Vineyard Shrine (Worm)

[Quolim]

1

At this point, there was enough liquor pumping through Taylor's system that it was getting difficult to distinguish her left from her other left.

She stumbled through the halls of Winslow, giving dopey smiles to everyone whose path she crossed. She saved her widest, bestest smiles for Emma and Sophia and Madison. The three of them, seeing her approach, began to sneer. Taylor could already hear the vitriol slipping off of their tongues.

Taylor smiled a little wider.

"Oh god, look at her, begging for attention" Emma started it off. Her voice carried with it a false lilt, an uncertain overtone like an actress shakily sight-reading her lines, "She must be drunk. Or high. Or both."

Well, Emma was right about one of those things. She was indeed drunk. Very drunk. Veeeeery drunk. By her own calculation, there was only a teensy bit of blood left running in her alcohol stream.

Emma walked over and boxed Taylor in against the lockers, the other two girls standing behind her. Taylor saw a few of the other students in the hallway glance her way at the sudden commotion, and then hastily scurry away, not wanting to get caught up in whatever was happening. Emma leaned close enough that Taylor could feel her hot breath on her cheek, "Well, Taylor? Which is it? Drunk? High?"

"The first," Taylor shamelessly admitted. Her words slurred together into a nearly incomprehensible slurry, "Got a bit too excited this morning."

"You think you're real funny, don't you?" Emma snarled.

"Not funny," Taylor shrugged, "Just being honest."

Emma's face grew red and she began to screech. Taylor was certain whatever Emma was saying was suitably horrible, something about how her mother would've been ashamed of her—oh wait she was dead—but Taylor was busy looking over Emma's shoulder and making prolonged eye contact with Sophia. Taylor winked, giggled, and licked her lips.

Sophia grimaced and looked away.

You blinked.

Emma, apparently done with her tirade, gripped Taylor by the shoulders and threw her to the ground. She was nearly in hysterics, "Why don't you show us what you've been drinking, Taylor?

"Sure thing," Taylor unzipped her backpack and smiled because really, everyone was currently her friend. Even meanies like Emma. Taylor took out the half-empty bottle of wine that she'd been drinking from and offered it to Emma, "Want a sip?"

Emma's lips pulled back in a look of faint disgust, "From something you've been drinking from? I'll probably catch nasty something if I do."

"Suit yourself," Taylor took a big swig from the bottle. Emma muttered something darkly incomprehensible and brushed past her, jostling her shoulder as she walked away. Sophia glanced at her as she followed Emma. There was a hint of grudging respect in her eyes as she passed.

Then it was just Taylor in the hallway, taking deep swigs out of her wine bottle. She absently wandered the halls. The bell rang, and Taylor distantly registered that she should care about that. Her feet, however, brought her to the girl's bathroom rather than class. She sat down and continued to drink, idly wondering what she was even doing here. Then she stood up, an epiphany hitting her like a hangover. She didn't need to be here.

"For Dionysus," Taylor happily intoned, dumping what was left in the bottle onto the ground before tossing it aside and frolicking away, classes be damned.

In the spot where the wine had splashed onto the bathroom floor, the tiny stems of young plants began to sprout between the gaps in the tiles.

* * *​

The acne-ridden cashier, whose name tag read 'Jamie,' rang Taylor up for the five cases of wine that she had brought to the counter. He was almost certain that the girl was a minor, but also only vaguely cared. He'd be getting paid minimum wage regardless of whether or not the transaction was legal, and they were in the crummy part of town anyway. You learned not to ask too many questions, "Uh, your total is $478.79."

Taylor narrowed her eyes and swayed on legs made of jello, "I'll give you five drachmae for it."

She reached into her pockets and tossed five large golden coins onto the counter and glared at him with the peculiar sort of petulance-turned-anger that only drunkards could muster up. Her eyes were fiery with defiance, daring Jamie to challenge her, to contest her.

"What?" He said instead.

"Fine, six drachmae," Taylor begrudgingly put another gold coin onto the counter.

"Look, ma'am, I don't think—"

"Six drachmae and three obols," she declared, practically throwing a handful of silver coins at him. Taylor crossed her arms, "Take it or leave it."

Jamie blinked.

Jamie took it.

* * *
​

"Kiddo, your principal called. She..." Danny swallowed, "She said you brought alcohol into school."

"Sure," Taylor shrugged off her backpack and dumped the cases of wine that she'd bought onto the kitchen table. The cases were heavier than she'd expected at first, and her arms burned slightly from the exertion of carrying them all the way from the store, "First true thing she's said all year."

"Taylor," Danny sagged, shriveling up on himself like a raisin, "They've—they've suspended you. Two weeks."

Taylor hummed thoughtfully, "M'kay."

"Taylor—"

"I'll catch you later, dad," Taylor leaned forward and hugged him, "Love you."

A conflicting set of emotions warred across Danny's face. He watched, paralyzed, as Taylor waltzed out of the door, carrying two cases of wine with her, one in either hand. She'd left her other cases of wine just sitting on the kitchen table. The cardboard boxes taunted him as he sat down. He sat there for a while.

Outside, Taylor noted how cold it was. January in Brockton Bay was never particularly pleasant. There was a light dusting of snow that crunched underfoot as Taylor strolled about. Her feet felt terribly constricted within the confines of her shoes, and she considered just going barefoot. Maybe when it was warmer, she concluded. Going barefoot now was a surefire way to freeze her toes off.

Eventually, Taylor reached the Docks, the bad side of town. Not that there was a good side of town, given that it was Brockton Bay, and nearly everything was crummy in some capacity, but the Docks were a crumbling gray mess of samey broken-down architecture that was just a touch worse than the rest. Still, with the alcohol pumping through her veins, she knew that Dionysus was with her. And her god would never guide her the wrong way.

Or, he would, but only if it was funny.

She peeked around a corner and peered into a half-collapsed warehouse. Inside, half a dozen sleazy-looking men crowded around a trash barrel fire and passed around a dirty bottle of something. Ever since becoming a priestess of Dionysus, Taylor could immediately tell the quality of an alcoholic beverage even from a distance. And whatever was in that bottle could only charitably be considered booze. The more she looked at the group, the more that she could discern what they really were. A ragtag collection of filthy and homeless drunkards.

In other words: her kind of people.

"Gentlemen, yoohoo!"

They looked up.

"I'll leave these here," Taylor set down the crates of wine, "Far better than the horse piss that you're currently drinking."

"Girl," a dark-skinned man with a fabulously long and tangled beard slowly rasped out, "I think you're in the wrong part of town."

"On the contrary, sir," Taylor grinned, "I'm in exactly the right part of town."

