What Rains You Bring (Worm/Diebuster)
- Thread starter CuttleFish2.0
- Start date
- Location
- SoCal
Interlude... one from one of the Protectorate? So many Interludes to choose from... Still, enjoying this, and yes, I agree with minuseven on Lung trolling everyone. Heh. I wonder though... what did the villains think when Taylor showed up? Especially Tattletale... one of my favorite chars from Worm.
Czlyydwr Llrngwl
"Sell ya a door Learn gull," Czly/Celly for short
- Location
- Where the Beef is
- Pronouns
- Any
Tattletale was mysteriously absent as far as I can recall. I doubt she'd have been able to resist explaining why mixing up teams from different gangs without even the excuse of powers that synergize well would be a bad idea if she had been there... what exactly was keeping her occupied is an interesting question I hope is addressed in an upcoming part - she's not really the type for a solo operation, and the rest of the Undersiders were right there as were the Travelers except for Normal Guy or whatever he's called, who isn't a combat type. That could suggest they were sent on some infiltration-type gig while the big fight was on as a distraction with Coil's tinkertech armed mercs for their backup, or she could have just tripped on the stairs to the loft in their hideout and broke a leg, but I'm curious either way.
Sorain
The eternal DM
- Location
- Nexus, looking down over all there is.
Everyone forgets that Lung doesn't get less intelligent as he powers up, he just has a harder time expressing it.
But yes, Lung with Oni Lee via Bakuda weird science bombs for the fun escape.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
This assumes that the bad mixtures weren't intended by someone, that everyone involved in the alliance wanted its goals accomplished.
Arthur Hansen
Author of no Authority.
- Location
- Utah, behind the Zion Curtain.
Didn't they do amalgamation groups to prevent backstabbing in canon?
Last edited:
Czlyydwr Llrngwl
"Sell ya a door Learn gull," Czly/Celly for short
- Location
- Where the Beef is
- Pronouns
- Any
Fanfiction characterization doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity.
Sorain
The eternal DM
- Location
- Nexus, looking down over all there is.
Honestly, I would peg Coil for this. If anyone wanted to cut down on the local parahuman resources while ending the ABB problem, it would be him. After all, he could try out two bad mixes and then pick the one that screwed his plant's the least, with the other losses being acceptable expenditure of personnel resources.
Well stupidity IS infinite, so there's plenty to go around.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
This Space Reserved for Interlude 2!
I have something written, but as of right now it doesn't really work. At the same time I want it to be here structurally, so when it's done I'll post it here and let you all know, don't worry though it doesn't impact the core story... well, yet.
I have something written, but as of right now it doesn't really work. At the same time I want it to be here structurally, so when it's done I'll post it here and let you all know, don't worry though it doesn't impact the core story... well, yet.
3.1
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
*
3.1
*
In the end it didn't prove that hard to to get out of the ball of ice that the bomb had formed around me, I just reached inside and pulled at the Physical Canceler power; focusing on raising the temperature immediately around me. It wasn't something I'd tried before, but if I understood the intended function it should do it all the same, assuming that was that I had 'access.' After a few seconds I had some room to move and was also completely soaked, so I focused on raising the temperature higher both to melt the water faster and maybe dry my clothes once I actually got out. It only took a moment or two before I had enough room to move pretty freely, at which point I was able to bust my way out in a couple good cracks but I still needed to get Glory Girl out.
Thirteen seconds had passed between the both of us getting trapped and me getting myself free, I was pretty sure she would still be all right for at least a few more, but I knew that hurrying was probably best. Seeing her half in and half out of the ice, feet kicking as she made her own efforts, would have been comical had her life not been at risk. I moved around the sphere of ice, careful not to touch her so that I wouldn't burn her with the heat I was generating, and began to melt the ice surrounding her. In another moment or two the ice immediately around her was sufficiently weakened that she was able to extract herself, and with an audible 'pop' she shot backwards and came to rest floating in the air a few feet away breathing only slightly harder than normal. I let go of he power, letting the heat of the air surrounding return to normal. It had freed the both of us but my clothes were still soaked.
"Great," I thought sourly, picking at my clothes before asking aloud, "You okay?" I was surprised to find that she distinctly did not look okay at all despite the nod she gave in response.
In that moment I would have almost described her as looking like a scared little girl, but then I supposed there were things her power couldn't protect her from and I guessed suffocation was one of them. Describing her like a 'little girl' suddenly seemed pretty dismissive which made me feel guilty for thinking it. If I had been confronted by one of my weaknesses, not that I actually knew of any that I had, and been presented with the real possibility of my own death I would probably have been just as frighted probably. I think anyone would have. Strangely enough that thought made me miss fear; not that I was really fearless or anything, but I was starting to really understand just how indestructible I was and that made me feel alone all over again.
I shook that unpleasant thought off as best as I could and surveyed the scene before me. Fire engines were already starting to arrive to put the fires that Lung had started out, while the Protectorate capes had spread out in what looked like a pretty practiced pattern, probably looking for ABB stragglers or possible bombs or booby traps. I briefly used my enhanced vision to verify that they wouldn't find anything besides the obvious; I even tried to find Lung but he had apparently shrunk enough to disappear from my view, at least as far as a cursory sweep went. I considered going after him, doing a more thorough search, but given that he had just taken my trump card and kept going I wasn't sure it was a good idea. There was too much risk that if I did encounter him he would already be primed for it and just bulk up too quickly for me, which might lead to the exact sort of scenario I wanted to avoid; namely the entire city going up in flames. Given how things could have gone I was happy anyways, the destruction of my hometown had been prevented, and some villainous capes were even going to be put away; granted it was only two of the Empire, looked like Rune and Stormtiger, but it was still something when everything could have very much gone to hell.
Given everything that had happened today I didn't exactly feel enthusiastic about hanging around and talking to the Protectorate capes, and besides Dad would be home soon. I turned back towards Glory Girl and was pleased to find her looking better than before already, though she had a concerned look of her own plastered on her face.
"Are you okay? Kinda zoned out on me there…" she trailed off at the end, like maybe she wasn't sure if she actually cared.
"Yeah. I, uh, just need to get back to my D-family," I answered pausing for a moment before I continued. "So, yeah, I should go. Listen you can tell them whatever you want, blame me or whatever for making you come out here, just don't, uh, make me sound like a villain or anything."
I nodded my head, to emphasize my point I guess, before I turned sort of awkwardly and just started walking away. I heard Glory Girl call out behind me.
"Sure!"
No one really made any moves to stop me, which would almost have been disappointing if it hadn't been basically what I wanted, and soon enough I was back on the block with the gas station where I'd stashed my clothes. First I made sure the coast was clear of potential witnesses and then I snuck around to the back of the station to where my bag was hidden and changed back into my normal clothes. Now with my phone in hand I dialed home; Dad would be there if he'd come home and if he hadn't gotten home from work yet and seen my note I didn't want to spring all the news to him over the phone when he might be driving. He picked up just as it was starting to ring a second time.
"Taylor?" I could practically hear the relief seeping into his voice.
"Yeah, it's me Dad. I just wanted you to know I'm ok, I'll be home soon. We'll talk then?" I didn't want to get into anything right now, not with people who might overhear.
"Yeah. Oh, kiddo, I love you." It was stupid, he'd said it a thousand times before but this time it just hit me harder. Maybe because I had just been feeling lonely, or maybe because today had been so stressful, but for whatever reason it had.
"Love you too, Dad."
I hung up, wiped hastily at the tears at my eyes and smiled.
Yeah, today had been a good day.
*
*
When I got home we didn't do a whole lot of talking, I mean we talked some about what had happened, but after making sure I was okay Dad didn't really seem all that interested in the details of the fight. I gave him some anyways, nothing to scare him, just the highlights so he knew what had really happened just in case what the news had reported wasn't everything. I guess I had a bit of a issue with trusting authorities, but then the system had failed me before, had failed the both of us really. Dad had fought for years to get the ferries functioning again, so the workers he was responsible for might have new and better opportunities, and the authorities had always stood in his way. So yeah, I didn't exactly think the system was doing such a great job.
Mostly what we ended up doing was watching TV together, not the news, but some old movie on one of those channels that only shows TV and movies from like the fifties to the eighties. Eventually I lost interest and went up to my room but with my day I didn't feel like doing homework, which wasn't honestly much in the first place and wouldn't take more than a few minutes for me to do in the morning at this point anyway. I ended up lying on my bed and staring out the window at nothing in particular, and studiously thinking about nothing as well until something suddenly occurred to me.
"Nono?" I asked, careful to keep my voice low.
"Uh huh?" she answered, appearing doing lazy loop de loops as her pink hair haloed chaotically around her head.
"Can you, I mean, could we track a single person? Like, a specific person?" Lung wasn't exactly the sort of person who struck me as likely to just forget the sort of damage I'd done to him; he might be out of the fight for right now but he was supposed to heal ridiculously fast. If he wanted to get his pound of flesh from me when he was healed enough, I was afraid he would do something violent to get my attention. Today had been good, but it had also been a bit of a close call, so I was wondering if there was a way for me to be basically the first one to know if he made another appearance.
"Nono doesn't like this, it leads to a bad path." She stopped doing the loops and stared straight at me, frowning.
"It wouldn't be permanent, Nono, just for the next few days. If he doesn't do anything by then I don't think he'll do anything at all, at least not like I'm thinking. It's just I feel guilty, for misjudging what would happen." At the last part, Nono frowned and looked a little guilty herself.
"Ok, Nono will see but the systems were not meant for these things, so she makes no promises." I smiled in response and nodded then she disappeared suddenly.
As I waited for her to come back with an answer I thought about the possibilities. If this worked it might mean I could track every villain in the city. I'd told Nono it would just be for a short time, but if I could it at all, didn't I have sort of a responsibility to my city and all the innocent people walking around who had been or would be hurt by these people? The power to stop villains before they got started would be at my fingertips! If I didn't take advantage of it it wouldn't I be partly to blame for all their future victims as well? Of course from there, it was a short hop to monitoring everyone, hell I would probably have to do that anyway just to figure out who was a villain and who wasn't, and then I would have to keep doing it in case someone new showed up. Soon I would be watching everyone, and it would only be me running things, only me standing over people as judge and jury, unless I got other people that I trusted but then soon enough they would need more people to help as well. It would go on and on, and soon enough I wouldn't be able to guarantee everyone was trustworthy and then would I be any better than what we already had? It would, after all still be people all the way down; what good would it do to replace the current system with someone I wasn't sure would be any better. So no, that wasn't a road I could go down, at least not with a lot more thought put into it.
"Nono makes no promises, this is not what was originally intended, but it should work." Nono said reappearing a moment later half smiling, before her face got more serious a second later and she started speaking sternly to me. "But a few days only, until it's a certainty the City will not be destroyed in the current situation."
I nodded, glad we were on the same page as far as this was concerned. Anyway, nothing came of it that night and eventually I went to sleep. Nothing came of it during the day on Friday either; I went to school, trudged through my now much easier classes with a sort of irritated boredom, and managed to avoid interacting with the trio almost completely. It was a good day as far as I was concerned, during lunch I talked to Sparky and though I wouldn't call us friends it was nice not to spend lunch alone again. Though in fact this wasn't the first time, or even the second, that we'd had lunch together, it was beginning be a sort of routine that every other day we would have lunch together. I didn't know where he went when he didn't have lunch with me, but seeing as before he'd started I hadn't even seen him hanging around school anywhere during lunch I was almost certain it was somewhere off campus. I could have just asked but neither of us had been very talkative so far during our lunches, so even though I thought he probably would have said, I didn't ask.
At home I did my homework in a ridiculously short amount of time, watched TV with Dad, and had dinner. All the normal everyday stuff which wasn't exactly a great help in distracting me from constantly worrying whether or not the alarm would go off, not that I thought it would actually be an alarm though maybe I should have asked Nono to make it an alarm, no that would be ridiculous and useless. Finally, at around eleven that night it happened.
It definitely wasn't an alarm; one moment I was staring at my ceiling, thinking about new ways to manipulate my powers to produce different effects, and the next I was staring at an only half lit empty street. Well not completely empty, walking down the center was a distinctly normal looking man who looked like all the pictures I had seen Lung, none of which had been of all that great quality so I wasn't absolutely sure.
Nono was next to me, so I asked her how sure she was it was him.
"92% positive match on identification, based on both available physical statistic, file photos, and geographic bounding. Nono thinks it is him, but she can't promise."
At that I was back in my room, sort of at least because I could still see probably-Lung walking down the street. Seeing as it was pretty late at night I figured I could probably sneak out of the house with my costume on without anyone seeing me, so I changed into it in my room before I went down to the basement and left the house. I kept a metaphorical eye on probably-Lung as I ran in his direction. He had come to stand in an abandoned lot just a few blocks from where I'd first fought him him that night a few weeks ago and just continued to stand there not doing anything.
Once I was closer I started sticking to the shadows so I he wouldn't see me and so hopefully I could find out exactly what he was up to standing out here in the middle of the night like that. Lung's right eye was nothing more than a mass a scar tissue but his jaw seemed fine, I guessed he'd been at enough power that he'd healed most of it pretty quickly but eyes were probably pretty delicate things so that would take longer. After ten long minutes I was still just as baffled. He wasn't doing anything, just standing there with his arms crossed staring out at the night like he expected Eidolon himself to walk out of the thin air. When nothing happened for another fifteen minutes I started moving around him, hoping that if I could get behind him and see exactly what he was looking at it might provide some sort of explanation. Unfortunately I was paying too much attention to the villain and not enough to where I was going and I apparently put my hand a little to hard on a pipe to my right which caused something metal and long at the top to shudder and clang as it knocked against the brick wall. I darted away from the wall of the building I was standing next to and into the shadows of the alley just as Lung swung in my direction. Besides that he didn't move, but he did start to change; he didn't go full lizard on me right away, just got a little bigger and his skin started getting this creepy dimpled quality like it was pulled taut over scales.
"Are you here, girl? I thought you might, you've shown up every other time I so much as stuck my nose out, and I wanted a rematch!" He shouted, his eyes wide open and then he breath deeply through his nose a couple of times like he was trying to sniff me out.
I chose not to respond and edged further into the alley, if I could get to the other end I could go around the back of the building and get into a better position but there was light at the end so I would at least be briefly visible to him. Whether or not he could smell me out I wasn't entirely sure but he would start moving in this direction soon probably and then it would be harder to move without being seen so I thought it was worth the risk. I edged back, staying in the shadow, until I was as close as I could get without entering the light.
"Well, are you going to show yourself, or do I have to start burning things down!?" As I dashed around the corner Lung's voice faded a little because of the building now between us, I checked on him and it didn't look like he reacted so he didn't appear to have noticed me.
He didn't say anything else as I moved around the back of the building to get a new vantage point, in fact he started to look distinctly unsure of himself. Given that he hadn't gone his full draconic self I was doubtful he would even be able to conjure up his regular gouts of flame, after all I'd never seen anything about him using his flames when he wasn't in fighting form. Frankly I didn't think that noise had gotten him feeling threatened enough for him to really be ready for a fight, it was just a startled response to the possibility of a fight that I was seeing.
