- Location
- I'll never tell...
He noped out as soon as he heard about the giant wasp.
My Random Fiction Bits and Pieces
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
If not sooner, because he heard about the Locker going even worse then usual.
LostArchivist
Sane, unfortunately.
- Location
- The State of Confusion
You have been incredibly on point with horrible puns in this one, I have to say.
Now I'm just imagining her doing that, but getting Lisa as a stream manager... she'd own the city in a week.
"Hello, chat~ I have a new proposal for the city council today~ *flaps wings innocently*"
Meanwhile, Ziz: "Why do I feel proud for no apparent reason?"
Danny is balancing his finely-tuned Brocktonite danger senses with parental duties right now.
This is getting to "memetic Skitter but friendly" levels in my mind already. This is a good thing.
I already know we'll never hear the story, but I'm sure it was hilarious.
Oh. Shit.
Is that Varga!Taylor speedrunning wormverses again by helping out her local versions?
Yeah, that's hardly reassuring!
I can speak from personal experience on this one.
Urk. NOPE!
Lisa is going to be SO jelly that Taylor has managed to nag her power into being helpful.
I don't have words for what level of broken that is.
And she can control them, too, though she hasn't used it much so far in favor of bugging people in person.
About how long do we have before she invents Cazadors, Fallout edition?
Yup, it just goes on. Broken as all heck.
HECK no. That's worse than the scorpion!
Helps if you have a sudden case of dark elves, or Greg. Rather situational otherwise.
Vespa 5... Developments of a certain type
New
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Looking around the old warehouse, Taylor smiled. It was perfect. No one anywhere near according to the insects she was sensing through, but close enough to the union buildings that it was only a few minutes jog away. Reasonably weathertight, so the wind wasn't blowing through and the roof was sufficiently intact that hardly any rain or snow got inside. It smelled pretty rank but she could easily ignore that. And due to proximity to the dockyards, and distance from where the Merchants hung out a couple of miles away, not even the junkies had any reason to wander in. Nothing to steal, or at least nothing light enough to be worth the effort of trying to move it, no power… It was your classic abandoned warehouse, which Brockton Bay had a near-infinite quantity of, with as far as she could tell none of the downsides such places often had.
Ideal for further experimentation.
Turning to her dad, she said, "Thanks. This is exactly what I needed to find."
"My pleasure. Please be careful, and reasonably discreet though?" He smiled back at her. "Hardly anyone comes around here these days but make sure you're alone even so. You never know if some random criminal or just someone lost might turn up, so keep your eyes open."
"I've got more eyes open than you'd believe," she assured him. After the last two weeks of practice she was up to a range of nearly two hundred yards in all directions, extending from here far enough that she was sensing things in the bay which was quite a lot less than that distance away to the south. Her power had nearly stopped urging her to throw caution to the winds and just go for it to maximum possible range, but it still felt a little annoyed that she was going so deliberately. She'd pointed out several times that slow and steady wins the race but it didn't seem to be entirely convinced. Even so, it was clearly having as much fun as she was, so on the whole they were getting on fine.
"Good. And that's never going to be anything less than very creepy," he replied with a slight shiver, making her laugh. "You can get in easily enough up there, I guess." He pointed at where a crack in the wall at one end of the building showed dull daylight, thirty feet up and nearly at the side. It looked like something had been mounted on the wall but had rusted away and taken the brickwork with it. The gap was certainly large enough for her super-hornet to get through, she could see from here, but it was sufficiently far from the floor to make it highly unlikely any human would try the same feat even if they could squeeze through. "All the other doors except that one we came through are blocked pretty solidly for various reasons, so if we chain this one up from the inside then you fly out through the hole, no one's going to get in here without quite a bit of effort and noise."
He hefted the two feet of heavy chain with a couple of shackles fitted to it he'd dug out of one of the dockworker's scrap bins, making her look at it and nod.
"Yeah, that'll work," she agreed. Following him as he walked back to the door she studied the thing, seeing that it was a basic but tough metal affair with a bar that rotated about the center pivot by means of a handle on the outside. Each end of the bar went into a bracket on the wall. The whole thing was extremely rusty, but sufficiently thick that it was still a lot more solid than one would suspect from looking at it. Back when this place had been built, it had been built to last.
"We connect this end here to the wall like this," he said, unscrewing one of the shackle bolts and fitting the loop part over a heavy bracket where something had once been bolted. Replacing the bolt he tightened it as much as possible. "Then you just close the door, swing the bar over, wrap the chain around it and the bracket a couple of times, and put the other shackle through the chain as tightly as you can. The only way anyone's getting through that door then is either by brute force or a cutting torch."
Her dad dropped the chain against the wall and turned to her. "I'll be in the truck. Lock this place up, then meet me there. We can go for a pizza and you can come back here when it gets dark if you want."
Taylor nodded happily. It was a good idea all round, and she even got pizza out of it. Taking her coat off, then her boots, replacing the latter with some light slippers she pulled out of her pocket, she handed what she'd removed to him. "See you in a couple of minutes," she said with a smile. He nodded and went out through the door, which she closed after him. Pulling the bar over, she made sure it was fully engaged, hit the brackets with the heel of her hand pretty hard which slightly bent them, further reducing the possibility of opening the door, then did what he'd suggested with the chain. Pulling it tight enough that it creaked a little, she screwed the shackle bolt into place and made sure it wasn't coming loose, then tightened the one he'd fitted. Her enhanced strength was more than up to the job.
After some testing she'd worked out that she was at least ten to twelve times as strong as a full grown very strong man, which seemed ridiculous, but it was easy enough to prove. She could dead-lift well over five tons while merged with the jumping spider, and if anything that was slowly and steadily increasing for reasons she was currently unclear on but was perfectly happy about.
She'd kept that merger going with only a few short pauses to check things ever since she'd first come up with the idea, and was very pleased with what it gave her. Sure enough the spider had grown larger, just like Vespa had, but it had been slowing down for the last couple of days. The unmerged jumping spider was huge now though, although nothing like as large as she was when she merged with it and had the spider characteristics turned up all the way. That produced a spider big enough for a small child to ride, while the unmerged arachnid was only about the size of her hand. Which was still absolutely enormous for a spider, of course, but even so ridiculously cute. Even her dad said so, and he wasn't nearly as fond of such things as she was.
It seemed likely that the increase in strength was down at least in part to the spider growing larger, and she wasn't sure why that occurred yet either. It was currently one of the mysteries of how her power worked that she was somewhat hazy on but was accepting as a thing that happened. Sooner or later she'd probably figure it out. But while the spider had apparently stopped growing, her strength hadn't, so obviously there was also something else in play.
Now, though, she quickly took off the sweatshirt and pants which was all she was wearing and, shivering a little even though her spider-enhanced body seemed more cold tolerant than it had been, folded them and put them into a small cloth bag she'd dug out of the attic. Her slippers followed, then she zipped the bag up and dropped it next to her feet. Vespa, who was as usual riding on her neck under her hair, the hornet now close to four and a half inches in length and still slowly getting bigger, provided her with the familiar super-hornet body, something she accepted as easily as the one she'd been born with. Picking up the bag in her front two legs she lifted off, carrying the small load without effort, and headed for the hole in the wall. It was the work of moments to stick her head out and double check no unwanted eyes were on her, something she was pretty sure of from the other bugs around her, then squeeze out and zip down to her dad's truck. He was standing next to it and opened the rear cab door, Taylor folding her wings and shooting through it easily, then grabbing the seat with her back legs to prevent herself going right out the other side, door or no door.
"Whoops," she said with a laugh. "Overcooked it a bit there."
Her dad closed the rear door and got in the front. They'd hung a blanket between the front and rear seats, so she had privacy, and the windows were covered too. "Try not to wreck my truck if you can," he requested, chuckling.
Reverting to her more or less normal human with spider boosts form, she quickly got dressed in other clothes she'd left back there earlier, and put the bag with her sweatpants and the other things in the foot-well. When she'd finished tying the laces on her boots, she hopped out and got into the front passenger side. "That's done. Thanks again." He smiled at her as he started the truck.
"Just be careful, Taylor. I know you need somewhere larger to see what you can do, but I still worry about you."
She put her hand on his where it was resting on the shifter. "I know you do. And I appreciate it. I'll be careful, I promise."
He met her eyes, nodded acceptance of her words, then put the truck in drive and turned it around. Moments later they were heading back into the city for a late lunch, Taylor settling back into the seat and thinking about all the things she wanted to look into.
The list was long and getting longer, but it was fun testing what she could figure out how to do. And her power seemed, despite its reservations and occasional shock, to be enjoying itself as much as she was.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Finishing off the assignment with one last figure, Taylor sighed with relief, put the pen down, and stretched. Home schooling was a hell of a lot less stressful than Winslow had been, that much was certain. Mind you, so would be tap-dancing blindfolded through a mine field, she thought with a grimace.
Even so, it was a lot of work. She was putting in the hours on the assignments that arrived three times a week in the post, then got sent back the next day for marking. The city had arranged this method as a stopgap while the case against Winslow rumbled on, and from what she'd heard gathered pace. A surprisingly large number of people, a horrifying quantity in truth, had been implicated in a whole series of overlapping scams, corruption and general malfeasance that seemed poised to upend half the institutions in the city from what her dad said. He'd had a couple of letters from the hospital's lawyers updating him, along with the other involved parents, on the ongoing legal issues. They were still hoping for an out of court settlement but the school board was being recalcitrant for some reason and digging its heels in. While that was going on, the mayor was apparently stomping around in a foul mood cleaning house in a major way, which had everyone even peripherally involved with anything connected to the problem running scared.
Her dad was following things with a good deal of interest, dark amusement, and a certain amount of schadenfreude relating to various local government officials he'd always heartily disliked and mistrusted. It was surprising how many of the those he and the rest of the dock workers had always felt were wrong'uns in fact turned out to be exactly what they'd suspected.
Or possibly not.
In any case, he was getting quite a lot of entertainment from the news, and she was happy to see him in a good mood. Overall things were going very well as far as either of them were concerned, even leaving aside her power experimentation. The remote schooling was in some ways annoying but at the same time kind of fun too, as she could get far more done on her own schedule without interference from little shits than she'd ever been able to at Winslow. Already after only a little over three weeks she was approaching being up to where she should have been all along in a real school and had no intention of stopping there. With any luck by the time the city worked out what the long term solution to the situation would be she'd be easily able to test into any of the high schools in the city. She had no intention of ever going back to Winslow, even if they did manage to turn it into a functioning educational establishment.
The memories were far too raw to allow her to set foot through the doors, and her dad had agreed with her decision without a moment's hesitation. Hopefully she'd be able to get into Clarendon or Arcadia, preferably the latter as it was the best school in the city, but by the same token the hardest to get into. It was something to strive for but she'd be happy enough anywhere that wasn't Winslow. Or, if it came to it, just continuing with the home schooling, since it wasn't dramatically taxing.
Her dad still wanted her to have friends in her life, but so far she wasn't particularly missing other people her age around her. It was something of a relief, to be honest. A holiday from two years of hell.
Scanning the assignment she double-checked her work then, satisfied she'd completed it, slipped the paperwork into the large envelope along with the rest of the stuff she'd finished. All of it would go in the post that evening, but for now she was done. Which meant she had the rest of the day free for other things.
In other words, perverting the course of nature for her own amusement. It was one of her favorite activities.
Grinning to herself she looked at the terrarium containing her scorpion, who was currently dismantling a cricket. There were three more tanks next to the original one, which she'd found through an online free disposals website and cleaned up, one a little smaller and two a little larger that her first. A pair of them were currently empty as she was still setting up suitable environments and working out what she should get for them, while the other contained her firespider hybrid. The creature she'd almost accidentally made seemed perfectly contented with life and entirely viable. She'd kept it like that because it was fun to look at when it started glowing at night as much as any other reason.
Her dad had come home with an old bookcase last Friday, one that he'd acquired from a coworker who was clearing out his grandfather's house, and she'd carried it up into her room and put it next to the desk. That had necessitated rearranging that whole side of the room but she didn't mind and considering how strong she was it was trivial to do. The ancient oak shelves were much wider than most bookshelves would be these days, and there were only four sets, which meant the spacing was pretty much ideal to support nearly a dozen tanks approximately the size of the ones she had. All three were on one shelf at the moment, and Taylor was looking forward to filling the rest.
She'd been back to the exotic pet shop several times to get more information on what was available, talk to Mike, the guy who ran the place and was a mine of information on almost any animal, aquatic or otherwise, he sold, and let her power examine all the neat things in there. She was considering what might be the result of trying the fusion power with some of the more interesting sea life too, although at the moment it was a little difficult to arrange. Tropical tanks, it turned out, were both remarkably complicated to set up successfully and really expensive as a direct result.
On the other hand, there was as she'd thought the first time lots of sea life adapted to the local environment just sitting there in the bay. It was free, no one would mind if she helped herself, she thought with a small smile as she flipped through one of the several notebooks she'd filled with the results of experiments and thoughts on other ideas to test. Crabs were high on the list as they had all manner of useful strengths that, especially when scaled up as her power did, could be a lot of fun. But there were plenty of others… Jellyfish for sting cells, for example.
Taylor was curious to see if she could locate a specimen of physalia physalis, commonly known as the Portuguese Man O'War. They certainly existed in the waters this far north although they weren't common from what she'd read, at least around Brockton Bay. Box jellyfish, which were even more dangerous, would be harder to find as they were primarily a Pacific tropical species, but if she wanted something really toxic that would do it.
Not that she was specifically looking for lethally dangerous things as such. It was just that she kept thinking they were rather interesting, and her power apparently agreed, so between the two of them they did keep thinking about this sort of thing.
Checking her phone, she made sure there weren't any messages from her dad or anything in her calendar that needed doing, then quickly sent him a text that she was going out for a long walk. Which was code for going off to the hidden test room in the old warehouse. Both of them were still a touch wary of cellphones for reasons they knew full well were based on lingering trauma, but they were undeniably useful. She got a reply moments later acknowledging her message and telling her to have fun. Which she was definitely going to.
