Synopsis: Taylor Costa-Brown, underachieving daughter of Chief Director of the PRT Rebecca Costa-Brown, is happy to spend her life being completely useless. Her mom is less happy.
I didn't want to necro either thread, so I didn't. Thank you Inthretis for suggesting this mash-up of two fics I enjoy and highly recommend.
P.S. this is only an omake and I have other things to do so don't expect "fast updates" or "planning" or "good writing"
"Taylor," her mother said, stepping through the doorway and over a grease-stained bag of Fugly-N-Out. Clad in her tailored dark grey business suit, she was a formidable figure, and even more formidable when she used that voice. "I just got off the phone with Mr. Rodriguez."
"That the guy who lives across our house?" Taylor held up her hands, the effect lost because she was horizontal. "I didn't steal his lemonade stand. He wasn't even using it."
"Your Spanish teacher, Taylor. He said you slept through his test, the lunch bell, the last bell, an earthquake, and two consecutive school shootings."
"Huh. I thought I heard a hail of gunfire punching through desks," Taylor said, pulling up the bottom of her shirt and craning her neck to check for any stray embedded bullets. "Anyone get shot?"
"I saved everyone worth saving," her mother said dismissively. "Don't be too surprised if some of your teachers don't show up next week. Back to the subject at hand: Mr. Rodriguez was very concerned about your health, so I assured him there was nothing wrong with you, physically."
"Cool."
Her mother took a hard step forward, examining Taylor with her left eye.
The right eye was concealed by a black cloth patch. She'd told Taylor it was just a particularly persistent infection, but that had been over ten years ago.
"No, not cool. Unacceptable," her mother said. "I've been lax because I didn't want to push you too hard, but I should have realised that not pushing you at all would turn you into an invalid. Well, I won't be tolerating this any longer. You are to improve your grades, and you are to sign up for at least one extracurricular."
"I have a job," Taylor protested.
"Mooching off your hooligan friends and posting clips of yourself napping on CapeVine does not constitute a job."
"My career has to take off someday."
"Someday will never come, because you have no concept," her mother said, her voice cutting. "You have no punchline. Beyond the snoring, you don't even have music. Not to mention the fact that all you've done is snip a single ten-hour video into six-second segments."
"That's how I can afford to post content three to four times daily without any additional effort," Taylor said. "My two point two million followers love my reliability. And my relatability. Two point two million can't be wrong."
"Seven billion can be wrong, Taylor."
Her mother's visible eye narrowed. But it was a tired narrow, a fall of the lid. She considered Taylor's bed briefly, the cookie crumbs and ants giving her pause. Taylor dispersed the ants towards the bedposts out of courtesy, but her mother had already ensconced herself on Taylor's swivel chair.
"When I was your age, I didn't just lie around in bed all day," her mother said. "I also read books, while lying around in bed all day. I was productive even in convalescence."
"So what you're saying is if I put The Great Hatsby on my face while I sleep, you'll get off my case."
"Gatsby."
"Gesundheit."
"You have powers now, Taylor. You have the potential to do things most people can't even imagine."
"Yeah, but I also have the potential to do absolutely nothing."
Her mother regarded her with restrained disapproval. "We may need to revisit the Wards talk."
"No thanks," Taylor said. She stretched her arms, unhinging her jaw in a loud yawn. "I'm content doin' what I be doin'."
"That's what you say now," her mother said, "but sooner or later it won't be enough. Powers demand to be used, Taylor, and the Wards program provides a safe environment in which to use them. You'll receive training. Resources. Responsibilities. Most importantly, you'll be given structure."
"But I don't want structure, Mom. I like being an amoeba."
"It's a good thing then," she said, "that I want more for you than you want for yourself. I'd consider it a personal failure if you turned to supervillainy to meet your needs, or became an ultraviolent vigilante of the night taking justice into her own uncaring hands. Or worse, a pothead." Her mother shut her eyes as though privately arriving at a difficult conclusion, but Taylor knew that she had shaped the outcome of the conversation from the moment she'd walked into the room. "If I don't see improvement in your attitude and your results by the end of this year, you will be joining the Wards."
Taylor contemplated this with a growing sense of horror. "Fine. I'll try harder."
"That's all I wanted to hear." Her mother gave her a curt nod. "I expect homework to be done by dinner time."
She'd check, too.
When the mosquitoes planted on her mother's back reached the bottom of the staircase, Taylor heaved herself off the bed, walked over to the window and pushed it open. A lean, curly-haired boy hoisted himself from the outside ledge into her bedroom, two sweating jars of iced lemonade hooked to his belt loops.
"Is she gone?" he asked.
"I thought you could sense people's nervous systems," Taylor said.
"Your mom doesn't get nervous."
That made sense. Taylor plopped back onto her bed, waiting for Alec to detach the jars from his hips.
"Spoiler alert, this is godawful lemonade," Alec said, unscrewing the lid of the full jar and handing it over. "There's concentrate, and there's vaguely citrusy cod liver oil that went through a cat first. Plus I think your neighbour was using these jars for tobacco spit."
"Free food, don't care." Taylor gulped down half in one go. When she allowed herself to taste it, it was disgusting.
"Sucks to be you."
"It's not that bad."
"No, I mean I heard what your mom said," Alec said. "About you needing to work and all. Sucks."
A squadron of beetles flew out from underneath Taylor's bed, dragging a sweatshirt in their wake. They brought it up to her face and she wiped her lips on the sleeve.
"I guess I should get round to doing that," she said.
They met each other's eyes. Then they broke out into raucous laughter.
"Yo Alec, what do you know about 'alluvial deposits'?"
"Sounds dirty, so probably a lot," Alec said.
They were making their way to her gym class on the other side of the school. Usually she'd skip, or forge a sick note, but she was under a microscope at the moment and couldn't take the risk.
Back at her locker, she had thought she might as well force some studying into the already terrible walk. She'd glanced at her textbook spines and decided to start with Geography, figuring that memorising a few facts about rivers would be easier than cramming dates and writing equations. She was wrong.
"'Alluvial deposits'," Taylor read, "are 'unconsolidated detrital material that are deposited during a comparatively recent geologic time by—"
"Ew," Alec said, shuddering and covering his ears. "I told you I didn't want to learn anything while I was here."
Taylor slapped the textbook shut. "I know, that was exhausting just to read. I don't know if I can do this."
"Got a test coming up?"
"If you call a pop quiz a test." Taylor released a mournful sigh, shoving her textbook into her backpack and her hands into her cargo pants pockets. "There are pop quizzes every other week, Alec. It's legally torture. You have no idea what it's like, having these nerdy randos constantly walk up to you and demand proof that you remember god-knows-what they rambled on about god-knows-how-long-ago. Isn't it bad enough that I had to sit through it the first time?"
"Can't relate, sorry," Alec said. "Other families invest in education, but Dad poured all our resources into cocaine and prostitutes."
"Didn't you say Grue actually makes you go over plans multiple times before you carry them out?"
"Oh shit, you're right. He is a nerdy rando." Alec chuckled. "You know the casino job? He drilled us on those floorplans for weeks. And I was like, bitch, I know how to rob a casino. When I play Payday 2 I play as a girl, so you could say I literally broke the glass ceiling for casino robbing."
They arrived at the gym. Taylor squinted at the piece of paper taped to the door.
PE cancelled
Coach Siskind decapitated
"Sick," Taylor said, pleased at not having to fake doing laps today. Fake laps were the worst, even worse than real ones. "He must have gotten ahead of himself."
She grabbed Alec's hand by the wrist and sloppily high-fived it.
"Tat's not gonna be happy about this," Alec remarked, tugging his hand out of her grasp. "She was milking that dude for PRT deets."
"Coach Siskind was a spy? I knew it."
"No you didn't."
"No I didn't," she conceded. "But I hoped."
"Hey, that gives me an idea," Alec said. "Before you have a test, just steal the answers."
Taylor pressed a finger against her lips.
"I bet they're super easy to find, like locked in a drawer in the teacher's lounge. And then y—oh. Your bodyguards around?"
"Just the one today. He's probably camouflaged right now." Taylor cupped her mouth and hollered, "Hey Chameleon, don't taser Alec! At least not when I'm not there to watch!"
Alec peered at their surroundings as well, watching out for hidden agents. "Thought they were just here to babysit you, not rat you out."
"Yeah, in theory," Taylor said. "In practice, Mom makes them report everything to her. If she finds out I even talked about cheating with you, she'll find some way to lecture me about having integrity or something."
"Ew."
"I know."
They continued down the lengthy corridor, before making a left turn out of the Physical Education wing.
"Whatever. I have two months to haul my GPA up somewhere adjacent to her stupidly unreasonable standards." Taylor stopped at the noticeboard and let her eyes drift over the thick spread of pep rally schedules, audition sign-up sheets, and extracurricular recruitment posters. "Maybe I'll sign up for something first. Is there like, a coma club?"
Alec shrugged. "I don't even go here."
To avoid having to exert her fingers, Taylor directed a small group of spiders to peel away the top layer of notices. Working methodically, they uncovered a comprehensive list of extracurricular activities pinned to the cork.
All of them required so much energy and commitment. Just reading the names caused a wave of fatigue to sweep through her from head to toe.
"Alec, pick one for me," she commanded.
"Taekwondo."
"Very funny. Passive activities only."
"Hmmm…" Alec dragged his middle finger down one of the columns, only to jerk it away when a spider ventured too close. "How do you feel about… Movie Club."
Movie Club. Taylor rolled the idea around in her mind. That was just sitting around watching films every week, wasn't it? And no one would check if she was actually paying attention to the screen.
Cosying up under a blanket in a darkened, air-conditioned lounge...
Popcorn and chocolate-coated raisins and Pepsi for days…
Only the ambient noise of whatever boring bullshit classics her peers picked out lulling her to sleep…
It would eat up her Thursday afternoons, including today, but sacrifices had to be made.
"New girl," a voice boomed in her ear. "New girl, wake up."
Taylor pried her eyes open only to find everyone in the repurposed classroom looking at her expectantly. "Whuh?"
The girl who had spoken—Meredith the club president, she later learned—offered Taylor a red-lipsticked smile. Her very long face was framed by even longer dreadlocks, lending her a distinctly equine appearance. "I always like to see what the new blood bring to the table. What you choose always says so much about your personality and worldview. D'you have anything specific you'd like us to screen?"
Being aware of movies may have been an inescapable consequence of living in Los Angeles, but somehow Taylor had managed to escape it. She rummaged through her memory for what shows were currently popular enough on Betflix that her mother deigned to watch them for demographic research. "Uh… Protectorate Pals?"
"Basic," said a weedy boy down the row.
"Damien, don't gatekeep." Meredith turned back to Taylor. "Good suggestion, but we're more about films than animated series here. Any favourites? Anything you feel is culturally significant or aesthetically unique?"
Taylor continued to plumb her memory for the next five minutes. She eventually resurfaced with a title that sounded innocuous enough, if generic. "All-American Hero?"
"Yeah?" Damien snorted. "Maybe while we're at it, we can torrent La Fin Absolue du Monde or The Intransigence of Love."
These allusions meant nothing to Taylor, whose knowledge of cinema was limited to billboard ads and whatever revolutionary filmic masterpieces her mother curated but almost never watched. Even so, Taylor strove to purge these prickly tidbits of trivia from her head as swiftly as possible so as not to scuff the soft and velveteen void.
The other club members must have noticed that Damien's sarcasm was lost on her. They were summarily shunted into an awkward silence, since nobody could figure out why someone would spend five minutes staring blankly at their club president only to propose a film she knew nothing about without a trace of irony or pretension. Taylor used the time to space out.
"All-American Hero is an urban legend, Taylor." A heavyset girl wearing glasses and a hijab finally chimed in from the back of the room, interrupting Taylor's comfortable settle into total mental vacuity. Taylor recognised her from one of her classes, though she was hard-pressed to name which. "They say Alexandria herself acted in it, but no one knows what it's about."
"Alexandria's acted in a lot of shows, Safiyah," said the guy in front of her.
"Those are just guest appearances and fly-bys. In this film, she was the star. And no one knows why, but she did everything in her power to pull copies from every video store in the country."
"Well," Taylor said, "Mom has at least twenty of 'em collecting dust upstairs."
"How on earth did she get a hold of them?" Meredith asked. "They're supposed to be impossible to find. Even more impossible to afford."
"Perks of working in the PRT, maybe. I dunno, don't really care enough to ask."
"I don't buy it," Damien said, arms folded. "They're probably like, dumb home videos where guys accidentally hit themselves in the groin with baseball bats and your mom just labelled them All-American Hero for a laugh."
Taylor decided that she also didn't really care enough to prove anything. Street credibility, while not an alien concept, was in her estimation a futile pursuit. Everything that required regular upkeep was. While the club members bickered, she rested her head on her palms and closed her eyes.
