough for Dad's eyes to widen in alarm.
"At first, yes," I forced myself to admit just as he began to open his mouth. "Then I realized how stupid that kind of thinking was, and how likely I'd be that I'd probably seriously hurt or even kill someone by accident when I began to really grasp what I can do now."
Dad wasn't quite glaring, if only because he was making a clear effort to keep his temper in check.
"Or," he bit out between clenched teeth, "You could have gotten yourself hurt or killed."
As I finally poured steaming water from our kettle into my mug - having finally judged the temperature to be acceptable - I immediately wanted to refute that.
But that was her arrogance and pride rearing its head; I was self-aware enough to acknowledge that unlike her, I hadn't been trained in Firebending by some of the best living Masters of the art since I was old enough to walk. Oh, I had all of the knowledge and skill and power. But when it came to pure physical conditioning?
The other me would have mopped the floor with me without even breaking a sweat… at nine years old, no less.
Were it somehow possible to face her as she was at my age, crazy or not, it wouldn't have been a fight. She would have destroyed me, plain and simple.
"That is another part of the reason why I didn't do anything," I grudgingly conceded as I allowed her disgust to slide across my face, even as I carefully set the kettle down onto the stove. Then I sat at the kitchen table across from Dad and began steeping my tea leaves. "To put it bluntly I'm in terrible shape, Dad. To really master my Fire to the degree that I know I can, I need a lot more work before I'm even acceptable. And that's not even taking into account that I'm still figuring out how to use my actual powers with my Fire."
Dad started to open his mouth.
Then he closed it and stared at me with a confused expression.
"Nevermind that that sounds like something that the Wards would be really helpful for," he said in a way that I chose to ignore, "you're making sound like the fire stuff isn't your power."
I sighed, then I very calmly pointed at the kitchen ceiling. Part of the reason why I'd distracted Dad with my little trick with the tea kettle was to give him an idea of what I was now capable of. The other reason was to give myself time to adequately demonstrate what else I could do.
When Dad's gaze followed my finger, he very nearly fell out of his chair at the sight of thirty-one thousand, five hundred and eighty-two insects of various species skittering about in perfect synchronization across our kitchen ceiling. To give Dad credit, it only took a few seconds for him to transition from horror and disgust to confusion and disgust to disgusted exasperation.
It probably had a lot to do with me directing the bugs skittering across the kitchen ceiling - a roiling swarm of silverfish, flies, ants, spiders, and centipedes all moving in concerted unison - to depict a moving image in real-time of myself just as I raised my cup of tea to my lips for a careful sip.
Dad's eyes flicked back to the ceiling, then me, then the ceiling again. He took a slow, calming breath and raised a hand to adjust his glasses.
Then he calmly looked me in the eyes and said, "You're grounded for another week."
The only reason I didn't choke on my tea is because I hadn't taken a second sip yet.
"Daaaaad!"
So, I'm gonna be honest; I've had this snippet mostly done - like 99.9% done - for months but I've been distracted with work and lazy and a little more stressed the hell out than I usually am. Time to see if I can get back on the horse for realsies.
Also maybe I should finally cross-post this thread to SB?
Last edited:
jwolfe_beta
Semi Genre-Savvy Overlord
- Location
- Canada
Tayor with echos of Azula in her head........
Normally I'd say that this would be a horrible fate but well, Earth-Bet.
Normally I'd say that this would be a horrible fate but well, Earth-Bet.
DrWhoFan13
┻━┻ ︵ ¯\ (ツ)/¯ ︵ ┻━┻
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What do you mean by "maybe?" SB'll love it!
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, at least it's not Fester with her comments about Annette.
- Location
- That place over there.
- Pronouns
- He/Them
That's might be more of a curse than anything XD
Love the snippet and your take on a Azula/Taylor mix.
Still dislike Danny though. "Watch me flex my authority after abandoning you! See how discerning and judging I am, making up for lost time due to my floundering and wallowing."
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
Yeah, like, Taylor was 100% honest here, explained herself and all the issues going on, showed off the bug powers even though she didn't have to, and was punished because of said honesty? Good luck ever finding out what is going on in her life ever again.
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
Hmm...interesting cross, but I wonder what would happen if she got Iroh's memories instead.
*wanders off on tangents involving characters known for Tea, like Uncle Iroh...then gets distracted *
*wanders off on tangents involving characters known for Tea, like Uncle Iroh...then gets distracted *
Savage (Worm/She-Hulk)
Geas
Meat Thing
Been working on this one for a little while, and finally got it good enough to share. Totally unbeta'd though.
For one moment, terror shakes her.
For one moment, three steel walls and a too-narrow door crush in on her from all sides as panic claws at her throat with burning fingers, even as the most horrid stench of rot crawls into her nose and mouth.
For one moment, she stands almost up to her knees in rotting tampons and pads as countless wriggling and writhing bugs creep up her body, skittering across her legs and arms and belly and underneath her clothes and in her hair and across her face.
For one moment, fifteen year old Taylor Hebert, who not even three minutes ago has just been stuffed into a locker filled with rotting tampons, is on the verge of a panic attack after having been forced into the painfully-cramped confines of her locker on the first day of school after winter break mere moments after discovering that it had at some point been filled with disgusting, rotting garbage. Her glasses are broken, irreparably damaged when her face had slammed into the coat hook at the rear of her locker, and she could feel hot blood trickling down from the bridge of her nose, seeping across the places where there aren't bugs crawling all over her.
Her aching nose burns.