It was interesting though, that he'd apparently come out tonight looking for me specifically, hoping that I would just show up. Maybe he thought he had something to prove after being driven off twice by a teenage girl? I could see Lung being that sort of prideful person, but at the same time it didn't seem like it would be the whole story; after all he'd been around long enough that he must have known that appearances weren't everything when it came to parahumans, so the idea that a teenage girl might be a match for him couldn't do too much to his ego. What else could he want from me other than revenge though? I wasn't much to look at and Lung didn't strike me as the sort of creep who would look for a high school girlfriend at his age so I didn't think that was it either. I couldn't see many other options, unless… Lung was one of the most powerful parahumans out there; he'd taken on entire cape teams, and an Endbringer, and won each time in some sense at least plus there was the way he'd been yesterday, laughing every time more people showed up. The thought struck me that he might like fighting, especially against tough opponents, and so far everything he'd done to me hadn't so much as scratched me; maybe this was all just about getting a good fight.
It seemed like a cliched sort of answer, like something from one of those badly dubbed asian fighting movies from the seventies, but then cliches had to come from somewhere. I didn't have a better explanation, but now the question was whether or not I should give him what he wanted; on one hand it might avoid outbursts from him but on the other hand it might just set him off. How exactly had I ended up psychoanalyzing villains?
By the time I made it to the other side of the building so I could see Lung directly with my own eyes again I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do, or rather I had but I wasn't sure it was the right decision. Frankly I wanted to fight him, it would be a chance for me to push myself, to test myself against one of the most infamous capes in the world without having other people's lives necessarily at stake and if I beat him there would be the bonus of being able to put him in jail, again. Of course, that was assuming the two of us could keep it contained.
Fuck it, if he wanted to do this I would force him to do it my way. I walked out of the shadows but it took a few seconds before he noticed me though once he did I immediately started to see the changes in his body. Shit, I would need to talk fast.
"Hey! You wanted to fight right?" I asked.
Lung's only answer was a nod.
"Well, then I've got some ground rules," he started at that, and made to say something but I barreled over whatever he might have said. "You can either agree, or I can leave. You might chase me down, but by the time you do others will have gotten involved. Agree, or don't, I don't care."
He paused a moment, considering the offer, then seemed to grumble his assent through his already distorted face.
"Okay, then; first, we keep it here which means no setting fire to the buildings," the lot was pretty big so I didn't think that would be much of a problem, Lung nodded. "Second, we don't fight for more than an hour. It's already late, and I have things to do tomorrow," he nodded again. "and finally… we don't hold back."
At the Lung laughed his great rumbling laugh.
"AGREHD!"
We met in the middle.
A/N: So begins Arc 3. I know I said it wouldn't be until the full edit later, but I worked on the ending of 2.8 a little more.
3.1
*
In the end it didn't prove that hard to to get out of the ball of ice that the bomb had formed around me, I just reached inside and pulled at the Physical Canceler power; focusing on raising the temperature immediately around me. It wasn't something I'd tried before, but if I understood the intended function it should do it all the same, assuming that was that I had 'access.' After a few seconds I had some room to move and was also completely soaked, so I focused on raising the temperature higher both to melt the water faster and maybe dry my clothes once I actually got out. It only took a moment or two before I had enough room to move pretty freely, at which point I was able to bust my way out in a couple good cracks but I still needed to get Glory Girl out.
Thirteen seconds had passed between the both of us getting trapped and me getting myself free, I was pretty sure she would still be all right for at least a few more, but I knew that hurrying was probably best. Seeing her half in and half out of the ice, feet kicking as she made her own efforts, would have been comical had her life not been at risk. I moved around the sphere of ice, careful not to touch her so that I wouldn't burn her with the heat I was generating, and began to melt the ice surrounding her. In another moment or two the ice immediately around her was sufficiently weakened that she was able to extract herself, and with an audible 'pop' she shot backwards and came to rest floating in the air a few feet away breathing only slightly harder than normal. I let go of he power, letting the heat of the air surrounding return to normal. It had freed the both of us but my clothes were still soaked.
"Great," I thought sourly, picking at my clothes before asking aloud, "You okay?" I was surprised to find that she distinctly did not look okay at all despite the nod she gave in response.
In that moment I would have almost described her as looking like a scared little girl, but then I supposed there were things her power couldn't protect her from and I guessed suffocation was one of them. Describing her like a 'little girl' suddenly seemed pretty dismissive which made me feel guilty for thinking it. If I had been confronted by one of my weaknesses, not that I actually knew of any that I had, and been presented with the real possibility of my own death I would probably have been just as frighted probably. I think anyone would have. Strangely enough that thought made me miss fear; not that I was really fearless or anything, but I was starting to really understand just how indestructible I was and that made me feel alone all over again.
I shook that unpleasant thought off as best as I could and surveyed the scene before me. Fire engines were already starting to arrive to put the fires that Lung had started out, while the Protectorate capes had spread out in what looked like a pretty practiced pattern, probably looking for ABB stragglers or possible bombs or booby traps. I briefly used my enhanced vision to verify that they wouldn't find anything besides the obvious; I even tried to find Lung but he had apparently shrunk enough to disappear from my view, at least as far as a cursory sweep went. I considered going after him, doing a more thorough search, but given that he had just taken my trump card and kept going I wasn't sure it was a good idea. There was too much risk that if I did encounter him he would already be primed for it and just bulk up too quickly for me, which might lead to the exact sort of scenario I wanted to avoid; namely the entire city going up in flames. Given how things could have gone I was happy anyways, the destruction of my hometown had been prevented, and some villainous capes were even going to be put away; granted it was only two of the Empire, looked like Rune and Stormtiger, but it was still something when everything could have very much gone to hell.
Given everything that had happened today I didn't exactly feel enthusiastic about hanging around and talking to the Protectorate capes, and besides Dad would be home soon. I turned back towards Glory Girl and was pleased to find her looking better than before already, though she had a concerned look of her own plastered on her face.
"Are you okay? Kinda zoned out on me there…" she trailed off at the end, like maybe she wasn't sure if she actually cared.
"Yeah. I, uh, just need to get back to my D-family," I answered pausing for a moment before I continued. "So, yeah, I should go. Listen you can tell them whatever you want, blame me or whatever for making you come out here, just don't, uh, make me sound like a villain or anything."
I nodded my head, to emphasize my point I guess, before I turned sort of awkwardly and just started walking away. I heard Glory Girl call out behind me.
"Sure!"
No one really made any moves to stop me, which would almost have been disappointing if it hadn't been basically what I wanted, and soon enough I was back on the block with the gas station where I'd stashed my clothes. First I made sure the coast was clear of potential witnesses and then I snuck around to the back of the station to where my bag was hidden and changed back into my normal clothes. Now with my phone in hand I dialed home; Dad would be there if he'd come home and if he hadn't gotten home from work yet and seen my note I didn't want to spring all the news to him over the phone when he might be driving. He picked up just as it was starting to ring a second time.
"Taylor?" I could practically hear the relief seeping into his voice.
"Yeah, it's me Dad. I just wanted you to know I'm ok, I'll be home soon. We'll talk then?" I didn't want to get into anything right now, not with people who might overhear.
"Yeah. Oh, kiddo, I love you." It was stupid, he'd said it a thousand times before but this time it just hit me harder. Maybe because I had just been feeling lonely, or maybe because today had been so stressful, but for whatever reason it had.
"Love you too, Dad."
I hung up, wiped hastily at the tears at my eyes and smiled.
Yeah, today had been a good day.
*
*
When I got home we didn't do a whole lot of talking, I mean we talked some about what had happened, but after making sure I was okay Dad didn't really seem all that interested in the details of the fight. I gave him some anyways, nothing to scare him, just the highlights so he knew what had really happened just in case what the news had reported wasn't everything. I guess I had a bit of a issue with trusting authorities, but then the system had failed me before, had failed the both of us really. Dad had fought for years to get the ferries functioning again, so the workers he was responsible for might have new and better opportunities, and the authorities had always stood in his way. So yeah, I didn't exactly think the system was doing such a great job.
Mostly what we ended up doing was watching TV together, not the news, but some old movie on one of those channels that only shows TV and movies from like the fifties to the eighties. Eventually I lost interest and went up to my room but with my day I didn't feel like doing homework, which wasn't honestly much in the first place and wouldn't take more than a few minutes for me to do in the morning at this point anyway. I ended up lying on my bed and staring out the window at nothing in particular, and studiously thinking about nothing as well until something suddenly occurred to me.
"Nono?" I asked, careful to keep my voice low.
"Uh huh?" she answered, appearing doing lazy loop de loops as her pink hair haloed chaotically around her head.
"Can you, I mean, could we track a single person? Like, a specific person?" Lung wasn't exactly the sort of person who struck me as likely to just forget the sort of damage I'd done to him; he might be out of the fight for right now but he was supposed to heal ridiculously fast. If he wanted to get his pound of flesh from me when he was healed enough, I was afraid he would do something violent to get my attention. Today had been good, but it had also been a bit of a close call, so I was wondering if there was a way for me to be basically the first one to know if he made another appearance.
"Nono doesn't like this, it leads to a bad path." She stopped doing the loops and stared straight at me, frowning.
"It wouldn't be permanent, Nono, just for the next few days. If he doesn't do anything by then I don't think he'll do anything at all, at least not like I'm thinking. It's just I feel guilty, for misjudging what would happen." At the last part, Nono frowned and looked a little guilty herself.
"Ok, Nono will see but the systems were not meant for these things, so she makes no promises." I smiled in response and nodded then she disappeared suddenly.
As I waited for her to come back with an answer I thought about the possibilities. If this worked it might mean I could track every villain in the city. I'd told Nono it would just be for a short time, but if I could it at all, didn't I have sort of a responsibility to my city and all the innocent people walking around who had been or would be hurt by these people? The power to stop villains before they got started would be at my fingertips! If I didn't take advantage of it it wouldn't I be partly to blame for all their future victims as well? Of course from there, it was a short hop to monitoring everyone, hell I would probably have to do that anyway just to figure out who was a villain and who wasn't, and then I would have to keep doing it in case someone new showed up. Soon I would be watching everyone, and it would only be me running things, only me standing over people as judge and jury, unless I got other people that I trusted but then soon enough they would need more people to help as well. It would go on and on, and soon enough I wouldn't be able to guarantee everyone was trustworthy and then would I be any better than what we already had? It would, after all still be people all the way down; what good would it do to replace the current system with someone I wasn't sure would be any better. So no, that wasn't a road I could go down, at least not with a lot more thought put into it.
"Nono makes no promises, this is not what was originally intended, but it should work." Nono said reappearing a moment later half smiling, before her face got more serious a second later and she started speaking sternly to me. "But a few days only, until it's a certainty the City will not be destroyed in the current situation."
I nodded, glad we were on the same page as far as this was concerned. Anyway, nothing came of it that night and eventually I went to sleep. Nothing came of it during the day on Friday either; I went to school, trudged through my now much easier classes with a sort of irritated boredom, and managed to avoid interacting with the trio almost completely. It was a good day as far as I was concerned, during lunch I talked to Sparky and though I wouldn't call us friends it was nice not to spend lunch alone again. Though in fact this wasn't the first time, or even the second, that we'd had lunch together, it was beginning be a sort of routine that every other day we would have lunch together. I didn't know where he went when he didn't have lunch with me, but seeing as before he'd started I hadn't even seen him hanging around school anywhere during lunch I was almost certain it was somewhere off campus. I could have just asked but neither of us had been very talkative so far during our lunches, so even though I thought he probably would have said, I didn't ask.
At home I did my homework in a ridiculously short amount of time, watched TV with Dad, and had dinner. All the normal everyday stuff which wasn't exactly a great help in distracting me from constantly worrying whether or not the alarm would go off, not that I thought it would actually be an alarm though maybe I should have asked Nono to make it an alarm, no that would be ridiculous and useless. Finally, at around eleven that night it happened.
It definitely wasn't an alarm; one moment I was staring at my ceiling, thinking about new ways to manipulate my powers to produce different effects, and the next I was staring at an only half lit empty street. Well not completely empty, walking down the center was a distinctly normal looking man who looked like all the pictures I had seen Lung, none of which had been of all that great quality so I wasn't absolutely sure.
Nono was next to me, so I asked her how sure she was it was him.
"92% positive match on identification, based on both available physical statistic, file photos, and geographic bounding. Nono thinks it is him, but she can't promise."
At that I was back in my room, sort of at least because I could still see probably-Lung walking down the street. Seeing as it was pretty late at night I figured I could probably sneak out of the house with my costume on without anyone seeing me, so I changed into it in my room before I went down to the basement and left the house. I kept a metaphorical eye on probably-Lung as I ran in his direction. He had come to stand in an abandoned lot just a few blocks from where I'd first fought him him that night a few weeks ago and just continued to stand there not doing anything.
Once I was closer I started sticking to the shadows so I he wouldn't see me and so hopefully I could find out exactly what he was up to standing out here in the middle of the night like that. Lung's right eye was nothing more than a mass a scar tissue but his jaw seemed fine, I guessed he'd been at enough power that he'd healed most of it pretty quickly but eyes were probably pretty delicate things so that would take longer. After ten long minutes I was still just as baffled. He wasn't doing anything, just standing there with his arms crossed staring out at the night like he expected Eidolon himself to walk out of the thin air. When nothing happened for another fifteen minutes I started moving around him, hoping that if I could get behind him and see exactly what he was looking at it might provide some sort of explanation. Unfortunately I was paying too much attention to the villain and not enough to where I was going and I apparently put my hand a little to hard on a pipe to my right which caused something metal and long at the top to shudder and clang as it knocked against the brick wall. I darted away from the wall of the building I was standing next to and into the shadows of the alley just as Lung swung in my direction. Besides that he didn't move, but he did start to change; he didn't go full lizard on me right away, just got a little bigger and his skin started getting this creepy dimpled quality like it was pulled taut over scales.
"Are you here, girl? I thought you might, you've shown up every other time I so much as stuck my nose out, and I wanted a rematch!" He shouted, his eyes wide open and then he breath deeply through his nose a couple of times like he was trying to sniff me out.
I chose not to respond and edged further into the alley, if I could get to the other end I could go around the back of the building and get into a better position but there was light at the end so I would at least be briefly visible to him. Whether or not he could smell me out I wasn't entirely sure but he would start moving in this direction soon probably and then it would be harder to move without being seen so I thought it was worth the risk. I edged back, staying in the shadow, until I was as close as I could get without entering the light.
"Well, are you going to show yourself, or do I have to start burning things down!?" As I dashed around the corner Lung's voice faded a little because of the building now between us, I checked on him and it didn't look like he reacted so he didn't appear to have noticed me.
He didn't say anything else as I moved around the back of the building to get a new vantage point, in fact he started to look distinctly unsure of himself. Given that he hadn't gone his full draconic self I was doubtful he would even be able to conjure up his regular gouts of flame, after all I'd never seen anything about him using his flames when he wasn't in fighting form. Frankly I didn't think that noise had gotten him feeling threatened enough for him to really be ready for a fight, it was just a startled response to the possibility of a fight that I was seeing.