Smiling happily, Taylor busied herself putting a fresh notebook and pen, along with the relevant existing notes, her phone which she turned off, a couple of battery powered LED lamps she'd picked up a week ago, and a few other things, into a pair of surplus ammo pouches she'd got from one of the guys at the union who was their unofficial quartermaster. A lot of the equipment like this that they used was military surplus, and he definitely had a shady past in acquiring things based on how he just nodded when you asked him for something then hours to days later it mysteriously turned up.
Almost anything you wanted, in fact, according to her dad, who shook his head in respect and refused to be drawn on the subject. She got the distinct impression there were some intriguing stories hiding in his past…
The pouches closed firmly with velcro, and were attached to a webbing belt. A larger one that she'd reworked from a tiny child's backpack left over from years back was also on the belt, and that she packed with some very tightly rolled clothes, her slippers, and a few other things.
Finished, she stood, moving over to the tanks and pondering them. "Yeah, I've been wanting to try this for a while," she commented to the firespider, which obediently climbed onto her hand when she lifted the lid and stuck her arm inside. Withdrawing it, she lifted the hybrid to eye level and smiled at the creature. "Up for some fun?"
The antennae it possessed twitched, making her grin. Moving it to her hair next to Vespa, she quickly undressed after making sure the curtains were pulled. It was now dark, being about quarter past five in the afternoon, and she didn't want anyone outside seeing odd shapes backlit at the window. With a quick mental action she merged with the hybrid, adding it her biological distinctiveness, a thought that made her grin. Quite a lot of practice had made it easy to maintain her human shape on the outside even with the hybrid now incorporated internally along with the jumping spider. Which she'd named Jumpy, her dad sighing and shaking his head when she'd told him that.
Apparently he thought her naming ability was sub par or something.
She could now sense three separate arthropod data sets, as she had come to think of it, in her power. Combining them or separating them was simple, and she'd found she could stack the outcome, although so far she hadn't tried more than four at once. Her power seemed to find this whole thing endlessly fascinating, as well as completely bewildering, and every time she found something new she could do, or forced it to work whether it liked it or not, she was sure the ability was getting even more confused although at the same time deliriously pleased.
The whole thing was bizarre, if she looked at it objectively, but it was definitely happening, and fun too, so she saw no reason not to keep on going. Although the inability to take her clothes with a change was still irking her quite a bit. They were going to have to work on that although she wasn't sure how yet.
Oh well. She'd figure something out sooner or later. But for now she just lived with the minor inconvenience.
Double-checking that she had everything packed she wanted, she merged with Vespa too, switching to the semi-humanoid hornet girl form, which she'd been playing with quite a lot in the last few days. It, like all her changes, was as comfortable as her human body, but she definitely had an affinity for the hornet variations she suspected was down to her so-far unique link to Vespa. Putting the elasticated webbing belt on around her very narrow insectoid waist, she made sure it was pulled tight, then headed downstairs.
Moments later she was peering out the back door into the yard. Her hornet's head stuck out the door, looking around. No one visible, nothing she could sense through her bugs, or her antennae. Perfect.
Switching to the full super-hornet body, and feeling the belt loosen off a little but stay firmly attached, she scuttled out onto the back yard, pushing the door shut with a hind leg and making sure it locked with a click. Satisfied, she lifted off and rapidly shot skywards, before the deep drone of her wings attracted attention. Leveling off about three hundred feet up she aimed for the docks and went to cruising speed, which she'd found out was a good eighty miles an hour without even pushing as hard as she could. If she really tried she could better that considerably, but this was a nice mix of getting around fast and not overexerting herself.
Zipping through the air feeling highly pleased with how her life in general was going, she pondered what to try tonight. Possibly the same thing she always did.
Try to take over the Arthropod Kingdom.
So far it was working surprisingly well.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Looking up at an odd sound, wondering what it was, the tall and strongly build Japanese man stared as something close to the size of a human, but very much not a human, zoomed overhead. Even in the dimness he recognized it. Or at least, recognized what it would be if it was about two inches long rather than probably the best part of four feet…
His eyes followed it until it vanished over the roofs of the decrepit buildings that lined the street, heading towards the bay. Those eyes were rather wide, and anyone who knew him would have found the color his face had gone unusually pale. He wasn't noted for being a man who was particularly worried by pretty much anything.
On the other hand, he remembered his childhood in Japan, and things he'd seen then…
"No," he said out loud, turning and walking rapidly in the other direction. "Just… no. Fuck that. Not a chance. If there's one there's hundreds."
He walked faster.
Muttering 'No' under his breath.
As far as he was concerned, if the docks had an infestation of giant killer wasps as large as a person he was going to stay way the fuck away. He was no idiot.
Wondering rather hysterically if moving elsewhere might not be a bright idea, he sped up to a brisk jog and tried not to imagine a stinger the size of his forearm.
He failed. Dismally.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Cool," Taylor exclaimed, looking down at herself. "That works amazingly well!"
She'd been playing around with trying to mix and match various aspects of different creatures to an even greater extent than she'd so far achieved. As seemed to be the usual result, at first she kept running into a wall where something wouldn't quite work the way she wanted it to, but by being particularly bloody-minded and insistent, each time the mental barrier collapsed and she managed to pull off the trick in question. Quite often this resulted in a certain amount of disorientation to begin with, but that seemed to be diminishing in both severity and occurrence as she kept on. That little watching thing at the back of her mind gave the impression of intermittently raising a finger with its mouth open like a meme she'd seen online, then just in the same manner pausing, closing its mouth, and just accepting what happened.
Which was all kinds of hilarious on multiple levels, she thought with glee even as she turned around and inspected her current body.
She'd managed to produce a jumping spider/hornet/firefly drider combo, the bulk of it the familiar jumping spider part, but with a massive stinger at the rear, and bright glowing patches on the sides and upper part of the abdomen. With a frown of concentration, she tried changing the bioluminescent areas in both size and shape, which took quite a lot of effort but eventually gave in and worked the way she wanted it to.
On the scale she could manage, and probably due to the same effect that she'd noticed with everything else going up almost exponentially in potency with increased size, the glowing bits of her were much brighter than the original firefly. That produced a very visible but fairly dim greenish-yellow light, whereas what she was emitting right now was a brilliant viridian green that cast weird shadows throughout a big part of the warehouse floor. It was nearly as bright as the LED lamps she'd set up to let her see what she was doing.
Playing around with it, she succeeded in dimming the glow to almost nothing while keeping it active, and turning it off entirely. Pushing the other way she found that the only method to make it brighter was ultimately to flash it, which after some thought about what she'd learned of the mechanism behind the light, made sense. It was a chemical reaction and there was a maximum rate the chemicals could be produced, although that was definitely a hell of a lot higher for her than it was for an actual firefly. By flashing it, she was storing up quite a lot of chemicals then mixing them all at once, which produced a lot more light over a short period of time.
After ten minutes work, she could make the light organs flash so brightly she was blinking spots away. "Wow. That was… impressive," she mumbled, making some notes then looking back at her body. "I wonder if it's even using the same chemicals? Not sure how to check that…" She wrote the question down as one to investigate, then moved onto some more testing. It turned out to be simple to make the light emitting parts into any shape in any position she wanted by this point and she amused herself by covering herself in various geometric patterns that glowed brightly. Even on her human upper torso. Holding out her arms and admiring the green glowing pseudo-tattoos she'd created on them she giggled. It looked really amazing.
'Huge success,' she noted, grinning as she wrote. 'That's that question answered. I'll have to see if I can figure out how to change the color but that's not bad for the moment. And useful too, right?' Her power felt like it agreed. 'Great. What next?'
Tapping the pen on her lips as she thought, after a moment she looked up, then around at the warehouse. The vast empty area echoed from a drip coming from somewhere far in the distance, but otherwise was silent. All her insects around the whole area told her no human was anywhere nearby, and the crabs and other creatures in the bay couldn't sense any boats in range either. She was completely alone aside from a vast number of much smaller lifeforms. Mulling over the thought she'd had, she started walking towards the far end of the building, her eight feet making a tapping sound that caused strange echoes, although to her by now it was entirely normal.
There was a pile of debris against the end wall, on the other side from where the door she'd chained up was, which contained lots of random pieces of scrap metal ranging from bottle caps and beer cans up to old cast iron chunks that were easily over a ton in weight. Along with quite a lot of rusted corrugated steel steel sheets, bent and torn, various I beams, and more. There was also quite a bit of wood, most of it rotting and broken, but she could see some ancient boards and beams that were probably oak and a century or more old. Likely parts recovered from wooden ships decades in the past if not before, or the remains of demolished buildings that had ended up dumped in here for one reason or another over the years.
Selecting a few pieces of wood, ranging in thickness from an inch or so up to over six inches, she picked them up and moved them to the middle of the room, then went back and collected some sheet metal as well. A pair of old and very heavy cast iron hollow blocks some three feet on a side, which she guessed were something to do with old steam engines or suchlike, were also carried back. Each was probably close to a ton but she was more that pleased that she could lift them without any trouble at all. Chuckling at how simple this was now, she set up the boxes a couple of feet apart on the floor and propped a plank against them so it wouldn't go anywhere.
'That'll do,' she thought as she turned around and looked over her shoulder. Extending her stinger, she aimed, then lunged backwards with all eight legs. There was a solid crunching sound like biting into an apple and Taylor stared in slight shock.
Moving forward again, she wiggled her abdomen several times trying to get the plank, which the stinger had gone entirely through with almost no resistance, to come off. In the end she pushed with both hind legs and popped it free. She'd underestimated both how sharp the thing was, and how strong she was.
Even without injecting venom, the foot-plus long stinger was more than enough to kill someone without even trying, she thought as she examined the hole she'd made in the oak plank. Splinters on the back surrounded a gap she could put her finger through. "Holy crap," she mumbled, feeling the hole, then looking speculatively at the thicker pieces of wood. Knowing full well how hard and tough old oak was, she was rather startled how much damage she'd done so easily.
Smiling in an odd way, she selected a three inch thick beam and set it up on her improvised test stand. Moments later there was another crunch, a little louder, and another hole.
The same thing happened with the thickest piece of wood she could find, something that was easily eight solid inches. Nearly as much stinger came out the other side. Taylor grinned, then turned to look at the metal scrap…
By the time she'd finished there were holes in a surprisingly large range of items, even the cast iron boxes. She'd found that going all the way through the bigger lumps of solid iron hadn't worked, but she'd still left a really significant divot in them, several inches deep. In theory it shouldn't have worked like that, she was fairly certain, because although she knew her hybrid body was amazingly strong, insect chitin shouldn't have been so effective against metal. It was another example of how various parameters of her Changer power scaled much faster than they should have done with size.
Powers bullshit, essentially. Which was something she'd read a lot about recently, and no one had a good explanation for.
Switching to the super-hornet body, just to double-check, and adding some bioluminescent patches for fun, she tried the same tests again. This body wasn't quite as physically powerful as the drider variant although it was far stronger than it should have been even taking into account proportional insect strength. And, again, she was pretty sure it was getting steadily stronger with time too, which seemed to be a common theme she still didn't understand the mechanism of.
She was also aware that her super-hornet form was slightly larger now than it had been the first time. She'd had her dad measure her, and nose to tail she'd increased by about eight percent at this point in time. It was very slow, not nearly as quick as the individual creatures she merged with, but was still happening.
So many questions, so few real answers, she mused as she took aim once more. Her stinger, about eleven inches long in this body, defeated all the wood samples easily, and some of the metal ones too. Anything less than half an inch thick might as well not have been there, and if she could get the leverage she could punch through two inches of cast iron without too much effort.
"Impressive," she commented to her power. "Terrifying, but impressive."
Recalling something she'd read about asian hornets, she hovered a few feet off the floor and curled her abdomen under her. It was easy to force venom out her stinger, under a lot more pressure than she'd realized was possible. Asian giant hornets were known to be able to literally spray their venom at a target, as opposed to simply stinging it, but so far she hadn't tried using it at all. A hissing sound was accompanied by a jet of liquid that went a hell of a lot further than she'd expected, spraying at least fifty feet and leaving a dark streak on the concrete.
"Jesus," she muttered, shocked. "That must have been at least a cupful." It was vastly more than needed to kill a human in seconds. Having looked it up, she'd found that the median lethal dose for asian hornet venom was a little over four milligrams per kilo of body-weight, which was actually less than that of a honeybee by a fair margin. She'd just fired off a minimum of several fluid ounces of the stuff, or thousands of times the quantity needed to kill a human-sized creature on the spot.
And that was with ordinary hornet venom, which, based on how the concrete was now bubbling and smoking this very much wasn't.
She landed on the floor and stared in disbelief. "What the fuck?" she exclaimed in horror. Moving closer she peered at the concrete, watching it fizz like she'd poured concentrated acid on it. When it finally stopped reacting, there was a scar a quarter of an inch deep on the floor, where the material had turned to powder. Cautiously she prodded it with a foreleg, feeling the remains move under her claws. Looking at the damage she felt faint.
Dying from toxic shock seemed like it might be the least of the worries of anyone she stung in this form…
Taylor wondered a little hysterically if there would even be a body left.
Reverting to a hornet-girl body, with a full exoskeleton and hornet head but humanoid proportions, she walked back to the lamps and her notes, then started writing her observations and results down while thinking hard about what she'd just discovered. In one sense she was wondering why she hadn't experimented with her venom before, but on the other hand she'd had so many other things to try it hadn't come up. She was, however, extremely glad she'd decided against stinging that fucking Nazi mugger a few weeks ago. He'd have practically exploded based on what she'd abruptly found out.
It was something of a shock to discover that a liquid with that amount of corrosiveness was inside her body right at that moment.
Having finished with her notes, she looked down and back at her hornet abdomen, extending the stinger a little and considering it. Just how corrosive was the venom? Did it change in potency with form? She made more notes, pacing back and forth as she thought.