Her left shoulder hurts too, where she banged it against something while being shoved in, hard enough to tear her hoodie and the skin underneath.
More blood, more burning hurt made all the worse by the feel of bugs crawling all over that wound and the itchy pin pricks of tiny legs and tiny mandibles taking tiny mouthfuls and the only reason that she doesn't scream is to keep them from getting into her mouth instead.
She can't get out, she doesn't have enough room to turn around enough to try and work the latch from inside without hurting herself.
She tries anyways, and the fire in her shoulder grows worse as it grinds against the gritty, filthy interior of the defiled locker that she's trapped in.
For one terrifying instant she's stuck and can't move and she thrashes, rocking back and forth and throwing herself back against the locker door as panic tears a keening whine from her throat. She cuts her fingers on the latch trying to open it before she realizes that it's not moving no matter how hard she tries to force it.
She can still hear the laughter as the other kids who did nothing but watch go to class.
For just the briefest moment, terror and panic and humiliation give way to anger and hate. And then the rage, fast and all consuming. It blazes bright and hot, shockingly intense as it burns through her veins as she begins to tremble, stuck in place with cramping muscles in her arms and legs, but that only makes the rage burn hotter. Her blood roars in her ears as her heart pounds with manic energy in her chest, so fast that it's a wonder it hasn't exploded out of her yet. It's startling, being so angry.
'They did this to me.'
The terror and panic clawing at her throat is replaced by burning rage that only grows hotter as the locker seems to grow smaller around her.
And then it's as if a supernova is exploding in Taylor Hebert's chest, and the only thing that she can do is scream.
It was supposed to be a good day.
The Dockworker's Association had finally gotten some good fortune to come their way, courtesy of a clean-up contract for the aftermath of a skirmish between the two major gangs of Brockton Bay. The Empire 88 - who were Brockton Bay's resident infestation of asshole white supremacists going on over three decades now - and the AZN Bad Boys, a Pan-Asian gang that was every inch as bad in their own special way, but with the added caveat of also being sex slavers. There was talk that there was a third gang of drug dealers trying to make a name for themselves, but they were a miserable bunch that kept mostly to themselves south of the Docks, around Archer's Bridge.
Usually when the big two clashed these days, there wasn't much damage… until just after Christmas, when a building ended up getting torched during a territory scuffle, resulting in an Empire Cape called Jotunn getting arrested by the local Protectorate and - for once - being shipped off to prison successfully… though that probably had a lot to do with the infamous leader of the ABB allegedly burning Jotunn's legs off, or something else equally unpleasant.
Danny B. Hebert didn't have much sympathy to spare, or any at all for that matter. Both gangs were scum and for once, only deserving people had gotten hurt in that particular clash. It stuck in his craw that yet another part of the Bay was wrecked… but a wrecked and now officially condemned building was one that needed to be taken down before it fell down, and that meant good, paying work for his fellow Dockworkers on the city's dime, given how most of the remaining labor and construction unions of Brockton Bay had merged into the DWA as a means of survival, or folded.
Danny and several others had been scrambling ever since the DWA had gotten the notification from the Mayor's office that they'd been given the contract for… how long had it been?
A glance at his watch told him that they'd been at it for almost two hours now, doing their best to quickly determine how many laborers and how much equipment would be needed, versus how much they could actually afford to use; it annoyed him a little because he hadn't been able to see Taylor off to school like he'd wanted. That the building in question sat between ABB and E88 territory made site security more than a concern, and bitter experience had long proven that neither the PRT, Protectorate or the BBPD could be relied upon if something happened.
Usually, the rank and file of the E88 left the DWA alone outside of some posturing, despite attempts in past years to influence the DWA into being more receptive towards the neo-nazi assholes' agenda, but usually it didn't go further than that, not after the seven deaths that had occurred during the Bad Old Days.
Sometimes, one of Kaiser's wannabe jackbooted thugs took things a little further than they should. Sometimes, a Dockworker's temper was a little shorter than usual. Yet there hadn't been any more deaths. The ABB on the other hand liked to make things very difficult whenever someone felt like trying to impress Lung which could get problematic, especially if his psychopathic lieutenant Oni Lee was anywhere nearby.
So that meant making sure that the DWA had personnel allocated to security, people that knew how to handle themselves in a scrap or better, but not anyone that might be looking for an excuse to do more than crack skulls.
Danny made it a point to offer Gerry one of the security positions first because he was one of the ones struggling the worst right now, it was a small miracle already that the Army vet hadn't had thugs trying to sweet-talk him around despite his trick knee, but it was only a matter of-
Danny's train of thought was abruptly interrupted when the door to the conference room that he, Lacy, and an older fellow named Phil (pushing 60 but fantastic at crunching numbers in his head and had forgotten more about plumbing than most people bothered to learn) was thrown open.
"Bossman!" Kurt called out and any other time Danny would've frowned at the other man in annoyance because he was just the head of hiring no matter what anyone else thought, but the blatant worry in Kurt's eyes cut off the rebuke before it could leave Danny's lips.
"What happened?" Danny asked, already expecting to hear how a cape fight was infringing close too close to the DWA grounds again, or that someone had just been badly injured.
"Shit's going down at Winslow and it sounds bad," was Kurt's answer and Danny felt his blood turn to ice in his veins. "It's all over the radio right now, man! Sounds like a cape is flipping out and wrecking the campus, trying to hurt someone or worse!"