As though deliberately choosing the prime moment to annoy her, the girl sitting by her nudged her awake. "Do you really have it, new girl?"
"Yeah," Taylor mumbled, blinking blearily. "Can bring it if you like."
The suddenly concrete possibility that they might actually get their hands on the film set the other club members abuzz, even if a few remained skeptical of its existence. They began speculating as to its contents, armed with half-baked forum theories and hearsay from relatives in the industry.
"I heard there's nudity in it," Damien said loudly, making pointed eye contact with Safiyah. "Not the tasteful kind either."
Safiyah glared back. "Alexandria wouldn't do porn."
"I heard," Damien said, "that she does it with everybody in the Triumvirate and then some. Onscreen."
"There is no fucking porn in All-American Hero," Safiyah snapped. "Don't be so disrespectful."
Meredith sighed. "New girl," she said, "can you confirm whether there is or isn't any adult-rated content in the movie?"
"I've never watched it," Taylor said. "Mom never let me for some reason."
Damien sniggered. "Definitely porn."
"Can you send it to me so I can vet it before we screen it next week?" Meredith asked.
"It's on a VHS tape," Taylor said, prompting a few raised eyebrows. "I could mail it to you, but you'll have to reimburse me for postage. That'll be about twenty bucks."
Meredith stared at her.
"No, fifty." Taylor realised she could make a killing here. "And two popsicles."
"Never mind. Just bring the tape next week. If there's anything too salacious, we'll fast-forward or turn it off. And just in case it doesn't work out…" Meredith cast her eyes down, her smile sliding almost imperceptibly from air stewardess to strychnine victim. "Safiyah, you can bring one of your romcoms."
The other club members in the room exploded into a cacophony of agonised groans.
"You suck, Safiyah."
"Fall into a ditch and die."
"You have such excruciatingly twee cinematic preferences and I find your screenings more of a chore than the pleasurable experience they are intended to be."
"Eat my first-kiss-loving ass, you complaining shits," Safiyah told the group, unperturbed. "If the new girl disappoints, you'll be grateful that I always have Sleepless in Sea-Cattle on hand."
Taylor was just glad when it was time to go home.
Taylor lay sprawled out on the sofa, her head on a cushion, a phone cradled under her chin. Someone was on the other line—her father, judging by the sound of his hesitant voice asking her if she was busy and if he should hang up. Taylor had lost the thread of conversation twenty minutes ago, if she'd even had it in the first place.
Luckily for her, her father was a simple man with simple passions, and he tended to circle back to the few mundane subjects that ruled his waking moments. She guessed from context clues that the current topic was his pipe dream of rebuilding the Brockton Bay ferry.
"Follow your dreams, Dad. I believe in you," she said, encouragingly. "Ferry godmothers are real. Faith, trust, and engine rust."
"What?"
"What?"
His voice cracked. "Taylor, I just need to know whether you'll make it to the funeral."
"Oh, sure. Send me a card or something."
The telephone base was too far away, so she just set the handset on the floor.
A warm, savoury aroma wafted out from the kitchen across the living room. Taylor glanced over her shoulder and saw her mother working industriously to turn a saucepan of potatoes into a mash. A pot of the oxtail stew left over from yesterday sat simmering on the stove.
"Whoa, you're actually home."
Her mother didn't look up from her mashing, which she was doing with a gloved fist. "And what exactly are you implying by that note of surprise?"
"Nothing."
"Are you perhaps implying," her mother said, "that you are a latchkey child who typically spends her days languishing in the absence of a maternal role model, and that my appearance at dinnertime is a rare occurrence?"
"Your words, not mine," Taylor said gamely. "I'm guessing the office wasn't too busy today."
"It's always busy." Her mother snapped off her glove for emphasis. "I simply felt it necessary to check up on you, and reprioritised."
As her mother set the table, Taylor slouched over to better assess her mood. She despised getting up, but her mother wouldn't take too kindly to her planting bugs on the bare skin of her face without a good reason.
Her mother never looked tired or stressed out despite seeming to work all hours of every single day. Her hair stayed shiny and silky, and she didn't get zits or wrinkles, and her physique stayed athletic slim beneath her tailored business suits. Even now, after over forty straight hours managing crisis after crisis, the expression on her face was stern and focused.
There was only a glimmer of something else there, and Taylor knew she was the only one who could see it, because it was both caused by and designed for her.
Taylor sensed that her mother sometimes felt sparks of guilt for not being around, for not being that perfect loving mom dreamed up by the parenting manuals, there to hold Taylor's hand and experience every childhood and adolescent milestone with her. It was probably this guilt that resulted in her popping in and out of the house just to say hello to her daughter, crafting the illusion she had been around all day and that Taylor was the one to blame for not reaching out. She never descended to the ineffectual fluttering and fussing that Taylor observed other parents doing, but she wasn't immune to bursts of affection intended to make up for some perceived lost time. Such moments were intense yet strangely remote—an unexpected gift, a stolen fond glance, a hand poised to smooth Taylor's unruly curls.
This dinner was not one of those moments. This was a tactical check-in. Chameleon must have squealed. "This is about me cheating, isn't it?"
Her mother looked up and fixed her with a deceptively calm stare, the kind that levelled subordinates to the ground. "That depends. Have you been cheating, Taylor?"
"Nope. My friend brought it up and I soundly rebuffed him, as is right and honest." Taylor was not a subordinate. Spiders climbed the table's legs, bearing a spindle of silk thread with which to lasso her fork and spoon. "Anyway, you don't have to worry about that. I have way too many morals, yada yada, integrity."
"Spiders off the table," her mother said, sharp.
Damn it. Taylor had hoped she wouldn't notice. The spiders relinquished her utensils and scuttled off.
"Roaches too."
The cockroaches hiding beneath the corners of her placemat crawled out.
"Taylor."
The houseflies stationed on the rim of her water glass deserted their posts. Her mother could be so squeamish. Taylor accommodated her desire for bug-free meals, but it seriously put a damper on her ability to eat without using her hands. The aversion may have stemmed from Taylor's last birthday party, during which Taylor accidentally bit the head off a beetle in front of all the guests.
In my defense, she'd said, they're very similar to macarons.
That doesn't explain why you ate five, Mom had argued.
Today, she wouldn't make a big deal out of it. She mumbled grace without complaint although neither of them was religious—her mother believed less in God than she did in the performance of rituals that appeased her own parents, even when they weren't around. Taylor waited for her to remove the lids of the steaming pots. Then, sadly bereft of external eight-legged aid, she helped herself to the creamy mashed potatoes and scooped free-floating hunks of rich and gelatinous oxtail meat onto her plate. Her mother could have the joints.
"I've arranged for your Uncle Kurt and Aunt Contessa to visit," her mother said, looking none too pleased at Taylor's table manners but refraining from commentary. She served herself in a more measured fashion. "Please clear your schedule for next weekend."
"Mmf. Done." Taylor shovelled a spoonful of mashed potatoes into her maw. Gravy splattered the tabletop.
"How was school today?"
Tedious like this conversation, Taylor thought, swallowing her mouthful. "Wasn't bad. No school shootings that I was aware of. Gym teacher lost his head. Oh yeah, and I joined the Movie Club. We haven't watched anything yet though."
"That…" Her mother paused. "… isn't what I had in mind when I asked you to take up an afterschool activity. But I suppose it's a start."
"Anything to not be drafted into kiddie cape camp," Taylor said.
Her mother suddenly became quiet, and not just because she was eating. "I do of course expect you to write an essay on every movie you watch," she said.
Taylor's eyes swivelled up to meet her mother's inscrutable gaze. "What?"
"With academic rigour commensurate to your grade level," her mother added wryly, "so no first grade book reports, please."
Taylor choked on an uneasy laugh. "No way. Extra homework wasn't part of the deal."
Her mother ignored her, gaily shredding a chunk of meat into bite-size slivers with her fork. "Two thousand words minimum, eleven point TNR, one inch margin, double-spaced, paginated. You may use MLA or Chicago for citations—I'm not picky. You may not use some unholy blend of the two, however. This will be graded."
"I have no idea what any of those words mean. Especially the ones that are just letters. Mom, you can't do this."
"Really? Because it looks like I just did."
"Mom. I can't write two thousand words a week on top of all my other work, and hobbies, and, and—what even is there to say about movies? You're not supposed to write about them. That's why they don't have words. They're not literature."
"Oh," her mother said casually, "would you prefer to write about literature? I can be flexible."
With that, her mother speared the last oxtail joint with precision and dropped it onto her own mound of mashed potatoes. Taylor watched her chew. For the first time in her life she felt her heart stir inside her chest, like an undersea mollusc awakening sluggishly from slumber.
Upstairs in the spare study, bugs were already hunting down a dusty VHS tape.
Random idea, All-American Hero is a compilation of funny moments of the Triumvirate made by the other members of Cauldron that was published as a prank, but Alexandria is too nostalgic of Hero to destroy them.
The members of the Movie Club gathered in front of the television, most of them bored and bewildered to the point of distraction.
Onscreen, an obscenely obese manatee swallowed another diver. It was more accurate to describe him as half-man, half-manatee, since he had been found by scientists to be fully sapient as well as possessed of numerous highly marketable humanoid features. Pre-gorging, he was sixty percent abs by volume, and his only claim to being part sea cow was perpetually clammy grey skin and early-CGI flippers for arms.
"How is this a romcom?" asked a guy in a trucker cap named Asher. He made no attempt to keep his volume down. "There is neither romance nor comedy in it. There is only suicide."
"It's not suicide to risk everything for what truly matters," Safiyah hissed. "Screw you, haters. Sleepless in Sea-Cattle is iconic. Taylor, you appreciate it, right?"
She elbowed Taylor, whose eyes opened in time to catch the protagonist nuzzling the manatee's moist snout as he poked his head out of the water.
"Gimme a recap," Taylor said, her eyes drooping closed again. "Plot's kind of hard to follow."
"The marine biologist's abusive husband got swallowed by the manatee-man," Safiyah explained. "So they keep sending divers to rescue him, but only she knows how to communicate with the manatee-man through her heart's song. The touching tale of a love that transcends language and physical barriers."
"I got that," Asher said. "But like, why did she flood her whole entire house so that she could consummate with Manatee Dude in front of her husband? I just think that was really insensitive to those of us who put a lot of effort not only into not being cuckolded by genetically improbable aquatic mammals, but also into drywall maintenance."
"So done with this." Damien crawled over to the remote. He snatched it up and turned off the television set, to furious booing from Safiyah and sighs of relief from everyone else. "Y'all talk way too much during movies. It's annoying."
"Well, what do you want to do then?" Safiyah retorted.
"Fuck it, let's watch All-American Hero," he said. He jerked his head towards Taylor, now dozing on a beanbag while the VHS tape lay at her feet. "I don't even know why we waited this long when the new girl ponied up."
The club members murmured amongst themselves. They'd held off for a reason.
"Are you sure we should?" Safiyah asked doubtfully, on the others' behalf. "I mean, what if it's a cursed film?"
"We've watched cursed films before and nothing happened," someone said.
"Remember how the Slaughterhouse Nine visited my dreams after we saw The Ninth House on the Left? And then my parakeet had a stroke?"
"That time was because you said 'Jack Slash' in the mirror three times at midnight. It had nothing to do with the movie."
"Everybody, please stop," Meredith said, and they stopped. "Fear not, for it isn't cursed. I watched the first scene before you came in, and I can confirm that it's nothing but a cheesy cape flick. A classic Saturday morning cartoon, but live-action."
"Then why was it recalled?"
"Who knows what set off the prudes in the '90s? Let's all just have a good laugh."
That seemed to settle things. Meredith got up and inserted the tape into the old VHS player. Damien reached for the remote, accidentally jostling a freshman sitting close by. "Sorr—wait, who even are you?"
The girl stared back owlishly, her hand taking unceasing dictation in a notebook. Her other hand moved to tug Taylor's shirt, gently at first, then violently. Taylor cracked an eye open.
"Ignore her. She's just transcribing everything you're saying," Taylor said, sinking deeper into the beanbag. She gestured languidly at the screen. "Just carry on talking the way you do."
The floor, the walls, the ceiling—everything was on the verge of collapse, if not collapsing already. But the four greatest superheroes in the world did not falter in the face of such trivialities. The only person who could truly be harmed was their tinker, but he did not falter either, because he lacked any sense of self-preservation. Many have theorised that that was his real superpower, for it allowed him to work under all stressful conditions up to and including imploding supervillain lairs.
"Give it up!" Legend shouted, bracing the crumbling ceiling above Hero. "Your henchmen can't reach you from the bottom of the piranha pool, and Hero has disabled all your contingencies. We've foiled your evil plan. You're done in this town, Lieutenant Lizard!"