Could she make it less dangerous, perhaps? Or… could she make it more dangerous?
She wasn't sure which was more interesting to consider. Her power was sitting at the back of her mind watching with interest and didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter. She thought hard, and very slowly tried to work out ways to fiddle around with the venom production process. Her success with the bioluminescence suggested she had a lot of latitude in changing her own biology in ways that were far more free-form than she'd originally realized. It was a lot of fun and she could see all sorts of interesting outcomes with some work.
Mixing and matching aspects of creatures she could merge with could apparently be extended well past making cool hybrid arthropods, as good as that was in itself. Her Changer ability was absolutely broken she thought with a grin, feeling her power agree somewhat incredulously.
After a while, she walked over to the pile of scrap, and experimentally tried dripping a little venom onto a piece of wood. Taylor yipped in shock when it smoldered violently then with a pop burst into flame. "Holy shit!" she exclaimed, stepping back. "What the hell?"
Watching as the flames died away, leaving a smoking piece of wood, she shook her head, trying to work out what sort of chemical reaction dissolved concrete and made wood spontaneously combust. She was quite good at chemistry but she was still only high-school chemistry quite good, not actual chemical engineer good. Vaguely feeling that there had to be a pretty scary oxidizer present, she guessed a little tentatively that possibly concentrated hydrogen peroxide might account for what she'd just witnessed. She'd seen videos about how it could, if sufficiently strong, make organic material combust.
She wasn't sure it had any effect on concrete, though, so that was still unexplained.
Shaking her head, she tried the experiment again, this time on a piece of cast iron, which fizzed nearly as violently as the concrete had, went bright orange, and slowly crumbled into rust. Definitely an oxidization reaction according to her chemistry textbook, and a really enthusiastic one at that.
And she was certain that the venom, aside from being horribly corrosive and a hellishly good oxidizer, was also a violently potent toxin too. She could literally feel her power agreeing happily.
Sighing, she made yet more notes, then began trying to work out how to change what she was producing in her venom glands. Perhaps if she took some inspiration from the wolf spider venom? That was much less powerful than hornet venom was, right? And she could find some other species of spiders, since she could feel lots of them around the area, and try mixing those in different proportions.
It was worth a shot.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When her dad came in with some chinese takeaway having been out visiting friends until fairly late, she was sitting in her bedroom desk chair staring at the pages and pages of notes she'd made with a satisfied yet mildly bewildered expression. He stepped inside her room and looked at her. "You seem bothered, Taylor," he commented.
"Confused more than bothered," she replied quietly. "I've learned all sorts of things tonight, and some of them are… scary."
Sitting on her bed, he studied her as she turned the chair to face her. "Scary how?" he queried.
"Scary like I can probably kill about a thousand people with a few drops of venom even before I play around with it," she told him, making him look concerned. "I only just started experimenting with it, and it's… a lot stronger than I expected. Like, a lot stronger." She shook her head in wonder. "As in it dissolves iron. And makes wood burst into flames."
"Jesus," he said slowly, staring. "That sounds dangerous."
The understatement made her laugh. "Yeah. Just a little."
"Best not to use it on anyone then," he suggested wisely, getting a smile back.
"I worked that out for myself," she told him. "I tried changing it to something else, and it took a lot of effort, but I worked it out in the end. Problem is that almost any changes I made still produced something lethal as hell. I think a lot of the problem is how everything in the merged forms is so ridiculously enhanced compared to the original creatures. Even pure wolf spider venom, which isn't all that toxic as spiders go, turns out to be insanely potent in wolf drider form. I caught a rat and and it killed it stone dead in about ten seconds from only a tiny amount." She felt a little guilty about having done that, but she needed to be sure. It had been barely possible that due to powers-related shenanigans the venom might have been relatively harmless to a living thing despite all the evidence. However, this was not the case.
She didn't want to try the flaming acid venom on even a rat. It seemed unfair. As well as very messy.
"Huh. I guess that's useful to know at least. You might have accidentally used it at some point and caused a real problem, so it's best to have advance warning of what not to do," he pointed out, making her nod. "You can turn off the venom I take it?"
"Oh, yeah, I've got no trouble not injecting or spraying it, it takes a deliberate effort to use the stuff. Just the stinger is more than enough honestly." She explained what her tests had shown, making him shake his head in wonder.
"Amazing. And absolutely terrifying."
"It is," she agreed soberly. "This is fun but every now and then I find something that really makes me stop and think. I don't want to kill anyone by accident."
"And, I hope, in general not on purpose," he remarked. She gave him a quick smile.
"Not really, no. I can't think of many people that deserve to die, not even Sophia. Deserve to get the shit kicked out of them, yeah, but that's different." She pondered the idea for a few seconds. "Maybe Kaiser, that Nazi shithead. His armor is a lot less than two inches thick…" She grinned as her father winced, but also looked amused.
"Might be best not to hunt Nazis for sport," he replied calmly. "As much fun as it could be, and despite it being close to a civic responsibility." Taylor giggled at his comment. She knew well how much he despised the Empire Eighty Eight and anyone who espoused the views they did. She shared the feelings wholeheartedly. "You're only fifteen and I don't really want you having deaths on your conscience at that age."
"Yeah, fair enough," she agreed with a sigh. "I don't particularly want to kill anyone either. Even a Nazi. Although I might make an exception for Hookwolf. I read he's killed four more people in the last two weeks on PHO. Why hasn't the PRT done something about that asshole yet?" She was genuinely baffled about how the murderous Empire capes kept getting away with the things they did. Even at her age she knew damn well the Nazi gang had been responsible for more deaths than she cared to think about, but they were still running around free, which was infuriating.
He shrugged. "I honestly don't have an answer for you other than that life is more complicated than it seems a lot of the time and the PRT is nowhere near as effective as it likes to claim. I agree, someone should have dealt with them years ago, but Brockton has had problems with gangs for much longer than you've been alive and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon, unfortunately."
He reached out and patted her knee reassuringly. "Try not to let it get you down. Which is hard, true, but it's all we can do."
Looking at her shelf of terrariums, he added, "Where's your firespider?"
She grinned and tapped her forehead. "In here. I thought I'd keep it merged for now to see what happens. And it lets me do this, look!" Holding out an arm she pushed her sleeve up and showed him a glowing green sort of celtic knot she formed around her bicep. His eyes widened comically.
"That… is rather impressive in a very weird way," he finally said.
Taylor nodded happily. "Built in night light," she replied with a smile, pulling her sleeve down again.
"Do you have any trouble having, what is it now, three? Separate creatures merged with you?"
"Nope. It's easy now. I'm not sure how many I can do, but so far it all seems completely viable. And I can mix and match them in different proportions, plus I'm pretty sure things like toughness and strength are stacking too. I can jump from the floor of the warehouse right into the roof beams without any trouble for example, which is amazing." She grinned at his expression.
"And jump back, of course. It would be embarrassing otherwise," she added, making him chuckle.
"True enough."
Picking up the book she had open on the desk, he peered at the cover, then leafed through it. "By the time you go to college you'll have learned more about entomology than most professors," he said with a small smile.
"I have an unfair advantage."
"Also true." He stopped on the page she'd had open. "Apposition versus superposition compound eye structures," he read, then raised his gaze to her quizzically.
"I'm trying to work out how to get the best vision possible," Taylor replied to the unasked question, taking the book back and turning the page. "Compound eyes are a lot more complicated than most people realize. Everyone tends to think they produce lots of little images, like you see in movies and that sort of thing, but they don't, all the separate lenses still resolve to a single image. And while it's often not as high resolution as a single-lens eye like a mammal has, it can be. In theory you can get an optical system that's only limited by diffraction, which is as good as it gets." She pointed at the diagrams, her dad leaning over to look at them. "And they can be incredibly light sensitive. Moths and some crabs have amazingly good night vision, better than the goggles the military uses in some cases. I've been trying to figure out how to combine all the different methods into something that does the best job all around."
"Interesting," he responded after thinking it over. "Not a lot of moths around at the moment though."
"No. In a month or so I can get some, though. And I'm going to collect a couple of crabs tomorrow since it's the weekend and I can spend the whole day experimenting." She put the book back on her desk. "I keep thinking of new ideas to try," she added with a pleased look, as he watched her fondly. "So many ideas."
"Your perversion of the natural order appears to be remarkably broad ranging," he joked. Taylor laughed.
"I'm definitely doing my best to warp life to my own goals as much as I can," she agreed cheerfully.
"How did your assignments go?" he asked after a moment. "Don't neglect your schoolwork in favor of horrifying god and nature."
Laughing, she picked up the envelope full of completed homeschool assignments. "Got it all done without any problems," she replied, handing it to him. Pulling out the sheaf of papers, he examined a couple of them and nodded approvingly. "It's much easier to do when I don't have someone stealing it all, of course."
"I can imagine." Putting the paperwork back into the envelope he handed it back, then got up. "Well done. I'm proud of you. Come on, let's eat before it gets cold."
Jumping to her feet she followed him downstairs, feeling that things were working out quite nicely at the moment. Soon they were eating and discussing various things, feeling much more like a real if small family than they'd done for so long.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Landing on the peak of a four story roof, Taylor cocked her head and listened intently. She had been flying around the general docks area in the dark, it being around seven in the evening and surprisingly warm for the time of year as the winter started to recede, mostly just enjoying herself. Flying as a vast hornet with extra superpowers was a hell of a lot of fun. She was being careful to stay out of sight, avoiding any of the few people she sensed with all the tiny bugs in range of her power, which she'd worked up to nearly three hundred and fifty yards around her at this point. It was far more than sufficient to keep her from getting close enough for anyone to do more than hear a distant deep hum, which according to her dad had caused a few stories in the area, which were discussed at a couple of bars he visited on occasion. The old one down near the water was full of rumors about there being something weird in going on in the docks but no one could settle on what, and rumors of that nature were so common anyway that hardly anyone took them seriously these days.
From what he'd told her over the years that sort of rumor predated actual Parahumans, for that matter. Apparently the docks area had always been a bit peculiar.
But right now she could hear a weird metallic crashing sound from somewhere not that far away, combined with a sort of yelling, and a few gunshots. Turning on the spot she tried to work out what it was and where it was, finally deciding the second point while drawing a blank on the first. Other than to think it was certainly a fight of some sort.
As she listened, the gunshots stopped following a much louder explosion, made faint by distance, which echoed through the mostly empty streets. Flying over to another perch a hundred yards away, she tried triangulating on the sounds, coming to the conclusion that her location was correct. Whatever was going on was over at the far edge of the docks proper, around the vicinity of Geraint street, which was a wide one leading down to where a canning factory had once been. It went dead straight for about a quarter of a mile, with lots of little alleyways off it that all disappeared into a maze of old buildings, the end away from the water narrowing and eventually turning into a smaller road due to a lot of redevelopment many years ago, much of which had in turn fallen into disrepair.
After some internal debate, she finally lifted off and flew at barely rooftop level towards the commotion, her curiosity overriding her caution. Someone was certainly throwing a fairly enthusiastic party that sounded like it had invited mayhem along for the ride and she was wondering what on earth was going on. It sounded like a combine harvester was arguing with a gravel crusher…
Only a few seconds later she was close enough for her ability to contact all the insects in the vicinity of what was going on. Through lots of little eyes, she examined the area, landing on another roof and staying out sight with her real body. To her great annoyance she recognized immediately the source of the noise she'd heard.
'Fucking Hookwolf,' she thought with massive irritation. Sure enough, she could see the Nazi Changer-Brute charging about the place causing enormous damage to the surroundings, and there were a number of bodies lying about in poses that made it clear they were very definitely deceased. A couple were in more than one piece which didn't help, and was not something she liked looking at. There were at least twenty corpses, roughly half of them people in ragged clothes which she strongly suspected were members of the Merchant's gang, or had been. The rest seemed probably to be Empire gang members. They were universally white, skin-headed, and with Nazi tattoos.
As far as she could work out, the two gangs had had a shootout, the Empire mostly wiping out the Merchants with the help of Hookwolf, then the remaining survivors of the former catching a grenade or something from the last of the latter judging by three bodies lying, severely damaged, near a small crater in the road. There was shrapnel damage around the area too, and a dead Merchant lying on his face twenty feet away, in a pose that suggested he'd thrown something then got fatally shot before he could retreat.
From all the evidence, both sides had wiped each other out entirely with the sole exception of the raging cape. Sending out her senses in the direction the battle seemed to have come from, she could also detect a number of other bodies, all of them minorities. There was a building on fire about a quarter of a mile further up the road towards the city too, which looked like it had probably had a number of homeless people living in it. Again, all too common around this part of the city, she knew.
Taylor guessed that the Nazis had been on one of their little missions of finding people that were less white than they were and amusing themselves by killing them and burning their homes. It happened way too often, she'd seen at least four reports of it in the last three months, and knew from what her dad had said that the Empire did that sort of thing on a regular basis. Feeling both ill and furious, she turned her attention back to Hookwolf, wondering why he was still rampaging around like a lunatic.
Fair enough, he was a lunatic, but with all his own people down, and the other side too, why was he acting like one?
The answer was in the small figure in green and white that was desperately trying to escape. Taylor recognized the costume immediately. The Ward Vista.
'What the hell is she doing here? Alone against Hookwolf of all people?' Taylor thought, confused. She looked around for any backup but couldn't detect any signs of PRT people or anyone else on the heroic side of things anywhere in the area. It was just Vista, who was clearly injured considering how much blood was on her costume, and a villain who was blatantly obviously doing his damnedest to kill her. Sending some smaller insects towards Vista Taylor inspected her closely. Her costume was badly damaged, there was blood on her chest, and every time she moved she winced in pain. As she watched, the younger girl, who couldn't have been more than about twelve or thirteen, put her hand to her ear, then ducked as a metallic bladed arm shot through where her head had been.