It was interesting though, that he'd apparently come out tonight looking for me specifically, hoping that I would just show up. Maybe he thought he had something to prove after being driven off twice by a teenage girl? I could see Lung being that sort of prideful person, but at the same time it didn't seem like it would be the whole story; after all he'd been around long enough that he must have known that appearances weren't everything when it came to parahumans, so the idea that a teenage girl might be a match for him couldn't do too much to his ego. What else could he want from me other than revenge though? I wasn't much to look at and Lung didn't strike me as the sort of creep who would look for a high school girlfriend at his age so I didn't think that was it either. I couldn't see many other options, unless… Lung was one of the most powerful parahumans out there; he'd taken on entire cape teams, and an Endbringer, and won each time in some sense at least plus there was the way he'd been yesterday, laughing every time more people showed up. The thought struck me that he might like fighting, especially against tough opponents, and so far everything he'd done to me hadn't so much as scratched me; maybe this was all just about getting a good fight.
It seemed like a cliched sort of answer, like something from one of those badly dubbed asian fighting movies from the seventies, but then cliches had to come from somewhere. I didn't have a better explanation, but now the question was whether or not I should give him what he wanted; on one hand it might avoid outbursts from him but on the other hand it might just set him off. How exactly had I ended up psychoanalyzing villains?
By the time I made it to the other side of the building so I could see Lung directly with my own eyes again I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do, or rather I had but I wasn't sure it was the right decision. Frankly I wanted to fight him, it would be a chance for me to push myself, to test myself against one of the most infamous capes in the world without having other people's lives necessarily at stake and if I beat him there would be the bonus of being able to put him in jail, again. Of course, that was assuming the two of us could keep it contained.
Fuck it, if he wanted to do this I would force him to do it my way. I walked out of the shadows but it took a few seconds before he noticed me though once he did I immediately started to see the changes in his body. Shit, I would need to talk fast.
"Hey! You wanted to fight right?" I asked.
Lung's only answer was a nod.
"Well, then I've got some ground rules," he started at that, and made to say something but I barreled over whatever he might have said. "You can either agree, or I can leave. You might chase me down, but by the time you do others will have gotten involved. Agree, or don't, I don't care."
He paused a moment, considering the offer, then seemed to grumble his assent through his already distorted face.
"Okay, then; first, we keep it here which means no setting fire to the buildings," the lot was pretty big so I didn't think that would be much of a problem, Lung nodded. "Second, we don't fight for more than an hour. It's already late, and I have things to do tomorrow," he nodded again. "and finally… we don't hold back."
At the Lung laughed his great rumbling laugh.
"AGREHD!"
We met in the middle.
A/N: So begins Arc 3. I know I said it wouldn't be until the full edit later, but I worked on the ending of 2.8 a little more.
Last edited:
Czlyydwr Llrngwl
"Sell ya a door Learn gull," Czly/Celly for short
- Location
- Where the Beef is
- Pronouns
- Any
3.2
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
*
3.2
*
There was no yelling, no roar to accompany the start of the fight, just the whooshing of displaced air as I ducked under Lung's fist. I rolled underneath his outstretched arm, popped back up at his side and then had to scoot back almost instantly to avoid his other arm.
He was quickly bulking up, scales sprouting and spreading across his skin, and with every passing moment he was less and less recognizably human. The scars around his eye disappeared into a twisted mass of discolored scale while his other eye was like a droplet of molten metal trapped in a mold. Going by past experience he was about two thirds of the way through his transformation from man to monster already. It wasn't likely he stopped changing after that of course, but from what I'd seen he mostly just got bigger at the point. There were those persistent rumors that he turned into an actual dragon at some point, but I didn't put much stock in them, and even if they were true I didn't think we would get there tonight. Hopefully not ever.
I reached for the Physical Canceller, pushed on it in a familiar way, and felt myself become lighter. Ducking under the next attack Lung sent at me, I grabbed hold of his arm and extended my right foot as I swung myself upwards, aiming it towards his head. Lung shook his arm violently as he reared back to avoid the blow. My grip loosened and started to slip, then suddenly the world ignited around me.
I was borne up and away on the force of the explosion he had created, roiling flames slipping past me harmlessly like the confetti from my ninth birthday party. For a second I floated, my body twisting as I tried to reorient myself perpendicular to the ground, and then I released the weight I had pushed away and the wild tumblr slowed dramatically as my body returned to a more normal mass. I crashed back to the ground, landing and rolling forward a few feet before I righted myself.
The two of us stared at one another and circled; neither of us had really gone after the other yet.
"You cahn do better, ghirl. Ohr does that only work for surprhise attacks?" Lung's voice wasn't yet distorted too much by the alterations to his form, in fact his face was still in large part humanish looking. That was, if you ignored the scales and his one aforementioned glowing metal eye.
"Just making sure you can take it, you overgrown gecko." I answered, not happy at the way he kept calling me 'girl,' like I wasn't worthy of his speaking my name. Wait, did he even know my name? I wondered for a moment whether Lung even bothered to keep up with the new capes that showed up. How would he do it anyway, would he attend the Protectorate press conferences, or did he troll the PHO Brockton Bay specific boards? The image of a hunched over Lung in his scaly form, tapping away one key at a time in response to some troll almost made me break out laughing. The man-slash-monster in question himself seemed amused by my comment.
"I will take everythhing you hhave, girl, and then I will break you over my knee. Hhow does thhat sound? You surprised me twice, but now it is just you and me and I want to find out just hhow hhard you can hhit in ah real fighht. So, cowm. Ahnd ghet me." His speech slurred worse towards the end, as presumably some part of his mouth transformed in a way that made normal speech impossible. Well it didn't matter anyways, we'd probably done enough talking.
We circled each other for another few moments before charging towards one another again, I pushed again to make myself lighter before I launched myself into the air above Lung. A little over halfway through my arc over him I shifted again. Turning and pushing back towards him I let the power go and started plummeting towards the earth. My foot cracked his scales on impact but his hand, already on its way up when I started falling, now large enough to wrap around my waist, does exactly that. Fine spiderweb cracks radiated out through the scales around his shoulder, some shattered flakes popping off to fall lazily towards the ground. They caught the light from the flames dancing up and down his other arm, as he twisted and brought me slamming bodily into the ground. Pinned underneath his hand at my waist I watched him raise his other hand, wreathed in flame, and then I was engulfed in a universe of of fire.
I wrapped my right leg around his forearm and planted it firmly to the ground to anchor the rest of his arm into that position while I reached across my body with my right hand and began prying his hand off of me. Once I managed to get halfway loose I tensed and pushed; twisting myself suddenly out of the tangled position under Lung's grip. I escaped all but a glancing blow from his next strike as it passed my spinning body, and was several feet away before I landed, already planning my next attack.
I could hit him hard enough to do damage, but nothing close to what I needed in order to take him down, sure his scales would crack and break off in chunks, but then seconds later they would have healed back to new. Without a distraction he would just move out of the way if I tried the same trick that had worked yesterday or the first time we'd fought; maybe if I could get at the system directly I could have done it, but the way Nono treated it I didn't think that would be happening soon. So, if I had to do this on my own then I had to figure out something else to really put the hurt on Lung.
We continued to fight, each of us trading the advantage back and forth over and over. I would wait for him to open himself to a new angle of attack, then I would explode into action to take advantage of it; sending Lung off balance, and shattering scales. When I tried it again Lung would be more than ready, sometimes he moved out of the way at the exact right moment to escape a hit or he would counter attack and force me to either abandon my own assault or take the hit. By twenty minutes into the fight his formerly ruined eye was nothing more debilitating than a swollen-shut mass of distorted scales. Lung would occasionally press his own offensive. He couldn't actually hurt me, but he didn't know that and he could toss me around easily enough if he got a good grip so throughout the fight I ended up hurled or slammed against brick walls, the pavement, and scattered junk at a number of points. The noise of our fight sounded deafening to me whenever it punctuated the otherwise eeries silence of the night, but it couldn't carry that far and it wasn't like there was anyone really around to hear it in this part of town at this time of night.
I wasn't getting hurt but all the same I could really push myself against Lung, where with other opponents I think I would have been afraid of hurting them. I'd noticed it when I was fighting the Merchants; the way I would pull back on hits even though my opponents had armor of their own, of a kind at least. Here and now though, I wasn't holding back at all; I was actually reaching for more power instead and that was an exhilarating feeling, to be pushing myself, to test my current limits. I could sense the power Nono had been using to move, faintly just beyond them, not in the sense of distance but in some other way which I couldn't quite define. It was like touching something with only my fingertips as I stretched my arms painfully just to get that extra metaphorical inch, just barely unable to grasp it.
Not when I straddled his shoulders and brought both my fist down on his skull.
Not when I ducked under his outstretched arms and tried to uppercut him, and only ended up giving him the opportunity to try to crush in a bearhug me for my trouble.
Not as I launched myself off a wall and tried to kick his head, causing the disturbing mass of scales around his injured eye to split apart to reveal his healed eye through ragged flaps of skin and scales.
Or when feinted to left, then lunged right and struck at his exposed side.
Or in my attempt to throw rocks hard enough to do the job.
Or as I dodged being pinned under his clawed foot, and kneed him in the ass on my way past.
Or even when I… well, you get the idea.
I tried everything I could think of; I pulled on what powers I sort of knew how to work to try to make my limbs go faster, tried just pushing harder and harder, tried 'flexing' every part of my limbs that I could feel, and hell I even tried just thinking about going faster really hard. None of it seemed to have any effect whatsoever, and eventually I just gave up.
At some point Lung had stopped growing; I first noticed at about the forty five minute mark that he hadn't changed in size even the slightest bit in the last ten minutes. He hadn't shrunk or anything, and it wasn't like I'd stopped hurting him but nothing I was doing seemed to inflict any damage that lasted past a few seconds, even the flaps of flesh around his eye had receded to reveal a perfectly normal looking eye, or at least as far as normal went for giant transforming dragon men. The flesh surrounding it was still slightly off-color from the rest of his scales, but that wasn't likely to last.
When an hour had passed since the fight began, somehow I knew it exactly. I decided that enough was enough and that I just didn't want to continue what was becoming somewhat of a frustrating fight, and I was worried that if we kept up it would eventually get out of hand or that the Protectorate would show up sooner or later. I dodged a couple more swings while backing away from Lung, but eventually he seemed to get the message.
"Enough!" I shouted, and then more quietly, "Enough. I still need sleep." A lie, but I figured it wasn't a big deal to lie to someone like Lung.
He didn't seem happy, his face had distorted into something that might have been a grimace or a snarl before it relaxed again. I think it relaxed at least, it was hard to tell.
"TAHRRAHR!" I had no idea what he mean by that.
"What?"
Lung paused, took a deep breath and spoke slowly. "TOH. MAHW. RHAOW."
Tomorrow, he was trying to say tomorrow; which I guessed probably mean he was asking, or more likely demanding, a rematch tomorrow night. I wasn't quite sure how to respond, on the one hand I wanted to fight him again if only to push myself farther and maybe break past whatever barrier I had encountered to finally understand how the power that Nono used actually worked, and on the other hand it seemed basically pointless to engage in some weird sort of sparring match with Lung without knowing for sure I could take him. I might figure it out tomorrow, or I might figure it out years from now, or Nono might just one day drop the answer in my lap because she suddenly thought I was 'ready' or something, but there were no guarantees of when I would pass that barrier. Still, I wanted to test myself more, so what was the harm in one more sparring match?
"Okay, tomorrow. Same time and same place." Lung stomped his feet and nodded in agreement, then he simply turned turned away and started stalking off. Meanwhile I stayed there staring a little dumbly at his retreating back, until I came to my senses and turned to head for home.
Walking home took longer, mostly because I wasn't in any sort of hurry to actually get there anytime soon. On the way I considered my night; it had started off normally enough, at least relative to my life in the last few months, as I did my homework and worried about whether or not a super villain would do something tonight. So, how exactly had I ended up facing off against Lung himself, all alone and in some sort of weird sparring match instead of an actual fight? This had turned into such a weird night.
My entire life had turned weird.
Was it right for me to be fighting Lung like this? Should I call the Protectorate, let them know about my appointment with him for tomorrow night so that he could maybe be taken in and off the streets where he presented a serious and significant danger to the entire city? I didn't want to because I still wanted to find out just how far I could push myself and maybe in the process unlock some of the secrets of my new body, but was my pride worth it? I wasn't sure that I could excuse not contacting the Protectorate just because I wanted a chance to fight one of the most powerful parahumans in a one on one fight, but at the same time it wasn't a sure thing that calling in the Protectorate would even be enough. He'd fought teams of heroes before and emerged the winner, so what was to say that he wouldn't this time or that the fight itself wouldn't lead to the worst case scenario I wanted to avoid? In a way my fighting him one on one was a sort of safety measure when you looked at it like that, he wanted to fight me after all and so long as he was preoccupied with trying to defeat me at a time and place I could control he would be less likely to go off attacking somewhere else. Unless that was just a self-serving rationalization that I was making up to justify the decision I had already made before of my personal pride.
I hated thinking about this stuff, because I was never sure what the actual right decision was. Well I'd already sort of given my word, not actually but it still felt sort of… wrong to call the Protectorate on Lung now after I'd already agree to meet him tomorrow night. So, tomorrow I would fight him again and then that would be an end to that.
I hoped.
Oh god, how could I have been so stupid.
Lung definitely wouldn't leave it at that. Shit.
*
*
When I woke up on Saturday it was bright and sunny outside. After having breakfast with dad, making small talk about school and my, ah, 'work,' I took a quick shower and went to the basement where I spent the next several hours accomplishing essentially nothing. I had a list of methods I'd tried with no results, or at least not the results I wanted, that was reaching almost an entire notebook page. Nono was virtually no help, she just floated there smiling vaguely and occasionally playing with my hair as I thought long and hard about everything I could remember of what she did whenever she used the ability. It wasn't much, just a vague similarity to the Physical Canceler and a weird sense of incongruity.
I was kicking myself for not taking physics this year, not that I thought it would be all that helpful but it had to be better than being basically completely ignorant of all this from the start. Actually, given my experiences in school so far I was fairly confident that I could just start teaching myself physics at this point, and that sooner or later I could probably make some interesting 'discoveries' which would change the entire field.
That was one advantage of sharing the body of an advanced robot girl from an alternate universe where humanity had achieved essentially everything we'd ever dreamed of achieving in space. Probably not a good idea though, as it would invite a lot of questions I just didn't want to even think about answering any time soon. The point was that maybe if I knew a little more figuring this out might be easier. Of course even with my new abilities it was probably too short a time frame to teach myself the physics and figure out how the power worked.
I tried a number of different tacks over the course of those few hours. One of the first was to try turning my super snooping power on myself, in the hopes that it would reveal something about how my new body actually worked. It maybe wasn't the smartest idea, not because I thought it would do anything dangerous by itself but because I doubted I would understand half of what I saw anyways. That turned out not to be true, I barely understood a quarter of what I saw and given all the things I could conspicuously not look at I wasn't seeing the entirety of myself; entire vast parts of myself were simply invisible to me even as I could detect them through their connection to other systems. Probably most of that was a result of the system I was using being passive and the fact that some of it wasn't all here anyways, rather than any effort to hide stuff from me on Nono's part.
What I did see was weird enough.
My hair was normal at first, until my sight carried me closer and instead of the sort of layered, scale-like pattern shown in textbooks and in those commercials for dandruff shampoo on TV, I saw only smooth, glossy black material off of which smaller spiny hairs radiated.