"I've been promoted. It's Captain Lizard now," the supervillain said, his voice a sibilant rasp. A moment later, his smirk curdled into a grimace. "No, never mind. I dislike how it doesn't alliterate."
Recently lasered glass lay in perfectly circular pieces around the control booth. Hero was wedged in a corner, sweating, furiously rewiring circuits and flipping dials and mashing buttons in sequence. Every now and then, he would consult a chart covered in technical arcana, derive some meaning from the scribbles, and go back to hacking into the reactor's mainframe.
Eidolon just sort of hovered around awkwardly, unsure of what to do with his molten plasma hands or why this specific power had even kicked in, but not quite ready to extinguish them. His mask glowed with the intensity of a strip of LED lights that had been painstakingly hidden along the borders.
"It doesn't have to be this way," Legend said. "Come quietly and we'll help you make things right with your estranged son!"
"The only way things can be made right is if the world is recreated in my image."
The villain tried to make his getaway, crawling towards the exit on his elbows and knees with his gear strapped to his back.
But someone was waiting in the doorway. Alexandria towered over him, mirroring his fast-fading smirk. She gripped him by the throat and lifted him up like he weighed nothing, then strode forward and ground him into the nearest pillar. The obsidian cracked upon contact, and he groaned both in pain and at the crunch of his gear. "ETA, Hero?"
Hero popped his head out from under the control panel indignantly. "I haven't even betrayed you yet!"
"How long until the reactor is disabled."
"Oh. Four seconds."
"Foolish heroes," the villain choked out between struggling. A wide smile stretched his reptilian face, fanged and gloating. "You know not what hell you have unleashed."
Alexandria had time to raise an eyebrow before the reactor blew up, sending her and her three teammates flying in opposite directions. The world was enveloped in blinding light.
❖ ❖ ❖
Alexandria cut a crisp figure on the edge of the cliff, like a black gnomon pitched upward against the eternal sun. She was perfectly motionless except for her cape rippling in the breeze. From the back she looked like she was gazing at the horizon, but the observant viewer would notice that her head was tilted slightly downwards. The omniscient viewer would know that her eyes were closed in troubled meditation.
"You've been out here for a while," came a voice from the jungle behind her.
It was Eidolon, returning from another hunt just in time for sunset—rather, a parody of sunset followed by a parody of dusk, crafted by someone who had only read about times of day in picture books. The sun never went down and the moon might as well have been cut out of crepe paper for all it illuminated. Once a day, a false night descended from the canopy, blanketing the underbrush in roiling darkness.
It became impossible to find food and shelter then, and even the great crepuscular and nocturnal beasts that roamed the land had trouble locating prey unless they happened to possess enhanced senses or that specific retinal adaptation to low light. Most of them tended to have adaptations like 'pores that secrete acidic slime' and 'lamprey-like vortex of needle fangs' and 'seeds that impregnate you when you eat them'. Legend had had a rather protracted and distressing run-in with that last one, but by lucky happenstance Hero had discovered that a mutant porcupine quill made a good coat hanger in a pinch.
The pickings were slim as usual. Eidolon held out a branch, offering up three pitiful slivers of cooked snail flesh on charred bark. At least the snails were normal, if one didn't inspect the antennae too closely.
"As the smart one of this team, I've come to a decision," Alexandria said. She opened her eyes but did not look at him or accept a dicksnail. "We're going to eat Hero."
Eidolon was silent. Their two teammates emerged from the thicket, absorbed in conversation.
"It's an idea in progress," she said quietly. "Don't tell him yet. I want to broach it with the others first."
Eidolon pivoted to face Hero and activated a voice amplification power. "Hero!"
"What?" he yelled back.
"Alexandria says she wants to eat you!"
"Eidolon," Alexandria said.
"Keeping secrets is hard," he grunted.
"Whoa there, Lexy," Hero said, approaching them. "You know I love you, but I don't ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■. And no offense, Eids, but you're not my type."
"What is your type?" Legend asked. "Just wondering."
Hero mulled over the question.
"Hot," he said finally.
"Please don't improvise," Legend said.
"They're professionals, they'll edit it out. Anyway, my type is straight female women." Hero flashed the viewer a wink and a rakishly handsome grin, before turning back to Alexandria. "What were you saying about my butt?"
"Now is not the time for farcical misunderstandings," Alexandria said. "Let me rephrase: we're Donner Partying it up in this district."
Legend made a skeptical noise. "Sounds like a last resort."
"Now is the time for last resorts. Think about it logically. Nobody knows where we are, least of all us. There is an impenetrable dome over our heads, preventing us from simply flying away. We've been stranded here with rapidly diminishing abilities for an unknown period of time, subsisting mainly on stoat and turtle eggs."
Hero laughed. "Silly Lexy," he said. "Stoats don't lay eggs."
"This just isn't a sustainable situation," Alexandria went on. "Look at us. If Eidolon weren't using the vestiges of his power to project the illusion of a six-pack, we would be able to see his ribs."
"It's a myth that I do that," Eidolon said, turning to the camera.
"We're wasting away in the expectation that someone is coming for us. It's time we face the facts. No one is coming for us, and even if they are, we may not be alive to take advantage of it. But if we do this the intelligent way, make a sacrifice in exchange for survival and rationing out our supplies, we buy ourselves time to figure a way out of this mess. This is the utilitarian solution. I may be a hero like you, but I am also willing to be something of an anti-hero making the difficult choices you aren't willing to even consider."
"But why me?" Hero asked. "Eids still has more calories. We'll probably all get mad cow, though."
"Alexandria, the smart one of the team, has a point," Eidolon said. "The rest of us are still mostly invulnerable to physical trauma. With you, all we'd have to do is crack open that armoured shell like an oyster and scoop all the good meat out."
Hero folded his arms. "Implying I have bad meat?"
"Getting worse every second."
"You have all officially gotten on my last nerve," Alexandria said. She glanced to her right and lowered her visor. "Except you, Legend. You're grandfathered in."
"What did I do," Legend said.
"No, no, I'm with you," Eidolon said gruffly, laying an arm across Hero's shoulder. "Look, Hero, you're the heart of the team."
"Aw. Thanks, man."
"Is it so hard to also be the liver, kidney, breast, tongue, ribs, haunches, eyeballs, brain, and large intestine?"
Hero wrested Eidolon's arm off of him. "You're going to eat my tongue? Gross."
"Not too thrilled about it either, but waste not, want not."
Legend interposed himself between them. "Guys, this is madness. I know we're desperate. I know we're hungry. I know the odds are high that we'll die out here. But we've been through so much and come out all the stronger for it. And most importantly, we've come out of it together. Are we seriously considering discarding all our morals and our friendship just so we can have a few substantial meals?"
"Yes," Alexandria said.
"That was my impression as well," David said.
Hero shrugged. "Guess that's where things are at."
Legend sputtered. "Well—we shouldn't be!"
"Ledge, the real question is why are you horning in on my role as heart of the team?" Hero shook his head. "Isn't it enough that you're already the eye candy of the team?"
"That is actually also me," Alexandria said in a voice that brooked no debate. "Legend is the token buzzkill."
"Checks out."
Legend's mouth flattened into a line. "Why are you so okay with having your body desecrated?"
"Because that's just a typical Tuesday night in my household, hey-o," Hero said, cocking fingerguns. "But I'm not like, actually okay with it."
Alexandria focused all her attention on him, softening. "Aren't you? You seem calm about it."
"I don't have to be okay with things to do them, especially if they're the right thing. And I know it's the right thing to help you guys get home," he said. "Limbs can be regrown and organs can be replaced, but there's no substitute for my best friends."
One good thing that came out of the power loss was that Alexandria could hug Hero as tightly as she wanted without crushing his spine. Legend's too, now that he was here. Eidolon just sort of stood around awkwardly, staring at his hands and willing them to become plasma again so that he would have an excuse not to join in. They dragged him into the fray anyway.
Alexandria released Hero and took a step back. "We'll explore other avenues, but—"
Then a giant two-headed jaguar leapt out of the bushes, seized Hero in its jaws, and bounded off into the jungle.
❖ ❖ ❖
A campfire blazed in the middle of the clearing. Flames distorted the surrounding air as they rose, curling, into the artificial night sky. The three teammates sat around the fire, with dinged-up armour and artfully arranged scratches and smears on their faces that didn't actually besmirch their features at all. Alexandria sat on a log considerably further away from the fire, facing the forest.
Legend was the first to speak. "I already miss him. So much."
"I'm just sad we could have been eating mutant jaguar this whole time," Eidolon said. With a greasy skewer, he prodded the slices of medium-rare flesh he'd spread over a branch. "Instead we're stuck with this stringy bull■ ■ ■ ■."
"Sometimes I think I'm the only one who even tries to stay on-script," Legend said, earning an offended look from Alexandria.
"They'll edit it out." Eidolon coughed a few times into his fist, and when he spoke again his voice had fallen a few octaves. "We could have saved him. If we'd only moved faster…"
"There was no way, in our weakened state," Legend said. "We couldn't have matched its speed, and with how powerful its jaws were, it wasn't safe to extract him."
"But how can we call ourselves heroes, if we can't even protect one of our own?"
Eidolon's stoic front cracked at the word 'protect'. He hunched over, his shoulders heaving a little as he not-so-covertly smacked the back of an upside-down ketchup bottle to get the sauce out. A thick red gob of it oozed onto his branch.
Legend stared at it. His eyes narrowed. But he swallowed whatever he was going to say, and gingerly reached over to pat his teammate's back. "Maybe giving up your life for the greater good is part of being a true hero. We can only make the best of tragedy."
"I'm so sorry, Hero," Alexandria whispered to her kebab. She twirled it slowly, a single tear trailing down her cheek. "I'll never be able to forget you."
And the black closed in.
♩♪♫♬
WE STARTED SINGIN' BYE, BYE MISTER AMERICAN PIE/DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE BUT THE LEVEE WAS DRY, the television blared over the credits.
Meredith turned the television off, plunging the classroom into gloom. She set the remote on the floor and after a thought, nudged it towards Damien with her foot before drawing her leg back tight against her chest.
"You told us," Safiyah said, "that it wasn't cursed."
There was no response from the president or the other club members, only soft snoring from a beanbag.
Around noon that Saturday, Taylor wandered downstairs to find her mother feeding her essay into a shredder at the dining table.
"Morning, Mom," she said, but her mother must not have heard her over the noise.
Bugs went about opening cabinets and fetching her sustenance. Her mother had destroyed her elaborate silk system for getting herself breakfast after one too many clutches of spider eggs (and more than one spider) got scrambled along with the regular eggs, so she made do with cereal.
A team of praying mantises spread out over the rim, readied their scythes and started picking all the marshmallows out into a separate bowl.
The whirring petered out. Her mother didn't move, but she was looked at Taylor expectantly, her hand resting on top of the machine.
"You know, I worked moderately hard on that," Taylor said, muffled by the marshmallows. "Not very hard? But moderately."
"Taylor, your bibliography was two lines long."
"Cite shit, get crit."
"To your credit, your analysis wasn't complete gibberish," her mother said, flicking at the plastic container of essay confetti. "Only mostly. But I found it difficult to believe that you consulted little to no relevant literature while writing your more coherent expository paragraphs. So I ran the paper through plagiarism detection software."
"Man, they're making those programs bulky these days." Taylor nodded at the shredder.
"Imagine my lack of surprise," her mother said, "when it revealed that over a third of the text was copy-pasted wholesale from unsourced PHO Wiki articles. You even failed to remove the banner begging for donations."
"That was left in on purpose."
Her mother slowly canted forward on her elbows. Her hard eyes locked onto Taylor's. "Was the comments section debating whether Hero with prep time would beat bloodlusted Alexandria in a sealed room 'left in on purpose'?"
"Okay… I'm picking up on some rancid vibes?" Taylor fried her voice to imitate her mother's Valley Girl drawl. "At least the rest was like, original? Credit where credit's due?"
"I can distinguish between your writing style and that of a freshman you snatched at random from a hallway and bribed with a free smoothie coupon."
"What?" Taylor cursed in her regular New England accent. "But I copied exactly what she wrote with my own two hands!"
There was a long silence as her mother sat down and poured herself another cup of looseleaf oolong tea from a clear teapot.
"And it was a smoothie coupon book," Taylor said. She shrugged a shoulder. "That I got someone else to make."
"Taylor, the point of this assignment was not to evaluate how well you could execute a pyramid scheme."
"Well, duh. You already know the answer is 'flawlessly'."
The light furrow of her mother's brow meant that Taylor was going to get it one way or another. The ultimatum loomed large.
"The next essay will be better," Taylor promised. "I guess. Maybe. Probably not."
