Then there was the rest of the fake timeline. It lasted for hours. I thought I was mistaken for a while there. That it might have been the real one, but it did end. Most of it was waiting in the principal's office while being denied medical care and occasionally glimpsing the panicked flailing of Sophia trying to salvage what's left of her secret identity. That last bit was the funniest thing going on.
Thinking about it why
did she stop attacking people once she realized that her actions weren't effecting her future? As I understood things that was one of the reasons why she was treating her body as disposable.
The issue in my actual life has now turned into unmasking Shadow Stalker without her killing me for it. The list of people who would do such a thing to an alleged hero is very small. Wait a minute, is it actually though? There's a, uh, significant number of teenage gangsters that attend Winslow. All it would take is the right rumor working it's way through enough of them. Hmm, food for thought.
Now most might that think that unmasking a Ward is kind of an escalation here. To which my response is are you fucking high?! She almost killed me a week ago! There is no escalating from that! This is the kind of thing national scandals are made of! Except I have no intention of dying before the media takes notice. Oh, she might not have known? That's even worse!! I refuse to let this dumb bitch kill me in any capacity. I've also already tried going to the authorities in the school. I somehow doubt the one in the PRT would give any more of a damn than the ones here. With so much more room to go wrong too.
Hey I remember this line from another story! "
"Given my previous interactions with Shadow Stalker, I knew full well that if I let her leave with that as her parting word, she'd never leave me alone. It would start with backhanded insults, then grow to pushes and shoves and little 'accidental' injuries, then would come the naked abuse and destruction of property, then the sabotage and blackmail, and finally the attempts on my life."" from
Implacable.
In light of the fact that she's willing to escalate proportionally to that I'm surprised that she isn't willing to be more direct about it.
In computer science class I spend my time making alt accounts for an email and various forums. Going to wait until the time is right before unleashing my storm. I actually got lucky enough for another fake timeline to start when I was waiting for the bus. Good thing the library stays open for about an hour after school. I started unleashing it all into the net. Unfortunately the timeline didn't last more than an hour.
Would probably have been a more productive use of her time to get into violent fights to the death with people; knowing how to survive those is important.
Also murdering; she'd probably want to prepare for having to inevitably do that.
"Mr. Gladly, you are a failure of a teacher, failure of a human being, and everybody here thinks you are a sucker. Everybody. Fuck off." I flip him off and slam the door in his face. In both timelines I get such a rush from this. Oh my God, this is the good shit. Drugs? What are those? Can you eat them? Well, yes probably, but that's not the point. The point is this is the best I've felt in months. How does Sophia even get off on violence? It sucks!
Morale is also a worthwhile use of them; got'a keep up your dopamine levels.
The next thing I do is vent Sophia's identity as Shadow Stalker to the wide reaches of the internet at a library computer. Barely an afterthought really. Takes ten minutes with how fast I type.
She should really prepare a bot to do that for her. Not just to save time but as a precaution against death.
Over in the gym behind the bleachers I find a couple jocks smoking weed. I try to turn around, but-
"Holy shit, is that Taylor?" Rrgh. Don't run, running gets you beaten.
Girl you beat them is what you do not the other way around. Sure you might end up seriously hurt but you weren't planning for that sequence of events to last anyway.
When lunch comes around I decide to end this with a bang. I decide to just go into the lunch room looking for Sophia. Luckily she's still here. I go right up to her, no hesitation.
"Sup loser." And punch her straight in the face.
"Raaaghh!!" And just like that it's on. A real knockdown drag out fight. Specifically she knocked me down and dragged me out onto the lunch table to wail on me. Wow that was embarrassing. Lost in about two seconds.
Still worth the experience. Would have been a lot better if she'd bit and clawed and headbutted and whatnot instead of just ragdolling while being beaten but it's still a learning experience. Specifically it's learning not to ragdoll mid-fight.
Oh my god did she punch with her thumb tucked in? I thought that people that stupid were a myth
or manufactured.
"Not my fault she punched me wrong. Dumb bitch probably broke her thumb."
Fuck me that's hilarious!
"The automated filters caught what you were doing and scrubbed your posts before they were sent out."
Ah there you go; definitely going to want to make a bot. Shouldn't be too hard to make some automatic input-program.
"Taylor Hebert you're under arrest for the attempted unmasking of a Ward." She produces some handcuffs. I suppress a flutter in my stomach. This is a new experience for me.
Yeah see? Getting new experiences; won't be so bothersome any other time she goes through it.
It's here while I'm sore and in pain that I contemplate my situation again. What in the actual hell is going on here? Am I a parahuman? Sure as hell doesn't feel like my power I'm using if so. Am I seeing somebody else's power? It's just, it's just so goddamn bizarre. How would I ever use my power normally if so? Whatever, I'm not getting anywhere thinking myself in circles like this.
Minor story criticism here; her going to "seeing somebody else's power" as a assumption is a bit contrived. Maybe try thinking about the story from a first-person perspective without any meta-knowledge a bit more.
"Smith." Well darn, that's fake. "We're not going to the PRT because you're threatening a scandal that will cost me my retirement. You're not surviving the day." I slowly lean back in my seat. Not every day somebody admits to plotting to murder you.
Ah. Well shit I guess that that rules out that course of action in a persistent timeline. Might be fun to spring on someone if you can get a bot onto their computer though.
Weird that they'd give a fake name to a dead girl though.
"So how are you planning to get out of this?"
"Excuse me?"
