To put it lightly, Taylor Hebert was not doing well.
It was probably the sleep, she knew. She remembered reading something about how sleep deprivation leads to hormonal balance, particularly in teens, so kids who were starved for rest ended up lazy and depressed. If she could just fix her sleep schedule, get to bed at eleven and wake up at seven every day, that might fix everything - all the evidence pointed in that direction, at least.
But wasn't that a little bit backwards? Maybe the reason she wasn't getting any sleep was because she felt like shit, not the other way around. People sleep to avoid feeling tired, but she just felt tired all the time, even after sleeping. So maybe sleep deprivation was a symptom, not a cause, and there was some other problem? What then? How could she solve the problem if she didn't know what it was?
Come to think of it, she didn't know that there was a problem at all. She couldn't remember ever having felt better. Maybe life had always been shit and she was just mature enough now to come to terms with it. Maybe every adult felt like this, all the time, and it was just the sort of thing that she had to learn to live with. Or worse, maybe nobody else felt like this, and she was just defective somehow. Sad, slow, emotionally dry.
Maybe she was just color-blind. The world looked, the world felt, so gray to her. It wasn't bad, it wasn't hurting her, it was just boring and blank and so very heavy.
Maybe part of the problem was that Taylor had been holed up in her room for several hours. For the second time this week, it seemed, she had accidentally pulled an all-nighter.
She hadn't been doing anything, really. Just jumping around on the internet, trying to find something interesting enough to engage her for another hour, to distract her from herself.
And that was another problem, wasn't it? She didn't feel happy anymore. She didn't really feel sad anymore, either. She just . . . walked around, ate food and occasionally slept. Just existing. Not even that, really. Just persisting. Like she had spent her whole life practicing the same routine, and now it was so automatic that she did it on autopilot, except that the routine was her entire life, and she lived it all from the passenger seat.
Click, click. It was 6 o'clock in the morning. She would have to leave for school in another hour or two. Click, click. Her stomach growled. Hungry. But she didn't want to move. Click, click. She would grab a bowl of cereal or something before she had to leave. Click, click. She wouldn't, really, she would hold off on getting out of bed until it was too late for her to get a proper breakfast. Click, click. She didn't really care.
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Huh. Taylor wasn't entirely sure how she had ended up here, actually. The URL read "parahumans . net," but she didn't remember clicking a link with that caption, but she hadn't exactly been paying attention to what she did, so she was sure that she had just forgotten.
The fact that her short-term memory had deteriorated to the point that she couldn't remember what she did ten seconds ago was troubling, but on the bright side, it wouldn't be something to worry about for much longer. In the last few months, Taylor had found that a lot of problems tend to go away if you ignore them. Some problems get replaced with bigger problems, like the problem of doing homework turning into the problem of having bad grades, but plenty of things just went away for good if she spent long enough refusing to acknowledge them.
Ignoring her problems left her with a lot more time to . . . well, mostly to sit still and feel guilty about not dealing with her problems, which was a bit of a problem. She had so much free time. She would probably be best served spending some of that time to fix her severely fucked-up sleep schedule. Well, better late than never . . .
Taylor's eyes blinked open as her head fell on her pillow. She couldn't fall asleep now, there was no time. She would sleep for at least three hours, wake up too late to catch the bus, and miss school entirely.
Would that be so bad? It wasn't like she did much in school. Kids missed all the time when they were sick. They ended up just fine. Wouldn't it be fine if she just stayed home all day? A mental health break or something. Just to clear her head. Just to catch up on sleep. Just for a day, that's all.
It would spiral out of control, she was sure. She would justify missing more days, more and more until it actually did cause a problem. It wouldn't be anything new - it was pretty similar to the process by which she had stopped doing homework, actually. It had started with just missing an assignment here and there, not enough to hurt her grades, and then out of fucking nowhere she reached the point where she couldn't make up enough assignments to fix her grade, so there was no reason to even try at that point. She wasn't a total delinquent, at least not yet, but she knew that it was just a matter of time. And even knowing that sped the process considerably: she knew that she would stop doing assignments completely pretty soon, not even bothering to do the easy, 5-minute-type stuff, so what was the point of delaying the inevitable? A self-fulfilling prophecy, sure, but the point of prophecies is that they're true.
So if she skipped school tomorrow, she would do it more in the future. Taylor shut her laptop and pushed it under her pillow.
She didn't really care.