Barely a second later Kurt was swiftly moving clear of the door, and an instant after that Danny went through the doorway so hard that he half-tore the suddenly bent hinges free of the frame. More than a few stevedores of the association had kids that went to Winslow, so he wasn't the only one suddenly sprinting for the parking lot.
But as he shoved the emergency exit door open to get to his truck faster rather than force his way through the already crowding front door, he left a visible dent in the form of a handprint in the door's metal.
Too loud, too cramped, even too many fucking smells, too much of everything, it's all too much and it makes her even angrier. Her feet hurt until her shoes come apart and leave her with the feel of disgusting sludge squishing around her toes.
Angry.
She screams. Or maybe she roars. She can't tell. Either way, when she swings her arm she moves so easily now, like she's pushing through soaking wet cardboard or maybe tissue paper, and just like that she's stumbling out into the hallway.
Into the too-fucking-bright hallway, but the goddamn stink, she can still smell it, taste it even, like the stench had been crammed up both nostrils until poured into her mouth.
Angry.
Her filthy clothes are too tight, pinching around her chest and shoulderd and arms until they aren't, but the fucking smell isn't going away!
Angry.
She's never been so angry in her entire life.
She hadn't known it was possible to be so angry, like something hot and molten is building and building and building in her chest as fire crawls through her veins, until it feels like something inside of her is about to explode.
Angry.
Snarling, she can't help but bang a fist into the warped and deformed locker adjacent to the one that she'd just forced her way out of. That locker - and the one immediately next to it - folds around her clenched fist like cellophane, and the entire row shakes and rattles as the wall behind it buckles and collapses, while several drop ceiling tiles fall to the floor.
Almost immediately, there are startled yells from the students on the other side of the collapsing wall. The yells become screams when her fellow Winslow students glimpse her. More than a few in particular are like nails on a chalkboard, high and screech and too loud. She yells right back at them because their screaming is pissing her off even more, and how dare they all begin screaming for help now, instead of five goddamn minutes ago when Sophia Hess shoved her into her filthy locker?!
Only, where their yelling and screaming is merely irritatingly loud, the furious roar that bellows from her mouth knocks several people over and shatters three of the glass windows lining the classroom's far wall.
The chaos only grows from there with the students in the room running and stumbling in every direction that is away from her, some of them even trampling their slower classmates in their haste to be elsewhere. She turns away from them however, ripping her hand and arm free of the ruins of the locker that she's just destroyed.
Snarling, she shakes her hand to try to discard the refuse clinging to her sticky, filthy skin. More than anything at that moment. She just wants to leave, to go home where it's quiet so she can take a long hot shower until she no longer feels the desire to break something or someo-
That train of thought grinds almost violently to a halt as she stops in her tracks to stare down at the person frozen in front of her.
Familiar red hair. Even more familiar grey-green eyes. All designer clothes and curves, frozen in place as she stares up at the thing not quite looking over her. The other girl's painted lips are moving rapidly but Taylor suddenly can't hear anything over the racing of her own heart and the roar of blood in her ears as her anger intensifies.
"EMMA."
She feels more than hears the name as it rumbles hatefully past her own lips. Emma's eyes go wide with horrified recognition as the blood drains out of her face, looking as if she can't believe what her very own eyes are telling her.
The other girl is supposed to be almost as tall as Taylor herself, yet she looks so small.
Weak.
Puny.
"EMMA!" she snarls out and Emma visibly flinches, the phone that she'd been clutching falling to the tile floor.
Just like that, everything stops.
The panicked shouting and screams of students and faculty come to an abrupt halt as those closest realize that there is just one person that suddenly holds the entirety of her attention. She's dimly aware of frantic and quiet whispering in the background as she takes a single step towards Emma Barnes, who takes a trembling step back.
"T-T-Tuh-Ta-" Emma tries to stammer out, but her voice trails off as she begins backpedaling, not daring to take her eyes off of the filthy, powerfully muscled form of the girl stalking towards her, thick grey fingers twitching.
Her thoughts spiral, blood roaring in her ears as her lips peel back from her teeth and in that moment all she wants to do in that moment is … is…
She's not actually sure. But a very large part of her wants to make it painful.
Then she suddenly stops as something bounces off of the side of her neck, even as someone yells, "Emma, fucking run already goddamnit!"
There is something familiar in that voice, and it stokes the anger building in her chest and slithering underneath her skin into something black and hateful. She whirls, just in time to see a female masked Cape in black firing a wrist-mounted crossbow, only this time instead of bouncing off, the bolt somehow passes through her skin to suddenly lodge itself in her chest almost all the way to the fletching.
The black rage bubbling inside comes out with a roar that has the few lingering bystanders running away screaming as Taylor rips the tranquilizer bolt out of her chest.
Barely seconds later Shadow Stalker is frantically phasing out of the way as Taylor Hebert, moving far faster than someone with that much muscle mass has any right to, tries to put a grey fist bigger than Shadow Stalker's head through the Probationary Ward's chest.
For one moment, terror shakes her.
For one moment, three steel walls and a too-narrow door crush in on her from all sides as panic claws at her throat with burning fingers, even as the most horrid stench of rot crawls into her nose and mouth.
For one moment, she stands almost up to her knees in rotting tampons and pads as countless wriggling and writhing bugs creep up her body, skittering across her legs and arms and belly and underneath her clothes and in her hair and across her face.