"What is it they say? It's not the crime it's the coverup? You were only facing down a scandal before. Its probably all over social media and the school right now that the resident punching bag got arrested. Didn't a few students get you on video marching me out? Dad is going to be wondering where I was booked into. He's going to be wondering why nobody informed him. Hell, don't government cars have trackers on them? You're-"
"Shut up you little smartass bitch! You think you know everything don't you? You think the law will punish me when you're gone? Ha! I've seen law enforcement get away with things that you wouldn't believe. You're just one little girl. Nobody is gonna make any fuss about you."
"We'll see then, won't we." She grunts and looks back to the road. I continue my implacably calm staring contest with her every time she looks back at me.
A shame that she didn't practice her psychological warfare against him; it's not like that staring achieved much.
Thank Christ that timeline ended before she actually killed me. For all my bravado I do not want to actually experience death. And what a sentence that was. The transfer of pain is weird between timelines. Ghostly but not. I vividly remember it, but it's all only memories. It's... Surreal. I can take it if it means getting my life back though.
Yeah as I understand it pain effects three different parts of the brain, one for knee-jerk flinching/flailing a second for thinking of ways to avoid what is currently being experienced and a third for marking ones current experiences as something to be avoided, and emotional memories are encoded onto entirely different parts of the brain from long-term events and knowledge (which are encoded onto two different parts of the brain) so there's probably a few ways to transfer knowledge between brains, or iterations of the same brain, without transferring aversions between them.
Anyways, I have some goals. First up is locker combinations. Any time a fake timeline opens up in-between classes I'm going to be memorizing locker combinations and writing them down in one of my notebooks. Not keeping them in school for anybody to see though, that can only ever end badly. I'll collate them at home, and either memorize what I need or bring them with me when I need to open a locker. This is all to plant evidence that other people leaked Sophia's identity.
Only that? I would have expected her to pull a knife on somebody at some point. Maybe a torn open drink can? Those motherfuckers can be sharp as hell.
Second up is making a more secure online account. I do this in less than a day. Just repeating my account creation spam in the city library. Signed up for the computer as Emma to cover my tracks. No cameras facing the computers, fortunately.
That's probably not going to be as helpful as she thinks that it will be.
Also not going to be spreading the information over the school computers. Not sure exactly what the automated filters do, but I'm pretty sure they're on the school's side of things. For example I doubt the PRT has any kind of power over the Gesellschaft owned forums over in Germany. I spread a wide net.
Fuck's sake girl you may as well just throw a pipe-bomb though her window.
My final goal is to get better at fighting. Just in case. That means whenever a fake timeline opens up that lasts more than five minutes, and I'm not doing anything else I go and start a fight with Sophia. She beats me every time. It's not even close. It's all just as quick and dirty as the first time in the cafeteria. So frustrating. The worst part is that it's all so calculated. I've started noticing that every single encounter with me she has a plan to take me apart from the first second, and then she executes it. Flawlessly. Actually makes me kind of mad when I see how much control she has over the situation. Means every tiny bit of pain she's inflicted on me has been on purpose. Gonna take up cardio and go to the gym to help with this. Gotta put on muscle and work on my endurance to help with my situation. All the muscle memory in the world won't help me one bit if I don't have the physical capability to back it up.
Ah fantastic! She's getting some
good use out of her extra time! Not to say that the other things that she's learning aren't also useful but fuck me is learning to knock a motherfucker out useful. I'm actually kind of surprised that she's not lasting longer in those fights; presumably Sophia would be starting with vaguely the same moves each time.
I do technically have another option here. That is to get in touch with somebody up the chain of command in the PRT. They'll probably be more sympathetic to my cause than agent 'Smith' was. One does not simply jump to murder in the woods or wherever to cover something up if you think your bosses will help with the paperwork. Though there is the risk they will be sympathetic to her in some way and screw me over regardless. If I can find somebody I think will help I'll go for it, but I'm not holding my breath here.
I like that Taylor is getting to actually test whether institutions are actually as useless as she usually believes here.
I admit beating Emma was OOC for authorial reasons, but what about the second chapter stood out to you?
Funnily enough I actually
don't think that it's OOC for Taylor; in Canon Taylor avoided Carrie'ing her school because of how it would effect her life, viewing it as a loss condition for her bullies to have driven her to that point and ruining her live that way and so viewing avoidance of it as a form of victory, but with that not being a problem here I can
easily see her resorting to it.
Taylor is someone who, despite fully being able to, never even slightly used her powers against the people bullying her. Not even for the pettiest of things like making bugs bother them occasionally because she wanted to be a hero who was above that. It's part of why being a cape was such an escape for her. Of course, knowing that Shadow Stalker, a hero, is one of her bullies would change her opinions on the PRT and Protectorate, but it's kind of hard to believe that this is the direction she would go even if she could do things without consequences. She's also just way too confident (even if the confidence is faked) for a Taylor who, in canon, was essentially going to commit suicide by cape in a couple months even if she didn't consciously think of it as such.
Semi-unrelated fun fact, according to Wildbow, it would have only taken a few more months after where canon would start of bullying for Taylor to go Carrie on the school in canon.
Oh right the "not being that sort of person is a point of pride" angle. That's a valid, if utterly strange, point.
Kind of undermined by other factors though.
That, yes. I mean that was with a power she could control. She can't control anything about Coil's power here. She cannot choose to do anything heroic with that power because typical heroics consist of physically beating up criminals. Something you can't do when you're not actually there.
This is a Taylor who has no hope of being a hero who was just given the barest sliver of control over her own fate. The school system has already beaten into her the futility of relying on the authorities for anything with an extra helping of that just recently. I would say of course she's going to leverage this to the best of her ability. And we all know what she did with just bugs, right?
Yeah exactly my point; if this Taylor
is Out Of Character then it's not by much.
