A/N: The previously published Spirit 1.7 has been retconned and is no longer canon. I thought about it and it really was too comedic for the overall story tone, so we'll just call it an omake. You can find it in Apocrypha.
Spirit 1.7
"What? But…" Amy started, but couldn't find the words to continue. It was incomprehensible to her, that somebody who seemed so nice would be so callous about using her power to heal people in need.
"She's a villain! I knew it!" Victoria said loudly and flew back into the air aggressively.
"Hold it, Vicky! I'm sure there must be a good explanation, right Taylor?" Dean asked with a serious expression.
Taylor opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again, appearing hesitant for the first time to the three teens in front of her.
Her eyes were fixed on Amy still, but Amy didn't think that Taylor was seeing her anymore. The expressionless façade she had been maintaining was gone, replaced by eyes that were lost in painful memories.
The silence stretched on for what seemed like an eternity as even Victoria felt the shift in mood.
"…I'm sorry. You wouldn't understand it," Taylor said at last, turning to walk away.
Amy stepped to follow almost subconsciously, thoughts awhirl with regret and trepidation. She had been wrong about Taylor being callous. It wasn't that she didn't care or thought herself above healing, that much was obvious from her subdued reaction.
'Maybe I do,' she wanted to say out loud, but found herself unable to voice it. If Taylor didn't want to speak of it, what right did she have to press her? They weren't even friends. But she really wanted to know. Did Taylor have the kind of thoughts she did about her patients? Amy wasn't as into healing as she tried to act like. In the beginning, she had been motivated to do it when she first triggered, but over the years it had become a chore, and she felt guilty for thinking about it that way. It was hard to keep caring about any individual patient after healing a few thousand people. The fact that she'd never heard of another healer like Taylor in Brockton Bay didn't mean that there couldn't have been somebody going around to heal people in secret outside of hospitals, maybe even outside of Brockton Bay. If Taylor routinely did things like breaking into people's houses secretly…and she did say that she was recovering her powers, which implied that her powers were stronger before.
"Try us! If you have a good reason, why wouldn't we understand?" Her sister voiced aloud what she could not, and in a much more hostile tone than she would have. She regretted not speaking up first.
Taylor turned back around just a little, glanced at Victoria, then to Amy again.
"You don't have to tell us if you don't want to, Taylor," said Amy. She ignored the protest from Victoria and continued, "Being a healer isn't easy and it's not for everyone. I get it."
There was a flash of something close to surprise on Taylor's face, before it melted back into that troubled faraway look. She nodded her appreciation before leaving. Victoria saw the looks Dean and Amy gave her, and she relented to let Taylor go.
After they were alone, Victoria spoke up. "What was that about?" She looked to Dean for his power analysis.
"I think she does want to heal people, but something happened to make her unwilling. I was reading guilt, longing, and sadness from her," said Dean. "But it's a little confusing. She was disdainful at first when she said she wasn't going to heal anyone else, I'm not sure why it changed abruptly like that. Her emotions were pretty hard to read too the whole time until the end. It was like she barely had any emotions, they were so faint, but then during the fight there was a really strong emotion I've never felt in anyone else before. It was…sharp, and I had the strangest idea that it would become physical and cut me if I focused on it too closely."
"Could she be a Master victim? She can't heal because somebody else is stopping her? And that might be why she can resist my aura! If her emotions are partially being controlled by someone else, or she built up an immunity to emotion effects over time," said Victoria.
Dean had a thoughtful look on his face. "That…could be possible, actually. It would explain that weird sharp emotion. Power interactions and all that."
"Isn't that jumping to conclusions? She might just have a Trump power to resist other powers," said Amy. She knew firsthand that Taylor experienced the world in a different way from everyone else. Taylor's power when she shared it with Amy gave her a feel for living things and self-awareness that was expressed in some kind of metaphysical flowing energy. And moreover, "My power works really slowly on her body too."
"But you saw how her face changed. It wasn't just a power giving Dean the wrong readings. She was clearly an arrogant bitch right up until the end," said Victoria.
"Taylor's not an arrogant bitch, she's just not used to dealing with people! And her power isn't as strong as it should be. That's probably why she doesn't want to heal anyone else, when she's still recovering," said Amy.
"I've never heard of powers having to recover. What makes you think her power isn't as strong as it should be?" asked Victoria.
"She told me her powers were still recovering. She said it just now too, about her stealth not being as good."
"Wait a minute, where and when did you even meet her?"