Vista let out a short scream and rolled, diving behind a dumpster which was smashed out of the way by an enraged Hookwolf. Panting for breath, the girl did something weird to space and the Changer villain was suddenly about eighty feet away from her, but Vista was visibly exhausted and on her last legs. Taylor could see a gaping wound in her chest when she moved, which was the source of the blood. It didn't look particularly deep but the gash was long enough and bleeding enough that the other girl was in severe danger of passing out from blood loss.
She reached for her ear again, then yelled in frustration. It looked like she was trying to call for backup, presumably using some sort of earpiece, but…
Moving some insects closer, Taylor saw there was nothing in her ear. Checking around the area she saw the remains of some sort of high tech device on the street about a hundred feet away, definitely crushed and unusable. So Vista was all alone, had no way to call for help apparently, wounded, and much too close to a known multiple murderer racist lunatic. Who was, despite her power, getting way too fucking close again…
'Well, fuck,' Taylor thought with disgust. 'Goddamn Nazis. Ruin a perfectly good night out…' Muttering to herself and feeling her inner hornet get extremely angry, she thought hard about what she was about to do, decided she had no real choice, and took off.
'Dad is going to be torn between being furious and pleased,' she thought unhappily. 'But what else can I do?'
She wasn't prepared to watch Vista get killed in front of her, despite the risks to herself.
So in the end, she had to step in. Or fly in, rather.
Such was life. Sometimes you had to do things you didn't want to, and hope for the best.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Vista let out a groan followed by a high pitched scream as Hookwolf charged at her again, her power suddenly failing due to her sheer tiredness and disorientation. She was feeling dizzy, cold, and ready to pass out, but knew if she did she'd never wake up. The front of her costume was sticky, both inside and out, and she could smell blood. Every time she moved the pain in her chest went through her like hot wire burning into her flesh. She didn't want to look at the damage, and was pretty sure she was going into shock. Chills and shivering were definitely a thing at the moment, and she knew from her training that she was close to collapse.
Unable to properly concentrate, she flung herself desperately backwards as a bladed limb flew over her head, barely missing her. It was only her short stature that let her avoid it and she really wasn't sure she could do much more evading. It had taken one slip for the asshole Nazi to open her chest like a watermelon with one of his blades, and she knew damn well she was lucky that she'd barely been able to pull back enough that all he did was gash her skin rather than slice her in half.
She'd seen him do it before. Far too recently and far too close up. Cursing her stupidity in going off on her own, wanting to do something important rather than idiotic publicity stunts, she exerted what little of her power she could bring to bear and warped space between her and the Changer just enough to put him out of range, even as she jumped behind another wrecked burned-out car. Looking around frantically she wondered how the fuck she was going to escape. Without her communicator she was shit out of luck on calling for backup, and she'd left her phone behind due to the tracker in it.
Right now, she was bitterly regretting doing that. Being tracked by someone who could bring a really big gun to the party would have been ideal just about now. Preferably something with armor piercing ammo…
Feeling the effort of maintaining the spatial warp overcome what little mental strength she had remaining she was forced to let it collapse, having at least managed to take a few heaving breaths. A moment later Hookwolf was once again far, far too close, and still rabidly furious. He was always in a bad mood but right now he'd lost the plot completely and was absolutely definitely intent on killing her no matter what sort of shitstorm that would bring down on the Empire.
The remains of the car she was cowering behind was slammed out of the way. She looked up at the monstrous form made of sharp edges. The girl could practically feel the malicious grin even though there was nothing approaching a human face visible. "Nowhere to run little girl," Hookwolf snarled, sounding eager.
A second later, following a weird deep hum that approached from down the street towards the water at a huge speed, there was a massive metallic crashing sound and Hookwolf was tumbling ass over head away from her, bouncing several times and ending up fifty feet away before Vista had the faintest idea what had happened. She gaped as the bladed wolf struggled to his feet, shook his head, and looked around. "What the hell was that?" she whispered to herself, taking the opportunity presented to get up and head for cover again.
"Who did that?" Hookwolf roared in fury, turning in a circle.
The hum came back in the other direction and again there was a hard impact, blades flying, and the villain went end over end once more. Vista backed away, not wanting to turn her back on the bastard, and wondering what was going on.
The hum, which was really more of a deep bass note, vanished upwards and behind one of the buildings. Hookwolf and she were both listening, although he was turning towards her again, possibly under the impression she was doing whatever it was.
Moving backwards, she had an arm over her chest pressing on her wound, and was limping too, but she kept a wary eye on her opponent. He was much faster than you'd expect from someone that size and far more dangerous than she'd realized, although she'd always been well aware he was a killer. She hadn't expected him to just flat out try to murder her on the spot though, when she'd interrupted the Empire's little hate party.
Bad judgment on her part, and something she might well not live to regret, she thought with despair as he started moving towards her rapidly, apparently dismissing the mysterious hum.
This proved to be a mistake as it returned, going even faster. Something shot past Vista in a blur, lit up in shades of green just before impact, so brightly she closed her eyes, then slammed into Hookwolf. By the time she'd blinked hard a few times, she could see him sliding to a stop a good eighty feet from the impact point. "Go away, Nazi idiot, or you'll end up as dead as your friends," a weird voice said from somewhere above them. Both Vista and Hookwolf looked upwards. She gasped in shock. Hovering about fifty feet above the street, facing the villain, was the biggest fucking wasp she'd ever seen in her life. It was unbelievably huge, probably bigger than she was, and was illuminated in a tracery of green light. The drone of its wings filled the street.
Hookwolf stared at it in at least as much shock as she felt. Neither of them had expected whatever this was. And he didn't seem to know what to do.
Which, she admitted to herself, wasn't all that surprising. The wasp looked both angry and very dangerous, and the fact that it was talking somehow made that much worse.
She wasn't generally all that scared of bugs but she'd never met one so big she could ride it. And apparently tough enough that it could knock half a ton of enraged murder blender flying and show no damage.
What the hell was this thing? And where did it come from?
At least it seemed to be on her side. Or not on his side, which wasn't necessarily the same thing, unfortunately.
"What the fuck are you supposed to be?" Hookwolf demanded harshly, glaring at the hovering insect.
"Your death if you don't go away right the fuck now," it replied just as harshly. Vista shivered, because the threat in the words was so real she could feel it in her bones. "Leave the girl and run. You've got five seconds before I lose my patience."
"Fuck you, bug," he shouted. "No one tells me what to do."
"Time's up, dickhead. You were warned." The monstrous wasp aimed its stinger at him, the size of the thing making Vista stare in horror, even as Hookwolf roared defiance at it and flung a handful of blades at the creature. It avoided them with contemptuous easy and fired back, a burst of some liquid streaking from it to spray over the Changer.
Who screamed instantly and started smoking.
Vista recoiled in horror. Acrid vapor rose in clouds as Hookwolf thrashed, rolling over and over like he was in agony. Metal flew and the street was getting gouged to pieces as he went entirely insane. She watched wide eyed as he flopped around for another ten seconds, emitting a terrible howl, before suddenly seizing up then going limp.
Smoke rose from him for a few more seconds before his Changer power started to revert. He shrank, metal disappearing, and a few seconds later a human body was lying on the street, clad only in jeans, which were showing burn marks. His chest was heavily scarred too, the damage looking like severe blistering. Vista could smell something like cooked meat, which made her stomach turn despite iron control.
Landing next to him, the wasp monster examined him for a moment. "Huh. Still alive. I'm impressed. Guess his regeneration is pretty good." The voice sounded thoughtful. "Bet he doesn't enjoy it when he wakes up though. If he does." Turning around, the creature looked directly at Vista, who swallowed hard. "You need medical help," it commented, walking towards her.
It didn't sound nearly as terrifying as it had done when it was confronting Hookwolf, but it was still a four foot long blatantly incredibly dangerous giant-ass wasp, Vista thought frantically as she tried to work out what the hell to do next. Stopping a few feet away the thing looked her over. "That's a lot of blood loss," it added helpfully, telling her something she was all too aware of.
The stress of the last half hour finally hit the point of being too much, and Vista blacked out. It was, to be honest, a bit of a relief.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Well, shit," Taylor sighed, watching the badly injured Ward topple over and lie there in an untidy bloody mess. She looked around, seeing and sensing no one in the vicinity. No one alive at least, except for the mass murdering asshole cluttering up the street behind her.
She was honestly surprised that her venom hadn't killed him on the spot. She hadn't hit him with all that much, to be sure, but she was certain it would have easily done for most people. Even though he was still alive she was pretty sure that he was going to have all sorts of issues with life despite his regenerative power. He sure wasn't giving the impression of someone who was likely to wake up in a hurry.
Taking the decision to spray him was one she'd wrestled with, but in the end if it came down to him or Vista, she'd prefer the Ward be the survivor. Hookwolf had a kill order on him as far as she knew anyway, so one could argue that she was only doing what she should. But her dad had been right; killing someone wasn't something to take lightly in any way at all.
Even a Nazi.
However, he was still alive for the moment at least so she hadn't quite managed the feat. Half tempted to go and make certain, she instead looked at him and told her power, 'See? That asshole gets to keep his pants? Why don't I?' It was unfair and annoyed her. Her ability kind of shrugged and she sighed again. 'You're no help at all sometimes,' she grumbled, turning back to Vista, who was gently leaking important bodily fluid all over the street. Thinking for a moment, she wondered how heavy the girl was. She was barely four and a half feet tall and skinny with it, so not much.
'Worth a try I guess,' she thought in resignation. 'I can't leave her here like this.'
Moving over to the girl, she carefully rearranged her slightly, then took off, hovered over her, and gently grabbed her with all six legs. It took a little trial and error but slightly to her surprise she found she could lift Vista. She had to flap a lot harder, but it worked. Satisfied that she could hold on, she rose into the air, orientated herself, and headed towards Brockton General at flank speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"A giant wasp just brought Vista in."
Amy looked up at the familiar voice, although the note of sheer disbelief in it was new. Doctor Williams was pale and wearing an utterly confused and somewhat scared expression. Behind her, in the ER room, it had gone oddly silent. Amy had been taking a break in the staff room and now realized that the normal noise from ER had stopped completely.
"What?" she asked, not sure she'd heard correctly.
Doctor Williams pointed over her shoulder. "Giant wasp. Vista. In the ER."
"What?" Amy still didn't understand, but she put her book down and stood up. Walking over she peered past the doctor. At the giant wasp in the ER, next to Vista, who was covered in blood. Every single person in the room regardless of profession or status was as far away as they could get from the pair, dead silent, and gaping in horror.
"Holy fuck," she said in shock. "That's a giant wasp!"
"I'm a giant hornet, thanks very much," the vastly too large for comfort insect called. "Is someone going to help Vista or not? She's got a massive wound and lost a lot of blood."
It sounded somewhat annoyed. Amy, who was feeling faint, jerked slightly at the voice, then exchanged an incredulous look with Doctor Williams. After a few seconds, and with some effort, she forced herself to walk over to where the insect was staring at her. Kneeling, she put her hand on Vista's face, then jolted. "Jesus, what happened to her?"
"Hookwolf. Then I happened to him." Thewasp hornet sounded both irritated and pleased at the same time. Antenna twitched as Amy looked at it, then down at the unconscious Vista. "She was trying to escape and he was trying to kill her. Down at the bay end of Geraint Street, near the old rope factory. He's still there. Doubt he's going anywhere soon." Now it definitely sounded quite pleased with itself. "Some sort of fight between the Merchants and the E88 I think. Vista got involved somehow."
Amy nodded, highly confused, and went to work on the younger girl. When she looked up the hornet had vanished and the main doors were closing. A moment later a deep hum resonated through the room before fading away. Totally baffled she called for the two orderlies who were, along with everyone else, staring at the door, to bring a gurney over. When Vista was stable they lifted her carefully onto it, still taking nervous glances towards where the biggest insect anyone had ever heard of had left.
By the time the PRT arrived, the hornet was long since gone, and Vista was sleeping comfortably, fully healed but needing a lot of food.
And Amy was no nearer understanding what the hell had happened.
When, about two hours later, Hookwolf was brought in, it only took her about ten seconds to discover that he wasn't going to recover nearly as easily, even if she'd felt like healing the shitbag. Whatever toxin he'd been exposed to was unbelievably potent and he was barely alive as it was. She told the PRT as much, then went on with her other patients, still wondering what the hell was wandering around the city and where it had come from.
She suspected that a lot of other people were wondering the same thing…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Well, that's going to cause some odd issues," Taylor's dad commented after listening to the story. He put his arm around her and hugged her. "Still, good job, I suppose."
Taylor nodded. Then she went to bed, because it had been a long day one way or another and she was pretty much done with it.
Ideal for further experimentation.
Turning to her dad, she said, "Thanks. This is exactly what I needed to find."
"My pleasure. Please be careful, and reasonably discreet though?" He smiled back at her. "Hardly anyone comes around here these days but make sure you're alone even so. You never know if some random criminal or just someone lost might turn up, so keep your eyes open."
"I've got more eyes open than you'd believe," she assured him. After the last two weeks of practice she was up to a range of nearly two hundred yards in all directions, extending from here far enough that she was sensing things in the bay which was quite a lot less than that distance away to the south. Her power had nearly stopped urging her to throw caution to the winds and just go for it to maximum possible range, but it still felt a little annoyed that she was going so deliberately. She'd pointed out several times that slow and steady wins the race but it didn't seem to be entirely convinced. Even so, it was clearly having as much fun as she was, so on the whole they were getting on fine.
"Good. And that's never going to be anything less than very creepy," he replied with a slight shiver, making her laugh. "You can get in easily enough up there, I guess." He pointed at where a crack in the wall at one end of the building showed dull daylight, thirty feet up and nearly at the side. It looked like something had been mounted on the wall but had rusted away and taken the brickwork with it. The gap was certainly large enough for her super-hornet to get through, she could see from here, but it was sufficiently far from the floor to make it highly unlikely any human would try the same feat even if they could squeeze through. "All the other doors except that one we came through are blocked pretty solidly for various reasons, so if we chain this one up from the inside then you fly out through the hole, no one's going to get in here without quite a bit of effort and noise."