"Hardly matters now. I'm cancelling the assignment." Her mother sipped her tea. "The Movie Club disbanded."
Taylor processed this, and was surprised to find herself disappointed. Not very disappointed, but moderately. "Huh. Why?"
Rebecca swung open the door to the principal's office, ignoring the protests of the harried secretary outside.
"Ms. Costa-Brown, I didn't expect to see you back so soon," Principal Walsh said, standing up behind her desk. "On a Saturday."
"I'm a busy woman, Mrs. Walsh. I believe I've made that abundantly clear." Rebecca walked up and pulled a seat for herself. "I don't enjoy coming down here for anything less than an emergency."
"What emergency brings you here this morning?"
"My daughter recently joined the Movie Club," Rebecca said.
"I saw," Principal Walsh said, "and then I changed my prescription, because clearly my eyes were deceiving me."
She smiled, but Rebecca did not. Rebecca read her within blinks: curiosity, uncertainty, residual torpor from breakfast, a flash of confused attraction (understandable), slight nervousness at interacting with a parent that was intentionally being pushed aside. No awe. No fear, none specific to Rebecca. Usually that absence brought her a measure of comfort, that people still saw her as human and respected her regardless of her position.
Now it just irritated her, because it was in the way.
"She seems to be quite happy in it."
"You seem to be mistaking comfort for happiness," Rebecca said. "Taylor could be happy in a landfill if provided a pillow."
"You seem unhappy," the principal observed. "Why?"
Rebecca reached into her handbag, and took out the DVD case she had picked up from the classroom where the Movie Club convened. She pointed at the glossy red sticker on the corner of the cover. The one with the big, bold 'R'.
"I see… well, Sleepless in Sea-Cattle is iconic. When I was a little girl and my parents were throwing the dishes again, I'd race my twin brother to Granny's trailer, and we would watch it on repeat all night long." Principal Walsh adjusted her spectacles, and behind them, her pale green eyes took on a wistful gleam. "I later found out he was deliberately letting the dog out and telling Mum and Da that the other did it, just so they would fight and we could be blessed with these moments. Extraordinary."
"Your nostalgia for domestic violence and childhood psychopathy is moving, but immaterial." She was bitterly conscious of the irony. For all her undisguised disdain for sentimentality, she had only kept those tapes because they had Hero's voice and visage on them. "My daughter is only sixteen, and she is not the youngest member of the Movie Club."
"I see," the principal said again, and nothing else.
"What is the obstacle here?"
The principal hemmed and hawed for a bit, then admitted, "I just don't think it would be fair to deprive these kids of the same escape. Even if it does stray a ways away from the law."
"I'm afraid it's not up to you to decide."
"Ms. Costa-Brown, they're teenagers." The principal gave her a patronising smile. "There's no need to nanny them. Surely there were shows your parents let you watch when you were a child that contained scenes a teensy bit more graphic than they should've been. Perhaps even now, there are things you feel you shouldn't be watching but watch anyway." She winked.
What is this woman going on about, Rebecca wondered. And where the hell does she get off winking at me.
It wasn't that she completely disagreed. There were few good reasons to censor fiction; censorship should be reserved for the truth. People like herself and Doctor Mother and Contessa could have information. Other people needed stories. But what did one do when the lines were blurred? The premise of having to cannibalise a roadkill teammate had seemed like peak drama in 1994—now, given what had happened before they could salvage his body… it was in such poor taste.
The important thing was to not act any differently. To give Taylor no clue that reading the title of the essay—kudos to her for remembering to include one—had been like a slap in the face. Rebecca had not felt a slap in the face since she was about thirteen, but she imagined it hurt at least as much having that entire film flit through her mind from opening credits to ending in the space of seconds.
Her own fault, for springing the assignment on Taylor on such short notice while not thinking to secret the tapes away somewhere more secure in the meantime. It was fortunate that Taylor was the way she was, because Rebecca doubted she had paid a whit of attention to the contents of her selection. She would go over the rest of the essay later with a red pen and only provide general feedback. There were opportunities to teach her daughter about proper analysis, about critical dissection of audiovisual elements and semiotics and themes and narrative structure. But this was not the film for that.
It also wasn't the time to go poking at ancient aches from ancient history, especially that which she and the others had all firmly and unequivocally agreed had been outside their control. "The reason I am bringing this up at all is to call your attention to the wildly inappropriate material that your students have access to, so that we may work together to prevent it from causing legal issues. Moral issues as well, but you don't seem to care as much about that."
Principal Walsh's eyebrows rose. "Legal issues?"
"Are you aware," Rebecca asked, "which film your students screened last Thursday?"
"All-American Hero? Why, yes, I did sit in. Shame I missed the first half, but it was… unique enough that I asked the club to host additional screenings for all interested students." Principal Walsh leaned back and steepled her hands thoughtfully. "I found the actress who played Alexandria very s—"
Her mother refilled her cup. "We can only speculate as to the reasons behind its demise. But a society like that, founded on rotten tomatoes and unearned elitism? It was bound to buckle beneath its own facade eventually."
"The club president said it was like, fifty years old," Taylor said. "Almost as old as the school."
"Of course she appealed to legacy," her mother said. "Elitists always do. These in-groups function only as a space for a self-chosen elect to smugly congratulate each other on their sophisticated taste in media, which just so happens to comprise nothing but identically bland, identically tawdry attempts at catering to the washed-up curmudgeons of the industry who lost their ability to discern paella from porridge decades ago. As though critical acclaim is any reliable indicator of quality. The Maggie Holt movies are never going to be considered prestige cinema, never not going to be snubbed at every awards show, and yet they have some of the most riveting writing and direction in film history. Does any so-called Schmoovie Club ever screen The Last Burden of the Goblin Queen? No. That would challenge their fragile sense of identity among their bougie peers, their only anchor in an increasingly entropic world. Somehow, a good clean modern supernatural adventure with a dash of intrigue has no place in this cold, dark sea of biographical melodramas and romantic historical epics."
Taylor paused in her marshmallow-devouring. Something was off. "Mom," she said, "did you murder the Movie Club?"
Instead of answering, her mother spent the next few minutes slowly but noisily drinking the rest of her tea, before getting up to rinse her cup at the kitchen sink.
Taylor watched her go, and shrugged. As long as she didn't have to write any more essays, everything was just dandy. She was about to get up and head upstairs to take a nap, when a few of her roaming flies brushed against something unexpected in the living room. She leaned over her chair to look.
A bespectacled blonde man wearing only a light blue dress shirt with a pocket protector was standing by the sofa. She both didn't understand and completely understood why she hadn't noticed him before—he was in plain sight, yet obligingly invisible, like a fellow elevator passenger. Unlike a fellow elevator passenger, he didn't flinch at the insects converging on his body.
Master/Stranger protocols would come in handy right about now. If only she remembered them.
Oh well. Maybe Mom does. "How long has that guy been here?" Taylor asked.
"Long enough," the man said, without skipping a beat or even looking at her through the cloud of bugs orbiting his head. "I was just admiring your DVD collection, Rebecca." He held up the copy of Sleepless in Sea-Cattle that had been resting on the coffee table. "Now this is iconic."
Her mother didn't acknowledge him at all, instead sweeping across the kitchen to grab the box of cereal off the counter. She brandished the packet at Taylor's face.
"The point of the essay assignment," she said, "was to help you understand that not everything will just fall into your lap. You are supposed to endure the stale sawdust flavour of the wheat flakes, suffer the inevitable agony of their jagged edges raking down your throat. Only then may you be rewarded with the sweet rubbery victory of marshmallow. But even then, not always." She crushed the packet in her fist. "In life the ratio of cereal to marshmallows is woefully unbalanced."
A beetle picked up a marshmallow that had fallen into Taylor's lap and flew it up to her open mouth. "You know you're supposed to chew food before swallowing it, right?" she said, demonstrating just that. "And you can put milk in it."
"Milk is but a distraction, from both the pain and my metaphor," her mother said. "We were going to do something fun today, but I changed my mind."
She set the packet of cereal aside, and the man approached the kitchen.
"It's nice to see you again, Taylor," he said, walking up to her and extending a hand. "The last time we met, you were barely up to my knee."
"Yeah, okay," she said. "Who are you?"
"Uncle Kurt is here to teach you the value of hard work. He is the foremost freelance banker in the world, as well as a longtime colleague whom I hold in fairly high esteem," her mother said. "And Aunt Contessa is here, too."
As though summoned, a white rectangle opened up next to the refrigerator and a dark-haired, fair-skinned woman in full suit and tie appeared in it. She tossed her fedora into the air as she emerged, and it landed neatly on one of the ears of Taylor's chair.
Taylor only had vague memories of this woman's infrequent visits throughout her life, and it seemed Aunt Contessa deemed her just as forgettable; she spared Taylor the briefest of glances before walking up to stare intently at her mother's cheekbone. Something about the utter blankness of her expression paired with the unwavering gaze conjured in Taylor's mind a person who thought purely in punctuation. Taylor could almost visualise the bubble-font question mark suspended over Aunt Contessa's head.
Her mother took a single step to the side, away from her.
Taylor waited a few seconds before she devolved into pleading. "Can I please use the portals too? Please, please, please, please, please, please lease, please, please, please, please? Please, please, please, please, please, please. Pleeeeeeeaase, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, pleeeease. Please, please, please, please, please, please please, please, please, please, please, please? Please, please, please, please, please, please?"
"No," her mother said.
Taylor unclasped her hands, pouting.
Uncle Kurt's own hand returned to his side untouched. He looked at the fedora hanging from the chair. "Will you not be joining us? I was under the impression that this was a family bonding activity."
"Contessa and I have important affairs of state to attend to," her mother said.
"Ah. Well. Things do come up." Uncle Kurt cleared his throat and nodded stiffly at Taylor. "I look forward to showing you what I know."
Wait. Banking… money… numbers…
"Math?" Taylor recoiled, shaking her head. "No, no math. My doctor forbade it. You can't make me think."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Uncle Kurt said. "That would go against the Constitution your own mother swore to protect. We're merely embarking on a little excursion."
"Do you need a grenade launcher?" her mother asked, casting a critical eye over his person. "I have spare AT-4s in the garage."
"I brought my own. Door, artillery." A small white rectangle opened up behind him at shoulder-height. "As for you, Taylor…"
He reached through the portal to retrieve an assault rifle. He presented it to Taylor, but before she could take it her mother stepped in between them. Her hand fell firmly over the muzzle of the rifle and lowered it.
"Taylor has not been trained in gun safety and marksmanship, nor can she be trusted with firearms at all."
Uncle Kurt started, "I'm certain I can—"
"A gentle reminder that over the years I have made a keen study of ligaments, with special focus on the variety of exceedingly painful ways to separate them from the articular extremities of bones. The knowledge is theoretical now, but if anything were to happen to my daughter, I would be forced to find practical applications."
Uncle Kurt pushed the rifle back through the portal. "Duly noted," he said, and turned to Taylor. "We'll be stopping by a few rainforests to pick up your spiders and wasps and whatnot. The rest is a surprise, but pack heavy and venomous."
Taylor's brain—which by some medical miracle happened to be all hind—lit up and guttered a little at the easy opportunity to expand her army of tiny serfs. She could feel the buzzing beyond the door. "Can I get crabs?"
"If you foresee needing them," Uncle Kurt said, "then I don't see why not."
He walked through the portal and motioned for her to join him. As she passed over the threshold, she heard a noise and felt vibrations ripple through some of the termites she'd left behind. She turned her head.
Behind her, her mother had slammed her aunt against the far display cabinet hard enough to rattle picture frames. She tightened a now flushed Aunt Contessa's torn-off tie around her wrists, before spinning her around and backhanding her onto the coffee table.
Despite not looking very injured, Aunt Contessa didn't rise, only gazing up at her mother with hooded eyes and slightly parted lips. A blinking mental exclamation point dissolved into ellipses, soon to start trailing off into a tilde. Her mother stalked over and gripped her thighs.
"Oh no," Taylor said, looking back and forth between the living room and the world outside the portal. The full weight of her punishment finally crystallised, dropping on her like an anvil. "Oh god, oh fuck."
Uncle Kurt glanced at her quizzically.
Taylor fell to her knees and flung her head back in despair. "I have to go outside?"
[Contains audio, adjust your volume settings so that you won't be done a spook]
[Legend gets no credit because I forgot and he's unimportant anyway]
That whole all-american hero scene was just fantastic. I'm guessing the reason alexandria deosn't like it is perhaps some bitter feelings over hero's death by a certain psycho cat-cannibal? I was really not expecting the video at the end.
Name possibilities bobbed up in Taylor's head as she tried out new configurations of crustaceans. Despite Uncle Kurt's unlimited access to fast travel, he'd insisted that they proceed to their destination on foot. Taylor suspected her mother was responsible for this blatant and unjust handicap, but his logic was that their quarry needed to be approached from a distance. She didn't see why they had to sneak up on a bunch of rocks.
