Wish [OUTDATED]

[Viri]

"It's okay. I got the answer, myself."

I looked away.

I looked up. My eyes were wet.

So many stars. The universe so vast.

We're s- so very small, in the end.

The first bullet hit me from behind, where my mask offered no coverage, and I slowly toppled. The second hit me before I could fall, before there could be any pain.

---

The first thing I felt was a massive burst of pain in my head. I clutched my head with my hands and curled my body up; my skin hurt like it was being bitten by a thousand insects, and I writhed in pain and fell to the floor. My mouth was dry and I tasted bile at the back of my throat, and dry heaved a couple of times from the dizziness and nausea. The pain was timeless -- hours of agony squeezed into moments -- but once it receded my recent memories came rushing back.

I was…in a forest? And there was a person talking at...or with me? I stood up and they…shot me. In the back of the head.

Twice.

I gasped, my head still throbbing, and touched the back of my head, trying to find a wound, a scar, stitches or something.

But there wasn't anything there. Just the familiar softness of my black curly hair, the same as my mother had. I clutched my head again, trying to remember what happened before that, but my memories were fragmented, odd in such a way that it felt like I was remembering the memories of someone else. Scenes I didn't understand flowed through my mind, alien and disconnecting, like I was watching a recording of someone else's life, burnt and frayed like a roll of discarded film.

I licked my lips, dry and chapped, and slowly got up into a sitting position, and tried to parse through my memories a second time.

I remembered how the end of the world started: in the ruins of Los Angeles, the city's landscape morphed and distorted by Bohu's attack on it. Jack Slash whispered something to Scion, causing him to go on a rampage and cause untold destruction across not only Earth Bet, but also several other alternative earths. We tried to fight back, we failed, and all our petty differences and infighting got in the way of actually providing a united front against him. I lost my arm while we were in the bowls of Cauldron's base, and Lung had to cauterise it.

It was then that I realised that I was clutching my head with both hands. My left hand, and the missing right one too. I moved my arm to take a look at it, as my limbs no longer ached and itched, but my limbs still felt unresponsive and limp, like I had fallen asleep on them. My body felt completely alien, but yet familiar to me; some part of my brain, despite the pain and nausea I was feeling, knew that something was wrong. My arms and legs felt shorter than I was used to, my skin didn't have the scars or signs of injury accumulated over the years as a cape. But my curly black hair fell in front of my eyes, meaning that whatever body this was, someone must've have made it to be similar to my own.

Discarding that train of thought, I continued searching my memories. After we came back from the abandoned Cauldron base, I made Panacea and Riley do….something to my brain?

Everything after that was still fragmented and disjointed, like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. There were brief flashes of things I could understand, like having a one-sided conversation with Glaistig Uaine, as I couldn't talk, for some reason. I remember interacting with Dragon.

Oh. It was good to know that she didn't fully die from Saint's kill switch. I hope she doesn't hate me, for what I did.

I made a mental note to go punch Saint at some point.

Dragon was the best of us, and one of the few heroes I liked, genuinely. The hug she gave me after my announcement of becoming Weaver… it stayed with me, for a long time.

I kept sorting through, and I remembered...gathering? Controlling? Every single parahuman I could use to fight Scion with.

Did I mind control everyone, forcing them to fight, heal, create, using them like they were an extension of myself, like my insects?

I briefly shuddered, and curled into myself. That would be something I would do. Controlling them like a puppet on strings, while they were completely helpless, unable to do anything themselves, all to force everyone to work together to defeat Scion?

Yeah. That sounds like something I would do.

As guilt pooled at the bottom of my stomach, I continued searching my memories, but everything else were impressions, or too fragmented and confusing.

I remember the feeling of taunting Scion with the death of his other half.. I used someone to heal a writhing mass of limbs and body parts, returning it to a human form. I remembered that I had some people behind me, with me, that I refused to control. They felt too important to me, to remind me of….something. Something important, intrinsic, like an anchor for my self-hood.

Who-who were they again? Why can't I remember their faces?

The pit of guilt and self-loathing that was pooling in my stomach widened.

Would they hate me too, for what I did?

But before my thoughts could continue to spiral, there were a series of knocks on the door, interrupting my stupor and reminding me that I had completely forgotten to examine my surroundings.

That was a fucking stupid thing to do. Waking up in an unfamiliar place with damaged memories, with my right arm healed, and with no idea how I got here, or who brought me here – the first thing I should have done was figure out how to escape the trap.

I glanced around the room, unfamiliar to me, but something in the back of my mind felt safe, being in here. It was a fairly nondescript bedroom, with a single bed that had tangled sheets and blankets hanging limply off the side. There was a bedside table next to it that I somehow managed to not hit my head on, with an alarm clock, a pair of glasses, and a photo frame sitting on top of it.

Oh, right. I can't see much because I need my glasses. Whoever brought me here was nice enough to supply me with a pair. I reached upwards as I pulled myself into a sitting position, and fumbled as I grabbed the glasses, my right arm still feeling heavy and numb, like it wasn't quite my own.

As I put them on, I glanced around the room for a second time, everything snapping into focus. The room was relatively clean, with only a few clothes strewn about, a computer desk situated in the corner, and a small, very old looking, pc and monitor on it. The room felt faintly familiar, in some way, that tugged at the back of my brain.

There was only a moment to look around though, before another series of knocks landed on the door, louder than last time. Adrenaline filled my veins as my heartbeat quickened, my muscles tensed, as I glanced around for an escape or a potential weapon. I was about to reach out to my insects, to give me sight, information, before a voice said something from behind the door.

"Taylor, are you alright? I heard you yell out." The voice said with concern, before I realised that it was very familiar to me.

"D-Dad?" I croaked. My mouth was dry like it was full of sand – my throat sore and raw like I've been screaming.

I didn't realise he survived Scion's attack on Brockton Bay. I felt tears well up in my eyes. What did he think of me now? Was he scared of me, this monster that took away his daughter?

He gently opened the bedroom door, walked in, and closed it behind him. The first thing I noticed about him was that his green eyes, the ones I got from him, didn't look at me with the mix of fear, anger, and hopelessness that I was used to seeing on him. My father was wearing a loose pair of pyjama shorts, and a familiar blue bathrobe that Mom got him for his birthday once.

As he looked at me, his face softened, with a look of hesitance and concern on his face. He then walked to where I was sitting up in front of the bedside table, and leaned down and put the back of his hand on my forehead, moving my hair out of my face.

"Well, it doesn't seem like you have much of a fever," he said, as he moved to a crouching position, and moving his hand off my forehead, "But I can call up the school to tell them that you aren't coming tomorrow, and maybe schedule a doctor's appointment, if you want?"

"School?" I murmured, as I broke eye contact with him and looked at the floor.

My dad looked at me, his frown deepening.

"It's Sunday, sweetie, and tomorrow is Monday, which means you have school tomorrow?"

Things were slowly coming together. This was my room, at my dad's house, at Brockton Bay. I had my arm back, and there were no scars or stitches at the back of my head.

I swallowed, and looked back at my dad, who was looking more and more concerned with each passing second.

"W-What's the date today?"

His eyes narrowed at that, and he leaned back down to check my temperature again.

"It's the 10th of April, sweetie. I might have to drive you to the hospital if you managed to forget the date." He said, attempting to add some mirth to his voice to cover up his panic.

April 10th. That was a date forever burned into my memory, like a roll of decaying film. That was the day I first went out as a cape, in a stupid attempt in running away from my shitty school and home life. I remember the angry look on Lung's face as I fought him, the vulpine grin on Tattletale afterwards, the suspicious look on Armsmaster. It was the flap of a butterfly's wing, the start of many events that cascaded into becoming that thing and defeating Scion.

Which was three years ago, but now it's the present, with everything I did now a possibility, not a certainty.

Fuck.

"Taylor?" My dad whispered, as he put his hand on my shoulder in reassurance.

"I-I'm fine. It was a bad dream, I think. Not sick with anything."

Dad looked at me with suspicion at that, but didn't say anything as he stood back up. He walked back to my bedroom's doorway, before turning around and speaking again.

"Well, my offer still stands, if you aren't feeling better. I'll be around the house if you need anything though, ok?"

I could stay quiet about everything. He might not believe everything, or maybe he'll sign me up to the Wards (That still had Shadow Stalker, I shuddered) out of a misplaced attempt at keeping me safe. Or maybe he'll forbid me from doing anything, not accepting that I was a different person, like he originally did?

But I had to be better. I didn't want to make the same mistakes as I did before. I didn't want to become an uncaring, ruthless crime lord like Skitter was, or a distant, unfeeling 'hero' that was only a means to an end like Weaver was, who pushed away everyone who ever cared about her.

Or whatever that thing I became, at the end.

I wanted to be better, to not cross so many lines, to not hurt the few people who cared about me, to trust other people, and not try and carry everything myself.

Which meant I had to start with the most difficult person first.

I swallowed, my throat raw and parched.

"Dad, there's some things I need to talk to you about, could you stick around, please?"

For a second he blankly looked at me, as if he was taken by surprise by my question. But then he smiled and nodded.

"Of course sweetie, I can cook us some breakfast while you go on your morning run, if you want?"

I gave him a small smile as he left, and stood up and sighed, and looked out of the window at the city that was just waking up. Brockton Bay was a city that one could ever describe as a shithole. It was infested with human-traffickers, a drug epidemic, and neo-nazis, with an over-worked, short staffed Protectorate, which in turn was controlled by the PRT, an organisation that could only ever see things in black and white, and ran with such little oversight someone like Coil was able to gain power through it.

But despite that, the people that lived here carried on, day by day, second by second. They survived Marquis, the Teeth, and Allfather.

And then they survived Bakuda's bombing, Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine, Echidna.

Me.

It was an ugly looking city, to be honest. The difference between the rich, wealthy suburbs with their two story mini mansions and well kept flora, and the slowly dying working class suburbs that were being taken over by gangs, that had little or none investment to keep things from falling into ruin.

But it was my city, and for the first time since mom passed away, it felt like home.

And in this moment, it was breathtakingly beautiful, with the orange, yellows and blues of the rising sun mixed with the fading night sky, with some stars still visible, twinkling faintly.

I glanced at the framed photo of my mother on my bedside table and looked back at the city.

I closed my eyes, pulled on that familiar feeling at the front of my head, my sensors expanded as my power came back to me, letting me feel the warmth of the morning sun through my insects. I took a deep breath, and opened thousands of tiny eyes, all seeing the same city in thousands of different ways.

It felt like I was forgiven, somehow.