The man looked at her incredulously. The fire crackled and painted everyone's face with a flickering and primal light. Taylor took a bottle of wine out of one of the cases and popped the cork off without using her hands, a neat little magic trick that Dionysus had taught her in a dream. She raised the bottle to her lips and began to drink.

And drink.

Glugluglugluglug

And then there was nothing left to drink. No wine left except for the tiny dribble of dark liquid that ran from the corner of her mouth to the tip of her chin. Taylor wiped it off with the back of her hand.

"I'll see you around," Taylor turned on her heel and began to walk away, "Have fun, boys."

 

[Quolim]

2

"Back again, girl?" A voice, scratchy with disuse, sounded out as Taylor stepped around the corner. It was day two of being suspended from school, and with little better to do, she'd wandered off again to the Docks. Like last time, she carried a crate of wine with her.

"My name's Taylor," she introduced herself. She was sober today, for a change. First time that'd happened in a week or two, "Just you today?"

There was only one person around the trash fire, unlike yesterday, where there had been six or seven huddled together passing around cheap moonshine. The one there was an elderly dark-skinned man. He was bald with wrinkled skin and a tangled white beard that reached about midway down to his chest.

He shrugged, "The others were here because I had booze. I passed it around to share because, hey, everyone needs a drink 'round here, yeah? When you came in with your cases of wine, we divided them between the six of us, and then the others split."

"Ah," Taylor frowned, "That sounds... lonely. They only come when you've got something to share?"

"Wouldn't say it like that. More like the booze was my excuse to get them here. Everyone's hungry and everyone's cold. I'm a bit better off than others, bit luckier with my scavenging. I've got a fire to keep myself warm, and a decent shelter with this warehouse over my head. Wanna share it when I can, but they've got pride, you see. They wanna be able to stand on their own and feel like it too. I share my booze, or whatever scraps of food I've got. And we gather 'round, and we talk, and then oops, it's dark out now, how's about you just stay the night here?"

"No one, I dunno, takes advantage of you when you're handing things out?"

"Usually not," he smiled, "You get the odd one that's really doing shit for himself and takes a little more than others, or you get the odd selfish one. But there's a code of conduct around here. We're sleeping in the garbage piles, but we do it with our heads held high."

"So everyone's just so prideful and individualistic that they won't accept help even when they're literally homeless and starving?"

"Something like that."

"That's..." Taylor struggled to find the words.

"Pretty neat, isn't it? Rock bottom. No strings attached. Just an odd helping hand when you slip. Liberating, is what I'd call it."

Taylor hummed and thought about it.

She grinned.

"I'm Damien, by the way. Just realized I haven't introduced myself," the man said, hobbling up to a standing position and stretching. The sun poked in from behind him through the cracked and fallen warehouse walls. It illuminated his figure from behind.

Taylor took a bottle of wine out from the case that she'd brought with her and idly took a sip from it. She sat down on a faded plastic crate that served as a makeshift chair. Her hand that wasn't holding the bottle was fidgeting, itching with the desire to do something, but Taylor didn't quite know what.

"Hey Damien?"

"Hrm?"

"Apropos of nothing, do you know where I could find some pine cones?"

* * *
​

"Hey, Damien! Hey!" Taylor burst into the warehouse.

"Oh, goodness, girlie. You're back. And drunk again."

"Nooooo," Taylor denied, "Maybe. Just a little bit. Only like, three or four bottles."

Damien sighed. He'd only known Taylor for two days and already knew she was trouble.

"Okay, but it's my job to be drunk. I'm not an alcoholic or anything, I'm just dedicated."

"Sure, whatever," Damien snorted, "Shouldn't you be in school right now? I'm sure your parents wouldn't exactly be thrilled if they found out that you were cutting class to hang out in the bad side of town. And drinking while you were at it."

"Meh, 'sfine. I've been suspended for two weeks, so it's not like I have much better things to do," Taylor waved off his concerns, "More importantly, check this out!"

Taylor produced an item from behind her back and showed it off proudly for Damien to see. He raised a critical eyebrow, "That looks like a pine cone on a stick."

"That's because it is a pine cone on a stick," Taylor confirmed, "But it's more than that. Way more. It's a thyrsus, Damien. It's special. It's magical. It's a holy symbol and all. Lord Dionysus sent me a dream and helped me make it. It's super cool, isn't it?"

Taylor waved her thyrsus around, conducting an imaginary orchestra with wide sweeps of her arms. She got a bit dizzy spinning around, though, so she decided that she would sit down. The ground was looking awful comfortable, after all, and it was an awful shame that no one's butt was planted on it.

"Taylor," Damien said carefully, "I'm not exactly sure how to break it to you, but you're drunk."

"I'm always drunk," Taylor scoffed, "What's your point?"

"Your pine cone on a stick—"

"Thyrsus."

"Sure, whatever. It's not magic. No amount of drunkenness makes magic, Taylor."

"See, now that's where you're wrong," Taylor pointed a finger at him, "I'm a priestess of Dionysus. My drunkenness directly correlates to my magicalness."

Damien sighed and sat down on the ground next to Taylor, "Alright, then. Show me. Show me whatever magic you've got. Show me so that I can point and laugh at you when you inevitably fall on your face. And then get on back home."

"You wouldn't laugh," Taylor declared, twirling her thyrsus around in her hand, "You're too nice for that."

Taylor got up and brushed herself off. As she straightened out her clothes, she made the realization that her hoodie and jeans weren't exactly the right clothes for a priestess. Not that Dionysus particularly cared. She could wear whatever she damn well pleased, as far as she could tell. Maybe she'd look into proper priestess-y robes later.

With a flick of her wrist, Taylor produced an empty glass bottle from thin air. Then, with a shake of her thyrsus, honey began to drip from the pine cone at the staff's end, slowly filling the bottle. When the bottle was full, she tapped the side, and the honey within turned to wine. Another tap and it was transmuted back to honey.

"Jesus ain't got shit on me," Taylor giggled, "Turn water into wine, try turning honey into wine and back, loser."

Damien's eyes boggled.

"Alright, it's been fun. I'll swing by later maybe," Taylor turned to leave, slinging her staff on the shoulder, "I'm gonna go plant an orchard or something."

 

[Quolim]

3

After waving goodbye to Damien, Taylor wandered drunkenly through the city. Restlessness brewing in her hands and her feet, compelling her to move around to do something. Building her thyrsus and performing minor magic tricks with it had felt good, but her fingers itched to do more.

Which was when Taylor was hit with the idea to construct a temple.