At least the weather was chilly. She had so few opportunities to wear her hoodie in the LA heat. Her mother had set air-conditioning restrictions in the house, even though there was an air-conditioner in every room and it wasn't like they were hard up for cash. She'd told Taylor to go to the beach and suffer like a normal Californian.
Easy for her to say. She hung out in a cushy office all day.
Uncle Kurt walked up from where he'd been surveying the barren landscape. His shoe grazed one of the crab's claws. He looked down at it.
"Don't touch Crabitha," Taylor said. "She's a load-bearing crab."
"Are you… building some sort of crabmobile so that you won't have to walk?"
"Crabmobile. I like that."
Taylor mounted her latest design. The crabs collapsed in a pile before she could get comfortable. She sighed.
"You're too heavy," Uncle Kurt said, "and they're packed too densely. There's no room for their legs to move."
She grunted acknowledgement, directing her spiders to wrap the bottom crabs in silk to reinforce the base.
"You're putting a great deal more effort into assembling this than I've come to expect from you."
"Not really. It's just a little something I like to call 'conservation of energy'."
"The total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant and cannot be created or destroyed," he said. "The first law of thermodynamics."
"Huh? No, none of that nerd shit. Conservation of energy boils down to this: You do one big thing, and you don't have to do a million little things."
"Such as walking."
"Exactly," Taylor said. "Conversely, you don't bother with stuff that has no consequences like doing homework and taking out the trash, thus conserving your energy for actually important stuff like… like…"
"Saving lives," Uncle Kurt prompted.
"That's not it."
"Taxes."
"It'll come to me."
The crabs collapsed again.
"Are you kidding me? You have one job! Stay! Up! And crawl!" She slapped the shell of a Dungeness crab. "This bad boy can hold so many structural weaknesses!"
She showered them in verbal abuse for the next few minutes before Uncle Kurt cut in.
"I could be wrong, but I don't think that berating your would-be steeds for your own failings as an engineer is likely to yield much fruit."
"True. It doesn't work on me either," Taylor said. "Well, do you know what will? I just don't understand why a bunch of crabs can't handle one skinny girl. They have the advantage."
"It's a matter of leverage and force distribution. Allow me."
Taylor stepped back and Uncle Kurt took over the construction. Finally, every crab was working together.
The sky had assumed the washcloth texture of dreams, the road had given way to violet prairie grass, and still they had not encountered anything out of the ordinary enough to brutally assault and maim.
Uncle Kurt ambled along next to her at a steady pace, carrying the grenade launcher on his back. It looked like it weighed the same as she did, but he showed no signs of flagging.
He didn't show much of anything, her uncle. For the most part, she appreciated the absence of idle chatter and all the tiresome niceties it obligated, viz. exhibiting a pulse. But she couldn't nap and control her swarm at the same time. Even if the crabs continued in the same direction while she slept, they were crawling sideways and not experts at avoiding obstacles without her input. She had to find ways to distract herself.
"Can you at least tell me what we're looking for?" She pinched her uncle's neck with a vinegaroon in the hopes of dragging a reaction out of him. "I don't think the surprise is gonna be worth it, whatever it is."
Wordlessly, he extracted the bug's pedipalps and flicked it away like a smelly, spindly-legged ball of sweater lint. It skittered back to join the other uropygids, not far behind the solifuges. "We were going to slay a dragon."
"Maybe it's a metaphorical dragon. Mom t'adores ces literary crap."
"You've conjugated that nonsensically." He squinted at their surroundings. "As for the suggestion, it's possible, but doubtful. I was briefed on the specifics by your aunt. We're ostensibly looking for a Case Fifty-Three locked in their brute-breaker state with the superficial appearance of a Western dragon."
"Well, it's not making an appearance, superficial or not. Can we go home now? I have to catch up on my nap."
"Not yet," he said. "Even if we don't find them, I feel there might be merit in remaining awake for more than three hours a day."
Taylor forced the crabmobile to halt with her power. "She wanted you to give me a lecture," she said. "Didn't she."
Uncle Kurt looked supremely discomfited for a split-second, confirming her suspicions. "I'm not certain how effective she expected me to be, here," he admitted. "I've never successfully talked Contessa out of falsifying mission details. Or your mother out of entering my office through the wall, however convenient it might be for her in the moment."
"Seriously? Does she straight-up bring a sledgehammer to work?"
"Something like that," he said.
"Classic Mom. And she gets on my case about my swarm coming in through the windows. What does she expect them to do? Locusts can't turn doorknobs." She sighed and started up the crabmobile again. "Let's just get this over with. Speedrun heart-to-heart, c'mon."
"Your mother has expressed concern for your development. Specifically, the lack thereof." He grasped for an appropriate question to tack on as an afterthought. "How do you plead?"
"Guilty, but also not that guilty? Her perspective is skewed." Taylor had been in her mother's bedroom a few times, and the vision board above her dresser was just a collage of mirrors. "I don't get too hung up on what she thinks is 'normal development' for people who aren't her."
"That much is evident, although I do think she should get your thyroid checked. It's frankly surprising that she hasn't in all these years."
"I haven't always lived with her, you know."
"Surprising," he repeated. "Then again, we did start a betting pool regarding your origins."
"What'd you bet on?"
"That she intermittently abducted similar-looking toddlers in a futile bid to demonstrate her affinity with children. It was only slightly more probable than our employer's guess, which involves vats and stem cells."
"Yeah, I'd've gone with the vat thing too," Taylor said. "Unless there was one about loneliness-induced hallucinations."
Uncle Kurt nodded. "Our custodian's guess."
"It's not that cool." Taylor guided the crabs over a rocky patch. "I just used to live with Dad and this woman Annette. Dad didn't want to relocate and Mom didn't want me to get kidnapped by folks wanting to stick it to the chief. So it was stealth all the way every day in Brockton Bay."
"Tell me about it. You know I used to carry a mace to school?"
"Pepper spray is an adequate, though pedestrian accessory for fending off assailants."
"Not pepper spray, the medieval weapon. Hey, maybe Uncle Rick got it from the same garage sale Mom got her sledgehammer."
They continued onward in relative silence. A village came into view, along with a strange and palpably ominous black stormcloud.
"It must have been difficult, growing up without a biological mother," Uncle Kurt said, apropos of nothing.
Taylor eyed her uncle warily. He always spoke with a halting, scripted civility that suggested he'd rather be somewhere else. It seized her with an urge to make this exchange even more awkward, to shake him out of his proprieties. Maybe she could start blubbering and witness his attempts to solace her, but she didn't trust her ability to pull it off. She hadn't cried in years.
She went with the most awkward of conversational tools: oversharing. "It wasn't so bad. I got to visit Mom. And Annette was all right, before she went and died."
"My condolences."
"That was a major tradge," Taylor said. "Dad couldn't do anything for a while. He actually still can't—he's arranged the funeral like, five times already and he keeps cancelling. Dunno if there's a time limit and after that you gotta just chuck the body into the ocean. If so, he better get cracking. Anyway, then a bunch of girls whose names I forget played their little AIDS box prank."
"Sorry," Uncle Kurt said. "AIDS box prank?"
"It's like the Chokey but with used needles. You shove some loser into a locker or iron maiden or other enclosed space you filled with junkie stuff. Wait a few days, and the HIV ferments into AIDS. I think that's how it works. Got healed by Pancreas and everything but she wouldn't tell me. She did tell me the mace could've given me tetanus, which was hilarious because it was what I used to break out."
"Was that your trigger event?"
"Nah, I'm vaccinated."
"I mean being in the locker."
"Oh. No, I triggered a while before that. Unrelated friend drama, you don't wanna hear it. Anyways, Mom was really pissed off at the school, and pissed off at Dad for 'letting this happen', and she swooped in and took me to live with her. But he didn't 'let it happen', you know." They reached the outskirts of the village. "I did."
The air had changed. It had come alive with a bright ozone tang that stung like a splash of lemon juice to the sinuses. Not overwhelming, but still irritating after a while. Taylor absently swept the area with her bugs, fanning them out as far as her range permitted.
There were people here, leaving nearby towers and heading towards them. A cursory examination of their contours suggested armour; she slipped her smaller bugs into what few cracks and crevices she could find, but they kept butting up against thick fabric. She could probably pinpoint these people's exact geologic age by counting the layers they were wearing.
It was when one swarm of bugs suddenly started dying en masse to an intense wave of heat that she decided this might pose a problem.
"Bunch of people incoming," she said.
Uncle Kurt glanced over at her. "From where?"
"Six o'clock."
He turned around. "I don't see anything."
"Uh, twelve then. I guess. No wait, your eight. Or maybe your nine thirty. I never learnt how to read analog clocks."
"Please just point."
Taylor did, but this proved redundant as the guards soon closed in on them. Even with the helmets over their faces, they didn't look happy.
Uncle Kurt didn't look much happier. "Taylor, have you been attacking them this entire time?"
"I don't think a couple of stings should count as—"
"Taylor," Uncle Kurt said, "stop attacking them."
"Okay! Geez. I already stopped. I just don't like when people try to keep my bugs from landing on their bare skin. Like, don't be weird about it. I'm not gonna sting you."
"You were stinging them."
"Not their bare skin. Well, not a lot."
One of the guards tossed up a massive wall of frost that instantly froze all the bugs surrounding her. They dropped to the ground in clumps.
How many powers does this ho have? Taylor wondered, looking down at the pile of insect-studded popsicles. "Cheese it, it's the stupid cops," she said. "Come to arrest us for being not as stupid."
"In strictly cumulative terms, we're not in any danger of low stupidity," Uncle Kurt said. "Let's refrain from antagonising them any further."
Ten minutes later, they were in a dungeon.
"Door, my office."
No rectangle opened up for Uncle Kurt, same as the first six times he tried it. Taylor watched him through half-closed eyes from the single cot in their cell.
Before imprisoning them, the guards had done due diligence and torched the bugs she'd let them see, as well as the ones on her person. She had more, of course, but her uncle had told her to hold off on using them lest they mistakenly perceive it as another attack.
For what? For him to spend their entire stint in jail walking around their cell and tapping on things and trying to open portals.
He leaned in and studied the wall.
Then she saw him wrinkle his nose.
"Are you actually sneering at the interior decor of our prison right now?"
Uncle Kurt didn't answer. He oriented himself away from her and placed a hand on the wall.
"Nice try, but your internal monologue is too loud. Testing, testing." Taylor cycled through a few voices before landing somewhere close to his bland tone. "One of the hundreds of identical pens that I purchased in bulk from Costco has been besmirched, and I lack implements with which to clean it. Zut alors and mon dieu and proper conjugation and so forth."
He ignored her impression, continuing to flatten his ear against the brick.
"Come up with anything?"
"This isn't really my domain," he said.
"You brought us here. Maybe not this specific cell, but like, the whole surrounding area, with the plains and shit? That was you."
"Contessa brought us here."
"Blaming Aunt Contessa would work better if she weren't still in that meeting with Mom."
"I think you'll find that Aunt Contessa is fully capable of directing events without being present." He looked down at the bloodstained ballpoint pen in his pocket, almost forlorn. "I just wish she had prepared me."
"They took," Taylor said with uncharacteristic vitriol, "my crabmobile."
"Think of it as a vacation for your crustaceans."
"I can't even sense most of them, and the ones I do sense are all slow and fuzzy. What'd those people even do to get them out of my range so fast? Eat them?"
"Sedate them," Uncle Kurt said.
Taylor whistled. "That's a lot of crabbos to stabbo with a syringe."
"With gas."
"You can't stab things with gas. Or can you?" She assembled the meagre minions she had left within the cell, lamenting the dearth of windows. "At least my bugs are still in working order. Help me make a bugmobile."
"There is a limit to what one can build out of six cockroaches and a spider."
"Correction: six cockroaches and two spiders. And the spiders are opposite sexes, so I can always breed more. Only one of the cockroaches is female, though. I guess she can have a harem orgy."
"While you're doing that," Uncle Kurt said, considerately turning away from the scene, "we should review potential avenues of escape. I've already identified the weak points of this cell. The challenge will be navigating our way out of the building when there are guards on patrol. I'm thinking we should wait until our captors deign to speak with us, but you may have other ideas."
"Aw man, I have to have ideas now?"
"No, this is a formality."
"Can't we do something like, I don't know." She made a slashing gesture at her neck to illustrate.
"We could," he said. "But it's always wise to get the measure of a predicament before rushing to action. They have at least one parahuman in their ranks, a barrier specialist. Any attempt to engage offensively would be dead in the water. That's all assuming there aren't other parahumans in civilian attire. Our best bet is to play along."