---

The air was crisp, and the rising sun was only just starting to warm everything up as we were still in the middle of spring. My morning jog took me through a city so different than it was in the past, before all the destruction happened. The discord between my memory and reality was jarring; enough that I stumbled for the third time since I started.

I gritted my teeth, forced to slow my jog into a walk. I hated this younger body of mine – everything about it felt wrong in a way that only compared to the monstrous form Lab Rat's tinkertech drug turned me into at the oil rig. Despite technically being my own body, I felt so…out of place in it, with the shorter stride and lack of upper body strength.

Which also meant needing to relearn how to fight with it, as well as having to do more workouts that weren't just running every morning. I unclenched my jaw, and changed my walk back into a proper jog, and continued my wandering thoughts.

There was so much to think about; so many angles to consider. So much to do, and decide, and only a few hours to start.

As always, my power was feeding me information on everything that was happening around me, still its six city block radius that it was before Panacea and Riley changed my corona pollentia. It felt good to use it, like it was stretching after a good night's sleep, eager to get back into things.

There's a small park that I sometimes went through during my morning runs that was near the Boardwalk, close enough that it received the funding to properly maintain it, compared to the other public parks in Brockton. There were a lot of people around, despite how early in the morning it was, a combination of the richer citizens from the southern part of town and the tourists who stayed in the nearby motels of the Boardwalk. All within my range, there were other people on their morning runs, walking their dogs, or meeting up for breakfast and coffee, enjoying the warmer weather of early Spring.

As I reached the Boardwalk, I changed my jog to a slow walk, fitting into the crowds of walkers going about their days as businesses were starting to open. It was an odd feeling, being here. The Boardwalk was my territory after Leviathan hit, and it was…..nostalgic, in a way.

I was intimately familiar with the layout of the Boardwalk, with the small office building that was my main base, the storm drain that was a secret entrance. It was here that I first started my actual efforts into trying to improve things, into being a certain kind of hero, as well as where I fought Mannequin, the first of many enemies fought with the odds stacked against me.

I don't know how I'm going to fucking do it, but I am going to make you regret that.

If there ever was a pivotal moment for Skitter, it would be that fight, for better or worse. It was how I built myself up as her; always escalating, never compromising, fighting unwinnable odds. It was easier to be the bigger monster than a person.

With a shake of my head, dispelling my thoughts, I reached my first destination: a tech store. As much as dad would still disapprove of me having one, I really needed a phone, and a cheap pre-paid one would do nicely. Instead of hoping that Lisa would work her magic, I needed some way to contact her after meeting the Undersiders, , and Armsmaster too. The next destination was a little cafe called the Hummingbird.

I walked in, ordered a large black tea and a cinnamon doughnut, sat down at one of the booths at the back of the cafe, grabbed out my notepad and pen, and started thinking. What I should do, what I should plan for, but more importantly, who I wanted to be. I didn't want to be Skitter, with her iron will, black chitin, intimidation and paranoia. Well, maybe some of her intimidation, her ruthlessness, but only when really needed, like against the Slaughterhouse Nine, but not when interacting with my friends, or regular civilians.

I didn't want to be Weaver, either, as she was born out of the naive hope of a younger me, and was only used as a means to prevent the end of the world. She was a hero, yes, but was constrained by the PRT, with its incompetent directors and its obsession with PR.

The barista gave me my tea. I sipped a little of it, and ate a couple of bites of my doughnut. I looked out of the window that was next to me, and considered.

So, what did I really want to achieve? Who did I want to be, outside of the labels and systems of Hero and Villain?

Well, I needed to unlearn my bad habits of pushing my physical tics and expressions onto my swarm. It was useful as an intimidation tactic, and for messing with thinker powers, but I ended up using it too much. It was easier to focus on my swarm; use it as a tool to compartmentalise my emotions, shoving them somewhere and not having to deal with the regret, guilt or self-hatred. I needed to turn down my other habits of escalation and paranoia, especially with any of my friends or allies. I wanted to be someone worth following, not out of necessity or intimidation, but out of actual trust and loyalty.

Well, defeating Scion without sacrificing my humanity was the biggest thing, but there was no way I could plan for any of that right now. Making the city better and safer was the other thing, but that involved a series of smaller problems, both easy and difficult. The gangs were surprisingly the easiest thing, as they all collapsed without much on my part, other than taking down Lung later tonight. The Empire collapsed with their civilian identities being outed and Kaiser's death at the hands of the Endbringer. The Merchants were wiped out in a night by the Slaughterhouse Nine. Noelle, Leviathan, and the S9 were things I couldn't plan around either, so I moved on.

Which led to the biggest problem: Coil, and by extension, his civilian identity, Thomas Calvert. I needed to take him down, and I couldn't do that if I joined the Wards or Protectorate, which meant I had to do it as a villain. Trying to be an independent or rogue would only give me a target on my back. Which then meant I had to join the Undersiders and be forced to go along with what he wants, and knowing him, he would engineer events to make me look worse in the eyes of the public.

I needed to be a cape that looked and acted with experience, like I was a hero that was doing illegal things for an unseen goal. Which wasn't really a lie, but the PRT would eventually link me to my civilian identity, and realise I must have triggered back in January.

I adjusted my position, took another drink of my tea and finished my doughnut.

Joining the Undersiders was always something I planned on doing, anyway. I wasn't exactly a good friend to them, and I knew deep down they really weren't friends with each other, only together as a team out of their own circumstance.

Starting out as an experienced cape would also give me more credence with the public, as I wanted to look like I was reigning in the Undersiders' villainous tendencies, like Lisa whispering someone's darkest secrets with a sadistic grin, Alec and Aisha's penchant for fucking around at the wrong time, and Rachel being Rachel. And Brian…..

I could trust him with not taking things too far. But he had his own problems, like doing whatever he needed to do to satisfy Coil, being a little overprotective of Aisha, and his complete lack of principles.

With another sigh escaping my lips, I rested my head on the cafe's window, looking at the clear blue morning sky. I knew I still loved him; but our relationship in my original timeline was a complete disaster, and as much as I wanted to be with him again, I had to treat him as a teammate and a friend this time around.

All of them were in shit situations and had nowhere else to turn to. It was logical that Coil sought them out in particular, with his carrot and stick routine that would give them just enough to feel like they're getting somewhere, but not enough so that they would be able to leave him.

Lisa was recruited at gunpoint after escaping from her parents who only cared about her because of her thinker ability, and would only be able to escape Coil, and his threats of becoming his little pet thinker, with his death. She was too valuable to him to lose.

Brian wanted to gain legal custody of Aisha, to rescue her from their drug addicted mother. Which would still force the both of them to work for him, and even if Brian managed to get custody of Aisha, that would just turn the both of them into leverage for Coil to manipulate.

Rachel was brought up in an uncaring, broken system, lashed out, and had to carry that weight with her, when all she ever wanted was to be left alone with her dogs. She has difficulty with bonding with other people, and for Coil, he would use her until she became enough of a liability that he could just discard when it was convenient for him. His position in the PRT would make it so easy to send her to the Birdcage.

Alec was raised by fucking Heartbreaker and had his capacity to feel his emotions sandblasted off, and was recruited only to avoid being arrested or bring found by his shitstain of a father. Alec was easy to please from Coil's point of view, and if Alec got any ideas about leaving, or doing anything that would go against Coil, well, Heartbreaker was only a phone call away.

I made another quick mental note to properly befriend Alec this time, and to also personally kill Heartbreaker.

All of them were dealt a bad hand, and I truly believed that all of them had the chance to become better people, all they needed was someone to guide them. The PRT would either force them back to their parents, in Lisa's case, or force them to join the Wards with the threat of prison for Alec and Rachel. Brian wouldn't be able to do anything about his sister. Coil would use all of them until they broke or became too detrimental to his plans, always dangling that carrot, but never giving them it. They were all stuck between a rock and a hard place, with nowhere left to go or run.

So it had to be me that helped them, to give them the chance to be better people that no one else has given them. It was the least I could do to make up what I did to them the first time around. They didn't have to be heroes, they just needed to be better people.

I finished my now cold tea, thanked the barista as I left, and started jogging back home.

---

Hey, thanks for reading! I finished Worm a couple of months ago, and I couldn't get this fic idea out of my head, so I decided to start doing some creative writing for the first time. Since this is a project I've started to practice writing, I'm aiming for this is be more like an actual webnovel style than fanfiction. I've written the first five chapters, which will be released once a week, and any advice or feedback will be welcome as I am looking for some betas to help edit or fact check my work.

EDIT: I now have someone to beta my work (Thank you, redironwolf!) so I have reuploaded this chapter!

 

[agpol257]

Hi, read the first chapter. It is a nice start. Watched.

 

[thewhiteraven22]

Hey, this looks good. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes!

 

[Vista]

this looks good watched

 

[Viri]

I held the now lukewarm mug of black tea while staring out of the window near the dining table, having finished eating the breakfast Dad cooked up, while I waited for him to finish his own. He had changed while I was out running, now in a pair of jeans and a plain blue polo shirt. As we sat there in silence, I attempted to get my nerves under control while keeping a neutral look on my face, trying to not become that still, expressionless statue that I have a habit of becoming.

I had faced countless capes, made the Slaughterhouse Nine run with their tails between their legs, fought multiple endbringers and killed a god. But yet, this conversation with my dad was the most terrified I've ever been. The insects in the walls of the house, in our yard, and beyond were moving and buzzing irrationally as I tried desperately to show my expressions.

And I fucking hated it.

I knew logically that this wasn't going to go that badly, but I was still terrified that he would look at me like he did in the previous timeline, as if in one moment his innocent little girl was there and in the next she was replaced by a monster wearing her skin.

I could handle him being scared for me. Scared for my well-being as I constantly plunged into danger, again and again.

But I couldn't handle him being scared of me.

Not for a second time.

I didn't want him to try and pretend that I was the same, to try and go back to the way things were, and not care about what I wanted to do. I remembered those moments, being in that cell with him and Tagg, and how he took his side rather than mine.

Oe of the things a small part of me hated about him; he never wanted to try and understand my point of view, of why or how I did things. He was always avoiding bringing up anything cape related when we talked, despite it being a huge part of who I was.

So with another deep breath to calm myself, I did what I usually did when I had a small amount of downtime.

I gathered all the Black Widows that were close enough to my home, and sent them down to the basement to make more silk. I knew my suit was ready and had enough, but making more couldn't hurt. Having extra had always proved useful.

While that was happening my attention touched on everything in my range. There seemed to be a meth lab being set up a couple of streets down – a few Black Widows bit the drug runner while he was passed out on his couch. I didn't want them to suspect a cape was attacking them, at least not yet, so I needed it to be passed off as an unfortunate happenstance. He immediately woke up, realised what was happening and attempted to get the spiders off him. Satisfying.