For one moment, fifteen year old Taylor Hebert, who not even three minutes ago has just been stuffed into a locker filled with rotting tampons, is on the verge of a panic attack after having been forced into the painfully-cramped confines of her locker on the first day of school after winter break mere moments after discovering that it had at some point been filled with disgusting, rotting garbage. Her glasses are broken, irreparably damaged when her face had slammed into the coat hook at the rear of her locker, and she could feel hot blood trickling down from the bridge of her nose, seeping across the places where there aren't bugs crawling all over her.
Her aching nose burns.
Her left shoulder hurts too, where she banged it against something while being shoved in, hard enough to tear her hoodie and the skin underneath.
More blood, more burning hurt made all the worse by the feel of bugs crawling all over that wound and the itchy pin pricks of tiny legs and tiny mandibles taking tiny mouthfuls and the only reason that she doesn't scream is to keep them from getting into her mouth instead.
She can't get out, she doesn't have enough room to turn around enough to try and work the latch from inside without hurting herself.
She tries anyways, and the fire in her shoulder grows worse as it grinds against the gritty, filthy interior of the defiled locker that she's trapped in.
For one terrifying instant she's stuck and can't move and she thrashes, rocking back and forth and throwing herself back against the locker door as panic tears a keening whine from her throat. She cuts her fingers on the latch trying to open it before she realizes that it's not moving no matter how hard she tries to force it.
She can still hear the laughter as the other kids who did nothing but watch go to class.
For just the briefest moment, terror and panic and humiliation give way to anger and hate. And then the rage, fast and all consuming. It blazes bright and hot, shockingly intense as it burns through her veins as she begins to tremble, stuck in place with cramping muscles in her arms and legs, but that only makes the rage burn hotter. Her blood roars in her ears as her heart pounds with manic energy in her chest, so fast that it's a wonder it hasn't exploded out of her yet. It's startling, being so angry.
'They did this to me.'
The terror and panic clawing at her throat is replaced by burning rage that only grows hotter as the locker seems to grow smaller around her.
And then it's as if a supernova is exploding in Taylor Hebert's chest, and the only thing that she can do is scream.
It was supposed to be a good day.
The Dockworker's Association had finally gotten some good fortune to come their way, courtesy of a clean-up contract for the aftermath of a skirmish between the two major gangs of Brockton Bay. The Empire 88 - who were Brockton Bay's resident infestation of asshole white supremacists going on over three decades now - and the AZN Bad Boys, a Pan-Asian gang that was every inch as bad in their own special way, but with the added caveat of also being sex slavers. There was talk that there was a third gang of drug dealers trying to make a name for themselves, but they were a miserable bunch that kept mostly to themselves south of the Docks, around Archer's Bridge.
Usually when the big two clashed these days, there wasn't much damage… until just after Christmas, when a building ended up getting torched during a territory scuffle, resulting in an Empire Cape called Jotunn getting arrested by the local Protectorate and - for once - being shipped off to prison successfully… though that probably had a lot to do with the infamous leader of the ABB allegedly burning Jotunn's legs off, or something else equally unpleasant.
Danny B. Hebert didn't have much sympathy to spare, or any at all for that matter. Both gangs were scum and for once, only deserving people had gotten hurt in that particular clash. It stuck in his craw that yet another part of the Bay was wrecked… but a wrecked and now officially condemned building was one that needed to be taken down before it fell down, and that meant good, paying work for his fellow Dockworkers on the city's dime, given how most of the remaining labor and construction unions of Brockton Bay had merged into the DWA as a means of survival, or folded.
Danny and several others had been scrambling ever since the DWA had gotten the notification from the Mayor's office that they'd been given the contract for… how long had it been?
A glance at his watch told him that they'd been at it for almost two hours now, doing their best to quickly determine how many laborers and how much equipment would be needed, versus how much they could actually afford to use; it annoyed him a little because he hadn't been able to see Taylor off to school like he'd wanted. That the building in question sat between ABB and E88 territory made site security more than a concern, and bitter experience had long proven that neither the PRT, Protectorate or the BBPD could be relied upon if something happened.
Usually, the rank and file of the E88 left the DWA alone outside of some posturing, despite attempts in past years to influence the DWA into being more receptive towards the neo-nazi assholes' agenda, but usually it didn't go further than that, not after the seven deaths that had occurred during the Bad Old Days.
Sometimes, one of Kaiser's wannabe jackbooted thugs took things a little further than they should. Sometimes, a Dockworker's temper was a little shorter than usual. Yet there hadn't been any more deaths. The ABB on the other hand liked to make things very difficult whenever someone felt like trying to impress Lung which could get problematic, especially if his psychopathic lieutenant Oni Lee was anywhere nearby.
So that meant making sure that the DWA had personnel allocated to security, people that knew how to handle themselves in a scrap or better, but not anyone that might be looking for an excuse to do more than crack skulls.
Danny made it a point to offer Gerry one of the security positions first because he was one of the ones struggling the worst right now, it was a small miracle already that the Army vet hadn't had thugs trying to sweet-talk him around despite his trick knee, but it was only a matter of-
Danny's train of thought was abruptly interrupted when the door to the conference room that he, Lacy, and an older fellow named Phil (pushing 60 but fantastic at crunching numbers in his head and had forgotten more about plumbing than most people bothered to learn) was thrown open.
"Bossman!" Kurt called out and any other time Danny would've frowned at the other man in annoyance because he was just the head of hiring no matter what anyone else thought, but the blatant worry in Kurt's eyes cut off the rebuke before it could leave Danny's lips.