He hefted the two feet of heavy chain with a couple of shackles fitted to it he'd dug out of one of the dockworker's scrap bins, making her look at it and nod.
"Yeah, that'll work," she agreed. Following him as he walked back to the door she studied the thing, seeing that it was a basic but tough metal affair with a bar that rotated about the center pivot by means of a handle on the outside. Each end of the bar went into a bracket on the wall. The whole thing was extremely rusty, but sufficiently thick that it was still a lot more solid than one would suspect from looking at it. Back when this place had been built, it had been built to last.
"We connect this end here to the wall like this," he said, unscrewing one of the shackle bolts and fitting the loop part over a heavy bracket where something had once been bolted. Replacing the bolt he tightened it as much as possible. "Then you just close the door, swing the bar over, wrap the chain around it and the bracket a couple of times, and put the other shackle through the chain as tightly as you can. The only way anyone's getting through that door then is either by brute force or a cutting torch."
Her dad dropped the chain against the wall and turned to her. "I'll be in the truck. Lock this place up, then meet me there. We can go for a pizza and you can come back here when it gets dark if you want."
Taylor nodded happily. It was a good idea all round, and she even got pizza out of it. Taking her coat off, then her boots, replacing the latter with some light slippers she pulled out of her pocket, she handed what she'd removed to him. "See you in a couple of minutes," she said with a smile. He nodded and went out through the door, which she closed after him. Pulling the bar over, she made sure it was fully engaged, hit the brackets with the heel of her hand pretty hard which slightly bent them, further reducing the possibility of opening the door, then did what he'd suggested with the chain. Pulling it tight enough that it creaked a little, she screwed the shackle bolt into place and made sure it wasn't coming loose, then tightened the one he'd fitted. Her enhanced strength was more than up to the job.
After some testing she'd worked out that she was at least ten to twelve times as strong as a full grown very strong man, which seemed ridiculous, but it was easy enough to prove. She could dead-lift well over five tons while merged with the jumping spider, and if anything that was slowly and steadily increasing for reasons she was currently unclear on but was perfectly happy about.
She'd kept that merger going with only a few short pauses to check things ever since she'd first come up with the idea, and was very pleased with what it gave her. Sure enough the spider had grown larger, just like Vespa had, but it had been slowing down for the last couple of days. The unmerged jumping spider was huge now though, although nothing like as large as she was when she merged with it and had the spider characteristics turned up all the way. That produced a spider big enough for a small child to ride, while the unmerged arachnid was only about the size of her hand. Which was still absolutely enormous for a spider, of course, but even so ridiculously cute. Even her dad said so, and he wasn't nearly as fond of such things as she was.
It seemed likely that the increase in strength was down at least in part to the spider growing larger, and she wasn't sure why that occurred yet either. It was currently one of the mysteries of how her power worked that she was somewhat hazy on but was accepting as a thing that happened. Sooner or later she'd probably figure it out. But while the spider had apparently stopped growing, her strength hadn't, so obviously there was also something else in play.
Now, though, she quickly took off the sweatshirt and pants which was all she was wearing and, shivering a little even though her spider-enhanced body seemed more cold tolerant than it had been, folded them and put them into a small cloth bag she'd dug out of the attic. Her slippers followed, then she zipped the bag up and dropped it next to her feet. Vespa, who was as usual riding on her neck under her hair, the hornet now close to four and a half inches in length and still slowly getting bigger, provided her with the familiar super-hornet body, something she accepted as easily as the one she'd been born with. Picking up the bag in her front two legs she lifted off, carrying the small load without effort, and headed for the hole in the wall. It was the work of moments to stick her head out and double check no unwanted eyes were on her, something she was pretty sure of from the other bugs around her, then squeeze out and zip down to her dad's truck. He was standing next to it and opened the rear cab door, Taylor folding her wings and shooting through it easily, then grabbing the seat with her back legs to prevent herself going right out the other side, door or no door.
"Whoops," she said with a laugh. "Overcooked it a bit there."
Her dad closed the rear door and got in the front. They'd hung a blanket between the front and rear seats, so she had privacy, and the windows were covered too. "Try not to wreck my truck if you can," he requested, chuckling.
Reverting to her more or less normal human with spider boosts form, she quickly got dressed in other clothes she'd left back there earlier, and put the bag with her sweatpants and the other things in the foot-well. When she'd finished tying the laces on her boots, she hopped out and got into the front passenger side. "That's done. Thanks again." He smiled at her as he started the truck.
"Just be careful, Taylor. I know you need somewhere larger to see what you can do, but I still worry about you."
She put her hand on his where it was resting on the shifter. "I know you do. And I appreciate it. I'll be careful, I promise."
He met her eyes, nodded acceptance of her words, then put the truck in drive and turned it around. Moments later they were heading back into the city for a late lunch, Taylor settling back into the seat and thinking about all the things she wanted to look into.
The list was long and getting longer, but it was fun testing what she could figure out how to do. And her power seemed, despite its reservations and occasional shock, to be enjoying itself as much as she was.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Finishing off the assignment with one last figure, Taylor sighed with relief, put the pen down, and stretched. Home schooling was a hell of a lot less stressful than Winslow had been, that much was certain. Mind you, so would be tap-dancing blindfolded through a mine field, she thought with a grimace.
Even so, it was a lot of work. She was putting in the hours on the assignments that arrived three times a week in the post, then got sent back the next day for marking. The city had arranged this method as a stopgap while the case against Winslow rumbled on, and from what she'd heard gathered pace. A surprisingly large number of people, a horrifying quantity in truth, had been implicated in a whole series of overlapping scams, corruption and general malfeasance that seemed poised to upend half the institutions in the city from what her dad said. He'd had a couple of letters from the hospital's lawyers updating him, along with the other involved parents, on the ongoing legal issues. They were still hoping for an out of court settlement but the school board was being recalcitrant for some reason and digging its heels in. While that was going on, the mayor was apparently stomping around in a foul mood cleaning house in a major way, which had everyone even peripherally involved with anything connected to the problem running scared.
Her dad was following things with a good deal of interest, dark amusement, and a certain amount of schadenfreude relating to various local government officials he'd always heartily disliked and mistrusted. It was surprising how many of the those he and the rest of the dock workers had always felt were wrong'uns in fact turned out to be exactly what they'd suspected.
Or possibly not.
In any case, he was getting quite a lot of entertainment from the news, and she was happy to see him in a good mood. Overall things were going very well as far as either of them were concerned, even leaving aside her power experimentation. The remote schooling was in some ways annoying but at the same time kind of fun too, as she could get far more done on her own schedule without interference from little shits than she'd ever been able to at Winslow. Already after only a little over three weeks she was approaching being up to where she should have been all along in a real school and had no intention of stopping there. With any luck by the time the city worked out what the long term solution to the situation would be she'd be easily able to test into any of the high schools in the city. She had no intention of ever going back to Winslow, even if they did manage to turn it into a functioning educational establishment.
The memories were far too raw to allow her to set foot through the doors, and her dad had agreed with her decision without a moment's hesitation. Hopefully she'd be able to get into Clarendon or Arcadia, preferably the latter as it was the best school in the city, but by the same token the hardest to get into. It was something to strive for but she'd be happy enough anywhere that wasn't Winslow. Or, if it came to it, just continuing with the home schooling, since it wasn't dramatically taxing.
Her dad still wanted her to have friends in her life, but so far she wasn't particularly missing other people her age around her. It was something of a relief, to be honest. A holiday from two years of hell.
Scanning the assignment she double-checked her work then, satisfied she'd completed it, slipped the paperwork into the large envelope along with the rest of the stuff she'd finished. All of it would go in the post that evening, but for now she was done. Which meant she had the rest of the day free for other things.
In other words, perverting the course of nature for her own amusement. It was one of her favorite activities.
Grinning to herself she looked at the terrarium containing her scorpion, who was currently dismantling a cricket. There were three more tanks next to the original one, which she'd found through an online free disposals website and cleaned up, one a little smaller and two a little larger that her first. A pair of them were currently empty as she was still setting up suitable environments and working out what she should get for them, while the other contained her firespider hybrid. The creature she'd almost accidentally made seemed perfectly contented with life and entirely viable. She'd kept it like that because it was fun to look at when it started glowing at night as much as any other reason.
Her dad had come home with an old bookcase last Friday, one that he'd acquired from a coworker who was clearing out his grandfather's house, and she'd carried it up into her room and put it next to the desk. That had necessitated rearranging that whole side of the room but she didn't mind and considering how strong she was it was trivial to do. The ancient oak shelves were much wider than most bookshelves would be these days, and there were only four sets, which meant the spacing was pretty much ideal to support nearly a dozen tanks approximately the size of the ones she had. All three were on one shelf at the moment, and Taylor was looking forward to filling the rest.
She'd been back to the exotic pet shop several times to get more information on what was available, talk to Mike, the guy who ran the place and was a mine of information on almost any animal, aquatic or otherwise, he sold, and let her power examine all the neat things in there. She was considering what might be the result of trying the fusion power with some of the more interesting sea life too, although at the moment it was a little difficult to arrange. Tropical tanks, it turned out, were both remarkably complicated to set up successfully and really expensive as a direct result.
On the other hand, there was as she'd thought the first time lots of sea life adapted to the local environment just sitting there in the bay. It was free, no one would mind if she helped herself, she thought with a small smile as she flipped through one of the several notebooks she'd filled with the results of experiments and thoughts on other ideas to test. Crabs were high on the list as they had all manner of useful strengths that, especially when scaled up as her power did, could be a lot of fun. But there were plenty of others… Jellyfish for sting cells, for example.
Taylor was curious to see if she could locate a specimen of physalia physalis, commonly known as the Portuguese Man O'War. They certainly existed in the waters this far north although they weren't common from what she'd read, at least around Brockton Bay. Box jellyfish, which were even more dangerous, would be harder to find as they were primarily a Pacific tropical species, but if she wanted something really toxic that would do it.
Not that she was specifically looking for lethally dangerous things as such. It was just that she kept thinking they were rather interesting, and her power apparently agreed, so between the two of them they did keep thinking about this sort of thing.
Checking her phone, she made sure there weren't any messages from her dad or anything in her calendar that needed doing, then quickly sent him a text that she was going out for a long walk. Which was code for going off to the hidden test room in the old warehouse. Both of them were still a touch wary of cellphones for reasons they knew full well were based on lingering trauma, but they were undeniably useful. She got a reply moments later acknowledging her message and telling her to have fun. Which she was definitely going to.
Smiling happily, Taylor busied herself putting a fresh notebook and pen, along with the relevant existing notes, her phone which she turned off, a couple of battery powered LED lamps she'd picked up a week ago, and a few other things, into a pair of surplus ammo pouches she'd got from one of the guys at the union who was their unofficial quartermaster. A lot of the equipment like this that they used was military surplus, and he definitely had a shady past in acquiring things based on how he just nodded when you asked him for something then hours to days later it mysteriously turned up.
Almost anything you wanted, in fact, according to her dad, who shook his head in respect and refused to be drawn on the subject. She got the distinct impression there were some intriguing stories hiding in his past…
The pouches closed firmly with velcro, and were attached to a webbing belt. A larger one that she'd reworked from a tiny child's backpack left over from years back was also on the belt, and that she packed with some very tightly rolled clothes, her slippers, and a few other things.
Finished, she stood, moving over to the tanks and pondering them. "Yeah, I've been wanting to try this for a while," she commented to the firespider, which obediently climbed onto her hand when she lifted the lid and stuck her arm inside. Withdrawing it, she lifted the hybrid to eye level and smiled at the creature. "Up for some fun?"
The antennae it possessed twitched, making her grin. Moving it to her hair next to Vespa, she quickly undressed after making sure the curtains were pulled. It was now dark, being about quarter past five in the afternoon, and she didn't want anyone outside seeing odd shapes backlit at the window. With a quick mental action she merged with the hybrid, adding it her biological distinctiveness, a thought that made her grin. Quite a lot of practice had made it easy to maintain her human shape on the outside even with the hybrid now incorporated internally along with the jumping spider. Which she'd named Jumpy, her dad sighing and shaking his head when she'd told him that.
Apparently he thought her naming ability was sub par or something.
She could now sense three separate arthropod data sets, as she had come to think of it, in her power. Combining them or separating them was simple, and she'd found she could stack the outcome, although so far she hadn't tried more than four at once. Her power seemed to find this whole thing endlessly fascinating, as well as completely bewildering, and every time she found something new she could do, or forced it to work whether it liked it or not, she was sure the ability was getting even more confused although at the same time deliriously pleased.
The whole thing was bizarre, if she looked at it objectively, but it was definitely happening, and fun too, so she saw no reason not to keep on going. Although the inability to take her clothes with a change was still irking her quite a bit. They were going to have to work on that although she wasn't sure how yet.
Oh well. She'd figure something out sooner or later. But for now she just lived with the minor inconvenience.
Double-checking that she had everything packed she wanted, she merged with Vespa too, switching to the semi-humanoid hornet girl form, which she'd been playing with quite a lot in the last few days. It, like all her changes, was as comfortable as her human body, but she definitely had an affinity for the hornet variations she suspected was down to her so-far unique link to Vespa. Putting the elasticated webbing belt on around her very narrow insectoid waist, she made sure it was pulled tight, then headed downstairs.
Moments later she was peering out the back door into the yard. Her hornet's head stuck out the door, looking around. No one visible, nothing she could sense through her bugs, or her antennae. Perfect.
Switching to the full super-hornet body, and feeling the belt loosen off a little but stay firmly attached, she scuttled out onto the back yard, pushing the door shut with a hind leg and making sure it locked with a click. Satisfied, she lifted off and rapidly shot skywards, before the deep drone of her wings attracted attention. Leveling off about three hundred feet up she aimed for the docks and went to cruising speed, which she'd found out was a good eighty miles an hour without even pushing as hard as she could. If she really tried she could better that considerably, but this was a nice mix of getting around fast and not overexerting herself.
Zipping through the air feeling highly pleased with how her life in general was going, she pondered what to try tonight. Possibly the same thing she always did.