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Light through the window. Birds chirping outside. Absolute silence.
Morning.
A text. "U ok?" Emma. Lying bitch. She didn't really care, just wanted to maintain appearances for her mom. Fuck her, hated her.
8:15. Shit. School had started fifteen minutes ago. Emma must have noticed that she wasn't in class.
It took Taylor another quarter of an hour to muster the energy to get out of bed - she almost expected that she would ignore her phone's alarm and sleep in until ten. Miraculously, though, she swung her legs over the edge of her bed and made her way to the stairs, dragging a thick blanket behind her.
"Oh! Honey, I thought you were at school already. Do you need me to drive you?"
Fucking Mom. How could she be so fucking happy in the morning? Not angry at Taylor for having missed school, not working on her own problems, just so fucking chipper, ready to fix all of the world's fucking problems, just wave her hand and poof them away.
"No. I was feeling sick all last night, probably best if I rest it off and go back tomorrow." Just don't ask questions, don't try to fucking fix everything, not everything has an answer some things are just fucking bad and you can't fix them . . .
"You know your body best. Do you want to go in to the doctor, or - "
"No. I'll be fine." Taylor cut her mother off abruptly, and immediately wondered whether she was being too sharp. If Mom thought she was angry, it would be a whole thing and that wasn't the sort of problem she could just ignore, as she knew from experience. "I think it's just a temporary thing," she explained.
"Okay. I'd love to stay and help but I'm afraid that I'm off to work. Love you!" Mom had just finished packing herself a lunch, and was almost out the door before Taylor could mutter a hasty "you too" in her general direction. Again, damage control.
Growl. Hungry. Food.
Chewing was hard. Taylor was too tired to chew.
She turned around, slumped onto the handrail, and made her way down the half of the flight that she had already traversed. Another wasted miracle.
She didn't want to sleep, she couldn't sleep. She wasn't the sort of tired that sleep could cure. She could lie down and tangle herself up in her sheets and lose track of time, but she wouldn't fall asleep. What she really needed was a distraction, some way to get the clock to go faster without worrying about anything else.
She typed a password into her laptop, practiced fingers flying across the fingers even as her wrists slumped on the machine's body.
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The blurb went on, but, honestly, Taylor didn't even get through the first sentence. What the fuck was "cape"? Maybe she was pronouncing it wrong. Maybe it was like "kah-pay" or something. Like some sort of martial art.
It made . . . well, it didn't make sense, but it made more sense to Taylor as she read through the site. It was a game? Or maybe a cult? Definitely seemed like more of a game than a cult, though the distinction wasn't entirely clear. It could be both, really.
It was like Dungeons and Dragons. Taylor had never played Dungeons and Dragons, but it was the best comparison she could make nonetheless - a whole bunch of people pretending to live in some sort of fantasy world, except instead of a classic fantasy setting it was more like a superhero story. There were consistent, worldwide stories - the story seemed to exist on several different power levels, so there were villains that mugged old ladies and villains that ate cities. Within specific areas, the same "capes" kept popping up over and over again, so it seemed like the story was different in different geographical areas. When the really big villains did things, though, all of the capes who could be bothered would get together, from all over the world, which seemed like an effective way of making sure that the story was coherent across all of the different geographical areas.
It was a huge undertaking - a banner at the top of the page boasted that there were "over 8 million users currently online," which obviously couldn't be correct. Could it? That was, like a tenth of a percent of the world's population, way too big. If it were that big, Taylor would have heard about it by now.
Right?
But people did weird things. She knew that people did all sorts of weird things, most of which she knew nothing about. This looked like a global thing - there were message boards for places outside of the US, apparently in different languages. Taylor recognized some Spanish, something that looked like German, even an Asian-looking script. Japanese, maybe?
Still, 8 million users online at ten o'clock in the morning EST on a Tuesday seemed off somehow.
So the number could just be made up. Still, the message boards seemed fairly active. There was a lot of posting happening on in the boards for most major cities, and it seemed complicated enough that a bot couldn't come up with it all. Technology wasn't that good, at least not yet. No robot could simulation conversation this well.
So it seemed like there really were a lot of users. Maybe the figure at the top of the page was meant to increase immersion or something. Some of the users probably were bots, just making sure that discussion didn't ever go dead, but there had to be real people somewhere behind the whole thing.