There was a man a couple of houses away that was saying goodbye to his wife while his mistress hid in a cupboard. As the wife was about to leave I sent a couple of silverfish and small, non-poisonous spiders to crawl on the hiding woman, making her cry out and stumble out of the cupboard she was hiding in, in a vain attempt at swatting the bugs off her. She cried out loudly enough for the wife to hear; she stormed back into the house to investigate as her husband stood frozen in the doorway.

A small amount of justice, but I'll take what I can get. I hope that poor woman will find someone better.

My dad got up from the table, picked up his used plate and walked over to place it in the sink, meaning it was time to reveal everything to him. Not including anything to do with Cauldron, though. I didn't want to draw the ire of the boogeyman.

My dad sat down opposite to me, put his hands in his lap, and nervously smiled at me.

"So, what was it that you wanted to talk to me about, Taylor?" He asked while trying very hard to not fidget in his seat.

It reassured me a little, to see that he was as nervous as I was.

I took another deep breath. I had to rip off the band-aid.

"Dad, I'm a cape."

He blinked owlishly at me.

"I mean, uh, that I have powers now. It's not a very cool or interesting power, though."

He continued blankly staring at me for a second before his nervous smile changed into a small, genuine one, one that I rarely saw from him after mum died.

"Well, now you can be like a hero like the ones you loved so much when you were younger! What kind of power do you have?" He replied, genuinely excited to see what I could do.

I tried to not wince at the 'H' word, and instead of explaining it to him, I walked over to the nearby window and opened it. The butterflies I've been gathering into the room, and I positioned them in various places.One of them landed on the top of his head, while the one he was tracking with his eyes landed on his nose, making him go briefly crossed-eyed. I couldn't help but smile at that, and willed some of them to land on the dining table that he was sitting at.

I closed the window and sat back down on my chair, and looked back at my dad, who was looking around the room with amazement, and made another mental note to use this trick again at some point. There was potential for me to be able to use my swarm for more whimsical things.

Clapping my hands together called his attention back to me, although it seemed to startle him a bit, as he turned his head sharply, refocusing away from the butterflies colouring the room.

"I can precisely control every insect and arachnid within a certain range of me." I explained, willing a butterfly to sit on my index finger.

"This means I can sense everything that happens within my range, but hearing and seeing is a little harder because bug sense doesn't translate well to human senses." His face didn't show an obvious reaction, but at least he wasn't afraid of me. "It also depends on which bugs, or how many I have."

"Interesting…." He murmured, looking closely at the butterfly I had willed onto his finger, "How far away can you sense them? How precisely can you control them?"

I pointed in the direction of the house with the cheating husband.

"Over in that direction, a couple of houses down the road, a cheating husband was attempting to hide his mistress in a cupboard while he said goodbye to his wife, who was just about to leave. I scared the mistress enough with some bugs to make her yell loud enough for the wife to hear."

I pointed in a completely different direction.
"A couple of streets over there, someone is trying to set up a meth lab, and a couple of houses down from there is a single mother, given the absence of a partner, fussing over her son who's scraped his knee while riding his bike. A street next to ours had a recently married couple moving into a vacant home, since their house has nothing in it except for a lot of cardboard boxes." I explained, all while pointing out the different directions.

There were so many mundane, normal things around me as the city and its people woke up and got ready for work, ate breakfast, recovered from a hangover, or any other of the hundreds of things that I could sense happening in my range. All of these people had their own thoughts, motivations, histories, and all of them impacted each other in tiny, insignificant ways. A barista handing someone their coffee, people sitting next to each other on the bus, a garbage collector grabbing someone's rubbish.

We were so small, in the end. Not unlike a hive of bees or a colony of ants.

So utterly inconsequential compared to the planet they lived on, or the stars they gazed up at and wondered about. None of these people would be remembered after a couple of generations, but they're here. There's evidence in the air, in the water, in the soil, in the significant and insignificant ways they had impacted each other.

But I didn't feel like a scientist looking down on an ant, or a god looking down on a human, in this moment. I felt like an ant witnessing every part of its colony, and understanding its role both in the colony and in the wider ecosystem.

It was hard to not feel humbled in this moment, witnessing the mundane, quieter parts of other people's lives. A single moment here, in this space and this time, was utterly unique and would not, could not be repeated again, all the way until the end of the universe and all the stars died out.

That didn't feel inconsequential. Not to me.

I let the odd moment of peace wash over me, and continued speaking.

"So essentially, my current range is a radius of six city blocks, or just over a third of a mile."

My dad's eyes boggled at this, but he quickly smiled again and let out a low whistle, as he leaned over the table, clearly interested in seeing what else I could do.

It was nice, seeing him be so interested in my power this time.

"And for my next trick," I deliberately deadpanned, while snapping my fingers like a stereotypical magician. I then formed a bug-copy of myself next to him, and tapped him on the shoulder, startling him again.

"I am also able to form copies of myself, as well as talk through them. This lets me do some minor tricks, like writing words to communicate, or enveloping myself in my swarm, making me much harder to track. Oh, and I also have better reflexes if I have enough bugs around me, as insects have a faster reaction time than humans." The bug-clone buzzed.

He looked a little freaked out by this, so I made the bug-me bow before dispersing it.

"I keep forgetting that it's kind of freaky for other people. To me, my insects just feel like an extension of myself." I said, adjusting my glasses and giving him a sheepish smile.

Dad turned back to me, looking rather proud of tricks, even if he did look a little freaked out from it.

"This is one hell of power, Taylor. I'm sure the Wards or the PRT would love to have you join them!" He said, obviously thinking that I would want to follow in the footsteps of my childhood heroes.

Heroes that were just as human and fallible as any of us. I wondered what he would think of Alexandria pretending to kill my friends, or Eidolon's involvement with Cauldron.

Or Armsmaster almost getting me killed and breaking the Endbringer truce.

Well, now for the hard part.

"Well, it's a little complicated for me to join the Wards." I sighed, "And there's a lot of things I need to say in order to explain that, so let me say everything first, please."

From the shift in the tone of my voice, he could tell that this was something important, so he reached out and held my hand, gently squeezing it.

"I'll let you explain everything ok? And no matter what happens and what you're planning on doing I'll always love you, Little Owl." He said, softly.

I squeezed his hand back. No more running away.

I looked him directly in the eyes.

"I'm from three years in the future."

"You're what."

I bit my tongue to hold back another sigh. I knew this wasn't going to be easy.

But I had to do it.

"So today, which was three years ago for me, I went out as a cape for the first time, fought Lung, the leader of Azn Bad Boys, won, somehow, and met the Undersiders for the first time, which would led me to joining them because I hated school because Emma bullied me to the point of nearly dying and having my trigger event, but I also ended up keeping you in the dark because I was scared of you finding out I joined a villain group."

"Taylor?"

I took a deep breath.

"This would lead me to robbing a bank and fighting the Wards, the secret boss of our team revealing himself and also finding out that the bank mission was a diversion so he could kidnap a child who was one of the strongest precogs I've ever known, Leviathan then hit, I claimed the boardwalk as my territory, and then the fucking Slaughterhouse Nine show up, which would lead to the world ending but don't worry about that now, we fought them, they left."

"Taylor!"

I took another deep breath, as my lungs felt they were burning, and my mouth felt dry.

"Then the city almost got condemned, Coil faked his death but it turns out he was pretty high up in the PRT, he tried very, very hard to kill me but I shot and killed him instead, and then a monster from coil's basement ran loose, she was stopped, but all of the PRT's secrets were revealed, and suddenly I was ruling the entire city as a crime lord but then my identity got outed and still hadn't told you anything at that point and you were so disappointed and hurt and I hated myse- "

"TAYLOR!"

Suddenly my dad was right next to me, with his hand on my shoulder, gently pushing me. I touched my face with my hand, and I realised I was crying.
Wh-when did that happen?

Breath.

After a couple more deep breaths I stood up and hugged my dad as hard as I could.

Smell.

Four scents; my dad's familiar cologne, the mix of egg, slightly burnt bacon, and toast we had for breakfast. The faint smell of tea coming from my empty mug.

Listen.

I could hear the rumbling of cars going past our house, two dogs barking at each other in the distance, and the whistling and chirping of some nearby birds.

When I finally calmed myself down, I dropped my arms down from the hug and stepped back a bit, seeing that my dad had a handkerchief in his hand, his shoulder damp from my tears. I nodded, and grabbed it and started to clean my face of the tears and snot.

"Why don't you go to the bathroom and clean your face up, and then you can explain everything, ok?" He suggested. "And, before you say anything, I believe you."

I had to choke down another sob before giving him another tight hug.

"I love you, Dad."

"I love you too, Little Owl." He said, as he hugged me back. "But you aren't a little owl now, with all the…" He joked, as he gestured to the butterflies surrounding us, still in the same place I last willed them to be. I quickly gathered them up and opened up the window, letting them outside before dispersing them.

I turned back to him, and saw him deep in thought, mulling over what he wanted to say. I smiled and nodded at him, and left the room to go and clean my face up.

After doing that and blowing my nose again, I looked at my reflection for the first time since waking up three years in the past. It was odd, seeing my younger version's face. I still had the piercing green eyes, the slightly too wide mouth for my face, my long curly black hair.

I thought about what just happened.

It….was a nice feeling, I suppose. For the longest time my life was dictated by the absence of trust, to really let down my walls. I've been betrayed and the betrayer too many times in my life, and in reflection many of my mistakes were my paranoia and mistrust. A little part of myself hissed at me for opening up, and tried to tell me of all the awful things that could happen now.

But it was nice. It was nice to talk to my dad without fear of him finding out about my identity as a villain, or like the times we spoke after I became Weaver, too full of regret and hurt to have a proper conversation.

I found myself feeling excited at the chance to talk about things. Although there were a lot of things I did wrong, there were a lot of things I could confidently say I did right. There were things I could do better.

Through my bugs I saw that my dad had filled two glasses of water, moved to the lounge room, and was currently pacing back and forth. I left the bathroom, and as I entered the room he motioned for me to sit next to him. He wrapped me in a one armed hug as I sat down next to him.

"So, how are you feeling now– good to continue talking, Little Moth?" He said.

I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He gave me a hesitant smile in response. I always loved that nickname mum had for me, but that was for a different Taylor.

"I really like that nickname, I think. Little Owl was Mum's thing." I murmured. "But I like the idea of you having your own nickname for me."