Try to take over the Arthropod Kingdom.
So far it was working surprisingly well.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Looking up at an odd sound, wondering what it was, the tall and strongly build Japanese man stared as something close to the size of a human, but very much not a human, zoomed overhead. Even in the dimness he recognized it. Or at least, recognized what it would be if it was about two inches long rather than probably the best part of four feet…
His eyes followed it until it vanished over the roofs of the decrepit buildings that lined the street, heading towards the bay. Those eyes were rather wide, and anyone who knew him would have found the color his face had gone unusually pale. He wasn't noted for being a man who was particularly worried by pretty much anything.
On the other hand, he remembered his childhood in Japan, and things he'd seen then…
"No," he said out loud, turning and walking rapidly in the other direction. "Just… no. Fuck that. Not a chance. If there's one there's hundreds."
He walked faster.
Muttering 'No' under his breath.
As far as he was concerned, if the docks had an infestation of giant killer wasps as large as a person he was going to stay way the fuck away. He was no idiot.
Wondering rather hysterically if moving elsewhere might not be a bright idea, he sped up to a brisk jog and tried not to imagine a stinger the size of his forearm.
He failed. Dismally.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Cool," Taylor exclaimed, looking down at herself. "That works amazingly well!"
She'd been playing around with trying to mix and match various aspects of different creatures to an even greater extent than she'd so far achieved. As seemed to be the usual result, at first she kept running into a wall where something wouldn't quite work the way she wanted it to, but by being particularly bloody-minded and insistent, each time the mental barrier collapsed and she managed to pull off the trick in question. Quite often this resulted in a certain amount of disorientation to begin with, but that seemed to be diminishing in both severity and occurrence as she kept on. That little watching thing at the back of her mind gave the impression of intermittently raising a finger with its mouth open like a meme she'd seen online, then just in the same manner pausing, closing its mouth, and just accepting what happened.
Which was all kinds of hilarious on multiple levels, she thought with glee even as she turned around and inspected her current body.
She'd managed to produce a jumping spider/hornet/firefly drider combo, the bulk of it the familiar jumping spider part, but with a massive stinger at the rear, and bright glowing patches on the sides and upper part of the abdomen. With a frown of concentration, she tried changing the bioluminescent areas in both size and shape, which took quite a lot of effort but eventually gave in and worked the way she wanted it to.
On the scale she could manage, and probably due to the same effect that she'd noticed with everything else going up almost exponentially in potency with increased size, the glowing bits of her were much brighter than the original firefly. That produced a very visible but fairly dim greenish-yellow light, whereas what she was emitting right now was a brilliant viridian green that cast weird shadows throughout a big part of the warehouse floor. It was nearly as bright as the LED lamps she'd set up to let her see what she was doing.
Playing around with it, she succeeded in dimming the glow to almost nothing while keeping it active, and turning it off entirely. Pushing the other way she found that the only method to make it brighter was ultimately to flash it, which after some thought about what she'd learned of the mechanism behind the light, made sense. It was a chemical reaction and there was a maximum rate the chemicals could be produced, although that was definitely a hell of a lot higher for her than it was for an actual firefly. By flashing it, she was storing up quite a lot of chemicals then mixing them all at once, which produced a lot more light over a short period of time.
After ten minutes work, she could make the light organs flash so brightly she was blinking spots away. "Wow. That was… impressive," she mumbled, making some notes then looking back at her body. "I wonder if it's even using the same chemicals? Not sure how to check that…" She wrote the question down as one to investigate, then moved onto some more testing. It turned out to be simple to make the light emitting parts into any shape in any position she wanted by this point and she amused herself by covering herself in various geometric patterns that glowed brightly. Even on her human upper torso. Holding out her arms and admiring the green glowing pseudo-tattoos she'd created on them she giggled. It looked really amazing.
'Huge success,' she noted, grinning as she wrote. 'That's that question answered. I'll have to see if I can figure out how to change the color but that's not bad for the moment. And useful too, right?' Her power felt like it agreed. 'Great. What next?'
Tapping the pen on her lips as she thought, after a moment she looked up, then around at the warehouse. The vast empty area echoed from a drip coming from somewhere far in the distance, but otherwise was silent. All her insects around the whole area told her no human was anywhere nearby, and the crabs and other creatures in the bay couldn't sense any boats in range either. She was completely alone aside from a vast number of much smaller lifeforms. Mulling over the thought she'd had, she started walking towards the far end of the building, her eight feet making a tapping sound that caused strange echoes, although to her by now it was entirely normal.
There was a pile of debris against the end wall, on the other side from where the door she'd chained up was, which contained lots of random pieces of scrap metal ranging from bottle caps and beer cans up to old cast iron chunks that were easily over a ton in weight. Along with quite a lot of rusted corrugated steel steel sheets, bent and torn, various I beams, and more. There was also quite a bit of wood, most of it rotting and broken, but she could see some ancient boards and beams that were probably oak and a century or more old. Likely parts recovered from wooden ships decades in the past if not before, or the remains of demolished buildings that had ended up dumped in here for one reason or another over the years.
Selecting a few pieces of wood, ranging in thickness from an inch or so up to over six inches, she picked them up and moved them to the middle of the room, then went back and collected some sheet metal as well. A pair of old and very heavy cast iron hollow blocks some three feet on a side, which she guessed were something to do with old steam engines or suchlike, were also carried back. Each was probably close to a ton but she was more that pleased that she could lift them without any trouble at all. Chuckling at how simple this was now, she set up the boxes a couple of feet apart on the floor and propped a plank against them so it wouldn't go anywhere.
'That'll do,' she thought as she turned around and looked over her shoulder. Extending her stinger, she aimed, then lunged backwards with all eight legs. There was a solid crunching sound like biting into an apple and Taylor stared in slight shock.
Moving forward again, she wiggled her abdomen several times trying to get the plank, which the stinger had gone entirely through with almost no resistance, to come off. In the end she pushed with both hind legs and popped it free. She'd underestimated both how sharp the thing was, and how strong she was.
Even without injecting venom, the foot-plus long stinger was more than enough to kill someone without even trying, she thought as she examined the hole she'd made in the oak plank. Splinters on the back surrounded a gap she could put her finger through. "Holy crap," she mumbled, feeling the hole, then looking speculatively at the thicker pieces of wood. Knowing full well how hard and tough old oak was, she was rather startled how much damage she'd done so easily.
Smiling in an odd way, she selected a three inch thick beam and set it up on her improvised test stand. Moments later there was another crunch, a little louder, and another hole.
The same thing happened with the thickest piece of wood she could find, something that was easily eight solid inches. Nearly as much stinger came out the other side. Taylor grinned, then turned to look at the metal scrap…
By the time she'd finished there were holes in a surprisingly large range of items, even the cast iron boxes. She'd found that going all the way through the bigger lumps of solid iron hadn't worked, but she'd still left a really significant divot in them, several inches deep. In theory it shouldn't have worked like that, she was fairly certain, because although she knew her hybrid body was amazingly strong, insect chitin shouldn't have been so effective against metal. It was another example of how various parameters of her Changer power scaled much faster than they should have done with size.
Powers bullshit, essentially. Which was something she'd read a lot about recently, and no one had a good explanation for.
Switching to the super-hornet body, just to double-check, and adding some bioluminescent patches for fun, she tried the same tests again. This body wasn't quite as physically powerful as the drider variant although it was far stronger than it should have been even taking into account proportional insect strength. And, again, she was pretty sure it was getting steadily stronger with time too, which seemed to be a common theme she still didn't understand the mechanism of.
She was also aware that her super-hornet form was slightly larger now than it had been the first time. She'd had her dad measure her, and nose to tail she'd increased by about eight percent at this point in time. It was very slow, not nearly as quick as the individual creatures she merged with, but was still happening.
So many questions, so few real answers, she mused as she took aim once more. Her stinger, about eleven inches long in this body, defeated all the wood samples easily, and some of the metal ones too. Anything less than half an inch thick might as well not have been there, and if she could get the leverage she could punch through two inches of cast iron without too much effort.
"Impressive," she commented to her power. "Terrifying, but impressive."
Recalling something she'd read about asian hornets, she hovered a few feet off the floor and curled her abdomen under her. It was easy to force venom out her stinger, under a lot more pressure than she'd realized was possible. Asian giant hornets were known to be able to literally spray their venom at a target, as opposed to simply stinging it, but so far she hadn't tried using it at all. A hissing sound was accompanied by a jet of liquid that went a hell of a lot further than she'd expected, spraying at least fifty feet and leaving a dark streak on the concrete.
"Jesus," she muttered, shocked. "That must have been at least a cupful." It was vastly more than needed to kill a human in seconds. Having looked it up, she'd found that the median lethal dose for asian hornet venom was a little over four milligrams per kilo of body-weight, which was actually less than that of a honeybee by a fair margin. She'd just fired off a minimum of several fluid ounces of the stuff, or thousands of times the quantity needed to kill a human-sized creature on the spot.
And that was with ordinary hornet venom, which, based on how the concrete was now bubbling and smoking this very much wasn't.
She landed on the floor and stared in disbelief. "What the fuck?" she exclaimed in horror. Moving closer she peered at the concrete, watching it fizz like she'd poured concentrated acid on it. When it finally stopped reacting, there was a scar a quarter of an inch deep on the floor, where the material had turned to powder. Cautiously she prodded it with a foreleg, feeling the remains move under her claws. Looking at the damage she felt faint.
Dying from toxic shock seemed like it might be the least of the worries of anyone she stung in this form…
Taylor wondered a little hysterically if there would even be a body left.
Reverting to a hornet-girl body, with a full exoskeleton and hornet head but humanoid proportions, she walked back to the lamps and her notes, then started writing her observations and results down while thinking hard about what she'd just discovered. In one sense she was wondering why she hadn't experimented with her venom before, but on the other hand she'd had so many other things to try it hadn't come up. She was, however, extremely glad she'd decided against stinging that fucking Nazi mugger a few weeks ago. He'd have practically exploded based on what she'd abruptly found out.
It was something of a shock to discover that a liquid with that amount of corrosiveness was inside her body right at that moment.
Having finished with her notes, she looked down and back at her hornet abdomen, extending the stinger a little and considering it. Just how corrosive was the venom? Did it change in potency with form? She made more notes, pacing back and forth as she thought.
Could she make it less dangerous, perhaps? Or… could she make it more dangerous?
She wasn't sure which was more interesting to consider. Her power was sitting at the back of her mind watching with interest and didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter. She thought hard, and very slowly tried to work out ways to fiddle around with the venom production process. Her success with the bioluminescence suggested she had a lot of latitude in changing her own biology in ways that were far more free-form than she'd originally realized. It was a lot of fun and she could see all sorts of interesting outcomes with some work.
Mixing and matching aspects of creatures she could merge with could apparently be extended well past making cool hybrid arthropods, as good as that was in itself. Her Changer ability was absolutely broken she thought with a grin, feeling her power agree somewhat incredulously.
After a while, she walked over to the pile of scrap, and experimentally tried dripping a little venom onto a piece of wood. Taylor yipped in shock when it smoldered violently then with a pop burst into flame. "Holy shit!" she exclaimed, stepping back. "What the hell?"
Watching as the flames died away, leaving a smoking piece of wood, she shook her head, trying to work out what sort of chemical reaction dissolved concrete and made wood spontaneously combust. She was quite good at chemistry but she was still only high-school chemistry quite good, not actual chemical engineer good. Vaguely feeling that there had to be a pretty scary oxidizer present, she guessed a little tentatively that possibly concentrated hydrogen peroxide might account for what she'd just witnessed. She'd seen videos about how it could, if sufficiently strong, make organic material combust.
She wasn't sure it had any effect on concrete, though, so that was still unexplained.
Shaking her head, she tried the experiment again, this time on a piece of cast iron, which fizzed nearly as violently as the concrete had, went bright orange, and slowly crumbled into rust. Definitely an oxidization reaction according to her chemistry textbook, and a really enthusiastic one at that.
And she was certain that the venom, aside from being horribly corrosive and a hellishly good oxidizer, was also a violently potent toxin too. She could literally feel her power agreeing happily.
Sighing, she made yet more notes, then began trying to work out how to change what she was producing in her venom glands. Perhaps if she took some inspiration from the wolf spider venom? That was much less powerful than hornet venom was, right? And she could find some other species of spiders, since she could feel lots of them around the area, and try mixing those in different proportions.
It was worth a shot.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
When her dad came in with some chinese takeaway having been out visiting friends until fairly late, she was sitting in her bedroom desk chair staring at the pages and pages of notes she'd made with a satisfied yet mildly bewildered expression. He stepped inside her room and looked at her. "You seem bothered, Taylor," he commented.
"Confused more than bothered," she replied quietly. "I've learned all sorts of things tonight, and some of them are… scary."
Sitting on her bed, he studied her as she turned the chair to face her. "Scary how?" he queried.
"Scary like I can probably kill about a thousand people with a few drops of venom even before I play around with it," she told him, making him look concerned. "I only just started experimenting with it, and it's… a lot stronger than I expected. Like, a lot stronger." She shook her head in wonder. "As in it dissolves iron. And makes wood burst into flames."
"Jesus," he said slowly, staring. "That sounds dangerous."
The understatement made her laugh. "Yeah. Just a little."
"Best not to use it on anyone then," he suggested wisely, getting a smile back.
"I worked that out for myself," she told him. "I tried changing it to something else, and it took a lot of effort, but I worked it out in the end. Problem is that almost any changes I made still produced something lethal as hell. I think a lot of the problem is how everything in the merged forms is so ridiculously enhanced compared to the original creatures. Even pure wolf spider venom, which isn't all that toxic as spiders go, turns out to be insanely potent in wolf drider form. I caught a rat and and it killed it stone dead in about ten seconds from only a tiny amount." She felt a little guilty about having done that, but she needed to be sure. It had been barely possible that due to powers-related shenanigans the venom might have been relatively harmless to a living thing despite all the evidence. However, this was not the case.