I pulled my viewpoint back from that and spun around myself to focus on my face. Something about my eyes caught my attention: as I focused I could see faint images of little circles behind my irises that grew and shrank as I watched. Those had to be the other visual sensors that allowed me to do things like see through the smoke in the college building and not get completely blinded by Bakuda's tinker flashbombs. There had to be some way to activate that stuff more consciously so I let go of my other powered vision and found myself instantly back behind my own eyes staring at the cluttered basement. Experimentally I tried to think about the ways the mini-irises I had observed were arranged , then tried shifting their positions with where I knew my normal iris was. My vision exploded; strange indescribable shapes and unnamable colors kaleidoscoped across my vision, and in surprise I let go. Everything returned to normal.
That had at least produced results, if not anything that was particularly useful or telling. It had seemed like my vision was switching across a dozen different modes each second, like some demented and bizarre stereoscope. I probably hadn't been specific enough in what I'd wanted and so it had given me everything at once which wasn't very useful as it turned out. I would need to focus on one or two at a time, but I didn't know which ones would do what. Of course so far everything else had responded to my internally expressed needs to some extent; I concentrated on 'seeing details' and 'more than just the surface' as my two thoughts and then raised my hand so that I was looking at the back of it.
I focused on my hand which expanded and expanded over and over again until all I could see was an expanse of skin. It was more regular than I would have expected; there was a regular geometric pattern of hexagons and the occasional more complex shape to it that gave the impression of precision manufacturing. Along the borders between shapes small structures were nestled, many of them were little more than tiny curved lenses while others were small depressions with hatch marked surfaces, and where hairs sprouted hundreds of thin antennae split off of either side of the follicles. Within the 'cells' other shapes were just beneath the surface; ovals, circles, spiderweb structures, snakelike patterns, and more besides lurked under my skin.
I focused, trying to resolve those indistinct shapes from beneath my skin. Then my vision swam and I was through the surface, only briefly catching sight of what looked like devices from one of those old magazines from the fifties where people predicted what the future would be like. Then I was past that and great lengths of corded ribbons bundled together, most tensing and flexing in synch but some expanding or contracting to some other rhythm lay before me, and great fat pipes were nestled within the bundles in a creeping network. Tiny figures flowed through these; great bulbous shapes with squirming little protrusions, lithe slithering minnows, tiny crawling and skittering spiders, needle sharp lances, and other, weirder shapes were carried along in the tide of some unknown fluid. The smaller, crawling kind occasionally worked their way out of the pipes to race across the pulsing ribbons, they would sometimes stop to pull at frayed or broken fibers, coiling them into great (for their size) spools or reattaching two broken ends, but otherwise they simply went from one pipe to another pipe. Millions crawled across the fibrous bundles in my arms… in my arms… oh god.
These things were inside of me, crawling who knows where, pulling little bits of me apart or just skittering like creepy invisible bugs.
My vision swam again, and I was staring at the floor, my hands braced against the cold smooth concrete basement surface. I gagged for a moment or two, my body trying to throw up all the food I'd eaten barely two hours ago.
"Okay, calm down Taylor," I thought, desperately trying to bring my scattered thoughts back into order and calm trembling nerves. "It's your body, none of that is weird. It's all part of you, it doesn't make you less than a person. Calm down."
I had to repeat something along those lines to myself at least five separate times before my body finally listened and I recovered from the shock of it.
That had been… something. Not what I'd been expecting and probably ultimately not very useful, even if I could somehow turn my eyes on the rest of my body, I doubted that I would be able to identify anything by sight alone and even if I could I didn't think that would be of much help in figuring out how to use my powers.
After that I spend a long while doing basically nothing except staring blankly at the boxes piled up in the corners of the basement, before I eventually decided to get back to original goals. It was clear I had to try a different tack, especially given that I didn't want to go through whatever the hell what I had just recovered from was again. Physical examination had been a strikeout, so the obvious next attempt was the opposite;:something mental. I needed to see if I could trace the connections I used to control my other abilities to get at it. The only question was how the hell I was supposed to do that? Maybe some sort of meditation exercise?
I tried to clear my head of all thought, which was exactly as easy as it sounded but I managed it eventually anyway, or at least something close. At first all I noticed was a weirdly heightened sense of all the little things going on with your body all the time; things like little twitches in my hands or legs, the way I stood with one leg bent at a slight angle, the phantom sensation of prickling sweat, a rhythmic thumpathump that seemed to reverberate through my entire body, and a dozen other tiny little sensations. None of it very useful for my purposes.
I reached out, not with my actual hands but with what I could only describe as 'mental limbs,' testing the interior space of my own mind, and at first nothing happened as I undoubtedly fumbled around like an idiot. My frustration was just about total when suddenly it all opened up before me like a great glittering rainbow web, except calling it a web was altogether too simplistic for the structure that confronted me. It was like a sphere, except as soon as I had that thought the shape distorted and unfurled like a great flower where each petal was itself a web just as complicated and intricate as the original. My mental fingers traced the edges of the vast network before me, encountering protrusions, depressions, and perforations that littered the surface and whose function and purpose I did not understand.
I was swallowed by the flower-web-network, enfolded in a great cocoon of data and information which humbled me in its vastness. I became lost in tracing out connections between structures I encountered; vast monoliths which dominated the impossible landscape, crystalline palaces of jagged blades, undulating baubles of fluid, and shuddering mechanical mountains.
My attention was wrenched from my explorations by a hand on my shoulder, I turned my head to look and found my Dad standing behind me with concern etched across his face. How long I'd been standing here since I'd started my little journey I wasn't sure. 3 hours 43 minutes 15 seconds.
Okay, so it was just after two. I'd missed lunch and obviously Dad had gotten worried after hours of not seeing me, so he'd come down here and caught me totally spaced out and staring off into nothing. Whatever was going through his head right now couldn't be good.
"Taylor, are you all right? You've been down here for hours." His voice was soft and tinged with worry.
"Sorry, I got caught up trying to figure out some… stuff." I felt bad at the lie, even though it wasn't really a lie, it probably counted if only because I was trying to keep stuff from him even if what I was saying wasn't actually untrue. Right now though, I couldn't think of any situation where telling him about all the various weirdness going on with me currently didn't just complicate our barely functioning relationship even worse.
Dad didn't seem totally reassured by that vague answer.
"You know you can talk to me about anything, right Taylor? I know it probably doesn't seem like your Dad would know anything about the stuff your dealing with even since you got your… ah, powers but sometimes just talking out loud can help with tough problems." He smiled gently as he spoke, an expression which was made slightly creepy on faces like ours.
"I know, I know, this is just stuff I think I have to figure out for myself, you know?" I answered.
"Okay Taylor, okay." He sighed a little and turned to go.
I was the worst daughter ever.
"But! I think I've figured out as much as I can for today," A lie, I hadn't figured out anything and I only had more questions than I'd started out with but I was frankly exhausted anyways. "I'll come up now." I paused, trying to think of something else to say. "Did you already put away lunch?"
Dad smiled again slightly at that and I followed him upstairs.
For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening I did my best to completely forget about all the things that I should have been trying to figure out but had no clue where to even start with, and instead just be there with my father. After a late lunch of some sandwiches we sat down in the living room and started watching old movies; stuff from the the seventies and sixties, before there were parahumans. Before Mom died I remembered the two of them cuddling up on the couch late at night on the weekends to watch movies like this; they were my Dad's favorite, I remember he used to say that nothing after Scion was ever much good. I knew for sure that after the Endbringers appeared people weren't as interested in that sort of stuff. None of the people at school went to movies except for the "rich kids", or at least what passed for them at Winslow, I mean when just about every two months some city had actually for real gotten trashed it kind of made the whole spectacle of watching it happen on a screen feel sick. They still made movies, so someone had to be watching them, but I hadn't gone to any in years, not since everything had gone to shit with Emma.
I liked the older movies too, they tended to be about regular people in a world of regular people without all the insanity of capes and powers. It made them like looking into a sort of bizarre, funhouse mirror reflection of the world. I knew Earth Aleph was out there in a vague, intellectual sort of way, but these movies gave me something of a look into what living there must actually be like, or at least I thought they did. Probably life there was nothing like them, since they were just movies, and from more than thirty years into the past of both our worlds.
Spending time with Dad like this was nice though. We watched movies through the afternoon and into the evening, then ordered pizza and ate it in front of the TV. We didn't talk much, just the occasional comment or question during the commercial breaks, but that too was nice, to be able to escape from the pressure of having to think about anything or to do anything for at least a few hours. I think it made him feel better too; slowly we were finding ourselves a way back to something resembling an actual father-daughter relationship.
There are only so many movies I can watch in a night though, so about eight or so I begged off and went up to my room. Of course now that I was alone all the things I had been very much not thinking about downstairs flooded to the forefront of my mind: Lung would be showing up in the abandoned lot in a little under three hours, I had no clue how to activate the one power I needed to really fight him, and today I had seen things which made me question my own sanity in completely new ways. I knew for sure now that I definitely was not human, human looking maybe but not human in the way everyone around me was still human; I was like one of those capes that you hear about in the news every once and a while that has their entire body changed into something almost unrecognizable when they got their powers. Wait, no I wasn't just like that, that's exactly what I was! Except I'd also gotten a voice in my head, though nothing I'd ever heard said that those types of capes didn't have voices in their heads. After all, I hadn't told anyone so why would they?
So, maybe I wasn't as completely alone as I'd thought, the only difference was that I'd apparently won the power lottery and ended up in a body that looked completely normal even though it wasn't. The problem was I didn't know who those capes were and I doubted there was any sort of list that wasn't in Protectorate or PRT hands, who probably wouldn't be chomping at the bit to hand it out to either teenage girls or unaffiliated parahumans. I could maybe ask around the PHO forums but that would probably send up warning flags of some kind. There might some sort of member group for those kinds of capes that I could take a look at, though. Even if I could contact someone I wasn't sure what to say, how to start a conversation like that, so for the time being I decided that it was best just to focus on what was happening tonight and deal with the other stuff… later.
To distract myself from all the thoughts that I didn't want to be having right now, I turned towards the bookcase in the corner of my room. Contrary to appearances, I hadn't been a huge bookworm for my entire life; in fact I had been more of a tomboy until about a year and half before the accident.
It had been a way for me to try to be like my mother. She was after all an english professor, and I had thought that if I started reading a lot that would make me more like her, maybe even make me as beautiful as she was. It hadn't worked of course, not that it'd been a serious or even conscious thing I was trying to do, but still I'd been a voracious reader for the months right up until the night my world collapsed.
Now, almost two years past that night, I could finally stand to look at those books against the wall and not feel terrible. They reminded me of my mother, of the way she lit up whenever I showed her a new book I wanted to read, the way she would sometimes give me books she'd loved at my age, or how sometimes she would read the same book and we would end up talking late into the night about it after we both finished. I decided to rearrange the bookshelf, though I didn't know how libraries did it so I just went in alphabetical order. I pulled all the books out into a great big pile and then started going through them one by one.
By the time I finished it was nearly ten thirty, I didn't actually have that many books but when I picked up one that was particularly meaningful I felt compelled to open it back up and get lost in its pages for a few minutes. Eventually, I put the last book on the shelf and sighed.
Lung would be showing up in half an hour. Since I already where he was going to be, and when he would be coming I figured I might as well get going myself. I could take it slow and probably arrive at the right time, so I changed into my costume and turned out the lights so Dad would think I had gone to sleep, then snuck out again. The journey there was interesting, before I had been rushing to get there but now I could move at a more leisurely pace and that gave me a new view of the city; late at night when almost no one was around. Streets without cars turned from sometimes impassable barriers into wide open expanses of pavement, and it struck me that there was a certain wastefulness in the way the streetlights stayed on even when no one was around, that is when they were on at all.
It was near eleven when I reached the abandoned lot. Evidence of last night's fight greeted me: scorch marks on the pavement from Lung's fire, new cracks in the walls or indentations from various impacts on the ground, but not the man himself. I didn't have to wait long though before he himself showed up, dressed in sweatpants and a wife beater that showed off his tattooed body.
He was admittedly an attractive guy but I don't think he'd intended to show that off, these were probably just clothes he wouldn't mind losing. Lung spotted me right off, and the two of us quickly fell into a familiar pattern of squaring off and then circling each other warily.
My curiosity got the better of me.
"Why do you want to fight me so badly?" We were close enough to one another that I didn't need to shout.
He only grunted in response at first but then after a pause he spoke. "You are strong."
It wasn't exactly illuminating.
"What the hell does that mean? Armsmaster is strong. Kaiser is strong. Miss Militia is strong. You're not fighting them." I was a little pissed at the vagueness of his answer so the words came out a little harsher than I'd initially meant them.
"Them? They are shackled, little better than slaves. The strong do not bind themselves to anything but themselves; like you, like me." What? He thought I was like him, that I wasn't part of the Protectorate because I didn't want to put myself under someone or somethings' thumb? It was true in a way, but I suspected not in the same way he meant.
To me it sounded like he was saying the you either submitted to someone else's rules or you made your own. There wasn't room for right and wrong in that type of worldview, only the rules you made or the rules you followed. The idea that I might be like him frightened me.
"All those others, the heroes and the villains they settle into their little roles and are content to pretend they serve some purpose. I am singular, I am Lung and the only purpose I have is to rule." He pulled himself up straighter as he went on, and I could see it in my mind; see Lung standing atop a mountain of ash in the midst of a burnt landscape, ruling a dead world. "Perhaps I will let you live, make you one of the ABB. True, in the past I have accepted only Asians, but perhaps the time for that has passed and you are strong enough that our enemies would tremble to face the both of us."
This was so beyond fucked up, he was talking about inducting me into his gang like it was a done deal, like of course I would want that. Well to hell with that, I wasn't going to be one of his lieutenants. I'm a hero!
I charged at Lung and his entire face split into a grin at the same time as his body sprouted the telltale metallic scales of his transformation and he started bulking up.
He was still roughly human sized when I reached him so the punch I threw should have thrown Lung through a loop.
He moved like lightning though, throwing his head to one side and answering my attack with a swing of his scaled fist.
I took half a step back, and slapped his arm off to the side with my other hand.
Lung had grown almost a foot in height and half again that in width already. Almost in the same instant I was slapping his arm away, he was pivoting on one leg, wreathing himself in fire that turned his clothes to ash and throwing his other foot with its great claws up in a high kick.
I dropped low under the blow and rolled away from him. He grew several inches in both directions even as I moved. If I didn't think fast he would just get larger and larger and then we would be in the same situation as last night where I couldn't do anything close to permanent damage. Knowing what I did now about his thoughts I didn't know what another fight like that would result in; he might think we were evenly matched or he might get frustrated at his inability to defeat me and look to vent his frustrations on others. I needed time to think, to figure out how to use the only power that was proven to work, but Lung wasn't about to give it to me.
A great flaming fist, now almost as large as my head, entered my vision and I dodged away from it. Where the hell did he get all this fire from anyway? He couldn't just be making it- He was making it! Of course, he fucking made fire from nothing.
God, I was an idiot.
This whole time I'd been thinking of the power in terms of pushing or pulling energy and motions from somewhere else and putting it into whatever limb I was using to hit him with, but it wasn't like that. The motion didn't come from anywhere, it didn't get moved, one moment it wasn't there and the next it just was.