It was a perfect thing to occupy her time with. Building a shrine. It wasn't as though Dionysus particularly needed one; any place in which people were getting drunk and having orgies was hallowed ground as far as he was concerned. But at the same time, it just felt right. A shrine was a place to be. It was a place of power, a place of love, a place where alcohol flowed like water and friendship flowed like projectile vomit following a hangover.

So Taylor started making plans.

During the weekdays, Lord's Market was markedly less busy. Foot traffic was sluggish and occasional. Most people were off at work, anyway. That suited Taylor just fine. There were loads of things that she needed to buy today, and it'd be easier to get around without too many people.

"How much for this bedsheet?" Taylor asked a woman operating a stall.

The woman, a little bored with the lack of customers, gave a lazy reply, "Twenty bucks."

"I'll give you two obols for it," Taylor declared. She stuffed a hand into the back pocket of her jeans and dug out two of the silver coins, holding them up for the woman to see. They glinted in the sunlight despite their tarnished exteriors, "No less, no more."

As it turned out, Lord's Market, with its independently run stalls, were rather less gung ho about taking ancient Greek currency. Who would've thunk it? Taylor contemplated stealing them or turning the shopkeepers into dolphins for their disrespect, but ultimately decided against both courses of action. She would've worshipped Hermes if she was into theft, and perhaps turning them into dolphins for operating their business as intended was a bit much.

Taylor had a modest sum of money saved up. Not drachmae or obols. Dollars. She'd blown it all on alcohol in her first week as a priestess.

She fingered her thyrsus idly, thinking of what she would do now. She had to acquire money somehow. Or maybe she could take a page out of Damien's book and start scavenging through trash cans. And the more Taylor thought about it, the more the latter option seemed to be preferable. It even clicked with Dionysus' schtick. What was the god known for other than alcohol, agriculture, and insanity, after all? Being a homeless vagrant, of course.

Taylor figured that the richer neighborhoods would have the more valuable junk, and so she began her quest over in the nicer side of town. In the first trash can that she rifled through, Taylor found a faded and well-worn stuffed bear. One of the button eyes was missing and one of the bear's arms had been torn off somehow, revealing the white stuffing within.

"Oh," Taylor cooed, "Someone used to love you loads, didn't they? Loved you to bits, I bet."

The bear slowly deflated as its stuffing leaked out.

"Don't you worry a thing," Taylor assured the bear, "Nothing that a good wash and a sewing job can't fix."

The bear was quiet.

"I think I'll call you Kallisto."

Taylor tucked the newly-named Kallisto underneath her arm and continued on to the next house's garbage bin. Pushing past the food waste, she found a slightly used bedsheet and several boxes of raisins that were well past their expiration date.

She wrapped the bedsheet around her body, "Kind of like a robe, isn't it?" Taylor made idle chatter with Kallisto.

Turning her attention to the boxes of raisins, She opened the boxes and poured out the dried fruits into the palm of her hand. Then, with a casual wave of her thyrsus, the raisins swelled with moisture, turning into bunches of grapes. Another swish of the wand turned the bunches into a connected circle. Taylor placed the grapes on top of her head like a circlet. She was looking more and more like the part of a priestess.

She moved on to the next house, which had the most garbage in the can that she'd seen so far. Most of it wasn't even proper trash. Old discarded clothes. Some of them didn't even look particularly worn, as though someone had bought their clothes, decided they didn't like them, and then threw them out rather than returning them.

Taylor shrugged. Waste not, want not.

She began humming a tune as she rummaged through the trash. She tried to pick and choose what clothes to take. Or maybe she'd just take the thing, trash bag and all.

Someone cleared their voice behind her, "Uhh..."

Taylor spun around to look at the person who'd spoken and nearly squeed out loud. It was Glory Girl, floating several feet in the air and carrying Panacea in her arms. They were in civilian outfits, both carrying backpacks. Taylor gave them her widest grin, and waved so hard she thought her arm would fall off, "Hello!"

"Hey, uh," Glory Girl bit her lip, "Why're you digging through our trash? Just, you know, wondering."

"You can find all sorts of neat stuff in the trash," Taylor smiled beatifically.

"Right."

"I mean, just look at all this stuff I've found!" Taylor held up Kallisto and then did a little spin to show off her bedsheet-turned robes and her grapevine tiara.

"Okay, that's... cool I guess?"

"You don't mind, do you?" Taylor was suddenly worried if she'd offended the superheroes somehow with the dumpster diving, "I just figured since you're throwing it all away anyway, I could take a little look and grab what I wanted? I'll put it back if you want."

"No, that's okay," Glory Girl landed.

"Awesome!"

Panacea, for her part, stared at Taylor as though she was some unquantifiably strange and alien creature.

"Look," Glory Girl seemed to hesitate for a moment before reaching into her backpack and pulling out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. She extended her arm and offered it to Taylor, "You probably need this more than I do. Stay safe out there, alright?"

Glory Girl raised a hand as though to pat Taylor on the shoulder before registering that she was dressed in literal garbage and thinking better of it. She aborted the shoulder pat and awkwardly transitioned into a thumbs-up. The two superheroes then walked into their house. Glory Girl spared one last wary look in her direction and shut the door.

Sweet, Taylor thought while she strolled away, a bounce in her step. Free money!

 

[Quolim]

4

"Ohh, Taylor," Emma crooned as Taylor walked by. Nearby students looked up with idle curiosity. Everybody liked to watch fights, "How was your suspension?" Emma put special emphasis on the word 'suspension' as though it was some poisonous thing.

"Pretty nice, actually. Thanks for asking," Taylor replied pleasantly. Her lunch tray held a slice of Winslow's subpar cafeteria pizza and was stacked high with boxes of raisins.

"What are you wearing?"

Taylor looked down at herself.

"I think it might be called a chiton, although don't quote me on that. It's a bedsheet, really, but I did the best I could. Had to work with what I had, you know? The circlet's made of grapes, though. Grew it myself out of a packet of raisins," Taylor explained, smiling all the while, "And below the chiton, I've got on Glory Girls' hand-me-downs."

Behind Emma, Sophia snorted, a sound that almost resembled a laugh.

"Looks like you fished it out of the trash," Emma wrinkled her nose.

Taylor smiled wider.

Emma's cheeks reddened at Taylor's non-reaction. She stomped forward and smacked the bottom of Taylor's lunch tray, making the contents spill all over onto Taylor's face and clothes. Taylor peered at Emma, narrowed her eyes slightly, and huffed, disappointed. Emma made some sort of whistling noise as air rushed in through her teeth. She kicked at Taylor's shins, which offered little resistance to the attack. Taylor toppled over.

Taylor made eye contact with Emma, "Got it out of your system now?"

Emma threw her hands up in the air and stormed away. Sophia remained behind and stared at Taylor. Taylor, for her part, was content to stare right on back.