"Brockton General. Remember how I stayed really late on Monday? She was the one I spent the night for."
Victoria looked at her oddly. "And then she…healed you? When was that? When did you get injured?"
"Well I wasn't injured, exactly. It was more like reducing stress. She came to my room last night. When I woke up this morning there was a note from her explaining about the healing she did when I was asleep. I never actually saw her using her power for healing so I don't know how it works, but I did feel pretty amazing after. I haven't gotten much sleep the past few days but I didn't feel tired at all today."
"O-oh. I guess I misunderstood what kind of stalker she was earlier. She was just looking out for you," said Victoria, her face was red with embarrassment. "Sorry. I shouldn't have attacked her."
Victoria was cute when she looked abashed, Amy thought. It was much better than the angry girl that thought with her fists.
"It's okay. Just don't jump the gun next time something like this happens," Amy said in a consoling tone, relieved that her sister could acknowledge the mistake.
Dean watched the exchange quietly with an unreadable look.
O O O
Taylor's emotions were still in turmoil long after she left the alley. To the question of why she wouldn't heal people, she had almost responded with the cultivator's generally agreed principles of conduct related to mortals.
Cultivators that followed the "proper path", in contrast to the "demonic path", did not interfere with mortal affairs unless they were expressly part of the ruling government in a sovereign state, or otherwise lawfully governed by the cultivator(s) in question.
There wouldn't have been any real repercussions for violating the rule unless one did it on a large scale and was considered to be subverting another cultivator's serfs, but to Taylor in the other world, healing other people just wasn't something she had really thought about early in her career, given her own troubles, and later on her sect didn't participate much in state governance at all. There was never any benefit that would have attracted Taylor to doing something like that.
But just as she was about to say it, memories of a time when she had been a cape enthusiast came unbidden, when she had looked up to heroes like Alexandria and Armsmaster, even Panacea.
Panacea wasn't as flashy as the big name heroes, but what she did, Taylor respected. What drove somebody to be so selfless, that part of her understood very well. She had dreamed of being a hero herself when she was younger. Even right up to the locker incident, if she suddenly got powers, she knew she would have gone out to become a hero.
She wondered idly if she might have tried to take revenge on the trio had she become a cape. She liked to think that she was better than that, but she didn't feel confident that she would have resisted the temptation.
At the very least, if she had become a cape with healing powers like Panacea, there was no doubt in her mind that she would have used it for the good people of Brockton Bay, much like Amy.
But Taylor wasn't the same girl anymore, and when she had gotten her powers it had come with a whole slew of other problems, feelings, and memories.
She wasn't a cape. Maybe by the definition of parahuman on Earth Bet, she would be considered one, but she knew for herself that something different had happened to her.
She made her way back to the house quietly. Her dad wasn't home yet, and she changed herself out of her robes and into her normal casual clothes.
The girl that looked back at her from the mirror on her closet was very different from what she was used to. It wasn't the gaunt, defeated figure of a long-term bullying victim that couldn't make any friends, but nor was it the cold, oppressive image of a prodigious fighter that isolated herself in the single-minded pursuit of survival.
Her facial features were a little different from before, having been cultivated through star essence. In the cultivator world, she had started very early so her body had grown in a much more efficient, healthy way. That same effect would start to change her slowly over time in this world too.
"Do you want to be a hero?" She asked aloud.
There was no response. Not that she expected one, but asking aloud made her feel better. More grounded, as if there really were two opinions she had to consider.
Her souls had merged into one being, and the outcome was a mix of both that acted like neither would have before. The confrontation with Amy and her friends showed that she had to take more time to reflect on how she had changed.
If it had been her old cultivator self, there would not have been a confrontation at all. It was entirely unnecessary to reveal herself, when she could have quietly escaped instead. But the modern girl in her didn't want to make trouble with the two heroes of New Wave, in case she was caught. Of course, if it had been the old Bet Taylor, she wouldn't have been out there stalking Amy in the first place.
Her reflection grimaced at her.
A lot of things she had done over the past few days, now that she thought about them, were very strange, and she didn't like the results.
If allowed to fester, this would lead to inner demons interfering with her progress, perhaps even a disastrous failure at a critical juncture.
It would be impossible to breakthrough to Ethereal Heart at the end of the Meditation stage if she could not rediscover her true self, which would be very different from the first time she did it.
It would be some time before she finished the rest of Meditation to reach that point, but the first major bottleneck in her cultivation had reared its ugly head.
O O O