Taylor turned and banged her fist against the door twice. She was poised for a third time when the panel at her eye level slid to the right, revealing a barred slot. A pair of brown eyes shaded by a helmet stared impassively back at her.
"Hey!" Taylor said, "you dipshits jacked my crabs and I want them back this instant, or else!"
To her surprise, the guard didn't slam the panel closed in her face.
"You are TCostabert_95," said the guard, in an unsettlingly soft feminine voice that betrayed her young age. She also had a thick accent Taylor couldn't place. "'Diamond in the Smooth' TCostabert_95."
"I am?" Taylor's brow furrowed, then smoothed. "Wait, I guess I am. How'd you know?"
The guard answered with something like reverence. "I follow you on CapeVine. You are an inspiration."
"I'm also on MeTube. Do you watch my unboxing videos?"
"Whenever we have the chance," the guard replied. "My sons and I, we live for it. We watch, we wait to see what is in the box. Then you open it—"
"And there is nothing in the box," she and Taylor finished at the same time.
Taylor tapped her temple. "Saves me from having to react."
"How do you get internet here?" Uncle Kurt asked. "No offense intended, but this doesn't strike me as a region rife with ISPs and optical-fibre cables."
"We have a man with special talents," she said. "He makes it so."
"A tinker?"
"I do not know this term. But he becomes a, how you say—a dread spectre that eclipses our land in darkness and brings the light to our screens. It is a sight to behold."
"A server," Uncle Kurt said. "Fascinating. Could we see it for ourselves?"
"Yeah, like, unlock the door," Taylor said.
The guard stared at her carefully. Finally: "I will. But please, do not run."
"We promise, just open it." Taylor met Uncle Kurt's eyes and drew a line across her throat. He nodded back.
The guard disengaged the lock, and the door swung open.
Uncle Kurt intercepted, grabbing her spear and twisting it out of her hands in one fluid motion. Before she could even think about retrieving it, he had it crushed against her throat. She was backed into a wall.
Taylor called her swarm to herself. She didn't issue a command to attack, but hemmed the guard in with them like cocked guns.
"We're gonna go now."
"You—promised—" the guard choked out, kicking ineffectually at Uncle Kurt's legs.
"That we wouldn't run," Taylor said. "I haven't run since Y2K. Not about to start now."
"They—will—kill—me—"
"You could say we escaped," Uncle Kurt suggested. He loosened his hold so that she could respond properly.
"My name—is on the roster—for this timeslot."
Taylor shrugged. "So? Just change it to the colleague you like least."
"Oh," the guard said, thinking about it. She brightened. "I will do that—and I will lead you—to safe harbour."
"Sure, why not." Taylor relaxed her swarm, and they dipped in the air.
Uncle Kurt gave her a flat look, his own grip unrelenting.
"What? We need to get my crabmobile back." Taylor turned to the guard. "What's your name?"
"You may call me xazureshieldmilkersx."
"I'm not calling you that," Taylor said.
"It is my handle. You see…"
The guard started to ramble on about her dairy business, but Taylor did not care about this woman's side hustle. "It's too stupid long for me to remember. I'll call you Az."
The guard looked distressed. "I do not want you to capitalise it. This compromises my aloof aesthetic. I would rather you call me Valerie."
"Is that your real name?" Uncle Kurt asked.
"No, it is the alternate handle I use to message my sister that she is barren and thus unmarriageable."
"Okay, Val, you saw me come in here with a bunch of crabs, right?"
"I did."
"So funny story, they're kind of my emotional support crabs. Got a doctor's note and everything. I'm gonna need them back."
"I am afraid I cannot return you your crabmonster," Valerie said. "The Elders wish to keep it as an exhibition of the beasts at their disposal."
"What the shit?" Taylor exclaimed. "It's my beast at my disposal."
"Then you would have it with you, would you not?"
"She has a point," Uncle Kurt said.
"Bitch," Taylor said, addressing both of them, "I'll obliterate you for this insult. That crabmobile is part of my legacy. I was going to pass it down for generations. The children of my children were going to ride it to school and take up two parking spaces and be the envy of all the popular cliques. Now guess what, they're gonna have to drive a car instead. A car murdered my father's girlfriend once, Valerie. Is that what you want to happen to a bunch of kids? Three percent of the preteen population die by storm drain clown, twelve die by ice-cream truck ghost, fifteen die by extreme locker sports, and a whopping forty-three percent are killed by not owning a telepathically controlled crustacean-based mode of transport. You've just about guaranteed my future grandkids the most bullshit boring cause of death of all time—vehicular manslaughter."
"What happens to the leftover twenty-seven percent?" Uncle Kurt inquired.
"Miscellaneous household accidents. Why, did you want me to name all of them, you sick fuck?"
"I apologise for sealing the fate of your unborn grandchildren." Valerie bowed her head, sounding genuinely contrite. "But even if I had the clearance to approach the monster—and I do not—I would not release it. I am sorry. I may not comprehend the Elders' reasons, but I will not defy their command."
Taylor turned to her uncle, accusatory. "Why did we even bother sparing her life?"
"Could you give me back the grenade launcher?" he asked the guard. "The weapon I entered with."
"Oh yes, of course."
Taylor scowled up at the crude stonework that lined the dungeon ceilings. "You know, this is not what I call hospitality."
The source of the altered atmosphere, it seemed, was the translucent bluish-black cloud hovering high above them. It billowed and undulated at irregular intervals like a great celestial moon jelly swollen with ink.
"That looks rather malevolent," Uncle Kurt said.
"It's the internet. What do you expect? I kinda wish I brought my phone." Taylor buried her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants. She sniffed the air. "Smells like it's fast."
They were passing through the village square. Out of sight, Valerie palmed a pair of ladybugs as she led them to her family's cottage—she'd been nervous about being seen escorting prisoners in public when she was supposed to be off-duty.
Taylor noticed that clusters of villagers—entire families—were paying respects. Crude shrines had been erected throughout the square, and people crowded around these to genuflect. Much of the signage bore symbols like lightning bolts, but a few of them depicted a lone matchstick figure radiating rays of light.
When Taylor wondered aloud about the latter, Uncle Kurt pointed out the tiny humanoid suspended in the overhead cloud.
Her immediate instinct was to poke it.
Taylor had a rule that if she felt like poking something for more than five seconds, she would just do it to see what happened. Before they could get too far away, she flew a modest collection of bugs up into the sky.
They punctured the cloud with ease and waded in, beating their wings and legs against the tide of jelly. There wasn't much in the way of physical resistance at first. But then tendrils of electricity wound through their bodies like copper wire, burning hot in places, cooking nerves and disabling some of the less durable insects. Taylor propelled her beetles through warnings of damage. The closer the bugs got to the figure, the more potent the shocks became, until—
ZZZAP.
"Whoops."
Uncle Kurt looked at her.
"Sent some bugs up to check things out. They got flash-fried." She retracted the surviving bugs. None of them had managed to touch target. "Makes sense that the server's got its own protections."
"Perhaps," Uncle Kurt said. "But what are they really protecting?"
They arrived at Valerie's cottage near the square and she welcomed them into her home. Her twin sons, subscribers to Taylor's channel as well, took immense delight in pestering her about her creative process.
"How do you even get started?" Callisto was the more boisterous of the pair. "Do you need like, an expensive special camera and stuff?"
"Nah. I just use my phone." Taylor reclined on the loveseat by the firepit. The cushions were threadbare and going by the smell, actively decaying. But it was somewhere to lie down and that was enough.
"Why's your channel just sleeping and unboxing?"
"Because everyone's doing vlogs and let's plays of PRT Simulator these days. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate a good cape fail compilation as much as the next person. But who needs all that visual stimulation all the time? My videos are like, the easy listening to the rest of MeTube's heavy metal."
"Why do you always open such big boxes?"
The truth was that she usually just picked up anything that was lying around the house (and in her direct line of sight, and within grabbing distance). There was no shortage of packages piling up by the door; her mother didn't have time for chores as mundane as shopping, but needed new supplies on a weekly basis. Why she didn't just have them delivered to the office was anybody's guess.
"Because if I open smaller boxes, haters will notice my big hands and think I'm into boys' love," Taylor said instead. The kids suddenly looked pensive. "Wait, do you… not know what that is?"
"'Course we know," Callisto said, sounding offended. "Mirabel won't shut up about it."
"We aren't allowed to go on those kinds of websites," Juniper said.
"Mm," Uncle Kurt said. "Parental restrictions?"
"I restrict nothing," Valerie said, before either boy could answer. She served Taylor and Uncle Kurt a plate of a stiff water biscuits and a weird-smelling milk drink. "I have no more access than the children do."
"Why is that?" Uncle Kurt asked.
"Our family has not earned such privileges."
"Mirabel has them," Callisto said, helping himself to the biscuits.
Valerie rolled her eyes. "And is it you or Mirabel who has a special talent? She will work for the Council when she is fifteen. It is only right that she has greater reach."
"Things were better around here before the Elders drafted us into eternal slavery mass-producing the very computronium that makes up the digital purgatory holding our brains captive," Callisto said sulkily, through a mouthful of biscuits. Juniper nodded in earnest agreement.
"What heresy are you speaking now?" Valerie scolded. "You are too young to remember the time before."
"Auntie Amber said—"
"You should not be listening to Auntie Amber. Auntie Amber cannot bear offspring for a reason." Valerie reached over and tousled Juniper's hair, to his good-natured protests. "Both of you, run back to the sweatshop now. TCostabert_95 and her companion need peace to recuperate from their ordeal."
"Sure do." Taylor saw them deflate. "Keep on watching, kids. Couple hundred more subs and I'll be able to turn on monetisation. And—" She dropped her voice. "You didn't hear it from me, but one day… there might be something in the box."
The boys gave Taylor a thumbs up each before scurrying off.
Suckers, she thought.
As soon as they left, Valerie took their place across from Taylor and Uncle Kurt. She gazed at them expectantly, resting her chin in her palms.
It was neither her nor her uncle's custom to solicit commentary from strangers, so they did not. Taylor sipped her drink. It tasted foul, like how a skunk's milk would taste if skunks lactated from their assholes. No wonder Valerie's dairy business was failing. Taylor held her nose as she drank the rest.
After five minutes of prolonged eye contact, Valerie finally spoke. "I have a tale."
Taylor shot Uncle Kurt a confused glance—who the hell is this—and he gave her the ocular equivalent of a shrug. "Good for you?"
"I would like so very much to be able to share it with you both. If you would indulge me."
"I'll pass," Taylor said.
"Long ago, there was a lizard."
"Or you could just knock yourself out."
"A reptilian behemoth," Valerie continued, her deep-set brown eyes ablaze with fervour. "An apex predator before there were apex predators. And all that lay ahead was a desolate white expanse, stretching out far into the horizon. It knew not what the future held for it. Still it walked, seeing nothing and no one for leagues and leagues, for it knew nothing else.
"And then for the first time in its journey, it encountered an obstacle.
"Surely, it thought, this diminutive formation was no match for its hidebound bulk, its brute strength. Lesser beings had been crushed beneath its tread. This rock would suffer the same fate.
"But alas, its primitive skullmeats did not comprehend that creatures of flesh are far less hardy than that which has endured centuries of unrelenting subglacial massage. It charged straight ahead. Its clawed foot snagged on the rock, and with an anguished cry it tipped over and came crashing to the paved stone below.
It knew now what it had to do. It jumped. It jumped. It saw no end to the jumping, for there would always be more rocks, more vegetation in its path."
"Is this a metaphorical lizard?" Uncle Kurt asked. "Or an existent one such as, perhaps, a dragon?"
"It is very much real," she said. "But it is not a dragon. Those are not indigenous to our clime."
Taylor clapped. "Great tale. Very three-dimensional characters, compelling storyline, lots of intrigue. Can't wait for it to hit theatres."
"It is not done," Valerie said.
"I kind of am, though? I can pretend to listen all the way to the end if you want," Taylor said, "but I'll need a pair of sunglasses and a big floppy hat. A newspaper, if you have those."
Valerie nodded uncertainly. "I can obtain these items for you."
She departed, leaving Taylor and Uncle Kurt alone.
"Hey Unc," Taylor said.
"Uncle Kurt."
"Uncle K. Just checking. Are we like, stuck here forever or what?"
"Or what. If the rest of what the files said was accurate, this earth experiences time dilation effects relative to Bet." At her mystified look, he clarified, "One day here is one minute on Bet. We could be marooned for what we would perceive to be forever."
"Oh, so like high school."
"I wouldn't know."
Taylor gave an elaborate shrug. "Guess we'll die."