Eventually, Sophia arched an eyebrow, "You went down pretty easy."

"Hard to keep your balance when you're drunk," Taylor admitted, "Most things are way easier, but when you're all boozed up, you see the world for what it really is. And it's real crooked. Takes effort to stay standing in this tilted world of ours, huh? Sometimes I stumble."

Sophia blinked.

"And also I'm just plain drunk. That might have something to do with it."

Sophia frowned and pursed her lips. She swiped a carton of chocolate milk off of a nearby lunch tray, tore the top open, and raised it over Taylor's head. Sticky-sweet liquid came flowing out of the flimsy container and rained down on Taylor, staining her already dirty clothes with dark wet splotches.

"You're fucking crazy, Hebert," Sophia said as she poured the milk on Taylor, although there was hardly any malice in it.

"Crackers," Taylor cheerfully agreed.

The bell rang then, signaling the end of the lunch period. Crowds of students left the cafeteria in droves, and Sophia disappeared into the mob. Taylor remained for a minute before picking herself up off the ground. She brushed off the bits of pizza and headed to the bathroom to wash up.

The faucet of Winslow's girl's bathroom ran with a meager dribble. Taylor found that most of the water was spilling out all over the ground. When she peeked underneath the sink's basin to see what was happening, she saw a cluster of saplings and weedy plants growing through the plumbing.

Taylor tilted her head.

From her backpack, she produced a bottle of wine. She poured the entire thing into the sink. With the plantlife clogging the drain, the wine stayed where it was, forming a shallow pool in the sink. Taylor summoned her thyrsus to her hand and dipped it into the liquid.

"For Dionysus."

The wine bubbled and burped in contentment.

* * *
​

"Taylor."

"Yup," Taylor warmed her hands on Damien's trash fire, idle thoughts drifting through her mind. She wondered if the alcohol content in her blood was high enough at this point that it was flammable. If it was, that'd be pretty metal, she decided.

"The hell is this?"

"It's a donkey, obviously."

Said donkey, which clopped around Damien's warehouse-shelter, bleated in smug agreement. As far as Damien was concerned, the donkey had appeared out of thin air a minute or two ago. Damien had promptly had a heart attack at its appearance, while Taylor ran over and cooed over it, showering the animal in affection.

"Okay, let me rephrase the question," Damien ran his fingers through his beard, "Why is there a donkey inside my home?"

"Lord Dionysus sent him."

"Did he mention why he sent him?" Damien tried to inject as much disbelieving sarcasm as he could into his words.

Taylor, immune to sarcastic comments, replied straight-faced, "He'll be integral to helping out Brockton Bay, of course. Or, he'll be integral to helping me, but same difference, right?"

Damien closed his eyes and sighed deeply.

Taylor rubbed the donkey's neck adoringly and then attempted to feed her algebra textbook to it. The animal had been quite happy to chew on the textbook but then stamped a hoof on the ground in frustration as it fell out of its mouth. The textbook had taken on a golden sheen, and Damien jumped when it hit the ground with a loud thunk.

The book had turned into solid gold.

"I'll call him Midas," Taylor rubbed the donkey's ears, "It's a bit on the nose, but it works. He'll be my little source of income for the foreseeable future. I'd start pawning off my drachmae and obols, but I've only got a few left. I'll find a buyer for all the gold Midas make, though, and then I can get started on making that temple."

Damien sighed.

"So anyway," Taylor continued, "Next time you see any of the guys that normally stop by your place, can you tell them I'm offering work? Can't make that temple alone, after all. I'll even pay them. Say, twenty bucks an hour or so? Sounds reasonable I think, but maybe I'll increase that, since it's not like I'll be short on money with Midas here."

"Right," Damien nodded numbly. Best just to go with it for now.

 

[Quolim]

5

"Hey Dad, I'm working on this, uh, thing over at the Docks," Taylor conversationally mentioned at the breakfast table, "So if there're any of the guys in the Dockworker's Union that need a job, tell them I'm willing to pay twenty dollars an hour? Nothing terribly hard, I don't think. Just a bit of physical labor. Send them my way if you get the chance. I'll be a street or two away from the waterfront, and it should be pretty hard to miss it."

"Taylor, what—"

She yawned drowsily and got up, starting for the door, "Don't worry 'bout it."

"Taylor, you have school today."

"Uh, call it an extracurricular thing?"

"Taylor..."

* * *​

"Shouldn't you be in school right now?" Damien peered at Taylor.

She made a so-so gesture and took a sip of her wine, "Ehh, I try to go to school as much as I can. Out of habit more than anything else, but there's also some other stuff I wanna check in on. Dad gave me an earful about it this morning."

"You said you go to Winslow, yeah?" After Taylor nodded, Damien let out a snort, "Place is a shithole. I was there thirty years ago, bet it's the same pile of garbage it was then. School's still important, though. Should try to at least finish it if you can."

"I do go to school," Taylor's tone was vaguely whining, petulantly tipsy, "Told you, got some stuff there I wanna check in on."

"Boss!" A man, one of the many homeless people that had come flocking to Taylor after hearing about the twenty dollar-an-hour wages (more than double minimum wage with no entry requirements? What was this girl smoking?) interrupted Taylor and Damien's conversation. He and several others were working together to carry a large stone slab, "Where you want us to put this?"

"Does it look like a know a thing about architecture?" Taylor threw her head back and finished off her bottle of wine, "Just, like—"

She let out a thunderous drunken burp.

"—like put it somewhere over there," Taylor gestured vaguely towards where some of the other workers were throwing the building materials that they had gathered into a large and messy pile, "I'll do some like magic wavy stuff at it later."

"You got it, boss."

Damien spared one skeptical look at the haphazardly thrown together heap of miscellaneous building materials. He knew better than to doubt Taylor's abilities, but he couldn't help but be slightly dubious about the whole project. Then again, the girl that could transmute honey to wine and produce a donkey that could turn anything into gold (Midas tended to hang around his trash fire, and really was rather friendly once you got to know him), was probably more or less capable of anything in Damien's mind.

The pile of building materials was being gathered in an empty parking lot. Any other place, they would've immediately been ushered off the property, but this was a particularly terrible place in an already terrible area of the city. Damien doubted anyone had bothered parking in that lot in years.

He looked back at Taylor, who was busy starting on her third bottle of wine, "How the hell do they let you stay in school like that? You drink that much in school too?"

"You said it earlier, Winslow's the trashiest school around," Taylor snorted, "But they've got to at least look like they're trying. They suspended me a little while ago for bringing alcohol into school. My fault for getting so obvious about it, I guess, but doesn't matter too much. My projects don't require all too much direct supervision on my part."