"What happened?" Danny asked, already expecting to hear how a cape fight was infringing close too close to the DWA grounds again, or that someone had just been badly injured.
"Shit's going down at Winslow and it sounds bad," was Kurt's answer and Danny felt his blood turn to ice in his veins. "It's all over the radio right now, man! Sounds like a cape is flipping out and wrecking the campus, trying to hurt someone or worse!"
Barely a second later Kurt was swiftly moving clear of the door, and an instant after that Danny went through the doorway so hard that he half-tore the suddenly bent hinges free of the frame. More than a few stevedores of the association had kids that went to Winslow, so he wasn't the only one suddenly sprinting for the parking lot.
But as he shoved the emergency exit door open to get to his truck faster rather than force his way through the already crowding front door, he left a visible dent in the form of a handprint in the door's metal.
Too loud, too cramped, even too many fucking smells, too much of everything, it's all too much and it makes her even angrier. Her feet hurt until her shoes come apart and leave her with the feel of disgusting sludge squishing around her toes.
Angry.
She screams. Or maybe she roars. She can't tell. Either way, when she swings her arm she moves so easily now, like she's pushing through soaking wet cardboard or maybe tissue paper, and just like that she's stumbling out into the hallway.
Into the too-fucking-bright hallway, but the goddamn stink, she can still smell it, taste it even, like the stench had been crammed up both nostrils until poured into her mouth.
Angry.
Her filthy clothes are too tight, pinching around her chest and shoulderd and arms until they aren't, but the fucking smell isn't going away!
Angry.
She's never been so angry in her entire life.
She hadn't known it was possible to be so angry, like something hot and molten is building and building and building in her chest as fire crawls through her veins, until it feels like something inside of her is about to explode.
Angry.
Snarling, she can't help but bang a fist into the warped and deformed locker adjacent to the one that she'd just forced her way out of. That locker - and the one immediately next to it - folds around her clenched fist like cellophane, and the entire row shakes and rattles as the wall behind it buckles and collapses, while several drop ceiling tiles fall to the floor.
Almost immediately, there are startled yells from the students on the other side of the collapsing wall. The yells become screams when her fellow Winslow students glimpse her. More than a few in particular are like nails on a chalkboard, high and screech and too loud. She yells right back at them because their screaming is pissing her off even more, and how dare they all begin screaming for help now, instead of five goddamn minutes ago when Sophia Hess shoved her into her filthy locker?!
Only, where their yelling and screaming is merely irritatingly loud, the furious roar that bellows from her mouth knocks several people over and shatters three of the glass windows lining the classroom's far wall.
The chaos only grows from there with the students in the room running and stumbling in every direction that is away from her, some of them even trampling their slower classmates in their haste to be elsewhere. She turns away from them however, ripping her hand and arm free of the ruins of the locker that she's just destroyed.
Snarling, she shakes her hand to try to discard the refuse clinging to her sticky, filthy skin. More than anything at that moment. She just wants to leave, to go home where it's quiet so she can take a long hot shower until she no longer feels the desire to break something or someo-
That train of thought grinds almost violently to a halt as she stops in her tracks to stare down at the person frozen in front of her.
Familiar red hair. Even more familiar grey-green eyes. All designer clothes and curves, frozen in place as she stares up at the thing not quite looking over her. The other girl's painted lips are moving rapidly but Taylor suddenly can't hear anything over the racing of her own heart and the roar of blood in her ears as her anger intensifies.
"EMMA."
She feels more than hears the name as it rumbles hatefully past her own lips. Emma's eyes go wide with horrified recognition as the blood drains out of her face, looking as if she can't believe what her very own eyes are telling her.
The other girl is supposed to be almost as tall as Taylor herself, yet she looks so small.
Weak.
Puny.
"EMMA!" she snarls out and Emma visibly flinches, the phone that she'd been clutching falling to the tile floor.
Just like that, everything stops.
The panicked shouting and screams of students and faculty come to an abrupt halt as those closest realize that there is just one person that suddenly holds the entirety of her attention. She's dimly aware of frantic and quiet whispering in the background as she takes a single step towards Emma Barnes, who takes a trembling step back.
"T-T-Tuh-Ta-" Emma tries to stammer out, but her voice trails off as she begins backpedaling, not daring to take her eyes off of the filthy, powerfully muscled form of the girl stalking towards her, thick grey fingers twitching.
Her thoughts spiral, blood roaring in her ears as her lips peel back from her teeth and in that moment all she wants to do in that moment is … is…
She's not actually sure. But a very large part of her wants to make it painful.
Then she suddenly stops as something bounces off of the side of her neck, even as someone yells, "Emma, fucking run already goddamnit!"
There is something familiar in that voice, and it stokes the anger building in her chest and slithering underneath her skin into something black and hateful. She whirls, just in time to see a female masked Cape in black firing a wrist-mounted crossbow, only this time instead of bouncing off, the bolt somehow passes through her skin to suddenly lodge itself in her chest almost all the way to the fletching.
The black rage bubbling inside comes out with a roar that has the few lingering bystanders running away screaming as Taylor rips the tranquilizer bolt out of her chest.
Barely seconds later Shadow Stalker is frantically phasing out of the way as Taylor Hebert, moving far faster than someone with that much muscle mass has any right to, tries to put a grey fist bigger than Shadow Stalker's head through the Probationary Ward's chest.
Last edited:
- Location
- Tatum, Tx
Yes! Give in to the rage, Taylor! Smash the little bitch!