He looked at me, eyes a little watery, before he looked away to compose himself.

"Little Moth it is, then." He said. "There weren't a lot of bug names that didn't sound like I was patronising you, or didn't sound too off."

I took that as an opportunity to start.

"So a lot of what I'm going to say is going to take a lot of time to explain. But I'll start two years ago, when I came back from summer camp and started high school." I explained, as I adjusted myself before continuing.

"Emma, during that time, befriended another girl called Sophia, and to this day I have no idea what happened to her or what Sophia did, but she filled Emma's head with some nonsense philosophy about preys and predators, or something. And because of that my best friend of ten years turned on me and bullied me relentlessly for two years."

I could feel my dad tensing from that, but didn't say anything. I continued talking.

"Emma turned the entire school against me, making people either join in with her or making them apathetic. Anyone that tried to help me were ostracised until they stopped helping, and the facility just turned a blind eye towards everything that happened. I should still have a book in my bedroom that I used to catalogue everything that they did to me."

"They were the ones that pushed you into the locker back in January." He whispered in horror.

"That was my trigger event, yes."

He looked at me again, with confusion written on his face.

"People don't wake up with powers one day. The only way to have powers to begin with is having a Corona Pollentia, and even then that means you only have the potential. In order to get powers you need to break; only at your absolute lowest you'll trigger. The locker was mine."

"Why isn't it more commonly known, then?" He asked.

"It's to stop people from deliberately trying to make themselves trigger, because trigger events don't work that way. That's also why a lot of capes are like that, you have to be broken in such a way that you can't fix or come back from. It's why so many of us, regardless of them being a hero or villain, are so violent."

"This was my fault." He said quietly. "I left you alone, and you had to deal with all this by yourself. I didn't protect you."

My heart shattered. There were a lot of things my dad did wrong, but they weren't out of malice, only his depression and a misguided attempt at knowing better for me.

I wrapped him in another tight hug.

"There were a lot of things we both did wrong. I didn't say anything, you didn't ask. We were both reeling from mum's passing to help each other." I whispered. "But I forgive you. For everything. Because despite everything you're still my dad, and still I love you."

"I love you too, Taylor." He said, as he kissed my forehead.

We stayed hugging for a few minutes before letting go.

"So the reason why everything that happened to me is because Sophia, the girl I mentioned, is a Ward. Specifically Shadow Stalker. The principal and the PRT agent had enough reason to cover everything up, because the school got extra funding for it, and they didn't want any of the information to get out because it would be a PR nightmare for the PRT. Why bother putting your neck on the line for a random kid, when you can just turn the other way for it?" I shrugged. I was rather indifferent to it now.

"Jesus kiddo, that's…fucked up."

"It was another reason why I didn't tell you anything, I was scared that you would sign me up to the Wards if you found out."

"Well, I don't know anything about being a cape," He said, sheepishly. "I could see why you would think that. But, continue. I want to know how you became a villain."

I took a couple of gulps of water, and started talking again.

"On this day, three years ago for me, I went out as a cape for the first time. I just wanted an escape from school, and from here. So I waited until night and put on my suit and left."

"You have a suit already? How did you make it?"

"I made it from a combination of black widow silk and chitin, all dyed black. The mask was also chitin, but with yellow, high-end swimming goggles with a pair of my prescription glasses taped behind it. I hid all of it in the coal chute in the basement because I knew you wouldn't find it, because of mum's stuff."

He blinked owlishly at me for a moment, and for a single second he had a deeply regretful and mournful look on his face that changed to a forced smile.

"Oh right, insect control. Still getting around to that, as I was wondering for a second how you managed to get that much silk. But I would love to see how it looks, though. But only after you finish explaining things to me, even if I won't understand everything." He said, clearing avoiding the thing I said about mum's stuff. I didn't bring it up either, but there were so many other things to talk about first.

"So, I joined the Undersiders originally because I wanted to gain intel on them and give it to Armsmaster, because he gave me his number after I fought Lung. But I didn't take into account that I became friends with them. The first group of genuine friends I had in years, and they were all unrepentant villains.

"And, after that, there were a lot of important things that happened within a couple of months. We robbed a bank, fought Bakuda, an ABB cape, the Empire started a rampage because their civilian identities got outed,"

"Wait, wait." My dad interrupted, "Wouldn't that be a good thing?"

I shaked my head at him. "In cape culture, there's a term known as the 'Unwritten Rules', one of which is that if you know the identity of a cape, regardless of whether they're a hero or villain, you don't tell anyone. This is a rule born not out of morality, but practicality: if a villain outs a hero, then the hero's family and loved ones can be targeted by their enemies, and then the heroes can do whatever they want in retaliation. If a villain is outed though, then they can act far more destructively because they have nothing left to lose."

He slowly nodded in response.

"So it's a survival mechanism for everyone," I explained, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice, "Nobody wants their loved ones to be in danger, or their civilian life to be ruined."

He looked at me strangely, until he connected the dots.

"You've been outed yourself, haven't you?" He whispered, in horror.

"I'll get to that, as there's more background information to explain," I bluntly replied, continuing what I was saying, "Purity, for instance, had her baby taken by CPS, and we had to find and take her baby back so she didn't kill us, or level the entire city.

"Then, before the Empire capes could continue their destruction, Leviathan hit the city. A lot of people died, a lot of infrastructure damage, the normal things that happen with Endbringer attacks He was beaten back, and somehow the death toll for capes and civilians both were the lowest in a while, if I'm remembering right. Oh, and Kaiser died, which split the Empire into two different gangs, the Chosen and the Pure."

My dad responded with my nonchalant retelling of my first Endbringer fight with a painful look on his face, unsure of how to respond to that. I gave him a flat stare in response.

"I've been in about…." I said, counting the attacks I've been in with my fingers, "Nine attacks so far, which would've been higher if I could've fought the Simurgh."

Dad was still looking horrified, and then rubbed his face, sighed, and stood up from the coach and left the room. I drank some of my own water as I waited for him to come back. I saw through my bugs that my dad went to the kitchen to grab some of his whisky, filled up a shot glass and drank it.

"You know I was able to see everything that just happened, right?" I said, as he returned and sat back down on the couch. He looked horrified, and a little guilty at that, but I gave him another side hug.

"Sorry. I keep forgetting how insane a lot of cape stuff is for regular people, as well as your fifteen year old daughter saying that she fought multiple Endbringers by choice."

"It's fine, Taylor," he mumbled, returning my side hug, "I just need to get used to this…..new, older, you. And going by what you've said about the other Danny, I don't want to make the same mistakes with you as he did."

I was going to object to that, but he kissed me on my forehead before I could say anything.

"You're a different person now, and I can't treat you like you're the same girl I knew a couple of days ago. And I know that I can't really stop you from doing what you want, or being able to do what I should've been doing: protecting you."

"You can't protect me," I mumbled into his shoulder, "But you can protect me in a different way. You can protect me from myself."

He raised his eyebrow in confusion at me. I detached myself from our hug and drank the rest of my water before continuing.

"I have a lot of bad habits that I'm trying to break. I was given a second chance to do everything right this time, and I don't want to waste it. So, just having you here, knowing that I don't have to hide anything, and that you trust me to be able to protect myself is enough."

"But how would that protect you…from you?"

"I'm too used to escalating, crossing lines, and not compromising with people who disagree with me. I need someone that can help ground me from all the cape stuff. Something like that. It's hard to put into words."

He slowly nodded at what I said, and gave me another gentle smile, pulling me close into another hug.

"Of course I can do that, Taylor."

"So, back to what I was saying, I need to explain what my first major goal is: taking down the 'boss' of the Undersiders, Coil. He's got a particularly annoying thinker ability that lets him create multiple parallel timelines that only he is aware of. So, for example, he can be doing all of his villain stuff in one, and doing all of his regular civilian stuff in the other, and at any point, or if he dies, the 'timeline' collapses. Which means he can do whatever he wants in a disposable timeline in order to gain information.

"But the other hard part of dealing with him is that his civilian identity is really high up in the PRT, which means he has a ton of connections he can use, and makes it impossible to take him down if I join the Wards."

"Which means you have to do it from the villain side, which means joining the Undersiders and having to do what he wants." I nodded, as my dad was already starting to pick up on things.

"The other difficult thing is that in several days from now, regardless if I join the Undersiders, they will attack the Central Bank, as a diversion to kidnap Dinah Allcott, an extremely powerful precog, who Coil uses in order to get what he wants. He drugs her with some very powerful tinkertech stuff. Dinah is also the niece of the mayor, which Coil blackmailed him with."

"And there's not much you can do, because if you try to stop her from being kidnapped, he can just collapse the timeline, and then you'll become his target." He murmured.

"The only true way to take him down is with overwhelming firepower, or slowly moving pieces around to corner him into a situation that no matter what he does, he loses. I can't show my hand, because he won't know that I already know everything he's planning, which makes him predictable."

"So what's his plan, then? Why go to all this effort?" He said, leaning back into the coach, hand on his chin in deep thought.

"For all that effort, the only thing he wants is simple: he wants to rule this city, because he's a power hungry idiot that's also a massive control freak. He believes he deserves it, or something idiotic like that.

"And to do that, in my original timeline, he faked the death of his cape persona, got the current director fired so he could be in charge of the Protectorate, had the mayor in his pocket and wanted to use the Undersiders to control the villain side, as we were the only gang left in the city at that point."

"I think I have an idea." Dad replied, his face still in thought, "If you tune down the villainous parts of your gang, and publicly take him down by revealing everything, you can potentially get the public to side with you."

I stopped, and actually thought about that.

"And if you explained everything Coil had done, as a group of teenagers being forced to be villains for their own reasons, took down a villain that infiltrated the heroes so thoroughly that they didn't even know he was one?" He said, giving me a smile like he solved a particularly hard crossword puzzle.

"And, let's say that this particular group of young villains actually made a difference after an Endbringer attack, and hypothetically, that the Dockworkers Association struck a deal with?" He continued, swirling the shot glass in his hand.

"But I thought the rule was that the Union didn't make deals with the gangs?" I replied.

"Well, if my own daughter was the leader of said gang, who also convinced the other leader…it could be possible."

"The public would side with us. They love a good redemption or underdog story," I finished. "This…is good. It's promising. I'll have to go over this with Lisa, later."

I gave it more thought. It would be difficult to convince the citizens that we meant well. Dad patted my back, interrupting my thoughts.

"Well, I think that's enough planning for the time being, so why don't you show me your suit, and we can discuss how to make you less scary, ok?"

I smiled, got up and went to the basement to go grab my suit. I willed a nearby fly to land on his hand. I needed him to get used to knowing that I can sense things through my bugs, in case of an emergency, anyway.