She'd mentioned those projects of hers a few times now, and Damien was becoming intrigued, "Projects?"

Taylor shook a hand in a so-so motion, "Sort of. Got some friends I'm keeping an eye on. Or, kinda maybe friends, but eh. They're a work in progress. Also, I'm working on turning the girl's bathroom into a rainforest. Gotta refresh the spell that keeps the janitors from noticing anything's off every now and then."

Damien immediately regretted asking anything.

In the blink of an eye, Taylor had polished off the bottle of wine that she was working on and popped open her fourth bottle for the day, glugging furiously.

"Drinking those pretty quickly, huh?"

"Yeah," Taylor replied, rolling her shoulders, "Gotta get properly drunk before I can begin construction. Speaking of, looks like the pile's big enough that I can get started."

Indeed, the pile of rocks and whatnot that Taylor's hired help had been gathering had grown to a veritable mountain of junk over the course of their conversation. Taylor gestured for her workers to stop, then drunkenly stumbled on over to the pile. Clumsily, she picked her way through the junk and climbed to the top of the pile.

She summoned her thyrsus to her hand and waved it in the air carelessly, "Bippity boppity, let's build us some property."

Taylor uncorked yet another bottle of wine, took a messy swig, and then smashed the bottle against the pile. A single purple flower bloomed from between the cracks where the wine had seeped in. Then, a blindingly bright light flashed across the entire abandoned parking lot. Taylor felt herself beginning to rise into the air, carried upwards by a growing piece of architecture. The grinding screech of stone being mashed together rang through the air as Taylor was raised ten, twenty, thirty feet upwards. The entire pile of stone, which had taken nearly the entire day to gather, had all been transmuted into marble and cobbled together to construct only one singular, albeit massive, column.

"Hoo boy," Taylor muttered, peaking over the edge of the column.

Dimly, she heard the surprised shouting from below her, but there really was only one thought in her head:

"This is going to take a lot longer than I thought."

* * *
​

Emma stepped into her basement, flicked on the lights, and glanced at her dad's wine rack. It held several dozen bottles, each one of them cast in deep shadows. She picked one at random from the shelf and took a tiny sip. She grimaced at the bitterness and spat the liquid out, leaving a deep burgundy stain on the tile.

She clenched her fists hard enough that her fingernails drew blood.

 

[Quolim]

6

On the second day of construction, Taylor brought food for all of her workers. Heaps and heaps of things she'd picked almost at random off of the supermarket shelves. With Midas' financial contributions, she didn't at all have to be thrifty with how she spent money.

There was, of course, a side effect to her food handouts. Not everyone who came by the construction site of the shrine was there to work, Taylor noted. Sometimes the people who stopped by had full-time jobs, the ones that crammed them into cubicles and desks for the better part of the day, the ones that didn't pay well enough to keep them properly afloat. At around five o'clock each day, after work, they came to take food, and would maybe work for thirty minutes because they felt bad. But they had families to feed, and so they headed home, carrying bags of food by the armful.

Taylor didn't mind.

Towards the end of the day, it became a veritable block party, with all the people coming in, helping out where they could, and helping themselves to the food and the wine and the company. Fun times.

Days passed quietly. Sometimes, she went to school. Those days, she trusted Damien with supervising the construction efforts. Not that there was much to supervise anyway. It mostly boiled down to throw all your stuff into a big pile and wait for Taylor to come by and do some magic wavy stuff. And, of course, to have a good time while you were at it.

It was Monday, and she decided it was one of those days. Taylor headed to Winslow, riding on Midas' back. She'd heard you weren't supposed to ride a donkey somewhere online, but Taylor was fairly light, and Midas was big as far as donkeys went and also probably infused with divine magic of some sort.

"Wait out here for me, all right?" Taylor patted Midas' flank once she reached Winslow. Midas snorted in agreement.

She got a few odd looks in the parking lot, but she just smiled. Taylor was immune to it at this point. She moseyed on over to her first class, which she vaguely remembered to be with Mr. Gladly. Taylor had long replaced all of the textbooks in her bag with bottles of wine. Dimly, she wondered if she'd be able to keep up with anything that was happening in class before she remembered that it was Mr. Gladly's class, and she'd have to have the intelligence of a particularly dull iguana to get anything below a B.

As Taylor pushed through Winslow's overcrowded hallways, she spotted a head of distinctively red hair up ahead. She quickened up her pace to catch up.

"Hi, Emma!" Taylor's face split into a wide grin and she wiggled her fingers in a jaunty hello.

Emma's hair wasn't as perfectly put together that day, and her ordinarily flawless nail polish was a little sloppier than usual. Nothing that really stood out all too much, but Taylor had a keen eye for all things Emma, and to her, Emma looked positively frazzled.

"What do you want Taylor?" Emma's voice was tired, but venomous all the same.

"To talk to you, silly!"

Emma shoved her and stalked away. Definitely a work in progress, Taylor thought. She'd try again later, maybe when Emma was feeling like less of a frumpy pumpkin. She wandered over to Mr. Gladly's class, sitting down at her desk a few minutes before the bell rang. Class happened. Mr. Gladly made some noises with his mouth. The same people who used to bully her now only watched her warily. And then the bell rang again and class stopped happening.

A surprisingly pleasant waste of her time, Taylor noted.

"Taylor," Mr. Gladly stopped her at the door, "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?"

"Ehhh," she gave him grunt and a thumbs-up and strolled away, Mr. Gladly's damp protestations fading into faint background buzz.

Taylor's destination was, naturally, the girl's bathroom. The place had bloomed into a fiercely wild garden, with vines and flowers fighting for dominance among the bathroom stalls. The flora was beginning to spill outside of the bathroom even. Taylor shrugged off her backpack and unzipped it. Half a dozen wine bottles filled her bag, taking the place of her notebooks and textbooks. She took one out, uncorked it, and poured wine on the grass. Then, when that bottle was empty, she pulled out another and began to pour out the wine in a similar manner. Then another bottle, and another.

"For Dionysus," Taylor bowed her head in prayer. Then, while the plants greedily soaked up the alcohol, she left.

Only to bump directly into Sophia.

"Hebert?" Sophia raised an eyebrow. Then she peered behind Taylor, through the still-open door of the bathroom and the vegetation that slowly but surely crawling outwards, "What the fuck?"

Taylor smiled, and pressed her index finger to her lips in a shushing gesture, "Don't worry about it." With a coy wink, Taylor skipped away.

* * *
​

Taylor rode on Midas' back all the back to the Docks, to the construction site of her temple. By the time she arrived, the rush hour of people coming in for food was just beginning, with Damien handing out bags that he'd spent last night parceling together by the light of his barrel fire. There was a bit more of a commotion that day, a larger crowd than normal, and once Taylor drew in close enough, she could see why.

