Taylor wept and screamed and banged her fists against the locker door but, deep down, she knew that no one was going to come for her. None of the students cared about her enough to intervene and the faculty didn't regularly roam the halls. Her only hope of getting out was the off chance that a janitor would stop by and take pity on her. However, given how her life and luck had been going for the last year that wasn't likely to happen anytime soon. And so, in between scratching at herself to get the bugs off of her and opening up routes of infection in the biohazard-filled locker (not that that was really on her mind at the moment) she was banging on and kicking the locker door in the hopes that she could break open the door. Given her slight frame, though, not likely.

She had left class early, been allowed to leave early. Been excused. She couldn't think of why at the moment. Instead, she was focused on the here and now. Sophia, Madison, and Emma had tried to shove her into her locker. She had resisted, of course, which had merely earned her a beating from Sophia and, while nursing her bruised side, the trio managed to force her into the septic locker.

It was about this time that Taylor began to lose hope. She was going to die in her locker. A filthy, toxic locker full of bugs and, well, she didn't want to think about what else. Regardless, it was a disgusting place and she was going to die in it. She was going to die in a shithole school full of people that didn't care and she was finding it harder to care herself every moment. Then it happened. She felt…something.

The best way to describe it was as an expansion, like she was quickly becoming too large for her skin. It wasn't actually uncomfortable, but it was disconcerting, so she tried to resist it. Tried to hold it in. As she tried to resist the feeling of swelling, she began to regain her desire to escape, her will to cry out. She felt a desire to rage at the injustice of it. That was when things went fuzzy. She could clearly remember the stench becoming almost unbearable and she could clearly remember hearing the crunch and groan of metal as she knocked the door off of her locker.

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Sophia was walking back to class with Emma and Madison. It was math, one of the few that the three had in common (as well as their favorite punching bag) and it was also the subject that Sophia hated the most. That was a hard comparison, too. She really hated most of the classes. Hell, she hated most of the people, too. They were all simpering, whiny little fucks. Emma and Madison were two of the few who weren't. Well, Emma was. Sophia wasn't so sure about Madison.

To be honest, Madison was more Emma's friend, but Sophia tolerated her because she at least wasn't (usually) annoying and even had a concept of the pecking order of life. She wasn't really a true predator, but she knew the girl was trying to be. Sophia supposed that she could at least help the girl find her way. For Emma. That was when she heard the roar.

The trio stopped to listen, all of them curious. It was soon followed by another roar, closer than the first, and then they heard stomping. Shortly afterward, the three saw a giant wolf-like creature turn the corner. One look at the trio and the creature started its way toward them, menacingly.

"Run!" Sophia shouted and she and her two (well, one-and-a-half-ish) friends took off at a dead sprint away from the monster, with Madison and Emma screaming in terror. She knew that Emma and Madison had no way to fight back. They'd only get hurt trying, which meant she had to lead the creature away so she could deal with it herself.

When they came to a familiar tee in the hallway, Sophia saw her chance. "You two go right!" she yelled, "I'll draw it off."

The trio came to the tee and went separate ways. Sophia stopped for a moment to dig something out of her pocket and then waited for the creature to appear again. It didn't take long. As soon as the werebeast came into view, Sophia threw a mechanical pencil at its head. Not an ideal weapon, but it got the creature's attention well enough. "Hey! Over here ugly!" she yelled at it.

After another roar the creature started running toward her and Sophia started running again, but she had a plan. It wasn't long before she came to a door leading to a storage room. Ripping open the door, Sophia ducked inside and ran straight to a shelf against the wall on her left. As she heard the cape (it took her an embarrassingly long time to figure out it could be a cape and not a monster from the movies) near the door, Sophia started rummaging around in a space between the shelf and the wall, feeling her hand close on her gear.

As she drew away from the wall she heard the rampaging cape right outside the door, she shifted to her shadow state and turned and dove between its legs. She stood up in quick, fluid moment and put her mask on in a practiced motion. The cape went on and was secured without effort and she had one of her crossbows up and ready in no time. That's when she noticed that the cape was now just…standing there. He even seemed to deflate, for lack of a better word. This was not acceptable.

"Hey, shit head!" The cape turned to look at her, "Don't tell me you're giving up already!" Well, that appeared to be exactly what was going on, because the cape was already turning around to leave. Sophia shot a bolt right in front of his foot. He leapt back a bit in surprise and turned back around.

"Don't think that you can just step onto my home-turf and come after me and my friend like this without answering to me?!" she yelled. "Well think again!" she said as she raised her crossbow again.

Sophia expected many things, such as her foe-to-be attacking or even backing away in fear. What she didn't expect was dismissal. "Fuck off, Hess," he said, before turning back around. Wait. Now that she stopped to look, the werewolf (what else was she going to call it) looked to have very long hair. It kind of reminded her of Hebert's hair. Wait.

"Hebert? No fucking way!" she said.

Hebert turned around to look at her again. Yeah, it was definitely Hebert, she was sure of it now. So, the little freak had finally snapped. How pathetic. "Look at you! You spend a little time in a locker and you snap, is that? Do you know how sad that is?"