---

I stared at the yellow eyed, black mask that I held in my hands. It only occurred to me how creepy it was. I only knew before because of how other people reacted to it, but to me it was just a mask. A creepy mask that I used to my advantage, sure, and other people told me it was, but I never saw it as such, not before now, at least.

It's no wonder why Armsmaster thought I was a villain, back then.

I sighed, and put the mask on, and did another quick look around in my range. Most people were at home relaxing, doing some last minute chores before the start of the work week. The now ex-wife of the cheating husband seemed to have thrown out a bunch of what I assume to be his stuff out on the front lawn. She was crying while she was sitting on her bed. I willed a butterfly to land on her knee as an apology.

Other than that though, there wasn't anything else to note. The drug runner was sitting upright on his couch, calling someone while trying to give himself first-aid. I'd wanted to do worse to him, but I couldn't do that yet.

After our talk in the lounge room, I went to get changed into my suit in my bedroom. Dad was outside, waiting for me to finish changing, and so we could figure out any new cape names. I had also brought out all of my dyes, so that we could try and make my current armour less horrifying. With one final look into the mirror, I got up and motioned Dad to open my bedroom door with my bugs. He looked shocked when he saw me, but his expression quickly changed to pride as he let out a low whistle.

"That's one hell of a costume Taylor, especially if you made all of it by yourself."

"Yeah, it's not exactly heroic looking, isn't it?" I groaned, as I sat back down on my bed and took off my mask. "Fifteen year old me, with such a shitty school life, decided to go out wearing this, and had thought people would assume that I was a hero, a good guy."

My dad grimaced as he sat down next to me. I caught him looking fearful, and a little guilty as I said that. He grasped my hand again in reassurance.

"But if it makes you feel any better, I don't mind it, this time around. I had the chance to be a hero, and it…"

"Didn't work out well?"

"...In a way. Weaver was just a means to an end. She wasn't really…me. I didn't choose how the suit looked, or how I was able to act in combat. The PR department made me use butterflies exclusively, once."

He actually snorted at that.

"Well, let's get to coming up with something different, then. Something that you would like, that's not too villainous looking..."

---

"Monarch?"

"Taken"

"Beetle, maybe?"

"Too lame." I groaned. I was sitting in front of my computer, looking at Parahumans Online, trying to shift through its database to find names that weren't taken, while my dad was sitting on my bed, notepad and pen in hand, writing down ideas.

"Queen?"

"Taken."

"Plague?"

"Too villainous sounding."

My dad hummed in response, and repeatedly tapped the pen he was holding against his cheek in deep thought. We had been at this for a while, but none of the ideas we came up with stuck. Dad got up at some point, muttering something about an idea he had, while I continued looking for any ideas on PHO's database.

Dad was currently in his bedroom, and was on his knees and seemed to be grabbing out a box from underneath his bed. After he searched around for a bit, he found what I assumed to be what he was looking for: a thick, hardcover book that was dusty enough that I wasn't able to see the title. With a satisfied hum, he got up and went to the kitchen and grabbed a damp dish cloth and headed back to my bedroom.

"This book was one of your mother's favourites back in College," he said, as he sat back down on my bed and started wiping the dust off it. "And perhaps this can help us with coming up with a new name for you."

I got up from my chair and walked over to read the title properly:

MYTHOLOGY AND METAPHOR: AN ANALYSIS OF MYTHOLOGY IN MODERN CULTURE

"Your mother wasn't exactly a 'cape geek', but the one thing she always loved was talking about how things in the past still impacted the present, and how those things changed over time," he said, eyes full of nostalgia and longing, "and of course, this applied to the heroes and villains at the time, as it was still popular for them to name themselves after gods or goddesses."

"And it eventually died off since most people who did ended up being forgettable, or were lame enough to be laughed at outright. Most capes couldn't live up to whatever god they named themselves after." I replied, as he nodded in response, and started flipping through the pages.

Now that I think about it, there wasn't a lot of people who even did, off the top of my head. All-Father was technically based on Odin from Norse mythology, Alexandria based her name on the Library of Alexandria, which was a real place rather than mythological.

"Aha!" Dad exclaimed, and pointed to the page that he was looking for. I sat down next to him, looked at the page in question, and gave him a confused look.

"Khepri?"

He smiled at me, with a glint of anticipation in his eyes, and started reading the passage.

"Khepri is a god in Egyption Mythology that represents the morning sun, and by extension, the creation or renewal of life. He is usually depicted as a man with a scarab beetle for a face. The reason why the scarab beetle was seen as a representation of the morning sun was because it was thought that he made a new sun every morning, and moved it across the sky like a dung beetle.

"As of time of writing, Khepri hasn't been seen much in modern culture, both in fictional media and in the cape scene. This is possibly due to the relative obscurity of Egyption Mythology, compared to the Greek, Roman, or Norse pantheons."

That…could work. It wasn't too heroic to look out of place as a villain, but it wasn't too villainous, either. I would have to change the colour of my armour, and it might look a bit odd for the near future, until I would have the time to remake it.

"Sounds like we have ourselves a winner then, huh?" Dad said, seeing me seriously consider it. I nodded in response.

It was a good start.

 

[CrushOnchi]

Oh God, please tell me someone else came back. The misunderstanding would be hilarious!

 

[RichardWhereat]

She said she'd do everything differently if she had a chance to do it over, so when she comes back she does it all the same so she can keep the stations of canon. No, wait, so the author can keep the stations of canon.

 

[ScissorSlipper]

Uhhhh she has zero problems with being called Khepri or did she not even remember the name they called her?

 

[Gypsy_Druid]

Uhhhh she has zero problems with being called Khepri or did she not even remember the name they called her?

Click to shrink...

I don't think she quite remembers. By that time she was like, super crazy and one with her shard, or something like that. Mission-oriented and pretty robotic.

 

[Abao]

I hope she doesn't stick to canon, or we get to timeskip straight past the time before she makes her moves. I've read the same start of the same story maybe 50 times already.

Hopefully her plans on dealing with Coil gets derailed quick.

 

[Eastern Calculus]

Reading Worm Peggy Sues and divergences is always a pleasure. Watched!

 

[Time Paradox]

She said she'd do everything differently if she had a chance to do it over, so when she comes back she does it all the same so she can keep the stations of canon. No, wait, so the author can keep the stations of canon.

Click to shrink...

Those regrets of Taylor always seem to get misinterpreted by what she actually meant.

"Would you do it all over again? Knowing what you know now? Knowing that you end up here, at gunpoint?"


"I… know I'm supposed to say yes," the words made their way past my lips. "But no. Some-somewhere along way, it became no."


"Just about everyone comes to this crossroad," she said. "Some get seventy years, some only get fifteen. Enough time to grow, to take stock of who you are. Enough time to do things you'll regret when you run out of time."


"Don't- don't regret it. Was- had to. Saved lives. But I would do different, given a chance."


She smiled, bobbing her head up and down a little. "It's always about the people, isn't it?"


"Protect some, pay less attention to others."


Her smile twisted. A little sad. "Can't bet on the wrong horse."


Not what I'd meant. "Giving too much power to wrong people. To bullies. With powers, bullies without."

Click to shrink...

It is sort of vague - but I really don't think she regrets how most of the things went down in Brockton Bay. To me, this whole section was always about how she treated some people and what I also think is very much implied is that she regrets leaving the Undersiders. Because her stint in the Wards effectively didn't do anything to impact the end of the world she tried to prevent, besides leaving her friends and family behind.

And so far, despite some misgivings I have with chapter two - involving Dany in cape stuff, even going so far as asking him how she should proceed when in canon he was completely over his head - the fact that she tried to reconnect with her Dad already is a considerable change ...

No, wait, so the author can keep the stations of canon.

Click to shrink...

But this part I can agree with this. The place and time this story started also feed into my fears that this story is intended to stay close to the stations of canon ... which is rather boring and most importantly quite unbelievable because changes don't happen in a vacuum and the whole plot of Worm is highly dependant on initial conditions - meaning that seemingly small changes can have HUGE effects.

And those effects resulting from changes of the time traveler should be the very core of every time-travel story - with the time traveler's foreknowledge losing more and more worth the longer the story goes on ... which usually should boil down to some early incredible successes because of it and then slowly fading into nothing ...


However, I'm not so sure if going about it this way was a good choice - having Taylor wake up in chapter 1 and then bringing her dad into the loop which in part boils down to a canon retelling is the best way to start such a story. For one, despite Danny's importance in Taylor's life, he is at the end of the day just an unimportant side character and it is pretty much unavoidable that at one point or another she has to inform others about her being a time-traveler ... and reaction-wise and consequence wise Danny didn't contribute anything meaningful and it is doubtful he will in the future which I suppose is expected of an unpowered side-character.

So while I agree, some kind of reconciliation with her father is important and something a time-traveling Taylor would certainly do (since it is undoubtedly one of her regrets of how her relationship with her father deteriorated), I really don't think doing so in the first two chapters of your story was the best course of action.
I think, instead of solely relying on the premise to hook your readers it would have been better to somehow build up on it, get a real hook going with Taylor influencing some major canon events right off the bat in a big way and then go from there to have the talk with her father happening in the aftermath of it.

For example, her coming home after killing Coil and let the first chapter end with something like this:
"Dad we have to talk"

"Okay, what about?"

"It's better if you sit down"

"You are starting to scare me, Taylor"

Taylor took a deep breath, "Dad, I'm a parahuman and I just killed somebody."

 

[ptbptb]

Coil really isn't impossibly difficult to deal with given that you know his powers and can find his base. The whole 'have to be a villain to deal with him' thing is dubious. Piggot would believe the heck out of anything that made Thomas Calvert look bad so if you can get a message to her without anyone else knowing you should be able to get the PRT safely onside.

 

[Gnarker]

I'm somewhat curious if the mention of Ward in the title means anything. Is Antares going to make an appearance?

Coil really isn't impossibly difficult to deal with given that you know his powers and can find his base. The whole 'have to be a villain to deal with him' thing is dubious. Piggot would believe the heck out of anything that made Thomas Calvert look bad so if you can get a message to her without anyone else knowing you should be able to get the PRT safely onside.

Click to shrink...

Does Taylor know that?

 

[ptbptb]

Does Taylor know that?

Click to shrink...

Does she know which bit? Tracking down his base would probably be fairly easy - even if she doesn't remember where it was from the first time around. The bit where she decides to be a villain again is super short:

Which led to the biggest problem: Coil, and by extension, his civilian identity, Thomas Calvert. I needed to take him down, and I couldn't do that if I joined the Wards or Protectorate, which meant I had to do it as a villain.