- Location
- San Diego
Lots of red chunky jello substances litter Brockton bay. And Taylor wears a crown of a Dragons Skull.
- Location
- That place over there.
- Pronouns
- He/Them
Oh man Taylor has some justified rage there.
Even if you do nothing else with this concept please write the scene where she punts simurgh back into orbit because "she. just. won't. shut. up!"
Even if you do nothing else with this concept please write the scene where she punts simurgh back into orbit because "she. just. won't. shut. up!"
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And getting her to stop might be tricky
Ok, so I really doubted myself today. Still do, honestly. I saw a thread called Fire Worm (although for some reason I was sure it said Fire Bug when I saw it first during my lunchbreak) and thought "Hey, I read that! It was really, really good." So I read the new chapter and ... yeah no. It was a Taylor with firebending but instead of Azula's memories it was Ozai's voice. And it wasn't a Taylor at home, training her body and learning bending, it was yet another locker scene and roaring rampage of destruction.
So, after a minute, I decided this had to be a different story and I wanted to check out the thread I remembered. For the life of me I couldn't find it. Not on SB, not on SV... I tried to look for all the thread titles concerning TLA, fire etc. Nada.
"But hey, I'll totally figure it out when I get home and can log into my account. My watched threads will show it!" ... yeah, no. It simply didn't exist anywhere.
I almost believed I had imagined this story when I finally got the idea to check out the snippet threads. And there it was. Second one I checked.
Some days, eh?
So, after a minute, I decided this had to be a different story and I wanted to check out the thread I remembered. For the life of me I couldn't find it. Not on SB, not on SV... I tried to look for all the thread titles concerning TLA, fire etc. Nada.
"But hey, I'll totally figure it out when I get home and can log into my account. My watched threads will show it!" ... yeah, no. It simply didn't exist anywhere.
I almost believed I had imagined this story when I finally got the idea to check out the snippet threads. And there it was. Second one I checked.
Some days, eh?
AGAIN
New
Geas
Meat Thing
No idea where I was going with this one. Hell, this snippet was actually basically finished! I wrote most of this in August! Of 2023!!
*double facepalms*
So.
Yeah.
This one i think has its roots in a Worm/Akira idea i had some years back, with a wee bit of Warframe's Duviri.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
The little girl let out an annoyed huff. It had been close this time, so very, infuriatingly close. She'd almost succeeded, but instead? Failure. Yet another irritating failure!
She didn't get angry, however. Anger was for lesser, more pathetic creatures, and she hadn't been either for a long, long time now. So long in fact that the girl that she once was would have been horrified by who and what she was now. Instead, she merely felt irritation. After all, she must have made hundreds, if not thousands of attempts by now. Each and every one had been a failure, but what was failure but another learning experience? She had learned more than the old her ever could have imagined since she had begun her self-appointed task, and with every attempt, she had crept closer and closer still to that final success.
Surely, just one more attempt would finally be enough.
Just one more.
She let her irritation bleed out of her with a sigh.
Then with a gesture, the giant white hand that had been pinning her to the ground was ripped from the wrist that it had still been attached to, and raised several meters into the air, ichor dripping sluggishly from the ragged stump. Another gesture, and it flew off and out of sight, noisily crashing to the ground somewhere out of sight. She didn't bother to track just where the giant hand landed; neither it nor the dead creature that had been laying in a crumpled, broken ruin almost completely on top of her were important anymore.
She ignored both the corpse of the Simurgh and the yawning, oozing tunnel in the largest joint of her largest wing where the Endbringer's core had once been.
Instead, the little girl's attention was briefly focused on the ruin that had once been her right arm. Her right bicep and shoulder were horribly burned and her arm simply ended halfway to her elbow, reduced to charred bone. It should have hurt, but she didn't feel the pain because she didn't permit herself to. What made it annoying was that she didn't wish to waste even a trivially meager amount of the power at her disposal on something as asinine as mere flight, and climbing with one arm would be even more annoying.
"Legend, you massively petty asshole," she grumbled as she limped along the rubble and wreckage that had once been the downtown area of Brockton Bay. "Shoulda killed you slower this time. Dick." As she grumbled, less than a thought of effort caused the rubble that she picked her way over and through to twitch, then quiver. A moment later, shards of metal debris of varying sizes and assorted lengths of wiring began floating towards her. By the time she'd taken six steps, a skeletal mass where her missing arm should have been had taken form. After another twelve steps, it was a child-sized yet eerily-accurate model of the arm that she'd lost, pieced together from random scrap and fusing to her burned stump.
As she gave her new fingers an experimental twitch, the ruins of the Forsberg gallery, already heavily compromised by the wreckage of a Dragoncraft half-buried within its façade, crashed to the ground as it imploded on itself. The little girl ignored that, as she did the debris from something exploding nearby that spiraled into the air, only to come crashing back down to Earth scant meters from her.
Here, near the heart of downtown Brockton Bay, the destruction was at its very worst. Most of the corpses were all but buried in the wreckage. Still, idle curiosity had her glancing about to see if anyone interesting had managed to make it this far, and whether they were Parahuman or 'merely' human. To her utter lack of surprise, Mouse Protector's corpse - the upper half of the woman's body to be specific - was nearby, the woman having crawled on her hands towards the little girl's ultimate destination before finally bleeding out. The little girl had lost count of just how many times that had happened. The only notable thing was that the dead heroine had only managed perhaps forty-something meters less than her average this time.