She didn't want to try the flaming acid venom on even a rat. It seemed unfair. As well as very messy.
"Huh. I guess that's useful to know at least. You might have accidentally used it at some point and caused a real problem, so it's best to have advance warning of what not to do," he pointed out, making her nod. "You can turn off the venom I take it?"
"Oh, yeah, I've got no trouble not injecting or spraying it, it takes a deliberate effort to use the stuff. Just the stinger is more than enough honestly." She explained what her tests had shown, making him shake his head in wonder.
"Amazing. And absolutely terrifying."
"It is," she agreed soberly. "This is fun but every now and then I find something that really makes me stop and think. I don't want to kill anyone by accident."
"And, I hope, in general not on purpose," he remarked. She gave him a quick smile.
"Not really, no. I can't think of many people that deserve to die, not even Sophia. Deserve to get the shit kicked out of them, yeah, but that's different." She pondered the idea for a few seconds. "Maybe Kaiser, that Nazi shithead. His armor is a lot less than two inches thick…" She grinned as her father winced, but also looked amused.
"Might be best not to hunt Nazis for sport," he replied calmly. "As much fun as it could be, and despite it being close to a civic responsibility." Taylor giggled at his comment. She knew well how much he despised the Empire Eighty Eight and anyone who espoused the views they did. She shared the feelings wholeheartedly. "You're only fifteen and I don't really want you having deaths on your conscience at that age."
"Yeah, fair enough," she agreed with a sigh. "I don't particularly want to kill anyone either. Even a Nazi. Although I might make an exception for Hookwolf. I read he's killed four more people in the last two weeks on PHO. Why hasn't the PRT done something about that asshole yet?" She was genuinely baffled about how the murderous Empire capes kept getting away with the things they did. Even at her age she knew damn well the Nazi gang had been responsible for more deaths than she cared to think about, but they were still running around free, which was infuriating.
He shrugged. "I honestly don't have an answer for you other than that life is more complicated than it seems a lot of the time and the PRT is nowhere near as effective as it likes to claim. I agree, someone should have dealt with them years ago, but Brockton has had problems with gangs for much longer than you've been alive and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon, unfortunately."
He reached out and patted her knee reassuringly. "Try not to let it get you down. Which is hard, true, but it's all we can do."
Looking at her shelf of terrariums, he added, "Where's your firespider?"
She grinned and tapped her forehead. "In here. I thought I'd keep it merged for now to see what happens. And it lets me do this, look!" Holding out an arm she pushed her sleeve up and showed him a glowing green sort of celtic knot she formed around her bicep. His eyes widened comically.
"That… is rather impressive in a very weird way," he finally said.
Taylor nodded happily. "Built in night light," she replied with a smile, pulling her sleeve down again.
"Do you have any trouble having, what is it now, three? Separate creatures merged with you?"
"Nope. It's easy now. I'm not sure how many I can do, but so far it all seems completely viable. And I can mix and match them in different proportions, plus I'm pretty sure things like toughness and strength are stacking too. I can jump from the floor of the warehouse right into the roof beams without any trouble for example, which is amazing." She grinned at his expression.
"And jump back, of course. It would be embarrassing otherwise," she added, making him chuckle.
"True enough."
Picking up the book she had open on the desk, he peered at the cover, then leafed through it. "By the time you go to college you'll have learned more about entomology than most professors," he said with a small smile.
"I have an unfair advantage."
"Also true." He stopped on the page she'd had open. "Apposition versus superposition compound eye structures," he read, then raised his gaze to her quizzically.
"I'm trying to work out how to get the best vision possible," Taylor replied to the unasked question, taking the book back and turning the page. "Compound eyes are a lot more complicated than most people realize. Everyone tends to think they produce lots of little images, like you see in movies and that sort of thing, but they don't, all the separate lenses still resolve to a single image. And while it's often not as high resolution as a single-lens eye like a mammal has, it can be. In theory you can get an optical system that's only limited by diffraction, which is as good as it gets." She pointed at the diagrams, her dad leaning over to look at them. "And they can be incredibly light sensitive. Moths and some crabs have amazingly good night vision, better than the goggles the military uses in some cases. I've been trying to figure out how to combine all the different methods into something that does the best job all around."
"Interesting," he responded after thinking it over. "Not a lot of moths around at the moment though."
"No. In a month or so I can get some, though. And I'm going to collect a couple of crabs tomorrow since it's the weekend and I can spend the whole day experimenting." She put the book back on her desk. "I keep thinking of new ideas to try," she added with a pleased look, as he watched her fondly. "So many ideas."
"Your perversion of the natural order appears to be remarkably broad ranging," he joked. Taylor laughed.
"I'm definitely doing my best to warp life to my own goals as much as I can," she agreed cheerfully.
"How did your assignments go?" he asked after a moment. "Don't neglect your schoolwork in favor of horrifying god and nature."
Laughing, she picked up the envelope full of completed homeschool assignments. "Got it all done without any problems," she replied, handing it to him. Pulling out the sheaf of papers, he examined a couple of them and nodded approvingly. "It's much easier to do when I don't have someone stealing it all, of course."
"I can imagine." Putting the paperwork back into the envelope he handed it back, then got up. "Well done. I'm proud of you. Come on, let's eat before it gets cold."
Jumping to her feet she followed him downstairs, feeling that things were working out quite nicely at the moment. Soon they were eating and discussing various things, feeling much more like a real if small family than they'd done for so long.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Landing on the peak of a four story roof, Taylor cocked her head and listened intently. She had been flying around the general docks area in the dark, it being around seven in the evening and surprisingly warm for the time of year as the winter started to recede, mostly just enjoying herself. Flying as a vast hornet with extra superpowers was a hell of a lot of fun. She was being careful to stay out of sight, avoiding any of the few people she sensed with all the tiny bugs in range of her power, which she'd worked up to nearly three hundred and fifty yards around her at this point. It was far more than sufficient to keep her from getting close enough for anyone to do more than hear a distant deep hum, which according to her dad had caused a few stories in the area, which were discussed at a couple of bars he visited on occasion. The old one down near the water was full of rumors about there being something weird in going on in the docks but no one could settle on what, and rumors of that nature were so common anyway that hardly anyone took them seriously these days.
From what he'd told her over the years that sort of rumor predated actual Parahumans, for that matter. Apparently the docks area had always been a bit peculiar.
But right now she could hear a weird metallic crashing sound from somewhere not that far away, combined with a sort of yelling, and a few gunshots. Turning on the spot she tried to work out what it was and where it was, finally deciding the second point while drawing a blank on the first. Other than to think it was certainly a fight of some sort.
As she listened, the gunshots stopped following a much louder explosion, made faint by distance, which echoed through the mostly empty streets. Flying over to another perch a hundred yards away, she tried triangulating on the sounds, coming to the conclusion that her location was correct. Whatever was going on was over at the far edge of the docks proper, around the vicinity of Geraint street, which was a wide one leading down to where a canning factory had once been. It went dead straight for about a quarter of a mile, with lots of little alleyways off it that all disappeared into a maze of old buildings, the end away from the water narrowing and eventually turning into a smaller road due to a lot of redevelopment many years ago, much of which had in turn fallen into disrepair.
After some internal debate, she finally lifted off and flew at barely rooftop level towards the commotion, her curiosity overriding her caution. Someone was certainly throwing a fairly enthusiastic party that sounded like it had invited mayhem along for the ride and she was wondering what on earth was going on. It sounded like a combine harvester was arguing with a gravel crusher…
Only a few seconds later she was close enough for her ability to contact all the insects in the vicinity of what was going on. Through lots of little eyes, she examined the area, landing on another roof and staying out sight with her real body. To her great annoyance she recognized immediately the source of the noise she'd heard.
'Fucking Hookwolf,' she thought with massive irritation. Sure enough, she could see the Nazi Changer-Brute charging about the place causing enormous damage to the surroundings, and there were a number of bodies lying about in poses that made it clear they were very definitely deceased. A couple were in more than one piece which didn't help, and was not something she liked looking at. There were at least twenty corpses, roughly half of them people in ragged clothes which she strongly suspected were members of the Merchant's gang, or had been. The rest seemed probably to be Empire gang members. They were universally white, skin-headed, and with Nazi tattoos.
As far as she could work out, the two gangs had had a shootout, the Empire mostly wiping out the Merchants with the help of Hookwolf, then the remaining survivors of the former catching a grenade or something from the last of the latter judging by three bodies lying, severely damaged, near a small crater in the road. There was shrapnel damage around the area too, and a dead Merchant lying on his face twenty feet away, in a pose that suggested he'd thrown something then got fatally shot before he could retreat.
From all the evidence, both sides had wiped each other out entirely with the sole exception of the raging cape. Sending out her senses in the direction the battle seemed to have come from, she could also detect a number of other bodies, all of them minorities. There was a building on fire about a quarter of a mile further up the road towards the city too, which looked like it had probably had a number of homeless people living in it. Again, all too common around this part of the city, she knew.
Taylor guessed that the Nazis had been on one of their little missions of finding people that were less white than they were and amusing themselves by killing them and burning their homes. It happened way too often, she'd seen at least four reports of it in the last three months, and knew from what her dad had said that the Empire did that sort of thing on a regular basis. Feeling both ill and furious, she turned her attention back to Hookwolf, wondering why he was still rampaging around like a lunatic.
Fair enough, he was a lunatic, but with all his own people down, and the other side too, why was he acting like one?
The answer was in the small figure in green and white that was desperately trying to escape. Taylor recognized the costume immediately. The Ward Vista.
'What the hell is she doing here? Alone against Hookwolf of all people?' Taylor thought, confused. She looked around for any backup but couldn't detect any signs of PRT people or anyone else on the heroic side of things anywhere in the area. It was just Vista, who was clearly injured considering how much blood was on her costume, and a villain who was blatantly obviously doing his damnedest to kill her. Sending some smaller insects towards Vista Taylor inspected her closely. Her costume was badly damaged, there was blood on her chest, and every time she moved she winced in pain. As she watched, the younger girl, who couldn't have been more than about twelve or thirteen, put her hand to her ear, then ducked as a metallic bladed arm shot through where her head had been.
Vista let out a short scream and rolled, diving behind a dumpster which was smashed out of the way by an enraged Hookwolf. Panting for breath, the girl did something weird to space and the Changer villain was suddenly about eighty feet away from her, but Vista was visibly exhausted and on her last legs. Taylor could see a gaping wound in her chest when she moved, which was the source of the blood. It didn't look particularly deep but the gash was long enough and bleeding enough that the other girl was in severe danger of passing out from blood loss.
She reached for her ear again, then yelled in frustration. It looked like she was trying to call for backup, presumably using some sort of earpiece, but…
Moving some insects closer, Taylor saw there was nothing in her ear. Checking around the area she saw the remains of some sort of high tech device on the street about a hundred feet away, definitely crushed and unusable. So Vista was all alone, had no way to call for help apparently, wounded, and much too close to a known multiple murderer racist lunatic. Who was, despite her power, getting way too fucking close again…
'Well, fuck,' Taylor thought with disgust. 'Goddamn Nazis. Ruin a perfectly good night out…' Muttering to herself and feeling her inner hornet get extremely angry, she thought hard about what she was about to do, decided she had no real choice, and took off.
'Dad is going to be torn between being furious and pleased,' she thought unhappily. 'But what else can I do?'
She wasn't prepared to watch Vista get killed in front of her, despite the risks to herself.
So in the end, she had to step in. Or fly in, rather.
Such was life. Sometimes you had to do things you didn't want to, and hope for the best.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Vista let out a groan followed by a high pitched scream as Hookwolf charged at her again, her power suddenly failing due to her sheer tiredness and disorientation. She was feeling dizzy, cold, and ready to pass out, but knew if she did she'd never wake up. The front of her costume was sticky, both inside and out, and she could smell blood. Every time she moved the pain in her chest went through her like hot wire burning into her flesh. She didn't want to look at the damage, and was pretty sure she was going into shock. Chills and shivering were definitely a thing at the moment, and she knew from her training that she was close to collapse.
Unable to properly concentrate, she flung herself desperately backwards as a bladed limb flew over her head, barely missing her. It was only her short stature that let her avoid it and she really wasn't sure she could do much more evading. It had taken one slip for the asshole Nazi to open her chest like a watermelon with one of his blades, and she knew damn well she was lucky that she'd barely been able to pull back enough that all he did was gash her skin rather than slice her in half.
She'd seen him do it before. Far too recently and far too close up. Cursing her stupidity in going off on her own, wanting to do something important rather than idiotic publicity stunts, she exerted what little of her power she could bring to bear and warped space between her and the Changer just enough to put him out of range, even as she jumped behind another wrecked burned-out car. Looking around frantically she wondered how the fuck she was going to escape. Without her communicator she was shit out of luck on calling for backup, and she'd left her phone behind due to the tracker in it.
Right now, she was bitterly regretting doing that. Being tracked by someone who could bring a really big gun to the party would have been ideal just about now. Preferably something with armor piercing ammo…
Feeling the effort of maintaining the spatial warp overcome what little mental strength she had remaining she was forced to let it collapse, having at least managed to take a few heaving breaths. A moment later Hookwolf was once again far, far too close, and still rabidly furious. He was always in a bad mood but right now he'd lost the plot completely and was absolutely definitely intent on killing her no matter what sort of shitstorm that would bring down on the Empire.
The remains of the car she was cowering behind was slammed out of the way. She looked up at the monstrous form made of sharp edges. The girl could practically feel the malicious grin even though there was nothing approaching a human face visible. "Nowhere to run little girl," Hookwolf snarled, sounding eager.
A second later, following a weird deep hum that approached from down the street towards the water at a huge speed, there was a massive metallic crashing sound and Hookwolf was tumbling ass over head away from her, bouncing several times and ending up fifty feet away before Vista had the faintest idea what had happened. She gaped as the bladed wolf struggled to his feet, shook his head, and looked around. "What the hell was that?" she whispered to herself, taking the opportunity presented to get up and head for cover again.