Click to shrink...

No explanation. Just 'have to be villain'. Taylor, or possibly the author, seems to have a hate-on for the PRT and Protectorate, so it's likely that there was no real consideration given just gut reaction. She may not know that Piggot has reasons to hate Calvert, but it's not like she's doing any research before jumping to conclusions. Overall I'm not impressed with her planning skills.

 

[Viri]

Apologise for the hiatus, everyone! I was on holiday for the two weeks, but now that I'm back chapters will (hopefully!) go back to weekly updates!

---

I stared at my reflection, taking note of how my suit had changed. When I looked at her I didn't see Skitter, with her fully black costume, piercing yellow eyes and clawed fingertips. Standing before me was someone different, someone new.

The new costume, which was still my original Skitter suit that I made before becoming a cape, had a couple of modifications that Dad and I made after our talk. The first and biggest one was that the armour plating and mask had been dyed gold rather than black, giving the outfit an overall more regal look. The yellow lenses were swapped out for a pair of light blue ones, to make the new look overall less intimidating.

My time as Weaver, complicated as it was, did teach me something that I disregarded when I was Skitter: the importance of PR and costume design, ironically.

If I wanted things to go better, I needed to change how I acted around the general public, and the heroes of the PRT ENE. Getting them to trust me after Coil has been dealt will be a lot easier if I didn't look like I was going to eat their eyes out with insects.

Well, it didn't help that I actually did do that once.

With a shake of my head, I looked over to my alarm clock.

11:45 PM. Enough time to meet up with the Undersiders in case something went wrong.

Time to leave. I double checked my utility items, which contained my pepper spray, disposable phone, a couple of epipens, and a police baton that Dad and I picked up when we went out for supplies to change the costume. Satisfied, I headed downstairs and saw that he was waiting for me near the back door.

"So, time to go?" He said, fidgeting nervously. I gave him a quick hug, as he was probably still uncomfortable with me going out and fighting. After a minute or two I disentangled myself and stepped back and looked back at him.

"I know you're scared for me, but Lung isn't too scary," I said, shrugging my shoulders, "At the end of the day he's just a thug."

"A very dangerous thug who can turn into a fire dragon."

I couldn't help but chuckle a bit. Lung was dangerous, for sure, but compared to Coil, to Jack Slash, to the Endbringers? He was nothing.

I put on my mask and started walking out through the back door, before turning back and looking at Dad.

"Besides, I'm much scarier than him." I buzzed, using the bugs that I started gathering outside.

My dad's smile changed from a grimacing half-smile to a genuinely confident one.

"Give him hell, Taylor."

With one last nod, I shut the back door and started making my way to the Docks.

---

Brockton Bay was a city that was defined by its disparity; between the working class made of dockworkers and the rich upper class that profited off them, between the different gangs that ruled the poorer parts of the city and the heroes that attempted to keep the peace.

The difference between the ABB, ruled by Lung and forcibly recruited young Asian men into joining and sold off the women into prostitution, the drug running Merchants that only cared about the present and nothing about tomorrow; and finally the Empire Eighty-Eight, the largest in territory, influence and capes, the actual goddamn Neo-Nazis that held the city by the throat.

Well, if things go similarly to how they went before, the major gangs would dissolve in a couple of months anyway. Lung held the ABB together by himself, and his Birdcage sentence would ruin the ABB. The Empire capes having their identities outed by Coil would force the PRT to get help from other areas, or even the Triumvirate, if things got messy enough. Kaiser's death was the only thing I couldn't directly plan on, since he died from Leviathan and Armsmaster's betrayal of the Truce. On the other hand, the Merchants got wiped out by the Slaughterhouse Nine the first time around, but they were small-fry compared to the other gangs.

I made another note to come up with a proper plan to kill, or at least incapacitate Bakuda before she bombs the city. Much of the problems that Brockton faced was the constant large scale fights and disasters that hit the city in such a short amount of time, so stopping her from bombing the city would be a priority.

As I moved to the Docks, I reached out with my bugs for any useful information. If I was going to go all out this time, I needed to make a statement that I wasn't someone to mess with, and fucking with the ABB's various drug dens and hideouts would be a good place to start before meeting up with Lung again.

The first place I noticed that was also nearest to me was a three story building that had a locally owned takeaway shop on the ground floor, with a lot of graffiti and the ABB symbol, marking this as their territory. The shop looked like one of those typical food shops that operated in an industrial suburb, the ones that look really grimy and rundown but were really popular with the locals and generally operated for decades.

The store was either a front for money laundering or threatened with paying the ABB 'protection' money, I guessed. It had a suspicious lack of insects, so it was probably well run.

The other two stories were what I was really paying attention to, though, as they were crawling with far too many insects that should normally exist in a small building like this one, which gave contrast to the well kept ground floor.

The second story had several apartments that were filled with people partying, with people weaving in and out of them, which would make sense if the ABB owned the entire building. The third floor is where the leader was, as there were far less people there and far more of the floorspace was dedicated to the usual stuff gangs had. Drugs, chemistry setups used to make said drugs, a lot of bundled cash, and an 'office' where a man was sitting down behind a desk, with two thugs standing behind him. He seemed to be talking in Mandarin to a very nervous man who was standing in front of the desk.

I debated internally over what I could do here. I could swarm the entire building, scattering the partygoers and the gang members, potentially letting the PRT clean up afterwards. I could do something more stealthy, like ruining the very valuable slabs of cocaine and chemistry labs.

Decisions, decisions.

I decided to go for the shock and awe approach, and flooded the two floors with insects, causing the rather crowded party floor to completely panic, targeting any of the obvious gang members with bees and hornets. The leader upstairs seemed to have enough presence of mind to stay calm, and he attempted to ring someone on his phone, but I repeatedly stung his hand, making him drop it. With the complete chaos of the party floor starting to reach into the top floor, as people were shoving each other to leave the building and accidentally going up a floor then going down one, I prepared some spiders that were on the ceiling to make silk.

Most people don't tend to look up, especially in a situation like this. To confuse the gang members even more, I managed to use some of the heavier bugs in my swarm to flick the various light switches, plunging both floors into darkness. After a few more minutes, I managed to create enough silk to cover some of the gang members and the leader, who was writhing on the floor from my repeated stings.

Satisfied with my takedowns, I opened my phone and started ringing the PRT hotline as people started streaming out of the single door that led outside, and formed a smaller swarm to cover my head and mask.

"Hello, this is the PRT E-N-E hotline. How can I help you?" Said a tired, feminine voice from my phone. Someone doing the graveyard shift, most likely.

"This is Khepri. I am a new cape in town, and I have taken down an ABB hideout on 23rd street, with five ABB gang members that are incapacitated and are waiting for pickup." I replied, talking through my swarm. Hopefully that was still understandable through the cheap phone's microphone.

"I…see. I'll let someone know so we can send out a dispatch. Thank you…Khepri, was it?"

"Yes, that's correct."

After a brief pause, the responder started talking again. Writing down my name, or making a new log for me, judging from that pause.

"Alright, thank you for your assistance Khepri, have a good night."

"You too." I responded, and hung up the call. I normally wouldn't be so polite, as the needless pleasantries were a waste of time personally, but they would use this recording to analyse me later. And, just as Glenn taught me:

First times were essential to the image of a cape, regardless if they're a hero or villain.

I spent a couple of moments watching the chaos that I created, and continued on, sticking to the alleys and unlit areas of the Docks, and after a few more minutes of walking though I found my targets: Lung, and the Undersiders.

They were all on a nearby rooftop, attempting to avoid Lung who was on the ground with a couple of his goons. Bitch had two dogs with her, Judas and Brutus, judging from their size and looks, but it was always a bit difficult to tell her dogs apart when they were powered up by her. Tattletale had her arms crossed and was pacing, attempting to form a plan with Grue, who was crouching down, trying to look down onto the street below. Regent was casually leaning against the stairwell entrance, haphazardly twirling his staff.

God, I missed them. But I could reminisce later, I needed to make my entrance.

I moved closer to where Lung was, hiding behind a building close enough I could make visual contact with him, and started the first part of my plan. I needed to inject enough venom into him to effectively cancel his healing, avoid him for long enough for Armsmaster to show up and tranq him.

With a deep breath, I started by willing some moths to land on the right hands of the Undersiders, as I didn't want to spook them into running off and tip off Lung that I was here. Tattletale immediately stood still, her power already giving her the details, her head looking everywhere to find me. I formed a swarm-clone on the opposite side of the roof they were on, and formed it slowly enough to not scare them. Grue stood up, darkness wisping off him, Bitch's dogs started growling, Regent was startled and moved closer to his teammates.

Clone-me simply put a finger to its head, where its lips would be if it had them, and did a shushing motion and pointed behind them to where Lung was, as where they were standing they weren't able to see him.

With a deep breath, I willed my expressions onto my swarm, becoming a still, emotionless statue and began my assault.

I made a few fire ants attach themselves to Lung's goons and stung all of them simultaneously, making them cry out all at once. Lung snapped his head, attempted to see his new assailant, and yelled something to his subordinates. Using that as a distraction, I gathered everything that was capable of injecting venom, using bees and wasps to carry widows and recluses, and covered Lung in several inches of insects. Anything that had run out of venom, or had its stinger or fangs ripped off were quickly replaced with more insects, never letting up the assault.

I also bit his dick a couple of times with some black recluses, for old time's sake.

After a moment more, I willed the swarm to back off from him, just before he exploded, allowing me to save a good chunk of my more valuable bugs. I lucked out the first time I fought him, as the sheer amount of venom in his veins prevented him from healing from anything else, which led to the tranq Armsmaster hit him with actually putting him to sleep.

But this time I was better prepared, and much more experienced.

As Lung was still dealing with my swarm, I climbed the stairwell of the abandoned building I was hiding behind until I was on the roof, and walked to the corner and stood right on the edge, and looked down on Lung. My assault on him was still continuing, as he was starting to properly transform, covering himself head to toe in fire. The Undersiders were a couple of buildings adjacent from me, and were all looking at me. I glanced at them for a moment, before looking back down at Lung.

I heard a familiar motorcycle making its way here just entering my range from the south side. My tip-off about the hideout must've made him arrive earlier than he originally did, so now all I needed to do was distract Lung long enough for Armsmaster to be close enough to tranquilise him.

Lung finally looked up and saw me, and made eye contact with me. I raised my right hand and snapped my fingers, and willed every insect I had in my range to drown most of the street in an unholy cacophony of buzzing and skittering.