The ground violently shook, toppling the wreckage of more buildings to the ground. A short distance away an ugly, crooked fissure opened up in the ground; from the fumes and steam that it spewed, the damage this time around must have been deep enough to crack the tectonic plate below the city's aquifer.
It began to rain when the girl stopped walking and began climbing instead; though it should have been late afternoon, the sky was an ugly, roiling black crackling with thunder. She glanced up, then cursed and began to climb even faster when she saw how the moon was far lower and larger in the sky than it should have been; a portion of it was hopelessly shattered into massive pieces that looked to be slowly but steadily falling to Earth. That meant that the girl had to hurry.
She hurried, but fortunately, she didn't have to climb very far.
As she climbed onto the bizarrely intact roof of the PRT-ENE headquarters that had somehow ended up almost a mile away from the wreckage of the building, she saw her goal at last - a malignant, impossible tear in the air. Even after witnessing it so many times, it was difficult to look directly at it.
It was impossible to look at.
It was impossible not to look at.
It was as if reality itself were a pane of glass that had somehow inexplicably shattered. Around the breach, the laws of nature and physics were just as broken; debris and mangled corpses floated in midair in regions where gravity ceased to be. A lengthy section of a water main that should have been was instead existed in midair, spewing water from a crack longer than the little girl was tall and fell sideways, splashing across a floating corpse in blue and silver poeer armor with a crushed chest. The smoking and smoldering wreckage that had once been a car orbited in a sluggish elliptical around the PRT roof, only narrowly missing hitting Armsmaster's slowly-tumbling remains.
The little girl ignored all of that and more as she strode towards the mass of crystal and alien flesh that sluggishly oozed through the breach. Effeminate hands rose from the mass of crystal and flesh, silver in color and twitching and spasming, yet at the girl's approach, both crystalline material and flesh alike warped and twisted in on itself. As the little girl came to a stop, the mass settled into the shape of a crude, low-backed throne of bone, crystal and silver.
It was just as she prepared to climb up onto the throne that one of the last survivors made their final, desperate move. Almost absentmindedly the girl twitched her fingers, and Glory Girl - badly burned across almost half of her body yet still rocketing forward with a fist cocked-back - flinched as a concrete brick shattered across her face hard enough to explode into dust and dropped her forcefield. The small cloud blinded her just long enough to let the point of Mouse Protector's sword reach her nose unimpeded.
The upper half of her burned head hit the ground, with the rest of her corpse following scant seconds later.
Once again, Dinah Alcott made herself comfortable upon her throne. With a deep breath, she stroked the mass of crystal and bone underneath her. Once again, the flesh of the lobotomized Eden obeyed her, yielding to her the shards still enslaved to the entity's living corpse. Once again, she ruthlessly snuffed them out, draining centuries of stored energy in mere seconds to tear the hole in reality in a certain direction.
"Begin," Dinah quietly intoned as she raised her metal fist, "AGAIN."
Her fist slammed down onto the armrest of her throne and the universe trembled.
I sometimes get intrigued by the notion of Dinah Alcott rather than being the young damsel in distress, instead leveraging her powers in such a way as to become a threat to be feared and dreaded. Having said that, I really do wish that I could remember what the hell I was even thinking originally with this. Maybe it'll come back to me, maybe it won't.
Oh well.
*double facepalms*
So.
Yeah.
This one i think has its roots in a Worm/Akira idea i had some years back, with a wee bit of Warframe's Duviri.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
The little girl let out an annoyed huff. It had been close this time, so very, infuriatingly close. She'd almost succeeded, but instead? Failure. Yet another irritating failure!
She didn't get angry, however. Anger was for lesser, more pathetic creatures, and she hadn't been either for a long, long time now. So long in fact that the girl that she once was would have been horrified by who and what she was now. Instead, she merely felt irritation. After all, she must have made hundreds, if not thousands of attempts by now. Each and every one had been a failure, but what was failure but another learning experience? She had learned more than the old her ever could have imagined since she had begun her self-appointed task, and with every attempt, she had crept closer and closer still to that final success.
Surely, just one more attempt would finally be enough.
Just one more.
She let her irritation bleed out of her with a sigh.
Then with a gesture, the giant white hand that had been pinning her to the ground was ripped from the wrist that it had still been attached to, and raised several meters into the air, ichor dripping sluggishly from the ragged stump. Another gesture, and it flew off and out of sight, noisily crashing to the ground somewhere out of sight. She didn't bother to track just where the giant hand landed; neither it nor the dead creature that had been laying in a crumpled, broken ruin almost completely on top of her were important anymore.
She ignored both the corpse of the Simurgh and the yawning, oozing tunnel in the largest joint of her largest wing where the Endbringer's core had once been.
Instead, the little girl's attention was briefly focused on the ruin that had once been her right arm. Her right bicep and shoulder were horribly burned and her arm simply ended halfway to her elbow, reduced to charred bone. It should have hurt, but she didn't feel the pain because she didn't permit herself to. What made it annoying was that she didn't wish to waste even a trivially meager amount of the power at her disposal on something as asinine as mere flight, and climbing with one arm would be even more annoying.
"Legend, you massively petty asshole," she grumbled as she limped along the rubble and wreckage that had once been the downtown area of Brockton Bay. "Shoulda killed you slower this time. Dick." As she grumbled, less than a thought of effort caused the rubble that she picked her way over and through to twitch, then quiver. A moment later, shards of metal debris of varying sizes and assorted lengths of wiring began floating towards her. By the time she'd taken six steps, a skeletal mass where her missing arm should have been had taken form. After another twelve steps, it was a child-sized yet eerily-accurate model of the arm that she'd lost, pieced together from random scrap and fusing to her burned stump.