"Who did that?" Hookwolf roared in fury, turning in a circle.
The hum came back in the other direction and again there was a hard impact, blades flying, and the villain went end over end once more. Vista backed away, not wanting to turn her back on the bastard, and wondering what was going on.
The hum, which was really more of a deep bass note, vanished upwards and behind one of the buildings. Hookwolf and she were both listening, although he was turning towards her again, possibly under the impression she was doing whatever it was.
Moving backwards, she had an arm over her chest pressing on her wound, and was limping too, but she kept a wary eye on her opponent. He was much faster than you'd expect from someone that size and far more dangerous than she'd realized, although she'd always been well aware he was a killer. She hadn't expected him to just flat out try to murder her on the spot though, when she'd interrupted the Empire's little hate party.
Bad judgment on her part, and something she might well not live to regret, she thought with despair as he started moving towards her rapidly, apparently dismissing the mysterious hum.
This proved to be a mistake as it returned, going even faster. Something shot past Vista in a blur, lit up in shades of green just before impact, so brightly she closed her eyes, then slammed into Hookwolf. By the time she'd blinked hard a few times, she could see him sliding to a stop a good eighty feet from the impact point. "Go away, Nazi idiot, or you'll end up as dead as your friends," a weird voice said from somewhere above them. Both Vista and Hookwolf looked upwards. She gasped in shock. Hovering about fifty feet above the street, facing the villain, was the biggest fucking wasp she'd ever seen in her life. It was unbelievably huge, probably bigger than she was, and was illuminated in a tracery of green light. The drone of its wings filled the street.
Hookwolf stared at it in at least as much shock as she felt. Neither of them had expected whatever this was. And he didn't seem to know what to do.
Which, she admitted to herself, wasn't all that surprising. The wasp looked both angry and very dangerous, and the fact that it was talking somehow made that much worse.
She wasn't generally all that scared of bugs but she'd never met one so big she could ride it. And apparently tough enough that it could knock half a ton of enraged murder blender flying and show no damage.
What the hell was this thing? And where did it come from?
At least it seemed to be on her side. Or not on his side, which wasn't necessarily the same thing, unfortunately.
"What the fuck are you supposed to be?" Hookwolf demanded harshly, glaring at the hovering insect.
"Your death if you don't go away right the fuck now," it replied just as harshly. Vista shivered, because the threat in the words was so real she could feel it in her bones. "Leave the girl and run. You've got five seconds before I lose my patience."
"Fuck you, bug," he shouted. "No one tells me what to do."
"Time's up, dickhead. You were warned." The monstrous wasp aimed its stinger at him, the size of the thing making Vista stare in horror, even as Hookwolf roared defiance at it and flung a handful of blades at the creature. It avoided them with contemptuous easy and fired back, a burst of some liquid streaking from it to spray over the Changer.
Who screamed instantly and started smoking.
Vista recoiled in horror. Acrid vapor rose in clouds as Hookwolf thrashed, rolling over and over like he was in agony. Metal flew and the street was getting gouged to pieces as he went entirely insane. She watched wide eyed as he flopped around for another ten seconds, emitting a terrible howl, before suddenly seizing up then going limp.
Smoke rose from him for a few more seconds before his Changer power started to revert. He shrank, metal disappearing, and a few seconds later a human body was lying on the street, clad only in jeans, which were showing burn marks. His chest was heavily scarred too, the damage looking like severe blistering. Vista could smell something like cooked meat, which made her stomach turn despite iron control.
Landing next to him, the wasp monster examined him for a moment. "Huh. Still alive. I'm impressed. Guess his regeneration is pretty good." The voice sounded thoughtful. "Bet he doesn't enjoy it when he wakes up though. If he does." Turning around, the creature looked directly at Vista, who swallowed hard. "You need medical help," it commented, walking towards her.
It didn't sound nearly as terrifying as it had done when it was confronting Hookwolf, but it was still a four foot long blatantly incredibly dangerous giant-ass wasp, Vista thought frantically as she tried to work out what the hell to do next. Stopping a few feet away the thing looked her over. "That's a lot of blood loss," it added helpfully, telling her something she was all too aware of.
The stress of the last half hour finally hit the point of being too much, and Vista blacked out. It was, to be honest, a bit of a relief.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Well, shit," Taylor sighed, watching the badly injured Ward topple over and lie there in an untidy bloody mess. She looked around, seeing and sensing no one in the vicinity. No one alive at least, except for the mass murdering asshole cluttering up the street behind her.
She was honestly surprised that her venom hadn't killed him on the spot. She hadn't hit him with all that much, to be sure, but she was certain it would have easily done for most people. Even though he was still alive she was pretty sure that he was going to have all sorts of issues with life despite his regenerative power. He sure wasn't giving the impression of someone who was likely to wake up in a hurry.
Taking the decision to spray him was one she'd wrestled with, but in the end if it came down to him or Vista, she'd prefer the Ward be the survivor. Hookwolf had a kill order on him as far as she knew anyway, so one could argue that she was only doing what she should. But her dad had been right; killing someone wasn't something to take lightly in any way at all.
Even a Nazi.
However, he was still alive for the moment at least so she hadn't quite managed the feat. Half tempted to go and make certain, she instead looked at him and told her power, 'See? That asshole gets to keep his pants? Why don't I?' It was unfair and annoyed her. Her ability kind of shrugged and she sighed again. 'You're no help at all sometimes,' she grumbled, turning back to Vista, who was gently leaking important bodily fluid all over the street. Thinking for a moment, she wondered how heavy the girl was. She was barely four and a half feet tall and skinny with it, so not much.
'Worth a try I guess,' she thought in resignation. 'I can't leave her here like this.'
Moving over to the girl, she carefully rearranged her slightly, then took off, hovered over her, and gently grabbed her with all six legs. It took a little trial and error but slightly to her surprise she found she could lift Vista. She had to flap a lot harder, but it worked. Satisfied that she could hold on, she rose into the air, orientated herself, and headed towards Brockton General at flank speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"A giant wasp just brought Vista in."
Amy looked up at the familiar voice, although the note of sheer disbelief in it was new. Doctor Williams was pale and wearing an utterly confused and somewhat scared expression. Behind her, in the ER room, it had gone oddly silent. Amy had been taking a break in the staff room and now realized that the normal noise from ER had stopped completely.
"What?" she asked, not sure she'd heard correctly.
Doctor Williams pointed over her shoulder. "Giant wasp. Vista. In the ER."
"What?" Amy still didn't understand, but she put her book down and stood up. Walking over she peered past the doctor. At the giant wasp in the ER, next to Vista, who was covered in blood. Every single person in the room regardless of profession or status was as far away as they could get from the pair, dead silent, and gaping in horror.
"Holy fuck," she said in shock. "That's a giant wasp!"
"I'm a giant hornet, thanks very much," the vastly too large for comfort insect called. "Is someone going to help Vista or not? She's got a massive wound and lost a lot of blood."
It sounded somewhat annoyed. Amy, who was feeling faint, jerked slightly at the voice, then exchanged an incredulous look with Doctor Williams. After a few seconds, and with some effort, she forced herself to walk over to where the insect was staring at her. Kneeling, she put her hand on Vista's face, then jolted. "Jesus, what happened to her?"
"Hookwolf. Then I happened to him." The
Amy nodded, highly confused, and went to work on the younger girl. When she looked up the hornet had vanished and the main doors were closing. A moment later a deep hum resonated through the room before fading away. Totally baffled she called for the two orderlies who were, along with everyone else, staring at the door, to bring a gurney over. When Vista was stable they lifted her carefully onto it, still taking nervous glances towards where the biggest insect anyone had ever heard of had left.
By the time the PRT arrived, the hornet was long since gone, and Vista was sleeping comfortably, fully healed but needing a lot of food.
And Amy was no nearer understanding what the hell had happened.
When, about two hours later, Hookwolf was brought in, it only took her about ten seconds to discover that he wasn't going to recover nearly as easily, even if she'd felt like healing the shitbag. Whatever toxin he'd been exposed to was unbelievably potent and he was barely alive as it was. She told the PRT as much, then went on with her other patients, still wondering what the hell was wandering around the city and where it had come from.
She suspected that a lot of other people were wondering the same thing…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Well, that's going to cause some odd issues," Taylor's dad commented after listening to the story. He put his arm around her and hugged her. "Still, good job, I suppose."
Taylor nodded. Then she went to bed, because it had been a long day one way or another and she was pretty much done with it.
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SolarFlare
(Verified Cape)
- Location
- Brockton Bay, USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Couldn't have happened to someone more deserving. Wonder of Othala's regen actually removes scarring and heals fogged corneas? Because if any got him in the face, he's probably blind.
Also, wouldn't be surprised if some Nazis jump to blaming the ABB for this because that's where the biggest hornet species is from. And then Tay gets to go deal with them more.
Oooh, claim to be one of those parasitic wasps that lays eggs in caterpillars. That'd be good psychological warfare.
Also, wouldn't be surprised if some Nazis jump to blaming the ABB for this because that's where the biggest hornet species is from. And then Tay gets to go deal with them more.
Oooh, claim to be one of those parasitic wasps that lays eggs in caterpillars. That'd be good psychological warfare.
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Jadesteele
Out of my Mind - Back in 5 Minutes
- Location
- half-way between 'Crazy' And 'Eccentric'
ok, i can see another story becoming a thread of it's own, right now...
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Both Developments... and Monsterization... are tagged as Vespa 4 - I think this more recent threadmark is supposed to be Vespa 5 instead.
ScissorSlipper
Barber cat
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah yes, the queen of escalation. Seems like Vista's run-in with Hookwolf went worse in this story. And Taylor was really cool on her first night out! And it's classic of her to not leave a name..
And Lung may feel simultaneously reassured and concerned that the massive Asian hornet he saw was a parahuman, not just a hornet in a fleet..
And Lung may feel simultaneously reassured and concerned that the massive Asian hornet he saw was a parahuman, not just a hornet in a fleet..
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Vhalidictes
(Verified Demon)
- Location
- Las Vegas
I'm a little surprised that Amy didn't try to scan the giant sapient hornet... then again, giant sapient hornet.
I kind of want want it to be a running gag that hornet Taylor just always sounds irritated. The mental perception that the giant talking wasp/hornet is just permanently in a "how dare you make me buzz my a** over here" mood and everyone she meets think's that regardless of if it's true or not just tickles my funny bone.
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ScissorSlipper
Barber cat
- Pronouns
- She/Her
She probably did not want to touch the giant hornet without permission..
- Location
- Australia, often behind a keyboard
Which is pretty much what he did.Even Lung would be like this if he saw a four-foot Japanese giant hornet flying around.
That, and the injured hero in front of her took priority.
Yeah, I can totally see even Lung going, Fuck this shit I'm out! To a person sized Horrent, and Hookwolf totally got the neutering he so richly deserved. Real fic coming when?
- Location
- I'll never tell...
Best section.
Lung noped out and can point to Hookwolf as the perfect example why that's the best idea anyone could have. No one sane would question that.
GreydonCreed
Man of Culture
- Location
- United States
PHO is going to crap bricks, since the hospital lobby surveillance cameras footage of Vespa bringing in Vista is almost certainly going to be leaked, along with any mobile phone camera footage. 😅 Footage of a almost five foot tall talking hornet with a foot long stinger that can spray caustic venom. 😳
There may also be footage of Vespa flying at low level and medium speed above city streets since she was carrying Vista and did not want to get too high.
And there is a possible alternate code name for Vespa beyond the obvious - The F/A-18 SuperHornet. 😅
There may also be footage of Vespa flying at low level and medium speed above city streets since she was carrying Vista and did not want to get too high.
And there is a possible alternate code name for Vespa beyond the obvious - The F/A-18 SuperHornet. 😅
Even Lung would be like this if he saw a four-foot Japanese giant hornet flying around.
Pretty sure he did.
Large built Japanese man, who usually doesn't worry about anything? I think that was Lung "noping" out, because of memories of the giant hornets that can be found in the region.
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M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Yes. On the bad hand, the Director will not be even slightly happy that Vista was out there without a partner or backup.
On the good hand, at least Missy won't have to worry about stitching herself up without anybody knowing about it.
Hexcalibur
Not So Ordinary Sword
- Location
- Somewhere
- Pronouns
- It
Danny should buy Taylor a Vespa scooter to ride around in just because. People missing that the girl riding a Vespa around town is Vespa.
How old does Taylor need to be to get a license to drive a scooter around BB? I'm more driving a car or riding a bicycle never a motorcycle.
How old does Taylor need to be to get a license to drive a scooter around BB? I'm more driving a car or riding a bicycle never a motorcycle.
Lung may be a criminal gang boss but even he has limits on the horrific BS he's willing to deal with.
Wonder if he'll be the one to realize Vespa is a QUEEN killer hornet. Along with what that implies.
Wonder if he'll be the one to realize Vespa is a QUEEN killer hornet. Along with what that implies.
- Location
- Europe
Which ahould not exist on Earth Bet, simply because the PRT & Protectocrate is eating up most of the military budget.
Expect the JFK to still sail around, carrying Tomcats, for one.
No money for a new Nuclear Super Carrier, that Scion might just rip the fission materials, out off.
Question is, would they be flying F-14D's, E's or even F's???
Probably D's or E's, considering the later was mend to be a upgrade that would fix the Hangar Queen problem, the Cat had, but ended up killing her in our own world history.
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There is also the fact that a city would look very different from the air and Taylor/Vespa probably can't fly to the hospital in a straight line.
Since I am not sure if she has already the needed experience to read with her swarm, I am just going to assume that there is at least one video of a f* huge hornet descending "from the heavens" while carrying a person in order to take a quick look at a street sign.
Exactly.
Plus, pretty sure Touch Stingy Tail is very emphatically not a thing.
Stephenopolos
Going through stargate withdrawl
- Location
- illinois
Piggot is going to have a coronary and probably demand a kill order be pre-signed and for the prt to send in everything