I shouldn't think of it like making my attacks suddenly move, I should think of it as making them already have been in motion! The difference was that making my attacks move like that required them to follow certain rules the universe had about energy and causality, whereas the other just told all the rules to sit down, shut up and listen.
I threw a strike at Lung's head and he dodged deftly to one side.
Perfect.
My left leg was already up in the air before he had finished his move, on track to strike him square on the side of his head.
I imagined my leg moving; not starting to move but already moving. It had always been moving, forever, and there was nothing that could stop it.
There was a crunch, Lung went flying and crashed limply several feet away.
My leg continued to move.
Shit, I needed to stop it. How do you stop something that has always been moving? You don't, because you make sure it was never moving in the first place.
I fell in an ungainly heap as my foot suddenly lost all its momentum.
Once I'd picked myself up I made my way over to where Lung's body was sprawled face down on the pavement. He was still breathing and his power had already healed enough of his injuries that I was pretty sure there wouldn't be permanent or long lasting damage. With the fight finished, there were several options for what I could do. I could call the PRT to take him away, but he'd already escape once with Bakuda's help and that had resulted in pretty serious destruction. I could also just leave him here but who knew what that would result in. Or... I could kill him.
The last thought didn't appeal to me at all. I didn't want to make myself out to be some sort of judge, jury, and executioner vigilante. It would just be wrong. On the other hand I really didn't trust the PRT to be able to keep him in custody without more massive destruction being visited on the city, so that left me with only one option; to just let him go. The only problem was that I had no idea what he would do when he recovered, unless…
Lung believe the strong ruled, and I had beaten him fair and square, one on one. No tricks. No distractions. Just me. I would leave him a message which would hopefully keep him in line until I could actually get him put away with the rest of his gang.
I picked up one of his slowly returning to human hands, singling out the pointed finger claw and use it to carve two words into the pavement in front of him.
"I WIN"
Then I turned and left.
A/N: Ok, so this took a long time to write. But it's also the longest update so far by a large margin so I hope you enjoy it!
3.2
*
There was no yelling, no roar to accompany the start of the fight, just the whooshing of displaced air as I ducked under Lung's fist. I rolled underneath his outstretched arm, popped back up at his side and then had to scoot back almost instantly to avoid his other arm.
He was quickly bulking up, scales sprouting and spreading across his skin, and with every passing moment he was less and less recognizably human. The scars around his eye disappeared into a twisted mass of discolored scale while his other eye was like a droplet of molten metal trapped in a mold. Going by past experience he was about two thirds of the way through his transformation from man to monster already. It wasn't likely he stopped changing after that of course, but from what I'd seen he mostly just got bigger at the point. There were those persistent rumors that he turned into an actual dragon at some point, but I didn't put much stock in them, and even if they were true I didn't think we would get there tonight. Hopefully not ever.
I reached for the Physical Canceller, pushed on it in a familiar way, and felt myself become lighter. Ducking under the next attack Lung sent at me, I grabbed hold of his arm and extended my right foot as I swung myself upwards, aiming it towards his head. Lung shook his arm violently as he reared back to avoid the blow. My grip loosened and started to slip, then suddenly the world ignited around me.
I was borne up and away on the force of the explosion he had created, roiling flames slipping past me harmlessly like the confetti from my ninth birthday party. For a second I floated, my body twisting as I tried to reorient myself perpendicular to the ground, and then I released the weight I had pushed away and the wild tumblr slowed dramatically as my body returned to a more normal mass. I crashed back to the ground, landing and rolling forward a few feet before I righted myself.
The two of us stared at one another and circled; neither of us had really gone after the other yet.
"You cahn do better, ghirl. Ohr does that only work for surprhise attacks?" Lung's voice wasn't yet distorted too much by the alterations to his form, in fact his face was still in large part humanish looking. That was, if you ignored the scales and his one aforementioned glowing metal eye.
"Just making sure you can take it, you overgrown gecko." I answered, not happy at the way he kept calling me 'girl,' like I wasn't worthy of his speaking my name. Wait, did he even know my name? I wondered for a moment whether Lung even bothered to keep up with the new capes that showed up. How would he do it anyway, would he attend the Protectorate press conferences, or did he troll the PHO Brockton Bay specific boards? The image of a hunched over Lung in his scaly form, tapping away one key at a time in response to some troll almost made me break out laughing. The man-slash-monster in question himself seemed amused by my comment.
"I will take everythhing you hhave, girl, and then I will break you over my knee. Hhow does thhat sound? You surprised me twice, but now it is just you and me and I want to find out just hhow hhard you can hhit in ah real fighht. So, cowm. Ahnd ghet me." His speech slurred worse towards the end, as presumably some part of his mouth transformed in a way that made normal speech impossible. Well it didn't matter anyways, we'd probably done enough talking.
We circled each other for another few moments before charging towards one another again, I pushed again to make myself lighter before I launched myself into the air above Lung. A little over halfway through my arc over him I shifted again. Turning and pushing back towards him I let the power go and started plummeting towards the earth. My foot cracked his scales on impact but his hand, already on its way up when I started falling, now large enough to wrap around my waist, does exactly that. Fine spiderweb cracks radiated out through the scales around his shoulder, some shattered flakes popping off to fall lazily towards the ground. They caught the light from the flames dancing up and down his other arm, as he twisted and brought me slamming bodily into the ground. Pinned underneath his hand at my waist I watched him raise his other hand, wreathed in flame, and then I was engulfed in a universe of of fire.
I wrapped my right leg around his forearm and planted it firmly to the ground to anchor the rest of his arm into that position while I reached across my body with my right hand and began prying his hand off of me. Once I managed to get halfway loose I tensed and pushed; twisting myself suddenly out of the tangled position under Lung's grip. I escaped all but a glancing blow from his next strike as it passed my spinning body, and was several feet away before I landed, already planning my next attack.
I could hit him hard enough to do damage, but nothing close to what I needed in order to take him down, sure his scales would crack and break off in chunks, but then seconds later they would have healed back to new. Without a distraction he would just move out of the way if I tried the same trick that had worked yesterday or the first time we'd fought; maybe if I could get at the system directly I could have done it, but the way Nono treated it I didn't think that would be happening soon. So, if I had to do this on my own then I had to figure out something else to really put the hurt on Lung.
We continued to fight, each of us trading the advantage back and forth over and over. I would wait for him to open himself to a new angle of attack, then I would explode into action to take advantage of it; sending Lung off balance, and shattering scales. When I tried it again Lung would be more than ready, sometimes he moved out of the way at the exact right moment to escape a hit or he would counter attack and force me to either abandon my own assault or take the hit. By twenty minutes into the fight his formerly ruined eye was nothing more debilitating than a swollen-shut mass of distorted scales. Lung would occasionally press his own offensive. He couldn't actually hurt me, but he didn't know that and he could toss me around easily enough if he got a good grip so throughout the fight I ended up hurled or slammed against brick walls, the pavement, and scattered junk at a number of points. The noise of our fight sounded deafening to me whenever it punctuated the otherwise eeries silence of the night, but it couldn't carry that far and it wasn't like there was anyone really around to hear it in this part of town at this time of night.
I wasn't getting hurt but all the same I could really push myself against Lung, where with other opponents I think I would have been afraid of hurting them. I'd noticed it when I was fighting the Merchants; the way I would pull back on hits even though my opponents had armor of their own, of a kind at least. Here and now though, I wasn't holding back at all; I was actually reaching for more power instead and that was an exhilarating feeling, to be pushing myself, to test my current limits. I could sense the power Nono had been using to move, faintly just beyond them, not in the sense of distance but in some other way which I couldn't quite define. It was like touching something with only my fingertips as I stretched my arms painfully just to get that extra metaphorical inch, just barely unable to grasp it.
Not when I straddled his shoulders and brought both my fist down on his skull.
Not when I ducked under his outstretched arms and tried to uppercut him, and only ended up giving him the opportunity to try to crush in a bearhug me for my trouble.
Not as I launched myself off a wall and tried to kick his head, causing the disturbing mass of scales around his injured eye to split apart to reveal his healed eye through ragged flaps of skin and scales.
Or when feinted to left, then lunged right and struck at his exposed side.
Or in my attempt to throw rocks hard enough to do the job.
Or as I dodged being pinned under his clawed foot, and kneed him in the ass on my way past.
Or even when I… well, you get the idea.
I tried everything I could think of; I pulled on what powers I sort of knew how to work to try to make my limbs go faster, tried just pushing harder and harder, tried 'flexing' every part of my limbs that I could feel, and hell I even tried just thinking about going faster really hard. None of it seemed to have any effect whatsoever, and eventually I just gave up.
At some point Lung had stopped growing; I first noticed at about the forty five minute mark that he hadn't changed in size even the slightest bit in the last ten minutes. He hadn't shrunk or anything, and it wasn't like I'd stopped hurting him but nothing I was doing seemed to inflict any damage that lasted past a few seconds, even the flaps of flesh around his eye had receded to reveal a perfectly normal looking eye, or at least as far as normal went for giant transforming dragon men. The flesh surrounding it was still slightly off-color from the rest of his scales, but that wasn't likely to last.
When an hour had passed since the fight began, somehow I knew it exactly. I decided that enough was enough and that I just didn't want to continue what was becoming somewhat of a frustrating fight, and I was worried that if we kept up it would eventually get out of hand or that the Protectorate would show up sooner or later. I dodged a couple more swings while backing away from Lung, but eventually he seemed to get the message.
"Enough!" I shouted, and then more quietly, "Enough. I still need sleep." A lie, but I figured it wasn't a big deal to lie to someone like Lung.
He didn't seem happy, his face had distorted into something that might have been a grimace or a snarl before it relaxed again. I think it relaxed at least, it was hard to tell.
"TAHRRAHR!" I had no idea what he mean by that.
"What?"
Lung paused, took a deep breath and spoke slowly. "TOH. MAHW. RHAOW."
Tomorrow, he was trying to say tomorrow; which I guessed probably mean he was asking, or more likely demanding, a rematch tomorrow night. I wasn't quite sure how to respond, on the one hand I wanted to fight him again if only to push myself farther and maybe break past whatever barrier I had encountered to finally understand how the power that Nono used actually worked, and on the other hand it seemed basically pointless to engage in some weird sort of sparring match with Lung without knowing for sure I could take him. I might figure it out tomorrow, or I might figure it out years from now, or Nono might just one day drop the answer in my lap because she suddenly thought I was 'ready' or something, but there were no guarantees of when I would pass that barrier. Still, I wanted to test myself more, so what was the harm in one more sparring match?
"Okay, tomorrow. Same time and same place." Lung stomped his feet and nodded in agreement, then he simply turned turned away and started stalking off. Meanwhile I stayed there staring a little dumbly at his retreating back, until I came to my senses and turned to head for home.
Walking home took longer, mostly because I wasn't in any sort of hurry to actually get there anytime soon. On the way I considered my night; it had started off normally enough, at least relative to my life in the last few months, as I did my homework and worried about whether or not a super villain would do something tonight. So, how exactly had I ended up facing off against Lung himself, all alone and in some sort of weird sparring match instead of an actual fight? This had turned into such a weird night.
My entire life had turned weird.
Was it right for me to be fighting Lung like this? Should I call the Protectorate, let them know about my appointment with him for tomorrow night so that he could maybe be taken in and off the streets where he presented a serious and significant danger to the entire city? I didn't want to because I still wanted to find out just how far I could push myself and maybe in the process unlock some of the secrets of my new body, but was my pride worth it? I wasn't sure that I could excuse not contacting the Protectorate just because I wanted a chance to fight one of the most powerful parahumans in a one on one fight, but at the same time it wasn't a sure thing that calling in the Protectorate would even be enough. He'd fought teams of heroes before and emerged the winner, so what was to say that he wouldn't this time or that the fight itself wouldn't lead to the worst case scenario I wanted to avoid? In a way my fighting him one on one was a sort of safety measure when you looked at it like that, he wanted to fight me after all and so long as he was preoccupied with trying to defeat me at a time and place I could control he would be less likely to go off attacking somewhere else. Unless that was just a self-serving rationalization that I was making up to justify the decision I had already made before of my personal pride.
I hated thinking about this stuff, because I was never sure what the actual right decision was. Well I'd already sort of given my word, not actually but it still felt sort of… wrong to call the Protectorate on Lung now after I'd already agree to meet him tomorrow night. So, tomorrow I would fight him again and then that would be an end to that.
I hoped.
Oh god, how could I have been so stupid.
Lung definitely wouldn't leave it at that. Shit.
*
*
When I woke up on Saturday it was bright and sunny outside. After having breakfast with dad, making small talk about school and my, ah, 'work,' I took a quick shower and went to the basement where I spent the next several hours accomplishing essentially nothing. I had a list of methods I'd tried with no results, or at least not the results I wanted, that was reaching almost an entire notebook page. Nono was virtually no help, she just floated there smiling vaguely and occasionally playing with my hair as I thought long and hard about everything I could remember of what she did whenever she used the ability. It wasn't much, just a vague similarity to the Physical Canceler and a weird sense of incongruity.
I was kicking myself for not taking physics this year, not that I thought it would be all that helpful but it had to be better than being basically completely ignorant of all this from the start. Actually, given my experiences in school so far I was fairly confident that I could just start teaching myself physics at this point, and that sooner or later I could probably make some interesting 'discoveries' which would change the entire field.
That was one advantage of sharing the body of an advanced robot girl from an alternate universe where humanity had achieved essentially everything we'd ever dreamed of achieving in space. Probably not a good idea though, as it would invite a lot of questions I just didn't want to even think about answering any time soon. The point was that maybe if I knew a little more figuring this out might be easier. Of course even with my new abilities it was probably too short a time frame to teach myself the physics and figure out how the power worked.
I tried a number of different tacks over the course of those few hours. One of the first was to try turning my super snooping power on myself, in the hopes that it would reveal something about how my new body actually worked. It maybe wasn't the smartest idea, not because I thought it would do anything dangerous by itself but because I doubted I would understand half of what I saw anyways. That turned out not to be true, I barely understood a quarter of what I saw and given all the things I could conspicuously not look at I wasn't seeing the entirety of myself; entire vast parts of myself were simply invisible to me even as I could detect them through their connection to other systems. Probably most of that was a result of the system I was using being passive and the fact that some of it wasn't all here anyways, rather than any effort to hide stuff from me on Nono's part.
What I did see was weird enough.
My hair was normal at first, until my sight carried me closer and instead of the sort of layered, scale-like pattern shown in textbooks and in those commercials for dandruff shampoo on TV, I saw only smooth, glossy black material off of which smaller spiny hairs radiated.
I pulled my viewpoint back from that and spun around myself to focus on my face. Something about my eyes caught my attention: as I focused I could see faint images of little circles behind my irises that grew and shrank as I watched. Those had to be the other visual sensors that allowed me to do things like see through the smoke in the college building and not get completely blinded by Bakuda's tinker flashbombs. There had to be some way to activate that stuff more consciously so I let go of my other powered vision and found myself instantly back behind my own eyes staring at the cluttered basement. Experimentally I tried to think about the ways the mini-irises I had observed were arranged , then tried shifting their positions with where I knew my normal iris was. My vision exploded; strange indescribable shapes and unnamable colors kaleidoscoped across my vision, and in surprise I let go. Everything returned to normal.