"Our long-term goal is to find out what Contessa expects us to do and do it, but our short-term goal is to live until then." Her uncle walked laps around her loveseat, folding his hands behind him as he thought aloud. "Several options present themselves. First option, we stay in the shadows, making no waves except to barter for supplies. We ask around for low-profile odd jobs that need doing. Second option, massacre. Third, we find some way to ingratiate ourselves with the local authorities and higher-ups. They seem to place a higher value on citizens with 'special talents', and we do both have services to offer: I have accounting, you have staging biblical plagues to cement undying loyalty among the populace. Fourth, selective massacre. Doable, yet—"
"You're making me dizzy," Taylor complained. "And you're way overthinking it."
Uncle Kurt stopped pacing. "That isn't possible, with Contessa."
"Here's the actual plan. We fuck around doing nothing for like, a week, or as long as it takes for a portal to open up again. Aunt Contessa wouldn't risk getting in trouble with Mom, so she has to let us come back sometime. We can just steal what we need. What we want, too."
"So the plan is to have no plan, and indulge in reckless hedonism until the inevitable."
"You get it," she said, relieved. "Step three, profit."
"Your commitment to sloth is admirable," Uncle Kurt said. "But there's a problem with that. We're wanted fugitives."
"Well, let's get ourselves unwanted, then. Any ideas?"
Uncle Kurt must have been a wanted fugitive in a past life, because he did in fact have many ideas.
The tavern was rank and humid like the inside of a mouth, and all the drinks tasted like stale piss (though somehow still better than Valerie's so-called organic milk). Nonetheless, the place was a favourite hangout among the locals at night, at least for those lucky enough to not have to work graveyard shifts.
Tonight a group of twelve sat around a chipped wooden table, hunched over playing cards, their eyes studying each other with practised nonchalance.
One man broke the tense silence.
"Hector," Uncle Kurt said. "Do you have any sixes?"
"Fuck!" screamed Hector.
"'Go Fish' would have sufficed."
"Cheating. Bastard." The man slammed his three sixes of spades down face-up. "You knew I had it! You knew!"
Uncle Kurt slid the cards over to himself, adding it to his now-complete set of sixes. He fanned that out on the table for all to see, and raised his palms to show they were empty. The other players bellyached at what was his twelfth consecutive victory so far that night. Some got up to leave, recognising a streak when they saw one.
Hector remained, glowering. "I know who you are."
"Oh?"
"You're a con-man. Bleeding our little town dry before you move on to the next. I got news for you. Some of us ain't gonna take this sitting down. My wife and I, we got mouths to feed."
"Fortunately for your children, watches are inedible." Uncle Kurt leaned over with outstretched arms to gather the pool of valuables. "I would advise you to invest in less volatile moneymaking ventures, at least until you learn to not request nines from a player who relinquished all her nines several turns before."
"Well… that's not very nice now, is it?" Hector's growl became a bellow. "That's not very neighbourly!"
He lunged.
Uncle Kurt sidestepped the swing. He swept the man's legs out from under him and kneed him in the stomach as he was falling.
Wearing a pair of sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat, Taylor stretched languidly in her booth seat on the other side of the room. The newspaper spread over her face fell to the floor when she sat up. Her bugs followed the happenings as she began weaving her way through the crowd.
Her uncle's movements were too elegant, too precise to not be the product of training. But if it was martial arts, it was the most apathetic style of martial arts Taylor had ever seen. His defense was founded on one principle: never being where the blows landed. His offense was founded on another: ensuring his opponents were always where his blows landed. He delivered the minimum number of strikes needed to incapacitate and no more.
He made it look so effortless that people kept joining the brawl, eager to take him down a peg and wilfully ignoring the pile of combatants groaning on the floor—assuming that their failure had been due to their lack of brute strength or luck on her uncle's part.
Taylor sidled up to a blowsy-looking older woman who was observing the scuffle from the bar.
"'Sup," Taylor said, glad she didn't have to raise her voice to be heard. She'd asked the barkeep why he didn't play music, but he'd just grumbled that this wasn't some cheap dive.
The woman turned her head just enough to give her the side-eye. "Ain't you a little young to be in here?"
"Yeah." Taylor hoisted herself up onto a stool. "So, who do you think'll win?"
"Six, seven, eight against one?" The woman drained her tankard, before setting it back on the countertop. "No real contest."
A friend of Hector went for her uncle's lower back, believing it to be exposed. Uncle Kurt pivoted out of the way and the man hit the floor with a loud thud.
"Have a nice trip," Uncle Kurt said, a touch smug. "See you next fall."
A shudder ran through Taylor, and all her jealousy vanished in a puff of smoke. The only way he could be lamer was if he'd been her actual dad.
"Boooo!" she yelled. He glanced over at her, a faint frown creasing his face. She evaded eye contact and turned back to the woman. "That doofus with the glasses looks like he's holding his own. But I don't know too much about fighting."
"I've seen a lotta brawls in my time. He's not doing too bad now, but he's gonna get winded. And then all it'll take is one good deck."
Taylor smiled. She removed her hat and flipped it upside down. "Wanna put your money where your mouth is?"
The woman considered it. It wasn't long before she took Taylor up on the offer.
A second crowd soon gathered around Taylor, calling out their bets. Uncle Kurt stepped aside, not even breathing hard as he wiped eyeball pulp off his pen with the sleeve of the nearest downed brawler. He spoke to the butterfly on his wrist. "It's time we take our leave."
Taylor got up, her hat and pockets now heavy with coin. She distributed some of it to the three drunks who had bet on her uncle, and left the tavern through the main door. Shortly afterwards, Uncle Kurt left through a side exit.
They counted their spoils when they got back to their inn.
"Smartwatch, noice," Taylor said, picking it up and admiring it against her wrist. "This'll fetch a decent price at the market tomorrow."
"We'll be avoiding the market." Uncle Kurt stowed the sack in their shared closet. "I'm meeting with the fence tomorrow."
"Didn't she get raided?"
"Her cottagemate did, for grave-robbing. I negotiated with law enforcement on her behalf. They've agreed to show lenience since the bones were for personal use."
"They're gonna burn her at the stake."
"Just the legs," he said.
They went to bed at the same time. Her uncle shared her preference for early bedtimes, if not her additional preferences for late bedtimes and midday bedtimes.
But when the lights went out, Taylor couldn't stop thinking.
It was a foreign sensation. Her brain usually switched off on its own whether or not she was actively using it. She tried wrapping herself into a burrito with her blanket. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried mashing the pillow into her face in the hopes of smothering herself unconscious, to no avail. A kernel of memory was stuck between her mental teeth.
Well if I can't sleep, ain't nobody gonna sleep. "Hey, Uncle K? You awake?"
A moment passed. She moved a camel spider from the headboard to his forehead and caressed his eyebrow with its hairy leg.
He jerked. Sheets rustled, and the spider was thrown onto the floor. "I am now."
"What did you mean," Taylor said, "when you said it was surprising that I haven't always lived with Mom?"
"Could you get rid of that thing before you go to sleep?"
She sent the camel spider out the window to mollify him.
"As well as the other assorted things."
"If I let them loose outside they'll wander all over the place and I won't have them already here when I wake up."
"So summon them when you wake up," he said.
"That's what I do at home, but if they're too far away I'll fall asleep between the time I call them and the time they arrive. They follow my last command, so they'll just converge on my location. Then they'll be all over both of us while I'm not even awake to control them. Do you prefer that?"
"I prefer to not be eaten alive in the night by giant venomous spiders."
"Why's this suddenly a problem? You've been fine with this arrangement since we got here."
"You've been keeping them here every night while we both sleep?" he asked, a strangled note of agitation entering his voice. "Where, exactly?"
"Under our beds, in the cupboard, the bathroom, your sock…"
"Which?"
"Huh?"
"Which sock? Left or right."
"The hell are you talking about? There's no such thing as a left or right sock. They're omnidirectional."
A lengthy pause. "I'm not sure where to begin explaining the wrongness of that statement. I may need a whiteboard."
"If it makes you happy, I will put scorpions in both of them," Taylor said. "Now can you answer my question?"
"Ah. About your mother. She keeps tabs on you."
"Yeah, I know. I'm always finding tracking devices in my neck. The bodyguards say it's just melanoma, but I don't think even cancerous moles are supposed to light up whenever you use a public bathroom."
"I'm only prefacing with this so you'll understand that all I knew about you prior to this excursion was what's in your dossier," Uncle Kurt said. "It paints quite the picture. I couldn't help but notice a few patterns."
She saw where this was going, and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "What, are you gonna say Mom and me are the same?"
"No. You are not. But you are astoundingly alike in one respect."
"What's that?"
"Nothing ever stops either of you from getting what you want. Nothing, it seems, except each other."
"Sounds like a good thing."
"It can be. Other times, deranged."
"Harsh," she said, "and rich, coming from you."
"I reserve moral judgement," Uncle Kurt said diplomatically. "But there was your little peanut oil debacle that landed several elementary schoolers in the ICU."
"I thought the courts established that was the school's fault, not mine."
"The Leviathan scare of 2008 followed by your rather lucrative foray into disaster tourism."
"Mom wanted me to be more enterprising."
"There was the altercation this morning at the market when you tried to steal a whole crate of watermelons, against my advice," he said. "More than one casualty."
"Seriously? I literally can't afford EpiPens. They're like seven hundred bucks. I don't have insurance. If he dies, it's on the American healthcare system."
"And of course there was the AIDS box."
So he had known about it. "They did kind of try to kill me at one point," she said.
"They may have, but that wasn't on record. Why wasn't it, Taylor?"
"Does it matter?"
"Not particularly," he said. "I only know that you weren't at gunpoint when you filled your own locker with needles and trapped yourself inside. Nor was there a knife against your jugular when you orchestrated a trail of damning evidence that happened to lead straight to the very girls who had been visiting petty torments on you. And you were safe as could be when you dialed your mother, knowing exactly what was going to happen to them when she came down."
Taylor's breath caught, and she was glad to be facing away from him. "If you're gonna make up a story, you should at least make some of the core details believable."
"What would those be?"
"There's no way I'd put that much effort into a stunt like that. Too much collection and assembly required. Besides, everyone knows they were pulling shit for over a year and I didn't go narcing to nobody. I just took it. Ask anyone."
"You do one big thing, and you don't have to do a million little things," Uncle Kurt said.
Taylor's mother had appeared at Winslow shortly after the incident, claiming she'd coincidentally just arrived for a visit. This was fishy because her mother vocally hated Brockton Bay, both what it represented and the physical place. She'd always preferred to fly Taylor and her father out to LA instead.
Nothing had prepared Taylor for the image of her larger-than-life mother sitting there in Principal Blackwell's office, suddenly so ordinary but for the lethal calm steaming off of her in waves. She issued her expectations as though they were inevitabilities: Her daughter would be withdrawn from Winslow, effective immediately. Punishments for the perpetrators would be decided by her and her alone—and they, she emphasised, would be proportionate to the harm caused. The principal and other parents had raised their voices in protest; she silenced them with even fewer words.
And then in front of them, her mother had drawn Taylor close and pressed a kiss to her forehead.
The brief touch had felt so achingly familiar. But it was something she'd never done to Taylor before and never did since. Why had her mother shown her that small intimacy only to withhold it? In that moment, Taylor had felt a certain separation open up between them, not just between herself and her mother but also between herself and her present circumstances. The more she prodded at the memory, the more alien it seemed—ungraspable, like a glimpse through the gauzy veil of a recurring dream into a parallel childhood.
She brushed a hand against her cheek and found it unaccountably damp.
It was a dusty room. Bugs brought her glasses to her from the bedside table. She sat up in the darkness, slipped out of bed, and padded to the bathroom.
Propped up against the cistern was the grenade launcher. She picked it up. It was lightweight, lighter than her old mace—but her biceps must have atrophied quite a bit because it was still too heavy for her to tote around comfortably. Her bugs didn't do much good, and she leaned against the dingy wall to steady herself. When she finally got a handle on it, she made the trip downstairs and outside.
Despite the late hour, people were still milling about outside singing hymns to the black jelly god above.
Uncle Kurt came towards her, his pace leisurely. He'd even taken the time to dress.
"You can't stop me," Taylor said.
"I'm not trying to," he replied. "I simply have the ability to aim, and I'd rather you not injure yourself lest your mother injure me."
"Anybody who's seen me play Blood Death Violence Warfare 2 knows I'm a crack shot with a grenade launcher." She backed away to elbow a villager carrying a swaddled infant. "Right?"
"Kappa," the baby burbled. Taylor bumped his tiny fist with a free pinky.
"And I'm sure you've accrued many meaningless achievements," Uncle Kurt said. "But even if the skills did translate, this weapon has some tinkertech modifications that could backfire if not operated with the utmost care." He extended a hand, placid as ever. "Give it to me. Tell me the target."
"Not falling for it." Taylor hefted the grenade launcher away from him. "What even gives you the right to judge me off of a complete fabrication?"