Miss Militia stood at the front of the parking lot, waiting for Taylor as she slowly clopped in at Midas' mild pace. The crowd dispersed respectfully around her, clearing a path for Taylor to meet with Miss Militia.

"Hi," the hero waved at her. Even through the American flag-patterned scarf that she wore, Taylor could tell that she was smiling, "You mind coming with me for a bit? Nothing bad, I promise. PRT just wants to meet up with you real quick."

Taylor glanced over at Damien, who gave her a thumbs-up. He could take things from there.

"You mind if I get an autograph from you first?"

 

[Quolim]

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."

 

[Quolim]

8

"Bring this note to Kaiser, alright?" Taylor tied the note that she'd written onto the leg of a pigeon.

The bird let out a drunken warble of agreement, barely registering Taylor's words as it stuffed its beak into a bottle of wine. Behind her, Damien was busy with taking care of the people that had been roughed up by those Empire members and organizing efforts to wash off the graffiti.

"No idea where to find Kaiser, but you can track him down, yeah?" Taylor asked the bird.

The pigeon, rather than answering, dropped the now-empty wine bottle and crookedly flew away, spiraling away in drunken circles.

"Okay, bye! Thank you!"

* * *​

"The hell is this?" Hookwolf growled and looked down into the water. Several dolphins were flopping away in the bay, calling out desperately to him. Most of them had swastikas and other gang symbols tattooed on their flippers. Whoever had done this, he could only really applaud their audacity.

"I can only assume this to be some form of an elaborate practical joke," Kaiser remarked airily, "A joke made in particularly bad taste, might I add."

That morning, a bird had shattered the window to Kaiser's office in the Medhall headquarters. Tied to its leg was a note, a small folded piece of paper with a message written in runny dark purple ink.


Dear Mr. Kaiser,
Plz pcki pikk pick up ur goons. Nver come too 2 the temple evr ain again. And also go fyuck urself.

XOXO


The person that had written the note had butchered the English language beyond Kaiser's comprehension, with repeatedly misspelled words and the most atrocious handwriting that he had ever witnessed. It was almost like whoever had written it had been severely drunk while doing so. Despite how short the note was, it had taken Kaiser several minutes to decipher it. There was a street address hastily scrawled across the back of the note in the same bleeding purple ink that the message in the front had been written in. A cursory internet search had revealed that address to be a place in the Docks, a shipping warehouse right by the water that had been abandoned years ago.

Most alarming, however, was the fact that the messenger bird had known exactly where to bring the note, and had brought it to his civilian identity. That meant that the person knew who he was. Which meant that he had to investigate.

Which, of course, had led him to the scene in front of him. The dolphins.

Kaiser turned around and began to walk away, his heavy armored greaves thudding against the asphalt. The dolphins, seeing him turn away to leave began calling out even louder, as if trying to recapture his attention. Kaiser paid them no mind. He had bigger things to worry about than a random pod of dolphins.

"I've been hearing mutterings of a new cape setting up shop in the Docks," as Kaiser walked, he spoke to Hookwolf, who had stuck by the dolphins for a moment longer before following behind him, "It seems that this would be her doing."

"Can't be a very smart cape if the first thing she does is piss us off," Hookwolf scoffed.

"It's possible that we were the ones that 'pissed her off,' as you put it," Kaiser mused, "The way in which she phrased her note would suggest that. 'Never come to the temple ever again,' she said. Perhaps some of our membership had wandered over into her territory."

"Why the hell would anyone do that?" Hookwolf was vaguely incredulous, "She's set up in the Docks. Only the Merchants would ever bother with such shitty territory."

Kaiser rubbed his chin contemplatively. With both his face and his hands covered in dull steel armor, the action was slightly silly, but it was more for effect than anything else anyway, "By all reports, she seems to be an equal opportunity employer. A person's race is, apparently, not an issue for her. I assume some of our recruits took issue with that."

Hookwolf snorted in derision. Quietly, Kaiser agreed with the sentiment. He himself had never bought into the Empire's philosophy, simply using it as a tool to control his people. He'd long suspected Hookwolf shared his views and only publically espoused the Empire's philosophy for protection and as an excuse to get into more fights.

"Still, I can't let this stand," Kaiser continued, "She seems to have knowledge of my civilian guise. And, on top of that, used it to deliver a message. It would be remiss of us not to send a message in turn, wouldn't it?"

Behind the mask, Kaiser knew that Hookwolf was beginning to grin, spoiling for a fight.

* * *​

"Hebert," Sophia nodded in greeting as she bumped shoulders with Taylor in the hallway at Winslow. They were right by the girl's bathroom. The door to the bathroom had been locked or otherwise jammed for days at this point, ever since Sophia had stumbled upon the veritable jungle that Taylor was cultivating in there.

"Hi, Sophia!" Taylor belted out an excited greeting and opened her arms in a proferred hug which Sophia summarily ignored. Instead, she leaned back against the wall in a suitably surly manner and stared flatly at Taylor, waiting for her to drop her arms. She never did.

"What's got your ass so chipper this morning?" Sophia resisted the urge to roll her eyes at Taylor's routinely dopey attitude.

"When am I ever not happy at school these days?" Taylor beamed, "I get to see you, and Emma, and all sorts of people. Also, I'm drunk!"

"Of course you are," Sophia quirked her lips in an almost-smile.

"Speaking of," Taylor swung her head back and forth with comical exuberance, looking around. As she moved, her backpack jostled around, producing the sound of glass clinking together, "Where's Emma, anyway? I thought for sure I would've bumped into her today."

"Don't think she's here today," Sophia shrugged, "Probably out sick or something."

"Oh," Taylor tapped her nose, thinking, "If you see her, tell her I said hi, okay?"

"Uh-huh," Sophia grunted noncomittally.

Then came a loud crash from right behind her that made Sophia nearly jump out of her skin.

"... the hell?" Sophia muttered.

The door to the girl's bathroom had fallen clean off of its hinges and fallen onto the ground, revealing a solid wall of plant life, pulsating with primal power. The door hadn't been locked, Sophia realized, it had just been clogged up with an exponentially growing mass of flora. Beside her, Taylor giggled. Then she shrugged off her backpack, took out the wine bottles within the bag, and then began to feed the wine to the greenery.

Internally, Sophia wondered if she should bother writing up a report on any of this.

 

[Quolim]

9

Emma laid back on her bed, staring at nothing in particular.