As she gave her new fingers an experimental twitch, the ruins of the Forsberg gallery, already heavily compromised by the wreckage of a Dragoncraft half-buried within its façade, crashed to the ground as it imploded on itself. The little girl ignored that, as she did the debris from something exploding nearby that spiraled into the air, only to come crashing back down to Earth scant meters from her.
Here, near the heart of downtown Brockton Bay, the destruction was at its very worst. Most of the corpses were all but buried in the wreckage. Still, idle curiosity had her glancing about to see if anyone interesting had managed to make it this far, and whether they were Parahuman or 'merely' human. To her utter lack of surprise, Mouse Protector's corpse - the upper half of the woman's body to be specific - was nearby, the woman having crawled on her hands towards the little girl's ultimate destination before finally bleeding out. The little girl had lost count of just how many times that had happened. The only notable thing was that the dead heroine had only managed perhaps forty-something meters less than her average this time.
The ground violently shook, toppling the wreckage of more buildings to the ground. A short distance away an ugly, crooked fissure opened up in the ground; from the fumes and steam that it spewed, the damage this time around must have been deep enough to crack the tectonic plate below the city's aquifer.
It began to rain when the girl stopped walking and began climbing instead; though it should have been late afternoon, the sky was an ugly, roiling black crackling with thunder. She glanced up, then cursed and began to climb even faster when she saw how the moon was far lower and larger in the sky than it should have been; a portion of it was hopelessly shattered into massive pieces that looked to be slowly but steadily falling to Earth. That meant that the girl had to hurry.
She hurried, but fortunately, she didn't have to climb very far.
As she climbed onto the bizarrely intact roof of the PRT-ENE headquarters that had somehow ended up almost a mile away from the wreckage of the building, she saw her goal at last - a malignant, impossible tear in the air. Even after witnessing it so many times, it was difficult to look directly at it.
It was impossible to look at.
It was impossible not to look at.
It was as if reality itself were a pane of glass that had somehow inexplicably shattered. Around the breach, the laws of nature and physics were just as broken; debris and mangled corpses floated in midair in regions where gravity ceased to be. A lengthy section of a water main that should have been was instead existed in midair, spewing water from a crack longer than the little girl was tall and fell sideways, splashing across a floating corpse in blue and silver poeer armor with a crushed chest. The smoking and smoldering wreckage that had once been a car orbited in a sluggish elliptical around the PRT roof, only narrowly missing hitting Armsmaster's slowly-tumbling remains.
The little girl ignored all of that and more as she strode towards the mass of crystal and alien flesh that sluggishly oozed through the breach. Effeminate hands rose from the mass of crystal and flesh, silver in color and twitching and spasming, yet at the girl's approach, both crystalline material and flesh alike warped and twisted in on itself. As the little girl came to a stop, the mass settled into the shape of a crude, low-backed throne of bone, crystal and silver.
It was just as she prepared to climb up onto the throne that one of the last survivors made their final, desperate move. Almost absentmindedly the girl twitched her fingers, and Glory Girl - badly burned across almost half of her body yet still rocketing forward with a fist cocked-back - flinched as a concrete brick shattered across her face hard enough to explode into dust and dropped her forcefield. The small cloud blinded her just long enough to let the point of Mouse Protector's sword reach her nose unimpeded.
The upper half of her burned head hit the ground, with the rest of her corpse following scant seconds later.
Once again, Dinah Alcott made herself comfortable upon her throne. With a deep breath, she stroked the mass of crystal and bone underneath her. Once again, the flesh of the lobotomized Eden obeyed her, yielding to her the shards still enslaved to the entity's living corpse. Once again, she ruthlessly snuffed them out, draining centuries of stored energy in mere seconds to tear the hole in reality in a certain direction.
"Begin," Dinah quietly intoned as she raised her metal fist, "AGAIN."
Her fist slammed down onto the armrest of her throne and the universe trembled.
I sometimes get intrigued by the notion of Dinah Alcott rather than being the young damsel in distress, instead leveraging her powers in such a way as to become a threat to be feared and dreaded. Having said that, I really do wish that I could remember what the hell I was even thinking originally with this. Maybe it'll come back to me, maybe it won't.
Oh well.
IndigoPhoenix
Devourer of Citrus
- Location
- Everywehere
I heard that title in my bones. Somehow it's not a winter soldier snippet with that thing.
I'm unfamiliar with Akira so I had no idea what was going on there though.
Last edited:
Geas
Meat Thing
I'm glad I got the impact of the moment just right!
So, super short explanation for Akira.
In the late 70s, the Japanese government begins experimenting on forty young children to induce psychic powers in them; each is assigned a number. Most of the children die. A small number of them develop abilities but are left with crippling handicaps as a result (blindness, paraplegia, frailty, premature aging, etc). #28 on the other hand - Akira - becomes so monstrously powerful, he can basically cause nuclear fission reactions with his brain. On December of 1982, he single-handedly glasses Tokyo by accident and starts WW3. Only a small handful of the other test subjects survive the explosion, and the government is so terrified of Akira and their inability to control him that they put him into experimental cryostasis and buried deep underground.
30 years later the experiments are restarted when elements of the government get their hands on 15 year old Tetsuo Shima and make him subject #41, and unwittingly make him just as powerful as Akira... with absolutely none of the latter's restraint or stability.