"I didn't fabricate anything, and I don't judge you." His eyes flitted down her baggy green hoodie and zebra sweatpants. "Well, not for that."
Taylor scoffed.
"In any case," he said, "I wasn't the one who drew those conclusions. All I did was read what was written."
Taylor pointed the grenade launcher up at the blue-black cloud. Using bugs, she lined her shot up like billiard balls and readied her cue. She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
"The safety's on," Uncle Kurt said.
"I know that."
Taylor turned it over and toggled the lever marked 'SAFE', before aiming and pulling the trigger again. A warhead rocketed into the sky.
The recoil wasn't that powerful. It still rocked her back because she hadn't braced the launcher against anything solid. She stumbled, but a pair of strong hands caught her before she could fall.
Leaning against her uncle, she clutched the grenade launcher to her chest and stared up at the combusting sky. Behind them, a villager asked whether an explosion of oily black apocalyptic vapour meant it was a boy or a girl.
"Hah!" Taylor said over the ringing in her ears. "You said I couldn't do it, but I did!"
"You did." Uncle Kurt reached over her with one hand to flick the safety back on. "You used the gas-dispersing ammunition, too."
She preened. "Yeah, I did pick that on purpose. It wasn't already loaded with that."
"Very clever."
Then he dropped her.
She landed unceremoniously on her tailbone with a yelp. "What gives!?"
"That," he said, straightening out his shirt, "was for the vinegaroon."
The server was dissipating fast. A blob coalesced at the locus, gathering gel from the furthest reaches of the extant cloud to swallow up and add to its mass. It grew more and more gravid, and the surrounding sky was occupied by no more than tinted fog when gravity finally saw fit to assert its dominance. The blob plummeted.
It landed dead in the middle of the town square and burst open like an amniotic water balloon. Clear fluid splashed over the dirt, only to seep into it and vanish.
In this rapidly evaporating puddle lay the humanoid, naked and curled up in the foetal position. Their skin was a raw pink, veined, covered in pinprick pores reminiscent of a plucked chicken. It glistened with bluish slime, and a big gob of it oozed from their scalp into the pupilless mirror-globes of their eyeballs. They didn't so much as blink at the intrusion.
Taylor marched up to the creature and spun to face the rallying crowd.
"I'm taking your internet hostage," she announced. "Until someone storms the town hall or the dungeons or the royal suite or wherever you're stowing my crabmobile and brings it back to me, you will all be denied access to the server."
The villagers immediately checked their devices, their faces illuminated by screens in the gloom. Confusion reigned for a smattering of seconds.
"Something happen?" asked a bearded man at the front.
"I don't see it," said his neighbour, tapping away. "What did she say again?"
Taylor frowned. "You should be experiencing the effects right now. Show me your tablet."
The bearded man did, holding it up along with the others who could hear her. She squinted at the top right corners of their screens.
All of their internet connections were at the full three bars.
"Oh," Taylor said, looking from the glowing screens to the humanoid twitching on the ground. A half-annoyed, half-delighted laugh tumbled out of her. "Oh shit."
"Pog champ," the baby said.
Hours later, Taylor slouched over a bar, stuffing her face with eggs of dubious provenance. A very dispassionate jazz cover by an unenthusiastic local band trickled from the speaker that the barkeep had connected to his phone. He'd thanked Taylor over and over for enabling his lossless music torrents—the Elders had dropped his internet speed to a crawl for not renewing the tavern's liquor license, leaving him and his husband to survive on data.
The Server—or Leonard as he preferred to be called—sat next to her and bobbed his head jerkily to the beat. He was so haggard that the thin sackcloth tunic the villagers had given him hung off his frame like a poncho on a coat rack. Though his skin remained permanently moist with whatever conductive mucus he secreted, most of it had been squeegeed off to keep the barstool clean. He had difficulty masticating on account of the cored molars and docked tongue, so Taylor was baby-birding him with her bugs.
In return, he was blocking radio waves. It was easier for him to concentrate his attention on one comparatively small area when he wasn't splayed out among freezing clouds and paralysed by exquisite agony.
Uncle Kurt returned from his jaunt, absently scrubbing brain matter off the tip of his pen with a rag before sticking it back into his breast pocket. He claimed the barstool to her right without actually sitting on it.
"Hey Uncle K. How's that pen even still intact?"
"Pocket protector," he said. He glanced over the spread. "You're having breakfast. During a revolt in full swing."
"I'm not about to walk away from omelettes." Taylor polished off egg and shallots while instructing her leafcutter ants to finish up and start delivering bits of pancake to Leonard's gullet. "This is the twist of the century for them, not me."
She'd also delivered a swarm to help out by attacking anyone wearing especially fine garments or an abnormally magnificent beard. Hopefully it wasn't 'Formal Friday' down at the council quarters, or some of those servants were in big trouble.
The barkeep bustled over and thumped a tankard of sparkling mead down next to her plate.
"Because of you," he rumbled, "I can serve booze to minors and get all the latest tracks."
Taylor took several long swigs and waved the tankard for a refill. "You can have some if you want," she said to her uncle.
Uncle Kurt did want.
"TCostabert_95 and companion."
Valerie approached in her leather armour. It was spattered with blood, and not her own. Wet ribbons of intestine dangled from the tines of her pitchfork, which she set on the countertop in front of Uncle Kurt. He put his egg-laden fork back on his plate.
"You were right, TCostabert_95." Valerie cast her arm towards Leonard. "They used one of us to slow down our connection, to leash us to their whims. But unfortunately for them, this time there was something in the box."
Taylor looked up from her eggs. "Whuh?"
"Enlightenment." Tears glassed Valerie's gaze. "In unboxing it, you revealed the key to our chains. We are free now, free to glut ourselves on electronic mail, and forums, and amusing clip selections that implore us to subdue our emotions; my sons may consume as much 'yaoi' as their hearts desire. No longer shall we leave the desktop running all day so that our bootlegs may download at a reasonable rate, or order others not to graze our mouse out of the irrational fear that the movement will somehow disrupt the loading bar. Never again shall my family and I be forced to play the jumping T-rex browser game."
She lowered herself to one knee. As if on cue, so did the other patrons. Even Leonard wobbled on his stool.
"After the fighting is finished, we would ask you to attend a ceremony in your honour."
"Thanks but no thanks." Taylor made a face at the thought of going through that celebratory rigmarole. "I just want my crabs back."
"Aha," Valerie said, "we have brought the monster back to you."
Taylor perked up. She groped around with her power. A pile of crabs bound roughly in the configuration she'd left them in was tied to a pole outside, drowsy but alive. At her behest, they sawed and snipped at their flimsy tether until it broke, and displayed their claws menacingly at all onlookers who might bar the way.
Then they journeyed to momma, like Lassie coming home from the war to reunite with his grieving canine wife. (Taylor had never watched Lassie.)
She sat on the vehicle and was pleased to find it still held up. In lieu of doing a jig herself, she made the crabs bounce and sway from left to right on their legs, clacking their claws together in sync. The bartender upped the volume of the lackadaisical jazz.
Across the bar, Uncle Kurt had finally gotten a portal to open. "Are you done?"
"Hang on."
She ceased only when she heard the telltale crack of chitin beneath her. This was about thirty minutes later.
"You know, Mom will ask me what I learnt today," Taylor said.
"Yes."
"When she finds out the answer is 'literally nothing', she's gonna make me join the Wards."
"She will also ask me what you did today," Uncle Kurt said, "and when she finds out the answer is 'get captured, foment insurrection in a small village to dismantle the current power structure and enforce net neutrality, and learn literally nothing', she's going to break all the bones in my body."
"We could lie."
"She'd know."
She would.
"Which is why we need to coordinate a story," he said. "Gather props, if necessary."
Taylor and her uncle stepped through a portal into the living room.
Her mother was watching an animated show. Protectorate Pals—no, its spin-off series The Adventures of Alexandria, going by the more streamlined designs and brighter colours. Taylor had been the unwilling audience to several of her mother's rants about the janky visuals and washed-out colour palettes that had apparently come to define the later seasons of Protectorate Pals. It was an episode she recognised, too: some visored blond cape in bulky blue and gold armour was showing off a tractor beam by sucking up litter from the beach, an action that would spark the main conflict. All the while, he traded banter with Alexandria.
Taylor's mother never appreciated when Taylor laughed at his ribbing of the stone-serious woman in black. But she also didn't like when Taylor called him obnoxious, and if further provoked would start going on about 'his role beyond comic relief himbo sidekick' and 'the complex and tragic emotional trajectory of his character arc'. Taylor supposed that her IQ was not high enough to understand the nuances.
She watched along for a while, wondering if she could sneak upstairs since her mother didn't seem to have noticed her. But as soon as the scene ended, her mother muted the television.
"You're back," she said, without turning. "Come."
Dutifully, she and her uncle shuffled over to stand in front of the television and receive judgement. Taylor brought along the pitchfork, now washed of blood and speckled with dirt instead. Her mother appraised their sweaty faces, her own expression indecipherable.
"You guys look like you're having a slumber party," Taylor said, nodding at the junk on the sofa.
Aunt Contessa lay stretched out, her head nestled in her mother's lap. Her eyes were fixed on the silent onscreen proceedings as Taylor's mother gently but possessively combed her hair with her fingers. They wore matching blue silk pyjamas embroidered with the same tasteful rubber duck pattern. Also strewn over the sofa were a nearly empty bag of assorted vodka gummy snacks, the remains of a black bra, a bottle of aloe gel, and what looked like an undone bracelet strung with glossy silicone beads whose size graduated from melon ball to fist.
Her mother noticed Taylor looking at them. Remarkably, her cheeks darkened a few shades. She disentangled her hand from Aunt Contessa's hair for a second and placed a cushion over the gummy snacks. "Your aunt won't be staying the night. We both have a lot of work to get to."
"Hopefully you've gotten at least one thing done today," Uncle Kurt said. He glanced at Aunt Contessa, then quickly glanced away when she made eye contact.
"Speaking of," her mother said, "Contessa informed me that she already neutralised the Case Fifty-Three you were hunting ahead of time, and that you found other, sufficiently challenging activities to do instead."
"Yes," Uncle Kurt said. "I am eager to hear an explanation as to why."
"I was arranging a lesson, as requested," Contessa said, her voice soft, and Taylor's mother nodded down at her approvingly. "You of all people should know they sometimes come in the form of prisoner's dilemmas."
They started carrying on a conversation through vague doublespeak and minute eye movements, like they always did when Taylor was in the room. As though she cared enough to eavesdrop.
"Whew, all that running around and hard manual labour sure has tuckered me out." She didn't even have to force a yawn as she started up the stairs. She gave the pitchfork a token swing. "Work is really fun, but also really exhausting. Time to go to bed at a reasonable hour."
"Taylor," her mother said.
She paused. "Yeah?"
"You have a history test in two weeks."
"Okay?" Taylor said. "How do you know about that? Even I didn't know about that."
"I try to be involved."
"You sound like a helicopter parent, Mom. Do you want to be a helicopter parent?"
"If that's what it takes to get you moving."
Taylor leaned on the banister. "Well, I figure I have a one in four chance of getting every question right, so…"
"It's not multiple choice," her mother said. "You should start studying."
Her mother had a fireside voice when she had the luxury of expressing emotion—it made you listen and it made you want to listen, and you obeyed even if you didn't fully understand. There was a warning in it now, an idle threat with slits for eyes lying low in the veldt.
You knew, Taylor thought. You knew all along but you still went to bat for me. You fought with Dad, you sent the trio to the salt mines. Why didn't you tell me?
"Now, Taylor."
"Fine," Taylor said, and lifted herself off the banister. "I'll go do that."
The test would be hard. Her history teacher's pop quizzes had a reputation for turning classrooms into abattoirs, or so she'd heard her classmates complain. He harboured an inexplicable dislike for her despite her not even knowing his name. Beyond that, she had no idea what was on the syllabus, and she hadn't met a century she couldn't mix up with another, including her own.
But as she headed up the stairs, she was tranquil even by her standards. She was smiling when she picked up her cellphone to dial Tattletale.
Because if her mother let her get away with the AIDS box, she could get away with anything.
This chapter has been like 90% done for more than a year now. I just put it on hold to work on other things. It's very easy to write, but for some reason whenever I do I always feel like I've wasted my entire life. I even made most of an animatic for it! However, it sucked, so it will never see the light of day and you just get the thumbnail. Can I get an F in chat for the Taylor & Number Man Isekai Cut.
Leave a comment, let me know if it wasted your life too.
I adore how you handpicked the best possible memes to put into this and made them completely unpredictable because they slid into the narrative and writing so well they required no set up to make them funny beside the medieval internet Isekai thing. Absolutely outstanding.
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