That had at least produced results, if not anything that was particularly useful or telling. It had seemed like my vision was switching across a dozen different modes each second, like some demented and bizarre stereoscope. I probably hadn't been specific enough in what I'd wanted and so it had given me everything at once which wasn't very useful as it turned out. I would need to focus on one or two at a time, but I didn't know which ones would do what. Of course so far everything else had responded to my internally expressed needs to some extent; I concentrated on 'seeing details' and 'more than just the surface' as my two thoughts and then raised my hand so that I was looking at the back of it.
I focused on my hand which expanded and expanded over and over again until all I could see was an expanse of skin. It was more regular than I would have expected; there was a regular geometric pattern of hexagons and the occasional more complex shape to it that gave the impression of precision manufacturing. Along the borders between shapes small structures were nestled, many of them were little more than tiny curved lenses while others were small depressions with hatch marked surfaces, and where hairs sprouted hundreds of thin antennae split off of either side of the follicles. Within the 'cells' other shapes were just beneath the surface; ovals, circles, spiderweb structures, snakelike patterns, and more besides lurked under my skin.
I focused, trying to resolve those indistinct shapes from beneath my skin. Then my vision swam and I was through the surface, only briefly catching sight of what looked like devices from one of those old magazines from the fifties where people predicted what the future would be like. Then I was past that and great lengths of corded ribbons bundled together, most tensing and flexing in synch but some expanding or contracting to some other rhythm lay before me, and great fat pipes were nestled within the bundles in a creeping network. Tiny figures flowed through these; great bulbous shapes with squirming little protrusions, lithe slithering minnows, tiny crawling and skittering spiders, needle sharp lances, and other, weirder shapes were carried along in the tide of some unknown fluid. The smaller, crawling kind occasionally worked their way out of the pipes to race across the pulsing ribbons, they would sometimes stop to pull at frayed or broken fibers, coiling them into great (for their size) spools or reattaching two broken ends, but otherwise they simply went from one pipe to another pipe. Millions crawled across the fibrous bundles in my arms… in my arms… oh god.
These things were inside of me, crawling who knows where, pulling little bits of me apart or just skittering like creepy invisible bugs.
My vision swam again, and I was staring at the floor, my hands braced against the cold smooth concrete basement surface. I gagged for a moment or two, my body trying to throw up all the food I'd eaten barely two hours ago.
"Okay, calm down Taylor," I thought, desperately trying to bring my scattered thoughts back into order and calm trembling nerves. "It's your body, none of that is weird. It's all part of you, it doesn't make you less than a person. Calm down."
I had to repeat something along those lines to myself at least five separate times before my body finally listened and I recovered from the shock of it.
That had been… something. Not what I'd been expecting and probably ultimately not very useful, even if I could somehow turn my eyes on the rest of my body, I doubted that I would be able to identify anything by sight alone and even if I could I didn't think that would be of much help in figuring out how to use my powers.
After that I spend a long while doing basically nothing except staring blankly at the boxes piled up in the corners of the basement, before I eventually decided to get back to original goals. It was clear I had to try a different tack, especially given that I didn't want to go through whatever the hell what I had just recovered from was again. Physical examination had been a strikeout, so the obvious next attempt was the opposite;:something mental. I needed to see if I could trace the connections I used to control my other abilities to get at it. The only question was how the hell I was supposed to do that? Maybe some sort of meditation exercise?
I tried to clear my head of all thought, which was exactly as easy as it sounded but I managed it eventually anyway, or at least something close. At first all I noticed was a weirdly heightened sense of all the little things going on with your body all the time; things like little twitches in my hands or legs, the way I stood with one leg bent at a slight angle, the phantom sensation of prickling sweat, a rhythmic thumpathump that seemed to reverberate through my entire body, and a dozen other tiny little sensations. None of it very useful for my purposes.
I reached out, not with my actual hands but with what I could only describe as 'mental limbs,' testing the interior space of my own mind, and at first nothing happened as I undoubtedly fumbled around like an idiot. My frustration was just about total when suddenly it all opened up before me like a great glittering rainbow web, except calling it a web was altogether too simplistic for the structure that confronted me. It was like a sphere, except as soon as I had that thought the shape distorted and unfurled like a great flower where each petal was itself a web just as complicated and intricate as the original. My mental fingers traced the edges of the vast network before me, encountering protrusions, depressions, and perforations that littered the surface and whose function and purpose I did not understand.
I was swallowed by the flower-web-network, enfolded in a great cocoon of data and information which humbled me in its vastness. I became lost in tracing out connections between structures I encountered; vast monoliths which dominated the impossible landscape, crystalline palaces of jagged blades, undulating baubles of fluid, and shuddering mechanical mountains.
My attention was wrenched from my explorations by a hand on my shoulder, I turned my head to look and found my Dad standing behind me with concern etched across his face. How long I'd been standing here since I'd started my little journey I wasn't sure. 3 hours 43 minutes 15 seconds.
Okay, so it was just after two. I'd missed lunch and obviously Dad had gotten worried after hours of not seeing me, so he'd come down here and caught me totally spaced out and staring off into nothing. Whatever was going through his head right now couldn't be good.
"Taylor, are you all right? You've been down here for hours." His voice was soft and tinged with worry.
"Sorry, I got caught up trying to figure out some… stuff." I felt bad at the lie, even though it wasn't really a lie, it probably counted if only because I was trying to keep stuff from him even if what I was saying wasn't actually untrue. Right now though, I couldn't think of any situation where telling him about all the various weirdness going on with me currently didn't just complicate our barely functioning relationship even worse.
Dad didn't seem totally reassured by that vague answer.
"You know you can talk to me about anything, right Taylor? I know it probably doesn't seem like your Dad would know anything about the stuff your dealing with even since you got your… ah, powers but sometimes just talking out loud can help with tough problems." He smiled gently as he spoke, an expression which was made slightly creepy on faces like ours.
"I know, I know, this is just stuff I think I have to figure out for myself, you know?" I answered.
"Okay Taylor, okay." He sighed a little and turned to go.
I was the worst daughter ever.
"But! I think I've figured out as much as I can for today," A lie, I hadn't figured out anything and I only had more questions than I'd started out with but I was frankly exhausted anyways. "I'll come up now." I paused, trying to think of something else to say. "Did you already put away lunch?"
Dad smiled again slightly at that and I followed him upstairs.
For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening I did my best to completely forget about all the things that I should have been trying to figure out but had no clue where to even start with, and instead just be there with my father. After a late lunch of some sandwiches we sat down in the living room and started watching old movies; stuff from the the seventies and sixties, before there were parahumans. Before Mom died I remembered the two of them cuddling up on the couch late at night on the weekends to watch movies like this; they were my Dad's favorite, I remember he used to say that nothing after Scion was ever much good. I knew for sure that after the Endbringers appeared people weren't as interested in that sort of stuff. None of the people at school went to movies except for the "rich kids", or at least what passed for them at Winslow, I mean when just about every two months some city had actually for real gotten trashed it kind of made the whole spectacle of watching it happen on a screen feel sick. They still made movies, so someone had to be watching them, but I hadn't gone to any in years, not since everything had gone to shit with Emma.
I liked the older movies too, they tended to be about regular people in a world of regular people without all the insanity of capes and powers. It made them like looking into a sort of bizarre, funhouse mirror reflection of the world. I knew Earth Aleph was out there in a vague, intellectual sort of way, but these movies gave me something of a look into what living there must actually be like, or at least I thought they did. Probably life there was nothing like them, since they were just movies, and from more than thirty years into the past of both our worlds.
Spending time with Dad like this was nice though. We watched movies through the afternoon and into the evening, then ordered pizza and ate it in front of the TV. We didn't talk much, just the occasional comment or question during the commercial breaks, but that too was nice, to be able to escape from the pressure of having to think about anything or to do anything for at least a few hours. I think it made him feel better too; slowly we were finding ourselves a way back to something resembling an actual father-daughter relationship.
There are only so many movies I can watch in a night though, so about eight or so I begged off and went up to my room. Of course now that I was alone all the things I had been very much not thinking about downstairs flooded to the forefront of my mind: Lung would be showing up in the abandoned lot in a little under three hours, I had no clue how to activate the one power I needed to really fight him, and today I had seen things which made me question my own sanity in completely new ways. I knew for sure now that I definitely was not human, human looking maybe but not human in the way everyone around me was still human; I was like one of those capes that you hear about in the news every once and a while that has their entire body changed into something almost unrecognizable when they got their powers. Wait, no I wasn't just like that, that's exactly what I was! Except I'd also gotten a voice in my head, though nothing I'd ever heard said that those types of capes didn't have voices in their heads. After all, I hadn't told anyone so why would they?
So, maybe I wasn't as completely alone as I'd thought, the only difference was that I'd apparently won the power lottery and ended up in a body that looked completely normal even though it wasn't. The problem was I didn't know who those capes were and I doubted there was any sort of list that wasn't in Protectorate or PRT hands, who probably wouldn't be chomping at the bit to hand it out to either teenage girls or unaffiliated parahumans. I could maybe ask around the PHO forums but that would probably send up warning flags of some kind. There might some sort of member group for those kinds of capes that I could take a look at, though. Even if I could contact someone I wasn't sure what to say, how to start a conversation like that, so for the time being I decided that it was best just to focus on what was happening tonight and deal with the other stuff… later.
To distract myself from all the thoughts that I didn't want to be having right now, I turned towards the bookcase in the corner of my room. Contrary to appearances, I hadn't been a huge bookworm for my entire life; in fact I had been more of a tomboy until about a year and half before the accident.
It had been a way for me to try to be like my mother. She was after all an english professor, and I had thought that if I started reading a lot that would make me more like her, maybe even make me as beautiful as she was. It hadn't worked of course, not that it'd been a serious or even conscious thing I was trying to do, but still I'd been a voracious reader for the months right up until the night my world collapsed.
Now, almost two years past that night, I could finally stand to look at those books against the wall and not feel terrible. They reminded me of my mother, of the way she lit up whenever I showed her a new book I wanted to read, the way she would sometimes give me books she'd loved at my age, or how sometimes she would read the same book and we would end up talking late into the night about it after we both finished. I decided to rearrange the bookshelf, though I didn't know how libraries did it so I just went in alphabetical order. I pulled all the books out into a great big pile and then started going through them one by one.
By the time I finished it was nearly ten thirty, I didn't actually have that many books but when I picked up one that was particularly meaningful I felt compelled to open it back up and get lost in its pages for a few minutes. Eventually, I put the last book on the shelf and sighed.
Lung would be showing up in half an hour. Since I already where he was going to be, and when he would be coming I figured I might as well get going myself. I could take it slow and probably arrive at the right time, so I changed into my costume and turned out the lights so Dad would think I had gone to sleep, then snuck out again. The journey there was interesting, before I had been rushing to get there but now I could move at a more leisurely pace and that gave me a new view of the city; late at night when almost no one was around. Streets without cars turned from sometimes impassable barriers into wide open expanses of pavement, and it struck me that there was a certain wastefulness in the way the streetlights stayed on even when no one was around, that is when they were on at all.
It was near eleven when I reached the abandoned lot. Evidence of last night's fight greeted me: scorch marks on the pavement from Lung's fire, new cracks in the walls or indentations from various impacts on the ground, but not the man himself. I didn't have to wait long though before he himself showed up, dressed in sweatpants and a wife beater that showed off his tattooed body.
He was admittedly an attractive guy but I don't think he'd intended to show that off, these were probably just clothes he wouldn't mind losing. Lung spotted me right off, and the two of us quickly fell into a familiar pattern of squaring off and then circling each other warily.
My curiosity got the better of me.
"Why do you want to fight me so badly?" We were close enough to one another that I didn't need to shout.
He only grunted in response at first but then after a pause he spoke. "You are strong."
It wasn't exactly illuminating.
"What the hell does that mean? Armsmaster is strong. Kaiser is strong. Miss Militia is strong. You're not fighting them." I was a little pissed at the vagueness of his answer so the words came out a little harsher than I'd initially meant them.
"Them? They are shackled, little better than slaves. The strong do not bind themselves to anything but themselves; like you, like me." What? He thought I was like him, that I wasn't part of the Protectorate because I didn't want to put myself under someone or somethings' thumb? It was true in a way, but I suspected not in the same way he meant.
To me it sounded like he was saying the you either submitted to someone else's rules or you made your own. There wasn't room for right and wrong in that type of worldview, only the rules you made or the rules you followed. The idea that I might be like him frightened me.
"All those others, the heroes and the villains they settle into their little roles and are content to pretend they serve some purpose. I am singular, I am Lung and the only purpose I have is to rule." He pulled himself up straighter as he went on, and I could see it in my mind; see Lung standing atop a mountain of ash in the midst of a burnt landscape, ruling a dead world. "Perhaps I will let you live, make you one of the ABB. True, in the past I have accepted only Asians, but perhaps the time for that has passed and you are strong enough that our enemies would tremble to face the both of us."
This was so beyond fucked up, he was talking about inducting me into his gang like it was a done deal, like of course I would want that. Well to hell with that, I wasn't going to be one of his lieutenants. I'm a hero!
I charged at Lung and his entire face split into a grin at the same time as his body sprouted the telltale metallic scales of his transformation and he started bulking up.
He was still roughly human sized when I reached him so the punch I threw should have thrown Lung through a loop.
He moved like lightning though, throwing his head to one side and answering my attack with a swing of his scaled fist.
I took half a step back, and slapped his arm off to the side with my other hand.
Lung had grown almost a foot in height and half again that in width already. Almost in the same instant I was slapping his arm away, he was pivoting on one leg, wreathing himself in fire that turned his clothes to ash and throwing his other foot with its great claws up in a high kick.
I dropped low under the blow and rolled away from him. He grew several inches in both directions even as I moved. If I didn't think fast he would just get larger and larger and then we would be in the same situation as last night where I couldn't do anything close to permanent damage. Knowing what I did now about his thoughts I didn't know what another fight like that would result in; he might think we were evenly matched or he might get frustrated at his inability to defeat me and look to vent his frustrations on others. I needed time to think, to figure out how to use the only power that was proven to work, but Lung wasn't about to give it to me.
A great flaming fist, now almost as large as my head, entered my vision and I dodged away from it. Where the hell did he get all this fire from anyway? He couldn't just be making it- He was making it! Of course, he fucking made fire from nothing.
God, I was an idiot.
This whole time I'd been thinking of the power in terms of pushing or pulling energy and motions from somewhere else and putting it into whatever limb I was using to hit him with, but it wasn't like that. The motion didn't come from anywhere, it didn't get moved, one moment it wasn't there and the next it just was.
I shouldn't think of it like making my attacks suddenly move, I should think of it as making them already have been in motion! The difference was that making my attacks move like that required them to follow certain rules the universe had about energy and causality, whereas the other just told all the rules to sit down, shut up and listen.
I threw a strike at Lung's head and he dodged deftly to one side.
Perfect.
My left leg was already up in the air before he had finished his move, on track to strike him square on the side of his head.
I imagined my leg moving; not starting to move but already moving. It had always been moving, forever, and there was nothing that could stop it.
There was a crunch, Lung went flying and crashed limply several feet away.
My leg continued to move.
Shit, I needed to stop it. How do you stop something that has always been moving? You don't, because you make sure it was never moving in the first place.