It was pretty cool, actually, in a really geeky sort of way. People would just come up with information out of nowhere, and the rest of the community would decide whether or not that helped the story, and if it did then they would roll with it like it was established knowledge. It seemed like anybody was allowed to add to the history of the world, as long as everybody else agreed.
Taylor was disappointed to learn that there was no board for Providence. Most of the major East Coast cities were represented: New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were all quite active, as were cities like Baltimore and Brockton Bay . . .
A quick Google search confirmed that Brockton Bay did not, in fact, exist, and a new bout of research shed some light on that curiosity: part of the story, it seemed, was that Providence, Pawtucket, and Cranston had been replaced in the early colonial period by a somewhat different settlement, which, while not entirely justified, at least made sense. Looking around the rest of the site, Taylor found several other cities that seemed similarly manufactured for the sake of the story: Salem, OR, for example, was clearly just an excuse for somebody to write a witch-themed cape into the mythos, although that character didn't seem to have really gone anywhere.
The site was also quite nuanced, which surprised her. There was an entire section for "fan creations," full of fan-made drawings (good drawings,) people dressed up in costume, cape-based card games and more. An anonymized "connections" board, posts by characters who had been rescued by capes and wanted to get back in touch. Taylor didn't understand the appeal of it at first, but after looking at it for a while, noting how a certain subset of young female characters kept trying to get in touch with the same few capes, she began to appreciate how it fit within the game's world, how it functioned as a part of the total immersive experience.
Growl. Two-thirty. Holy shit.
Taylor hadn't realized until it had sucked her in just how big this game was. Each little thing she examined fit coherently into the whole, and there were so very many rabbit holes to explore. A project like this had to have a dedicated community of considerable size supporting it - each individual city was represented by dozens, hundreds, thousands of regular users, each with their own specific tendencies. There were even accounts for the capes within the story, operated by god-knows-who, that would confirm or deny (or refuse to either confirm or deny) various reports about themselves. After four and a half hours of research, Taylor still felt like an outsider to the whole system.
Unfortunately, after four and a half hours of research, she was also unbearably hungry. Taylor hadn't figured out for certain whether hunger was one of the problems that would go away, but she thought that it probably wasn't.
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Taylor had made a sandwich. Well, two pieces of Wonder Bread with peanut butter smeared in between them. It tasted fine. It had all those nutrients that bodies need. Some calories, some carbohydrates, some . . . Vitamin A? Maybe? Did people actually need Vitamin A?
Whatever. It was fine. A little bit too chewy and clumpy, so that sometimes when she swallowed parts of it stuck together and didn't fit down her throat and she couldn't breathe. That happened twice.
It wasn't that she didn't know how to chew food, she was just distracted. Distracted by the laptop cradled in the crock of her left arm while her right half was slowly assembling another peanut-butter bread thing. Not a whole sandwich, just a piece of bread with peanut butter folded over on top of itself. Like a taco or something.
She was reading the "Behemoth attacks Singapore" megathread. Behemoth was one of the biggest, baddest villains - he was one of the Endbringers, which were massive monster-ish things of unknown origins that sometimes destroyed Japan. Well, one of them destroyed Japan. Not this one - this one hadn't broken any countries. Yet.
It (or "he" - its gender status wasn't clear, which seemed pretty intentional) was a dynakinetic - it could absorb huge amounts of energy and redirect them however it wanted. It wasn't fast like the other ones, but it could cause high-magnitude earthquakes at will and was basically impenetrable, which tended to cause a lot of problems for every squishy hero who couldn't fly. The ones who could fly had to look out for the lightning that he threw, and the ones who could take earthquakes had to deal with the fact that almost anybody who got within thirty feet of him was instantly pulverized and turned to ash, excepting only super-durable capes like Alexandria.
Singapore had been alerted relatively early - Taylor wasn't sure how that had been decided, but the alarm had been sounded early, which meant that basically everybody had been evacuated before Behemoth had arrived. That meant that a lot of Singaporean accounts were posting live about the things that were "happening" to them, the tremors they could feel even from miles away and the loud cracks of thunder on a sunny day.
Taylor kept chomping on her sandwich, completely captivated by the megathread.
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A/N: I meant to do more work on Not in Kansas, but some stuff went down and I haven't been in the right headspace to write crack for a while. I've been in the right headspace to write this, though - I saw the idea somewhere a while ago and it turned around in my head until this came out. I have a pretty complete outline and I've been sticking to a good writing schedule over the last few weeks, so I should be able to update at least semi-regularly.