The Undersiders, watching from afar, all visibly finched from that.

Lung exploded a couple of more times, but that did very little against the sheer amount of insects I had at my disposal. Although I wasn't able to inject him with more venom into him now, since he was at the point that his skin started to glow, and any bug that was close enough caught fire. Not being able to hurt him was somewhat of an upside actually, as his ability to transform was based on how much damage he was taking, or how much danger he was in.

His enhanced hearing was countered by the sheer noise that my swarm was generating, making it difficult to hear me, let alone see me.

So, with little information to work with, Lung started heading towards the fire escape on the opposite building I was on, but the amount of venom that I injected him with was starting to take its toll on him, as his movement was starting to get more and more sluggish. He was going to try and jump up the fire escapes to reach me, which was right where I wanted him. With a groan, Lung crouched down and jumped upwards, but only managed to make it to the first story fire escape. I parted the flood of insects between us, giving me a clear shot at him.
He noticed this and saw me staring down at him. With burning hatred in his eyes, he screamed, his human voice slowly morphing into something more inhuman.

I grabbed the canister of pepper spray I had on my back, flicked the safety off, and threw it directly at him, making contact with his head before it exploded from the heat. He properly roared this time, voice fully transitioning to something that actually sounded monstrous.

The sheer heat he was emitting, even from two stories below me, drove me back a step. Lung, with his head damaged from the explosion, lost his grip on the railing he was hanging onto, and fell back onto the ground, still screaming. The damage done from the pepper spray and the venom would be enough to incapacitate him.

Armsmaster was much closer now, as he probably heard Lung's screams, and gathered some bugs to form an arrow on his hand. At first he shook them off, but then he realised that the bugs were pointing somewhere, and sped up his motorcycle. I dispersed my swarm, sending them back to their alleyways full of trash and forgotten, dusty hallways.

I created another clone behind the Undersiders, as they were looking on from a taller building. I made a throat clearing sound through my bugs to get their attention.

"Armsmaster is going to be here soon, and if you want to talk with me, you'll need to hide from him until he leaves." I said.

"Holy shit. Who the fuck are you, and how did you take down fucking Lung?" Regent said with some genuine amazement, which was rare from him.

"Regent!" Grue quietly hissed, disguising his voice with his darkness.

"Relax, she's not going to do anything to us." Tattletale said, her posture relaxing a bit. "If she genuinely wanted to hurt us she would've done it already. The spooky, sentient biblical plague just wants to talk to us."

I nodded with my clone.

"Wait, that thing's a she? Also, can we adopt her?" Regent said, as he pointed his sceptre at me.

"Regent!" Grue loudly hissed at him.

Bitch was just staring directly at me. From anyone else, she looked like she was trying to threaten or intimidate, but I knew her well enough that there was a hint of respect coming from her. I was able to hear Armsmaster's motorbike with my human body, I realised he was just at the end of the street, heading towards where I was, so I headed down the fire escape.

"Armsmaster is just down the street. You need to hide, now." I said, pointing with my clone.

They all nodded, and started to climb onto the dogs, and I waved at them before dissolving the clone. As Armsmaster slowed down, I formed another clone near him. He looked at it, and tilted his head in thought, before I started speaking.

"Over in that alley, Lung is incapacitated from a head injury and enough venom in his veins to kill several people. Tranq him before he recovers from that."

He only grunted at that, and he grabbed one of his tinker-tech guns from his bike, and loaded it with a couple of tranquiliser darts. He then ran to the alley as I dissolved the clone. Lung was still trying to get up, but the venom in his veins were properly kicking in, and attempted to roll over to look at Armsmaster and myself, but he got shot with a couple of darts to his back, and promptly went limp, the effects of his transformation receding. I jumped onto the railing and sat on it and looked at him as Armsmaster checked his vitals.

"You must be Khepri, the caller we got for the ABB hideout near here?" The tinker said.

I nodded. He glanced at Lung before looking back at me.

"How on earth did you do this?"

"Injected him with enough venom to counteract his healing, as his power prioritises what injury is the most lethal, which allowed me to incapacitate him with a can of pepper spray, which exploded from the heat he was emitting." I said, using a dense cloud of insects that hovered above my head, "You might want to get him to Panacea, though. I don't know how much venom his power can heal off before he actually dies."

He was still staring at me, his body tense. My stillness, lack of physical tics or expressions must be messing with his lie detection system.

"Are you a new cape? I don't know of any insect controllers that are local to the east coast." He said, still eying me warily, hands stretching out like he was prepared to fight.

I shrugged, before replying.

"This is my first night going out as a cape, so I was patrolling around when I overheard Lung talking about wanting to 'go and kill some kids', so I had to intervene."

He was still eyeing me suspiciously, but crouched down and started to weld some steel around Lung. A cage then, but I didn't understand how that would contain him. I waited a bit for him to start talking again, but he stayed silent as he started constructing the steel cage, so I took this as my chance to leave.

I jumped down, rolled so I wouldn't hurt my feet, and started walking out of the alley.

"Wait." Armsmaster said, standing back up and grabbing his phone before facing me again, "Before you leave, let me get some details from you."

"Name, and if you want to take credit for Lung's capture." He stated, waiting for me to reply.

"Khepri, and I'll take credit for his capture."

He nodded and jotted it down on his phone.

"Do you want to join the Protectorate, or if you're young enough, the Wards?"

"No, I have…personal reasons as to why I don't want to join."

"So you want to be an independent?"

I shrugged.

"Well, that's too bad. Since you managed to take down Lung by yourself, I'd think you would do really well if you joined." He said, walking towards me, "But if you have any questions, here's my personal number."

I grabbed my disposable prepaid phone and entered his number. I don't know how useful having it would be, as I don't plan on betraying my team this time.

With a final nod, I walked out of the alley and left Armsmaster to deal with Lung. With a quick search with my bugs, I found the Undersiders were on a rooftop of an abandoned, three story tall apartment building a couple of streets over, so I started heading there. While I was walking, I listened in to their conversation, relaxing my muscles and taking a couple of deep breaths. I didn't want to threaten them, and I needed Tattletale to pick up on everything that I showed. Being expressionless would mess with her own ability, and I really didn't want her to be suspicious of me.

As I moved towards their location, I reflected on the fight I just had. It was a nice comparison to see how much I actually changed from that lonely girl I was back then, who was so desperate to leave her school and home life, that she went out with an incomplete costume, no fighting skills to speak of, and fought one of the strongest capes in the city. I would have to commend her for fighting him, all because she genuinely thought he was going to kill some children.

But a normal teenager, even by cape standards, wouldn't do something like that. And it struck me, there and then, how much my life at Winslow and my non-existent home life shaped me into becoming Skitter. The ruthlessness, the paranoia, the sheer mistrust I had for everyone else, including my own teammates.

It was sad, in a particular way that I've never felt before. It felt like when I first understood what an endbringer attack truly entailed, or when I learnt about the various wars that happened before Scion first appeared. It felt like I was sad for someone else, someone that I couldn't help or do anything about, even if that sad, lonely girl was me from three years ago. It almost felt like the memories I had of my time after mom's death and before I fully committed to being a cape was someone else's, like I was viewing them like an aged photobook.

Perhaps it was just a sign of how much I've changed, that these memories felt so alien to me now, just like how different my fight with Lung was. But before I could continue my reflection, the Undersiders started talking to each other, giving me something to distract myself with.

"Tattletale, what were you able to gather?" Grue said, his voice returning to normal.

"Very little, other than she doesn't want to harm us and only wants to talk, and that she's an experienced cape, somehow." She said, her head tilted in thought, "I think she has some minor thinker power, as I was getting a lot of bad reads from her when she was standing on that building over there."

"C'mon Grue, there's no need to be so suspicious! Even if she wanted us dead, it would be a really metal way to go out, being eaten alive by a swarm of sentient bugs!" Regent joked.

"She's not a sentient swarm of bugs you idiot, she's a Master, and a powerful one at that, given how many insects she was able to control." Tattletale said.

Grue let out a heavy sigh and sat down on an air conditioning unit.

"So we have a completely unknown cape that single handedly took down fucking Lung with only insects and a can of peppy spray, despite him being a pyrokinetic, and not one of you is concerned? What if she's able to get information through them?"

There was a tense silence before Tattletale let out another equally heavy sigh, and sat down next to Grue.

"She's been listening in to our conversation since the start. We've never left her range, and I've only realised that now."

Grue groaned and held his head in his hands, while Regent let out a whistle.

I couldn't help but let out a quiet giggle, as I headed up the stairwell leading to the roof.

God, I missed them.

"How big is her range, then?" Regent asked.

Good timing, as I just reached the top of the stairs, and opened the door to the roof.

"My radius is about six city blocks, which makes my full range twelve blocks in diameter." I said, walking through the door and closing it.

I looked at my future teammates and took stock of their reactions. Bitch was sitting down with her dogs, looking out at the city before us, disinterested in the conversation.

Regent was sitting down on the edge of the roof, looking at me over his shoulder, his body facing the edge, before spinning to face me properly.

Tattletale was already facing the doorway, expecting me to come though it, and grinned in that trademarked vulpine way.

Out of all of the Undersiders, I missed her the most, I think. Even more than Brian.

Grue also moved to face me, his body no longer tense but he seemed to still be on his guard.

"Well, if it isn't our heroic saviour, who not only beat Lung by herself, but also saved us the trouble of encountering Armsmaster!" Tattletale said. I knew her well enough to tell that she was genuinely excited to talk, and wasn't forcing that cheer.

"Some introductions: I'm Tattle-"

"I know who you all are." I cut her off, "You're the Undersiders, a new group that has only committed some minor robberies, and stole from the Ruby Dreams Casino back in March, I think."

She faltered a bit at that, not expecting me to cut her off. She quickly went back to a smile that I knew that was forced, as her thinker ability was definitely giving her some mixed information.

"And before you do anything," I said, as I shifted my weight from side to side. I needed to do this honestly, and not push my emotions onto my swarm. "This is my first time going out as a cape, and I did some research before going out."

"There's no way you're a new cape!" Regent accused, pointing the butt end of his sceptre at me, "You took out Lung by yourself! And you just said that your range was six blocks!"

I glanced back to Tattletale, seeing that she was still looking at me, judging if I was trustworthy or not. Thankfully she relaxed a bit and gave me another smirk.

Good. I needed her to trust me.

"Nah, she's telling the truth." She said, while turning to the rest of the group. "She's trustworthy. Just has a couple of secrets, like we all do."

I let out a breath I didn't realise I was holding in and moved to sit down on another air con unit, opposite the one Tattletale and Grue were sitting on.