Taylor was strong now, that was for certain. Sophia had told her that the world existed in a dichotomy of prey and predator and that they were predators, so they had a sacred right to do whatever the hell they wanted to prey. Taylor was prey, and so she was nothing.

But that was wrong. Obviously and so stupidly wrong. Taylor hadn't responded to any of what she and Sophia and Madison had been doing to her, probably hadn't even really noticed it at all. They'd stuffed her locker full of trash again, hoping to riff off of the old locker prank, but as far as Emma knew, Taylor never even used her locker anymore, and Emma wasn't convinced that Taylor would care even if she did. The insults that she hurled at Taylor slid off of her like rain. The physical abuse was nothing to her. Even the suspension that Emma caused by tattling on Taylor to Principal Blackwell hadn't fazed her.

Taylor wasn't prey, but she certainly wasn't a predator either. A predator would have struck back a long time ago.

Taylor was a plant, Emma thought. A tree, hundreds of feet tall, with branches that held the sky. Docile enough to let even the lowest of animals pick off of her, but sturdy enough that even the strongest couldn't budge her an inch. She existed outside the system that she and Sophia had constructed.

So Emma thought. And she thought some more.

Taylor + Emma = Weak Taylor
Taylor - Emma = Strong Taylor

The math was dead simple. She was the only variable in the equation, after all, but she kept on getting tied into knots, trying to fit everything that she knew and understood into two tiny little equations. Logic chains that terminated in the same outcome, no matter what crackpot rationale she used.

Taylor + Emma = Weak Taylor
Emma = Weak Taylor - Taylor
Emma = Weak

No. No, that wasn't right.

Taylor - Emma = Strong Taylor
Taylor = Strong Taylor + Emma
Taylor - Strong Taylor = Emma
- Strong = Emma
- Strong = Weak
Emma = Weak

Damn.

It was supposed to be a clean break, a fresh start. Breaking things of with Taylor meant breaking things off with the old Emma. The one that was too weak to do anything at all, the one that was nothing. Cutting Taylor off had been a calculated risk of sorts.

But man, was she bad at math.

* * *​

A pipe burst at Winslow that day, something to do with clogging from the girl's bathroom. The water leak seeped through the bathroom and into the hallway, turning the western wing of the school into a veritable swamp. Rather than canceling school for the day, given that about a quarter of the building was flooded, Principal Blackwell had made the executive decision to simply move the affected classes into various unused spaces in the school. Which was how Taylor spent Mr. Gladly's world issues class in the cafeteria, chemistry class in the hallway, and algebra in the parking lot. It was, thankfully, an unusually warm day for late February, which meant that it wasn't terribly uncomfortable to attend class outdoors.

There was even a faintly classical quality to it, Taylor thought to herself while Mrs. Caulfield lectured about the quadratic formula or something of the sort. The ancient Greeks lectured and did much of their education outdoors, didn't they? Or maybe that was the Romans. It was kind of hard to keep them straight.

Taylor snickered to herself at the unintentional pun.

"Something funny, Hebert?" Sophia muttered under her breath.

"Nothing much," Taylor smiled. She scooted backward until her butt was against the curb and then reclined against the grass, freshly revealed, yellowed, and sodden from the recently-melted snow. The grass responded to her contact, turning green and lengthening. The grass tangled its growths together until it was a suitably comfortable pillow for Taylor to lie against, "You ever see Emma, by the way? I haven't seen her all week."

"I haven't either," Sophia rested her chin on her fist, "She hasn't really been returning my texts either. Was thinking of stopping by her house."

"Can I come with?" Taylor tilted her head to the side.

"Uh..." Sophia blinked, "Not sure that's a good idea."

"Why's that?" Taylor had an unnerving way of looking at people sometimes, Sophia noticed. These days, she was usually drunk enough that she couldn't look at anything with too much focus. But every now and then, there was something sharp behind that cloudy stare.

"Well, you and Emma have got that thing, right?" Sophia retorted.

Taylor stared at Sophia for a long moment. They locked eyes, and despite the relative chill of the day, Sophia began to sweat slightly. The grass behind Taylor lengthened and began to swing back and forth, forward and backward, side to side, an infinite series of offset metronomes. Tick tock.

Then the moment passed, the grass unwound itself and returned to normal, and Taylor put on a radiant smile.

"The rampant sexual tension?" Taylor tapped her cheek, only half-joking. Sophia blew out a sigh.

"Is that how you've been seeing it?" Sophia snorted, "I meant the fact that she hates your guts and bullies you mercilessly whenever she sees you, dumbass."

"Mhmm," Taylor hummed, "But Emma and I are friends, right? Or we used to be. Friend-in-progress is how I think of it these days. At least Emma's parents like me? I'm sure they won't mind if I stop by for a visit. Haven't seen them in forever."

Sophia gave Taylor a look that she hoped conveyed exactly how dubious she was feeling.

Mrs. Caulfield, their algebra teacher, had finally stopped with the lecture and was coming around to each person and passing out worksheets for each of them to do with the remaining class time. Sophia took one look at the worksheet and was instantly at a loss for what to do, or even how to start. Taylor, on the other hand, was madly scribbling all over it, already done with half of the problems in the time that it took for Sophia to even finish reading a single one of them.

Taylor caught Sophia's curious glance, "Math goes a whole lot quicker when you're drunk, you know?"

"How's that?"

"Just slap any old number down, all makes perfect sense," Taylor grinned, "It's all dead easy if you're sloshed to hell. Or rather, everything's harder, but it all feels easier, and that's really all that matters."

"Interesting methods."

"Pretty effective, too."

"That so?"

"I still have an A in the class," Taylor crossed her arms and cast a smug look in Sophia's direction.

"I think that says more about the school than it does about your math skills," Sophia said, "But I'll take your word for it."

Sophia surreptitiously pulled out her phone, first checking the time (only two or three more minutes until the school day was over), and hid her phone behind her worksheet so as to avoid Mrs. Caulfield's attention. She opened her messaging app and shot Emma a quick text, fingers tapping the screen rapid-fire.

coming 2 ur place

Then, after a moment, she sent another.

hebert says shes coming 2

There was a little speech bubble with an ellipsis, showing that Emma was typing, which then disappeared. Then it popped up again and disappeared once more. Looking up, Sophia saw that Mrs. Caulfield was looking in her direction, so she quickly crammed her phone back into her pocket.

Faintly, Sophia heard the bell ring from within the building. She probably wouldn't have been able to hear it if she hadn't specifically been listening for it, but she picked her bag up and stood up all the same. The other students had probably been similarly tuned to listen for the bell, as they all got up as a group and began to shuffle away. Mrs. Caulfield shouted the homework for the night, trying to make herself heard over the noise, but either nobody heard her, or they had heard her and pretended not to.