I fell in an ungainly heap as my foot suddenly lost all its momentum.
Once I'd picked myself up I made my way over to where Lung's body was sprawled face down on the pavement. He was still breathing and his power had already healed enough of his injuries that I was pretty sure there wouldn't be permanent or long lasting damage. With the fight finished, there were several options for what I could do. I could call the PRT to take him away, but he'd already escape once with Bakuda's help and that had resulted in pretty serious destruction. I could also just leave him here but who knew what that would result in. Or... I could kill him.
The last thought didn't appeal to me at all. I didn't want to make myself out to be some sort of judge, jury, and executioner vigilante. It would just be wrong. On the other hand I really didn't trust the PRT to be able to keep him in custody without more massive destruction being visited on the city, so that left me with only one option; to just let him go. The only problem was that I had no idea what he would do when he recovered, unless…
Lung believe the strong ruled, and I had beaten him fair and square, one on one. No tricks. No distractions. Just me. I would leave him a message which would hopefully keep him in line until I could actually get him put away with the rest of his gang.
I picked up one of his slowly returning to human hands, singling out the pointed finger claw and use it to carve two words into the pavement in front of him.
"I WIN"
Then I turned and left.
A/N: Ok, so this took a long time to write. But it's also the longest update so far by a large margin so I hope you enjoy it!
Last edited:
- Location
- West Michigan
That one might be intentional.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Nah, I fixed it a while ago on SB, I was just being lazy/forgot to do it here.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
So, I've just realized that the next update may be a little long in coming. Both this week and next week are potentially quite busy so at the very least I can almost guarantee the next update won't be any time before next week and there's a better than even chance I won't be able to start working on it until sometime the weekend after next, it is pretty well defined in my head so when I do get to it it might not take very long to write which is why I'm leaving the possibility open that I might be able to get to it anytime between then but I want to let everyone know right now that it might be a little bit before my next update.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Update. I have finally begun to actually work on the next part. Sorry for the extra delay, but I apparently really needed to decompress. I hope to be done by either tonight or sometime Thursday morning which would put the actual posting sometime Thursday evening or Friday morning depending on things.
ShineUCrazyStar
Grossly Incandescent
- Location
- Being the Sun
More Buster!Taylor Onee-sama is always the best thing!
Love the story so far, hope there's more character interaction between Taylor, the Wards, and New Wave in the future.
Algorithmic Like Engine online: And then I Liked.
Love the story so far, hope there's more character interaction between Taylor, the Wards, and New Wave in the future.
Algorithmic Like Engine online: And then I Liked.
3.3
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
*
3.3
*
That following morning, Sunday, I spent a lot of the morning in a semi-panic, convinced that I had done the stupidest possible thing last night. I was worried that at any moment I would learn that Lung had gone on a rampage, turning wholes swathes of the city into raging infernos. It was a stupid thing to panic over; for one nothing I knew about the gang leader so much as suggested he was likely to fly off the handle in that way, in fact everything I'd read online and all my own interactions with him painted a very different picture. Sure he looked like a big brute at first glance and even acted a little bit like one with his penchant for charging straight into a fight, but that tendency seemed more a result of his desire to deal with threats head on rather than an issue of temper.
Simply put, he charged because he wanted to get in close, wanted to throw off his opponents with how suddenly and ferociously he could attack. Lung didn't just want the upper hand in a fight, he went straight for victory and his power worked well for that because it responded to bigger threats more quickly with more power. In all of our fights I'd seen the vicious cunning in his eye; his powered up body might restrict some of the movements he could make with its bulk and inhuman structure, but it didn't stop him from understanding exactly how to dismantle an opponent in a fight. In a way he had been right last night, we were alike, just maybe not exactly as he had meant it because it wasn't our mindsets but the fact that people were more likely to underestimate us because of how we looked.
That thought made me shudder; I didn't like thinking of myself as like any villain. On the other hand, our similarities helped in convincing myself that Lung wasn't currently burning down our city. I know it couldn't be true, because even without having to resort to Nono's more targeted peeping from the night before I could, at a glance, take in the entire city in an instant and see that there wasn't even evidence of the smallest fire anywhere. Whatever Lung was actually thinking after last night it hadn't lead him to start rampaging across the city looking to exact vengeance on me. Still, the concern itched at the back of my head all morning and into the afternoon.
Nothing I did occupied my mind enough to banish the worry for more than a few minutes, and so most of the day dragged on interminably. What was more, I didn't feel comfortable leaving the house because I was worried that disaster would strike after all and then I would be caught without my costume. It developed into a vicious cycle where I would start thinking about last night: all the ways it could have gone wrong, that I could have done better, what could happen now, or what Lung was thinking; until I realized I was working myself into a panic and tried to occupy myself with whatever was closest at hand. By three I had organized my closet twice, started five separate books, changed clothes three times, cleaned my room once, and read ahead in two of my textbooks. I was actually nearing the end of my Trigonometry text, and solving the practice problems in my head almost as soon as I finished read the associated material, when my phone rang. Well, it vibrated, since I'd discovered over the last couple of weeks that I really didn't like it when it rang, so I had switched it to vibration and kept it in my pocket ever since.
There was little question about who was calling as the only people who actually had my phone number was still limited to two, and one of them was just downstairs. Sure enough, when I pulled the slim rectangle out of my pants pocket, I saw Amy's name on the screen. I'd put her name in once I'd realized it was probably less suspicious just to have a normal persons name in there than nothing.
"Victoria is a moron." Amy definitely has an interesting way of starting conversations.
"Hello?" I'm glad for the distraction she's presenting at the moment, but I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to respond to that opening. Would agreeing make her angry for insulting her sister? Did she want me to agree with her, or did she just want to rant?
"Shit, I'm- I'm sorry. Probably not a great way to start off a conversation, but she just pisses me off so much sometimes! ARGHHH!" There's a pause after her scream and I can hear her breath in and then out a couple of times before she finally greets me. "Hello Taylor."
"Hi Amy," I responded awkwardly, my own words sounding painfully stilted to my ears. I wondered for a moment what I sounded like to her, as neither of us made any other response for several seconds.
"Uh, what did your sister do to piss you off?" I finally ask once the tension has gotten so bad there's not really any other choice.
"She got back together with the boyfriend I told you she dumped last night," she said and then quickly continued, sounding like she'd just said something bad. "Not that that's bad or anything. It's just… well, you know the Mayor's gala every year?"
Mayor's what? I wracked my brain, trying to think of any big regular events that happened around this time of year while Amy just kept on talking. Nothing came to mind until I remembered when I'd been younger, when the Dockworkers' Association was floundering but not yet dead, and Mom had been alive. I remembered Mom and Dad getting dressed up a few times and leaving me with a babysitter.
"The thing's always pretty boring, but we're expected to show up, cause we're New Wave and all that. Usually the only thing that gets me through the entire night is having Vicky by my side, but this year she wants to sit with her boyfriend and his family; she says I can hang out with them and even suggested I could 'get to know' one of his friends," she derisively snorted at that. "Like I want to have some rich asshole trying to get into my pants while the two of them fawn over each other."
My parents had come home way past my bed time, but I'd snuck out of my room and parked myself at the top of the stairs when I heard them arguing. The two of them were in the kitchen, Mom standing in her black dress while my dad sat at the table looking miserable. Even at the time I didn't think I would ever be as beautiful as my mother, I must have still been at least a year away puberty but I distinctly remember being tall for my age and being well aware that I'd inherited more of my father's looks than Mom's. So, I remembered feeling awe at how good my mother looked in her dress but I also distinctly remembered the argument they'd been having because it was the one where she'd been talking about how he couldn't "do this to himself again."
"She's just so fucking clueless sometimes," Amy continued. "I don't understand why she's even getting back together with him! I just wish she would realize how- " she cut off, not hung up because I could still hear her breathing, but just shut herself up like she'd been about to say something she shouldn't. "I mean… I just can't deal with her right now. Which is kind of why I'm calling, I know we don't exactly know each other well and I've been kind of a bitch but, I mean- that is, I kind of have a favor to ask? Would you, assuming you're not busy, mind coming to the party with me? Just as a buffer, I mean not just as a buffer… like a- like a friend I mean."
That argument would finally make sense if they'd been going to some political party, what with Dad being the dockworkers spokesperson and Mom a respected professor at the college they probably would have gotten invited to that sort of thing up until my dad made himself too much of a nuisance. My memories told me it had been around the same time of year too, so it could be- wait, what?
Had Amy Dallon, Panacea, just invited me to a party as a friend? Granted it didn't sound like the sort of party high school kids normally went to, but still. I was mildly embarrassed to realize I hadn't been paying much attention to her while she'd been talking and instead had been caught up in my own thoughts, but even as I thought that the entire conversation seemed to flood into my head.
"I, uh, I don't know if that's a good idea…" I hesitated, figuring that it would be incredibly awkward to be sitting there with the rest of her family who I didn't really know at this fancy shindig.
"A bunch of the Wards will be there, for the PR, and some of the regular Protectorate capes will be there too. They won't know who you are- I mean, they won't know you're a cape, but you can get to know them." If the Wards were going to be there why couldn't she hang out with them? Unless, maybe she didn't get along that well with them, or more likely as Wards they would probably have to mingle more and couldn't sit around distracting her all night. "And- and I could buy you a dress, not that I'm sure you don't have something perfectly fine, I just mean that if you wanted a new outfit for the party I would buy it for you. As a thank you."
She had to be pretty desperate if she was asking me to be some sort of social safety net for her; I mean who in their right mind would pick me to go to a party with unless they didn't have any other choice? While I wasn't exactly what you would call terribly fashionable, it would be nice to go shopping given that I hadn't really done so since Emma had turned her back on me. Sure I'd gone shopping with Dad, but that was different because even if I'd been willing to ask him for advice it wasn't like he had any better idea of what was in fashion than I did. Emma had always been my source for advice on the subject, because even if I wasn't as obsessed with it as the other girls my age seemed to be sometimes I still liked looking good, before I'd started dressing to avoid any notice at all. With Amy along for the ride, there was at least a chance she would know more than me.
"I'll go. You're right, it's a good opportunity," I wouldn't make her buy me a dress or anything though, that would just feel weird. I could get some money from Dad, plus I had a little cash saved up, which should be enough to get me something that wouldn't be too embarrassing. "When is this thing anyway?"
Amy made a tiny coughing sound before she responded.
"Thursday… " She said it like she was ashamed or something, but that sounded like plenty of time to me. Unless, maybe this was a bigger deal than I thought; but how fancy could some political party for the Mayor of a small city like Brockton Bay really be? It wasn't like there would be royalty there, or foreign dignitaries, or anything like that.
"Is there… is there something I should know? Is this party special or something?" I asked.
"No! No, I just, I know it's sort of last minute," Amy answered, still sounding vaguely embarrassed. "I didn't want you to think this was all some sort of last minute thing, I mean it is, but… I don't know what I mean actually."
I shrugged, then realizing that she could see me through the phone obviously I said, "Three days seems like plenty of time to me. When would you want to go shopping?"
"Tuesday? I can only volunteer so much in a month, and it's one of the days I have off from practically everything else too, so I have almost all of the afternoon free."
Seeing as my social calendar had been strangely clear for the past couple of years pretty much any day would work for me, but that sounded depressing even in my own head so I didn't say it out loud. Instead I answered, "That works for me."
After that we talked for a few more minutes; not about anything serious, just the sort of small talk you make when you're looking for an opening to talk about something else. or a way to end the conversation. Amy asked about my dad, I said he was fine, and I asked about the tests and projects she'd mentioned last time, which had all apparently gone fine despite her worries. Then she asked about the computer class, and I was momentarily thrown that she'd remember that I'd mentioned it at all, but I recovered and said it was going fine. It was the truth after all. In fact the computer stuff was coming to me even easier than it had before I'd become a cape. I had some suspicions why, but I wasn't exactly about to share them over the phone, nor was I totally comfortable with mentioned them to Amy in the first place so I didn't. Eventually we agreed to meet up in the food court at the mall on Tuesday at around four, said our goodbyes, and mutually hung up, or at least I hoped we did so mutually. If we hadn't then that could make Tuesday weird.
The conversation had managed to distract me from what I'd been concerned with before, which I was grateful for, but now that was done and my previous worries were starting to creep back in. I needed to occupy my mind with something a little mindless that could take up the next few hours. The only thing which came to mind was practicing with my newfound control over my powers, but first I probably should let Dad know that I would be out on Thursday. I wasn't sure how much exactly I should tell him, but there didn't really seem to be any reason to hide anything about this from him.
I made my way downstairs and found him sitting in the corner of the living room at his desk, hunched over an array of papers with his glasses pushed high up on his nose. Pausing for a moment, I thought briefly about how I was going to say all this.
"Hey, Dad…" I started, causing him to glance up in my direction.
"Yes Taylor?" It was weird; telling my dad I was going to a party was about the most normal teenage girl thing I'd had to do in a long time, and it was still colored by my burgeoning superhero career.
"Uh, I'm going to a party on Thursday." We were both sort of shocked into silence by the words. For me it was the idea that just last night I had been out fighting with Lung and now here I was, telling my dad I was going to a party later that week. I don't know what it was for him, maybe he was worried it was a little lie to cover for something dangerous, or that someone was going to play a prank on me, or maybe it was just the suddenness of it all. Whatever the cause, I didn't give him time to ask.
"You remember Amy? The girl who showed up last Saturday in the morning?"
He nodded.
"Well, she invited me to this thing she has to go to with her family that night."
Another moment passed in silence, and then Dad stood up and moved closer to me. "Do you need a ride? What time will you be coming home? Where is this party?" he asked.
"I, uh, I don't actually know. I can ask though! We're- actually that sort of brings me to something else I need to ask you, I was wondering if I could maybe borrow some money? I think it's sort of a fancy party, so I think I need a new dress. It doesn't have to be much, I still have some cash saved up, but I don't really know how expensive dresses are." I was starting to ramble, so I cut that thought off and got back to the point "Anyway, we're actually going to meet to go shopping, so I'll ask her about that stuff then."
"Mmm. Okay, I trust you," He patted at his back pocket, then frowned and looked a little embarrassed. "I don't actually have any cash on me right now, kid, but if-"
"Oh, that's ok! I don't need it now, we're not going shopping until Tuesday." I explained, he relaxed and nodded at that.
After a moment of somewhat awkward silence I decided that that was probably all that really needed to be said on the issue.
"I'm going downstairs to, uh, practice." I hesitated, and half started to turn away before turning back towards my dad. "I love you, Dad."
"I love you too kiddo." We came together and hugged, then I turned away and headed towards the basement.
As I made my way down the creaky steps leading into the basement I considered what it was that I could actually practice, after all how much time would it really kill to practice what I' discovered last night? Not more than a few minutes. I would have to find a new project to focus on that could occupy my time for the next couple of hours if I had any hope of distracting myself, but the special move thing Nono did had been the only other ability there had been that I hadn't known how to do myself. Sure, I knew there were more capabilities hidden away from me, but I didn't even know what they were and I didn't think randomly throwing ideas at the wall to see if maybe something happened would be very productive.
Of course, it didn't look like I would have any other choice.
A/N: I promise you shouldn't have to wait as long for the next part.