"Oh, and my cape name is Khepri, by the way." I quickly added, forgetting that I haven't properly introduced myself yet.

"So then, newbie, what's your story? What makes you want to join our little group of misfits?" She continued, raising her arms and gesturing at the others.

"She wants to join us?" Grue quietly whispered to his teammate, not realising I could still pick up what he was saying. Tattletale held her hand up to him, and gestured for me to continue talking.

"Because the city that I live in is a shithole that's infested with nazis and human traffickers." I replied, bluntly, "And, for personal reasons, I can't trust the PRT or Protectorate to do their jobs right for once, so might as well try and do it myself."

Tattletale tilted her head in thought, still looking at me with those piercing green eyes of hers, while Grue merely nodded his head, his shadows idly curling around his motorbike jacket. Regent just looked bored, as he rested his chin on the butt of his sceptre, and Bitch was disinterested in the conversation entirely, quietly attending to her two dogs.

"Does that mean you meeting us wasn't coincidental, then?" Grue asked, crossing his arms.

Shit. I didn't want him or Tattletale to think I was connected to Coil. But, before I could reply to him, Tattletale interjected.

"No, it really was coincidental on her part. But judging from how she knows about us, Lung, and Armsmaster, she's done quite a lot of research before going out as a cape," She said, still blankly staring at me as her power gave her more information about me. "And…she must've triggered some time ago, a couple of months at the most, given how long it would've taken to make that suit of hers."

"Wait, how the fuck did you make your own suit?" Regent blurted out, lifting his chin up.

"Black Widow silk, mixed with chitin and insect exoskeletons. The silk is water-proof, strong enough that that it can't be cut with any regular blades, and although the panels aren't exactly bulletproof, its enough to protect me in a pinch," I explained, "And if you let me join, I'll remake all of your costumes with silk, but it'll take some time to gather that much of it."

Regent gave a low whistle in response, while Tattletale looked at me with more interest, eyes gleaming with fascination, and Grue leaned forward ever so slightly. Bitch even started paying attention, staring at me from the corner of her eyes, still facing her dogs.

"Holy shit, that so fucking cool." He said, with interest gleaming in his eyes from behind his mask.

Well, as much as someone like him can look interested, I suppose.

"Well, I vote for the scary bug girl to join us!" Regent exclaimed, raising one of his hands directly up.

Grue just looked away from Regent back to Tattletale, shrugged his shoulders, and raised his hand. The thinker gave him a lopsided grin, and turned to me and raised her hand too. Bitch just glared at me, grunted, and went back to fussing over her dogs.

She would probably be pissed at me joining, since that would mean less money for her, which meant less money to spend on her dogs. I'll have to come up with something to get her to trust me later. I didn't want a repeat of being mauled by her dogs again.

"So, with that out of the way, how much do you know about us, or our powers?" The blonde asked.

"Not much, honestly," I lied, shrugging my shoulders, "You guys are low-threat thieves, with your only public heist being back in March. As for your powers, I'm guessing that you have some sort of thinker ability that gives you information, Grue is able to make gas-like darkness, Bitch is able to make her dogs big, and Regent I have no idea since there wasn't anything about him online and I haven't seen how he uses his power."

"...Huh. How did you manage to figure all that out?" Tattle said, pausing for a bit, "Wait, I can answer that. You watched us fight Lung, combined with what you already know and some simple deductive reasoning."

I nodded. "That's basically it, really."

"Great, so that means I don't have to explain much. As you said, my power gives me superpowered deductive reasoning. I can look at someone, and more or less understand them from what they're wearing, body language, that sort of thing. For instance, I can tell that your suit has gone through some recent changes, judging from the colour and dye of your armour plates.

"Grue is able to make a cloud of darkness that muffles sound and blocks any light if you're in it. Downside is that is that it applies to anyone, including teammates. Bitch is able to turn canines into a bigger, meaner form." She explained quickly. She must have gathered that I already knew all of this, but is only saying it so I don't look suspicious in front of the others.

"Don't hurt my dogs, or I'll hurt you." Bitch added, continuing to glare at me, while Tattletale grimaced.

"What are their names?" I responded.

"Brutus and Judas." She grunted, turning away again. I forgot how prickly Rachel was when I first met her, distrusting everyone except herself and her dogs. Hopefully she'll trust me faster this time, since I'm not going to betray her like I did.

I couldn't hurt her like that again. I just couldn't.

"Also, she doesn't master them, she hand trains them to follow her commands," Tattletale continued, interrupting my thoughts, "And it takes some time for her to fully power up her dogs. Regent, since you don't know, can briefly control someone's nervous system, like making them trip over, drop something, that sort of thing."

I stood up, and before I could explain what my power does, there were police and ambulance sirens that could be heard from a couple of streets over. The others all looked over to where the sounds were coming from, and the friendly atmosphere disappeared.

"Shit. Do you think they're here for us?" Regent said, looking at Tattletale and Grue both.

"I think we might need to cut this short," Grue replied, his darkness seeping out from his helmet, "Sorry, Khepri, but would you mind com-"

"They're not here for us, or for the damage Lung did. They don't even know we're here, I think," I said, cutting him off, "Since none of the cars are heading near us, and I assume they're dealing with the ABB hideout that I dealt with before running into you guys."
They all looked at me with an odd look of confusion, exasperation, and a little bit of awe at what I said. I shrinked back at their gazes, and rubbed my right arm.

"With a little bit of déjà vu, I have to ask: How the fuck did you do that?" Regent asked, for the second time this night.

As I recalled how I took down the hideout, I looked at my new (old?) teammates to see their reactions. Tattletale was grinning maniacally, while Grue seemed to be undecided between being impressed or fearful. Regent just looked impressed, looking back and forth between the police lights in the distance and me. Bitch was still glaring at me, looking like she was about to start a fight, but there seemed to be a hint of respect coming from her.

"So…you got any more tricks up your sleeve, Khepri?" Tattletale asked, breaking the silence.

"Oh, um, I can make these sort of clones of myself, as well as be able to talk through them, as you've seen," I stated, "And I'm able to see and hear through them, but that depends on how many I have around."

"Well, after all that, I can now say that you'll fit right in with us," She said, giving me that familiar vulpine grin of hers, as she raised her hand towards me.

"Welcome to the Undersiders, Khepri."

 

[Fellgrave]

Glad to see this back. I do feel like the pacing of it is moving a bit on the fast side though.

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

Glad to see this back. I do feel like the pacing of it is moving a bit on the fast side though.

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The pace is fine but I don't buy Taylor being able to bullshit her way through Lisa like this. She's giving obvious bullshit that would set off a million red flags.

 

[Anor]

The pace is fine but I don't buy Taylor being able to bullshit her way through Lisa like this. She's giving obvious bullshit that would set off a million red flags.

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Perhaps both Taylor and Lisa just don't want to drop information bombs on the rest of the team immediately after meeting. They had a hell of a day, so it would be wise to let everyone rest and recover before starting serious conversations.

 

[underscore]

The pace is fine but I don't buy Taylor being able to bullshit her way through Lisa like this. She's giving obvious bullshit that would set off a million red flags.

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I am pretty sure Tattletale is just playing along, waiting for them to be alone to grill her for real. She def knows shit is up, since Taylor is deliberately making herself easier to read.

 

[Shepard]

Lisa knows it's bullshit. But is playing along for 2 reasons. 1. See where this goes. 2. Her power is telling her too.

 

[NecroMac]

"Are you a new cape? I don't know of any insect controllers that are local to the east coast." He said, still eying me warily, hands stretching out like he was prepared to fight.

I shrugged, before replying.

"This is my first night going out as a cape, so I was patrolling around when I overheard Lung talking about wanting to 'go and kill some kids', so I had to intervene."

He was still eyeing me suspiciously, but crouched down and started to weld some steel around Lung. A cage then, but I didn't understand how that would contain him. I waited a bit for him to start talking again, but he stayed silent as he started constructing the steel cage, so I took this as my chance to leave.

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This suggest me that Armsy's Lie detector is warning him about lie, remember that Taylor does not have perfect memory, and I don't even think she knew about his lie detector.

Lisa knows it's bullshit. But is playing along for 2 reasons. 1. See where this goes. 2. Her power is telling her too.

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I'd like to remind that super deduction skills does not mean pulling stuff from her ass. It all depend on TT if she goes down the rabbit hole of false leads. All depend on facts she decide to base her deductions like:

• Thinking Taylor is Coil' merc ordered to rescue Undersiders from the Dragon if they do not manage on their own
  • Tay appeared as they needed her
  • She knew exactly when and where they and Lung would clash
  • Taylor lie that she does not know about Undersiders might be something TT picks up on
  • It might be Coil's power that helped Taylor appear as she was needed.
• Taylor is some kind of Grab bag cape with several powers instead of one
  • Taylor mismatched age and mannerism, caused by trigger or some
  • Sheer amount of ways she developed to use her power and ease she planned and executed defeat of Lung can suggest some Thinker power on top of Insect control that helped her develop faster.
• Taylor is a victim/result of some tinker experiment
  • few months of being cape but just going out
  • mismatched age, mannerism
    

and yea going back in time 3 years is I think a theory that would be least plausible given what some tinker can get away with.

but yea TT would be quite enticed by this enigma, unless she makes herself believe that Taylor is a Coil's plant

 

[Umbra]

This suggest me that Armsy's Lie detector is warning him about lie, remember that Taylor does not have perfect memory, and I don't even think she knew about his lie detector.

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The problem with that?

It's not even a lie. This is the first day she went out as a cape.

It's just the first day in a different timeline.

So more than likely, Armsmaster is getting some very contracting results from that, because she's telling the truth with loads of half-lies.

 

[Gypsy_Druid]

Does she know which bit? Tracking down his base would probably be fairly easy - even if she doesn't remember where it was from the first time around. The bit where she decides to be a villain again is super short:

No explanation. Just 'have to be villain'. Taylor, or possibly the author, seems to have a hate-on for the PRT and Protectorate, so it's likely that there was no real consideration given just gut reaction. She may not know that Piggot has reasons to hate Calvert, but it's not like she's doing any research before jumping to conclusions. Overall I'm not impressed with her planning skills.

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Umm... they outed her to the public, arrested her at school, pretended to murder her friends and are run by the largest group of psychopaths after the S9, and you're surprised by a little animosity?

Besides, when has she ever demonstrated good planning skills? That's Lisa's forte.

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

Besides, when has she ever demonstrated good planning skills? That's Lisa's forte.

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How to know you are catastrophically bad at planning ahead: Tattletale is considered a much better planner than you.