When Sophia checked her phone again, she saw, to her surprise, that Emma had responded. The first text that she'd sent all week, and it was uncharacteristically laconic.

Don't come.

And another below.

Either of you.

"She says not to come," Sophia grumbled to Taylor, "Either of us."

"Huh," Taylor plucked her pinecone wand thing from... somewhere, and gave it a twirl. She tapped the end of it against her palm, before vanishing it away to whatever pocket dimension she'd drawn it from in the first place, "Well, some other time, I guess."

"Not gonna just barge in?" Sophia asked.

"Was thinking about it," Taylor admitted, "But I get the feeling some Nazi schmucks are gonna try mucking about at the temple soon, so I better get cracking on it. Keep me posted on Emma, though, yeah?"

"Sure whatever," Sophia muttered an answer while she watched, somewhat transfixed, as Taylor managed to not only open a bottle of wine without even touching the cork but then proceed to suck down the contents of an entire freshly-opened bottle in less than ten seconds.

"Later, Sophia," Taylor waved, wiping away the trail of wine on her chin while unevenly walking away.

 

[Quolim]

10

Things had gotten a little crazy in the past few days.

For one, Brockton Bay's homeless population had become highly concentrated in a small area right by the water, surrounding the empty parking lot where the temple was being constructed. In and around the abandoned buildings that comprised the district, people were banding together and pitching all manner of tarps and scavenged garbage together into makeshift shelters. The reason for this sudden exodus of homeless people was fairly straightforward. The Empire's aggressive expansion efforts into the Docks meant that if you weren't white, you were a goner, and if you were, you'd get recruited, willingly or not.

The easy solution was Taylor, the nuclear deterrent.

"Hello, are you a neo-Nazi, perchance? If so, there's a lovely pod of dolphins I think you could join..."

Multiple times a day, a group of Empire thugs would find their way over to Taylor's turf, looking for trouble. Taylor, of course, obliged with far more trouble than anyone could possibly handle. Still, it was an uneasy sort of quasi-peace. The Empire wasn't sending any of their heavy-hitters, only, apparently, some goons. Just to probe her out, apparently.

Really, it was only a matter of time until things began to get more heated.

"Nice Halloween costumes, you two," Taylor amiably commented, having rushed to the temple on Midas' back as soon as school had let out. She wobbled off of the donkey's back unsteadily, bottle in one hand and her thyrsus in the other, "Although admittedly a little lazy."

Hookwolf and Stormtiger. The two of them had shown up at her temple, leaning brazenly against one of the columns. The temple had become a bustling place during construction, with a flurry of people always bustling about. But none of the activity that had recently characterized the temple construction site was present that day. Everyone had either fled or were watching with bated breath from inside their makeshift shelters. Only Damien was brave enough to stand by Taylor's side and glare down the two Nazi parahumans. Some would call Damien, a middle-aged black man who was exactly the type of person that the Empire would kill without a second thought, categorically insane. To those people, Damien would only point at Taylor and shrug.

"Could say the same thing about you," Hookwolf's voice was gruff, "I'd say your costume is lazier."

"Really?" Taylor raised an eyebrow dubiously, "Hard to get much lazier than the whole 'shirtless with a mask' schtick the two of you have got going on."

"You're wearing a bedsheet over a hoodie."

"That is also true. Least I'm rocking it, though. You guys look like you just came back from the lamest rave in Brockton." Taylor sniffed, "But I'm sure you guys didn't just come here so I could lambaste you over your fashion sensibilities. Why the hell are you here? I thought for sure I told Kaiser his goons weren't welcome at the temple?"

Even though the mask that Stormtiger wore, Taylor could practically feel the sneer that was dripping from his words, "We're not really inclined to follow any sort of rule that you set down. We're the goddamn Empire, bitch. You do what we want, not the other way 'round. You keep doing something to the boys we send over, so we figured we'd send a little message."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," Taylor dropped her backpack on the asphalt. She drew her thyrsus and gave it a twirl in her hand, "You're just here to say hello, then?"

Without answering, Hookwolf's arm bubbled and burst into a thorny appendage made of swords. He reared back and punched one of the temple's columns. And the marble toppled to the ground. A barely visible coating of air coalesced around Stormtiger's fist as a blast of air blasted away stonemasonry and brought another column down. While the half-finished temple crumbled around her, Taylor never took her eyes off of the two Nazis, leveling her coolest glare at them even as chunks of stone rained down around her. Miraculously, nothing hit either her or Damien.

"Interesting," Taylor said after the dust had settled.

"Uh, is it?" Stormtiger answered, having expected a more distressed response from the girl.

"Well, it's just that I didn't know that the two of you wanted to die today. If that was the case, you could've just said that from the start, you know?"

Hookwolf and Stormtiger looked at each other.

Then Taylor smiled and spoke again, "Be a good boy and tell Kaiser I'm coming for him, alright Hookwolf?"

"Wha—oof!" A tree had sprouted lightning-quick from the asphalt and hit Hookwolf squarely in the stomach, launching him up and over the abandoned factory buildings of the Docks and into the sky. Within a few seconds, he was nothing more than a little glittering metallic speck spiraling away into the horizon.

When Stormtiger tried to move, he found that his feet were rooted to the ground by a tangle of wooden branches that were coiling around his ankles. When he lifted his eyes back up to Taylor and attempted to raised his hands and send a blast of air in her direction, he found that his arms were bound to his sides by branches that had somehow wrapped themselves all the way around his body in a matter of milliseconds.

Then, there was a flash of light. And after Stormtiger blinked the spots out of his eyes, he saw that all the destruction that he and Hookwolf had wrought against Taylor's temple had been neatly reversed. Tayor's thyrsus was vibrating with power and dripping honey onto the street, leaving sticky droplets on the concrete.

"Sorry, Damien. I don't think I'll be able to take care of things at the temple for a little while now," Taylor apologized to Damien, "I've got to do a little spring cleaning around the city, I think. This is the last straw with that band of idiots."

"The fewer Nazis, the better," Damien grunted, "Don't worry a thing. I've got it covered over here."

Then Taylor turned her attention towards Stormtiger, who could do nothing except watch as Taylor approached him. The branches had crawled all the way up to his neck at this point and were very quickly approaching his face. No amount of struggling loosened their grip.

"Hello," Taylor's smile was so wide that her eyes became nothing more than narrow slits, "Did you know that Lord Dionysus sometimes rides in a chariot drawn by tigers?"

What? Stormtiger wanted to ask, but couldn't, on account of the branches that were now stuffing their way into his mouth, effectively gagging him.

"Don't worry about it," Taylor bopped him on the nose with her thyrsus.