3.3
*
That following morning, Sunday, I spent a lot of the morning in a semi-panic, convinced that I had done the stupidest possible thing last night. I was worried that at any moment I would learn that Lung had gone on a rampage, turning wholes swathes of the city into raging infernos. It was a stupid thing to panic over; for one nothing I knew about the gang leader so much as suggested he was likely to fly off the handle in that way, in fact everything I'd read online and all my own interactions with him painted a very different picture. Sure he looked like a big brute at first glance and even acted a little bit like one with his penchant for charging straight into a fight, but that tendency seemed more a result of his desire to deal with threats head on rather than an issue of temper.
Simply put, he charged because he wanted to get in close, wanted to throw off his opponents with how suddenly and ferociously he could attack. Lung didn't just want the upper hand in a fight, he went straight for victory and his power worked well for that because it responded to bigger threats more quickly with more power. In all of our fights I'd seen the vicious cunning in his eye; his powered up body might restrict some of the movements he could make with its bulk and inhuman structure, but it didn't stop him from understanding exactly how to dismantle an opponent in a fight. In a way he had been right last night, we were alike, just maybe not exactly as he had meant it because it wasn't our mindsets but the fact that people were more likely to underestimate us because of how we looked.
That thought made me shudder; I didn't like thinking of myself as like any villain. On the other hand, our similarities helped in convincing myself that Lung wasn't currently burning down our city. I know it couldn't be true, because even without having to resort to Nono's more targeted peeping from the night before I could, at a glance, take in the entire city in an instant and see that there wasn't even evidence of the smallest fire anywhere. Whatever Lung was actually thinking after last night it hadn't lead him to start rampaging across the city looking to exact vengeance on me. Still, the concern itched at the back of my head all morning and into the afternoon.
Nothing I did occupied my mind enough to banish the worry for more than a few minutes, and so most of the day dragged on interminably. What was more, I didn't feel comfortable leaving the house because I was worried that disaster would strike after all and then I would be caught without my costume. It developed into a vicious cycle where I would start thinking about last night: all the ways it could have gone wrong, that I could have done better, what could happen now, or what Lung was thinking; until I realized I was working myself into a panic and tried to occupy myself with whatever was closest at hand. By three I had organized my closet twice, started five separate books, changed clothes three times, cleaned my room once, and read ahead in two of my textbooks. I was actually nearing the end of my Trigonometry text, and solving the practice problems in my head almost as soon as I finished read the associated material, when my phone rang. Well, it vibrated, since I'd discovered over the last couple of weeks that I really didn't like it when it rang, so I had switched it to vibration and kept it in my pocket ever since.
There was little question about who was calling as the only people who actually had my phone number was still limited to two, and one of them was just downstairs. Sure enough, when I pulled the slim rectangle out of my pants pocket, I saw Amy's name on the screen. I'd put her name in once I'd realized it was probably less suspicious just to have a normal persons name in there than nothing.
"Victoria is a moron." Amy definitely has an interesting way of starting conversations.
"Hello?" I'm glad for the distraction she's presenting at the moment, but I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to respond to that opening. Would agreeing make her angry for insulting her sister? Did she want me to agree with her, or did she just want to rant?
"Shit, I'm- I'm sorry. Probably not a great way to start off a conversation, but she just pisses me off so much sometimes! ARGHHH!" There's a pause after her scream and I can hear her breath in and then out a couple of times before she finally greets me. "Hello Taylor."
"Hi Amy," I responded awkwardly, my own words sounding painfully stilted to my ears. I wondered for a moment what I sounded like to her, as neither of us made any other response for several seconds.
"Uh, what did your sister do to piss you off?" I finally ask once the tension has gotten so bad there's not really any other choice.
"She got back together with the boyfriend I told you she dumped last night," she said and then quickly continued, sounding like she'd just said something bad. "Not that that's bad or anything. It's just… well, you know the Mayor's gala every year?"
Mayor's what? I wracked my brain, trying to think of any big regular events that happened around this time of year while Amy just kept on talking. Nothing came to mind until I remembered when I'd been younger, when the Dockworkers' Association was floundering but not yet dead, and Mom had been alive. I remembered Mom and Dad getting dressed up a few times and leaving me with a babysitter.
"The thing's always pretty boring, but we're expected to show up, cause we're New Wave and all that. Usually the only thing that gets me through the entire night is having Vicky by my side, but this year she wants to sit with her boyfriend and his family; she says I can hang out with them and even suggested I could 'get to know' one of his friends," she derisively snorted at that. "Like I want to have some rich asshole trying to get into my pants while the two of them fawn over each other."
My parents had come home way past my bed time, but I'd snuck out of my room and parked myself at the top of the stairs when I heard them arguing. The two of them were in the kitchen, Mom standing in her black dress while my dad sat at the table looking miserable. Even at the time I didn't think I would ever be as beautiful as my mother, I must have still been at least a year away puberty but I distinctly remember being tall for my age and being well aware that I'd inherited more of my father's looks than Mom's. So, I remembered feeling awe at how good my mother looked in her dress but I also distinctly remembered the argument they'd been having because it was the one where she'd been talking about how he couldn't "do this to himself again."
"She's just so fucking clueless sometimes," Amy continued. "I don't understand why she's even getting back together with him! I just wish she would realize how- " she cut off, not hung up because I could still hear her breathing, but just shut herself up like she'd been about to say something she shouldn't. "I mean… I just can't deal with her right now. Which is kind of why I'm calling, I know we don't exactly know each other well and I've been kind of a bitch but, I mean- that is, I kind of have a favor to ask? Would you, assuming you're not busy, mind coming to the party with me? Just as a buffer, I mean not just as a buffer… like a- like a friend I mean."
That argument would finally make sense if they'd been going to some political party, what with Dad being the dockworkers spokesperson and Mom a respected professor at the college they probably would have gotten invited to that sort of thing up until my dad made himself too much of a nuisance. My memories told me it had been around the same time of year too, so it could be- wait, what?
Had Amy Dallon, Panacea, just invited me to a party as a friend? Granted it didn't sound like the sort of party high school kids normally went to, but still. I was mildly embarrassed to realize I hadn't been paying much attention to her while she'd been talking and instead had been caught up in my own thoughts, but even as I thought that the entire conversation seemed to flood into my head.
"I, uh, I don't know if that's a good idea…" I hesitated, figuring that it would be incredibly awkward to be sitting there with the rest of her family who I didn't really know at this fancy shindig.
"A bunch of the Wards will be there, for the PR, and some of the regular Protectorate capes will be there too. They won't know who you are- I mean, they won't know you're a cape, but you can get to know them." If the Wards were going to be there why couldn't she hang out with them? Unless, maybe she didn't get along that well with them, or more likely as Wards they would probably have to mingle more and couldn't sit around distracting her all night. "And- and I could buy you a dress, not that I'm sure you don't have something perfectly fine, I just mean that if you wanted a new outfit for the party I would buy it for you. As a thank you."
She had to be pretty desperate if she was asking me to be some sort of social safety net for her; I mean who in their right mind would pick me to go to a party with unless they didn't have any other choice? While I wasn't exactly what you would call terribly fashionable, it would be nice to go shopping given that I hadn't really done so since Emma had turned her back on me. Sure I'd gone shopping with Dad, but that was different because even if I'd been willing to ask him for advice it wasn't like he had any better idea of what was in fashion than I did. Emma had always been my source for advice on the subject, because even if I wasn't as obsessed with it as the other girls my age seemed to be sometimes I still liked looking good, before I'd started dressing to avoid any notice at all. With Amy along for the ride, there was at least a chance she would know more than me.
"I'll go. You're right, it's a good opportunity," I wouldn't make her buy me a dress or anything though, that would just feel weird. I could get some money from Dad, plus I had a little cash saved up, which should be enough to get me something that wouldn't be too embarrassing. "When is this thing anyway?"
Amy made a tiny coughing sound before she responded.
"Thursday… " She said it like she was ashamed or something, but that sounded like plenty of time to me. Unless, maybe this was a bigger deal than I thought; but how fancy could some political party for the Mayor of a small city like Brockton Bay really be? It wasn't like there would be royalty there, or foreign dignitaries, or anything like that.
"Is there… is there something I should know? Is this party special or something?" I asked.
"No! No, I just, I know it's sort of last minute," Amy answered, still sounding vaguely embarrassed. "I didn't want you to think this was all some sort of last minute thing, I mean it is, but… I don't know what I mean actually."
I shrugged, then realizing that she could see me through the phone obviously I said, "Three days seems like plenty of time to me. When would you want to go shopping?"
"Tuesday? I can only volunteer so much in a month, and it's one of the days I have off from practically everything else too, so I have almost all of the afternoon free."
Seeing as my social calendar had been strangely clear for the past couple of years pretty much any day would work for me, but that sounded depressing even in my own head so I didn't say it out loud. Instead I answered, "That works for me."
After that we talked for a few more minutes; not about anything serious, just the sort of small talk you make when you're looking for an opening to talk about something else. or a way to end the conversation. Amy asked about my dad, I said he was fine, and I asked about the tests and projects she'd mentioned last time, which had all apparently gone fine despite her worries. Then she asked about the computer class, and I was momentarily thrown that she'd remember that I'd mentioned it at all, but I recovered and said it was going fine. It was the truth after all. In fact the computer stuff was coming to me even easier than it had before I'd become a cape. I had some suspicions why, but I wasn't exactly about to share them over the phone, nor was I totally comfortable with mentioned them to Amy in the first place so I didn't. Eventually we agreed to meet up in the food court at the mall on Tuesday at around four, said our goodbyes, and mutually hung up, or at least I hoped we did so mutually. If we hadn't then that could make Tuesday weird.
The conversation had managed to distract me from what I'd been concerned with before, which I was grateful for, but now that was done and my previous worries were starting to creep back in. I needed to occupy my mind with something a little mindless that could take up the next few hours. The only thing which came to mind was practicing with my newfound control over my powers, but first I probably should let Dad know that I would be out on Thursday. I wasn't sure how much exactly I should tell him, but there didn't really seem to be any reason to hide anything about this from him.
I made my way downstairs and found him sitting in the corner of the living room at his desk, hunched over an array of papers with his glasses pushed high up on his nose. Pausing for a moment, I thought briefly about how I was going to say all this.
"Hey, Dad…" I started, causing him to glance up in my direction.
"Yes Taylor?" It was weird; telling my dad I was going to a party was about the most normal teenage girl thing I'd had to do in a long time, and it was still colored by my burgeoning superhero career.
"Uh, I'm going to a party on Thursday." We were both sort of shocked into silence by the words. For me it was the idea that just last night I had been out fighting with Lung and now here I was, telling my dad I was going to a party later that week. I don't know what it was for him, maybe he was worried it was a little lie to cover for something dangerous, or that someone was going to play a prank on me, or maybe it was just the suddenness of it all. Whatever the cause, I didn't give him time to ask.
"You remember Amy? The girl who showed up last Saturday in the morning?"
He nodded.
"Well, she invited me to this thing she has to go to with her family that night."
Another moment passed in silence, and then Dad stood up and moved closer to me. "Do you need a ride? What time will you be coming home? Where is this party?" he asked.
"I, uh, I don't actually know. I can ask though! We're- actually that sort of brings me to something else I need to ask you, I was wondering if I could maybe borrow some money? I think it's sort of a fancy party, so I think I need a new dress. It doesn't have to be much, I still have some cash saved up, but I don't really know how expensive dresses are." I was starting to ramble, so I cut that thought off and got back to the point "Anyway, we're actually going to meet to go shopping, so I'll ask her about that stuff then."
"Mmm. Okay, I trust you," He patted at his back pocket, then frowned and looked a little embarrassed. "I don't actually have any cash on me right now, kid, but if-"
"Oh, that's ok! I don't need it now, we're not going shopping until Tuesday." I explained, he relaxed and nodded at that.
After a moment of somewhat awkward silence I decided that that was probably all that really needed to be said on the issue.
"I'm going downstairs to, uh, practice." I hesitated, and half started to turn away before turning back towards my dad. "I love you, Dad."
"I love you too kiddo." We came together and hugged, then I turned away and headed towards the basement.
As I made my way down the creaky steps leading into the basement I considered what it was that I could actually practice, after all how much time would it really kill to practice what I' discovered last night? Not more than a few minutes. I would have to find a new project to focus on that could occupy my time for the next couple of hours if I had any hope of distracting myself, but the special move thing Nono did had been the only other ability there had been that I hadn't known how to do myself. Sure, I knew there were more capabilities hidden away from me, but I didn't even know what they were and I didn't think randomly throwing ideas at the wall to see if maybe something happened would be very productive.
Of course, it didn't look like I would have any other choice.
A/N: I promise you shouldn't have to wait as long for the next part.
I didn't reply to this util now because i didn't want to give away too much before I posted this part, but I've basically been planning to deliver in a huge way on that exact sort interaction for a long time.
- Location
- Madison, WI
Awkward teenager phone conversation continues, how cute~
How you're shaping Amy and Taylor's friendship is quite believeable in its slowness, though it's kind of sad to realize that, for Amy, she really had no one to reach to until Taylor. Taylor at least /had/ her family and Emma, and even now she still has Danny. I'm really looking forward to their shopping excursion, I had sort of mentally pictured a similar scene from canon with this story in mind, where Taylor sees Emma, but instead Kenta sees them, recognizes Taylor & she end up having to iron-grip him to not make a scene, while he makes a scene due to how hard her hold is...
How you're shaping Amy and Taylor's friendship is quite believeable in its slowness, though it's kind of sad to realize that, for Amy, she really had no one to reach to until Taylor. Taylor at least /had/ her family and Emma, and even now she still has Danny. I'm really looking forward to their shopping excursion, I had sort of mentally pictured a similar scene from canon with this story in mind, where Taylor sees Emma, but instead Kenta sees them, recognizes Taylor & she end up having to iron-grip him to not make a scene, while he makes a scene due to how hard her hold is...
ShineUCrazyStar
Grossly Incandescent
- Location
- Being the Sun
Amy needs a proper onee-sama in her life, only Taylor can deliver; With coaching from Nono of course.
Still waiting for that other shoe to drop on Nono hacking the Protectorate's databases using Taylor's full name back in 2.6. Betting Dragon has been knee deep in everything shes been doing since that happened.
Oooh, That's the one from canon where SS and Emma were present when the Undersiders busted in.
Here's hoping Taylor rolls into the Gala looking all fine with Panacea, gets Emma and SS all jelly, and then punches out some capes (Might not be the Undersiders this time?) afterwards. *Waits here with popcorn*
- Location
- Portugal
- Pronouns
- She/They
Dear God, everytime I get these two together, even when it's just friendship, I'm reminded of how utterly adorable they are. Oh, HNG.
If it wasn't out of character for Amy, I'd say she should go in a pantsuit, just to confuse the heck out of everybody else and shove it in their faces that she's "gay goddamnit!" The fact that she's buying Taylor a very nice dress to go with her model-like figure is, obviously, a given. Taylor needs some confidence in her looks too, and who better than plain, freckled Amy to give it to her.
Yes so much to both of this. Amy needs an Onee-sama and so does Taylor, so they can be each other's Onee-samas! Nono helps of course. (background whisper: stop helping... please)
But better even than Emma's face, whose tears shall be delicious either way, will be when she'll try to mess with Taylor and gets Amy and/or Victoria pissed at her. That would be real nice.
