7
"Uh, Taylor, was it?" Miss Militia asked.
"Yup," Taylor confirmed, taking a swig out of her wine bottle.
"Just wondering if you could move just a
teensy bit faster?"
Miss Militia considered herself to be fairly patient as far as people went, especially when compared to her coworkers. But the donkey on which Taylor was riding was plodding along beside her at speeds that were honestly probably slower than if they were just walking normally. She was vaguely reminded of Assault whining to Battery about frustrating and slow-paced 'escort missions' in his video games, where the player had to follow behind an infuriatingly sluggish person, bound to their snail-scrawl pace.
Miss Militia didn't play video games, but she imagined that this is what an escort mission would feel like.
"Midas moves at his own pace," Taylor shrugged.
"Right."
"Care for a sip of wine for the road?" Taylor held out her bottle and shook it enticingly. Midas bleated in implied solidarity.
"Tempting," Miss Militia replied, "But no thanks. I think my boss would frown upon drinking on the job."
Left unsaid was the fact that bringing in a possibly unhinged, probably underaged, and definitely drunk maybe-cape who dressed herself up in a bedsheet and rode on a
donkey of all things was already surreal enough without the alcohol, thank you very much.
"Your loss," Taylor finished off the last of the wine in the bottle and tossed the empty glass onto the street, where it shattered into pieces.
"No littering," Miss Militia automatically chastised.
"
Sorry!" Taylor let out a burp, "Bit more drunk than usual. Not like this normally, you know? Don't worry, I'll fix it."
Taylor took out her thyrsus, spun around one-hundred and eighty degrees on Midas' back to look at the shattered glass, and waved wildly at it with the pinecone wand. The shards of glass began to wiggle slightly then elongate until they resembled little snakes. And then with a casual wave of her wand, the glass snakes animated themselves into
real snakes, which slithered off the road and into the grass.
It was going to be one of
those days, Miss Militia thought balefully.
Should've badgered Armsmaster into handling it instead.
When they got to the PRT headquarters, Taylor turned to Miss Militia, "Can I take Midas in with me? I already left him outside waiting for me at school today, and I'd hate to leave him alone for so much time in the same day."
Miss Militia peered, both eyebrows raised. The donkey stared right on back at her, "Sure. Why not? Bring him in."
Miss Militia led Taylor inside. They passed through some security checks and were led over to a little room, in which the only pieces of furniture were two chairs and a table. It didn't feel
quite like an interrogation room, especially with Miss Militia's mostly friendly demeanor, but it was definitely interrogation-adjacent. There was even a little tape recorder on the table, which Miss Militia pressed on as soon as both of them had sat down.
"So," Miss Militia clapped her hands together, "To start with, do you have a cape name? I know you've already introduced yourself with a real name, but that's something that you should really try to keep under wraps. Cape names are used for a reason, you know?"
"Why would I need a cape name?" Taylor cocked her head.
"... because you're a cape?"
Midas snorted.
"I think you've got the wrong idea," Taylor spoke slowly, as though she was explaining to a very small child, "I'm not a cape. I'm a
priestess of Dionysus."
"O… okay?"
"I mean, what, you think I'm just putting up that temple for nothing?" Taylor grinned and pulled out another wine bottle from… somewhere. Miss Militia couldn't really discern where Taylor had gotten it from, given that security had made her leave her bag at the front of the building, "I mean, I'm carrying around a thyrsus, and I've got a tiara made out of a grapevine. I've even got my priestess-y robes on. How much more obvious can I make it?"
Miss Militia idly remembered a report they'd received from Glory Girl that a girl matching Taylor's description had been digging through their trash can. She cast a blank look in Taylor's direction, then abruptly decided to get back to the original subject, "Anyway, cape names. Even if you think you're a 'priestess' rather than a proper cape, I insist, you should have a cape name. Just for safety purposes."
"I dunno, just assign me something. I don't care," Taylor waved it off and took a swig from the bottle, "It's not like I'll be particularly attached to it anyway, given that I'm not a cape."
"Sure, that's… fine," Miss Militia sighed. The PRT's working designation was Drunkard, after the numerous eyewitness reports of her alcoholism, but if Miss Militia had her way, they'd be changing that
very quickly.
"That all you wanted to talk about?" Taylor kicked her feet up onto the table.
"Uh, couple more things, actually," Miss Militia frowned and recalled the briefing that she'd had on the new cape earlier that week. There was a litany of things to go over: underage drinking, appropriation of ancient artifacts, illegal construction, and destruction of school property were all the PRT's chief concerns. Even still, Director Piggot had told her to give Taylor a softer sell, because despite the veritable laundry list of misdemeanors, by all reports there was no sign of actual
directed malice. They just wanted to make it clear that she had to cool it a little, not to cow her into submission.
"Hold that thought actually," Taylor stuck a finger up at Miss Militia, who went cross-eyed to look at it, "I'm getting, uh, a thing. I mean, spider-sense is tingling."
"What?" Miss Militia blinked, trying to parse Taylor's drunken slurring.
"You mind if we continue some other time?" Without waiting for an answer, Taylor stumbled to her feet and draped herself across Midas' back. The donkey bleated in agitation and began to clop away at a significantly quicker clip than he had on the way there. Taylor called after Miss Militia, "Shit's going down at the shrine and I'm not drunk enough to handle it!" The metal door to the room was torn neatly off of its hinges in the donkey's mad dash outside.
Miss Militia sat. With a button press, she stopped the tape recorder. Then she sat some more. At one point, the tape recorder turned
itself on and played something that she hadn't recorded. Taylor's voice came out of it, with the background noise of hastily clopping hooves, "Sorry! Had to leave in a hurry. I'll be back. How does next Thursday sound? Pencil me in for then, please." Which made
no goddamn sense (how the hell had the girl managed that? She already had master, shaker, brute, trump, and stranger ratings. Would they have to stick a tinker rating on there too?), but whatever. Now, at least, she had something to tell her boss.
After about fifteen minutes, the time when the interview was scheduled to end, Director Piggot's voice chimed in from her earpiece, "Miss Militia, report. How did it go?"
Miss Militia made a contemplative noise, "Honestly, not as bad as it could've been."
* * *
"Hello! Yoohoo!" Taylor cried, waving wildly from Midas' back. There were Empire goons at her construction site. Most of her non-white workers had been roughed up, and Empire goons were spraying
gang-tags on the columns of her temple. Drunken fury pulsed in her veins, "Might I ask what
exactly is going on?"
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then, one exceedingly foolish goon opened their mouth, "Your bitch ass is getting all
sorts of—"
"Hm, yes," Taylor's voice was quiet but powerful as it cut the man's tirade off. She hummed to herself, "The lot of you will make for
excellent dolphins."