Taylor just snorted and turned back around. Like Sophia didn't matter, like she wasn't a threat. Like she wasn't a true predator. That was unacceptable. "Hey! I'm talking to you! What, you had a bad day and now you're gonna just go home and cry to your mommy!?" She saw Hebert tense at that. Bingo. Normally, the emotional side of things was Emma's territory, but she wasn't here at the moment. Besides, Sophia had been paying attention.

"Oh, wait, I forgot she's dead. I guess that means you're off to go cry to your sad-sack of a daddy." Well, that seemed to do it, based on how Hebert was turning around and trembling. "I see you've got some backbone after all."

With a roar, Taylor charged. This was going to be good. Sophia turned back into her shadow state and let Taylor's hand go right through her. As soon as the freak passed by, Sophia shifted back and shot one of her tranquilizer darts at her. Not that she thought that one dart would do much to a seven-foot werewolf. Hebert certainly didn't seem to notice.

Then Sophia drew Hebert outside, allowing for more room to maneuver, keeping her attention with a few well placed tranqs. What followed was a flow of Hebert trying clumsily to hit Sophia, giving Sophia plenty of time to her shadow state and earning Hebert nothing but another tranquilizer dart every now and then. Sophia found herself glad that the other students had been going to their post-lunch classes. She didn't want to have to deal with trying to coral a crowd.

It was after tagging Hebert with the twelfth tranq that Sophia heard approaching sirens. That meant that back-up wasn't far behind which, for once, Sophia was glad for. She had expected it to take a few trans to put something the size of the werewolf in front of her down, but twelve!? The girl had obviously gained either an immunity to toxins or one hell of a regenerative ability. Based on the way that her tranqs were systematically pushed out of Hebert's body, Sophia was thinking regeneration. Well, it was time to try something else.

Sophia shot a tranq at Hebert's neck, hitting her just above the collarbone, right in the center. She then jumped, entered her shadow state, and pushed her arm through the glass vial on the bolt and shifted back. The resulting explosion of glass shredded the front of Hebert's neck, causing the monstrous girl to stumble backwards, clutching the bloody wound. It was about that time that Aegis and Kid Win arrived on the scene carrying Vista and Clockblocker respectively.

As Hebert pulled her hands away from her neck wound, Sophia could see that it had closed and the glass fell to the ground. Well, that hadn't lasted long.

"Listen up!" Sophia shouted at the new arrivals. "She's got really strong regeneration going, so hit her hard!"

Hebert looked to see that more had come and whatever rage was driving her to fight vanished as she turned and ran on all fours, away from the gathering crowd of junior heroes. Well, Sophia hadn't driven her off completely by herself, but it was good enough for her. Now it was time to chase her new prey.

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Taylor didn't know what was happening. There were so many sensations going through her head. Everything was so loud and her nose sang with scents she had never smelled before and couldn't identify and she was so scared. She knew she had gotten herself into trouble, but she couldn't focus through the overwhelming fright and the unparalleled sensations. She knew she had to get to her dad. She had been trying to get to her dad earlier, that she could remember, but not why. She couldn't focus enough to figure out why. So she ran home.

Home, however, was something she was having trouble finding. Everything was so blurry. It was like when she had her glasses off but much worse. Then she heard the sound of her pursuers again and she knew she had to lose them, so she ducked into an alleyway. She had no idea where she was going to hide. She knew she'd be too large to hide in most places. Then she caught a whiff of salt and she suddenly thought of the bay and where the storm drains emptied into the ocean. So, she turned and followed the smell of sea salt.

Her journey was punctuated with screams and honks and squealing breaks as she ran down sidewalks and across roads.

"Sorry!" she yelled back as she leapt over a man to avoid trampling him. She managed to reach the coast and then ran along it looking for a storm drain. There!

When she reached the entrance, she groaned in frustration. She had forgotten that there were bars on the drains to keep people from walking in. The sounds of her pursuers made her desperate, though, and she started tugging on the bars. After a full-body tug, two of the bars came free. Taylor repeated the process for several of the other bars until she was able to fit.

She ran down the tunnel, taking random turns to through off pursuit. She didn't know how long she was running around the storm drains, but after a bit she felt confident that she had lost the heroes, at least for awhile. She felt secure enough to sit down and take some time to think through the confusing jumble of her thoughts.

It took a moment and more than a little bit of breathing to clear the adrenaline coursing through her veins. As she calmed down she was able to process the scents and sounds. Once she grew used to the extra information from her heightened senses, she was able to better tune them out. Ignore the ones that didn't matter.

She remembered that she had been called to Principle Blackwell's office. Once there, she had been informed that her father had been involved in an altercation at work with the ABB and now he was in the hospital in a coma.

Taylor suspected it had to do with Sophia putting E88 tags on her locker and making sure some junior wanna-be ABB members saw them. And then they'd retaliated against her family for it. She had been told that she was excused to go visit him. While she had been walking down the halls to go home she had been ambushed by Winslow's Trio of Bitches and shoved into her locker, stuffed full of rotten, used tampons and pads. There were so many that they must have been raiding the girls' room for months. All things considered, she'd be lucky to get out of this without an STD, considering the rumors of what some of the students got up to.

Her entire plan fell apart as the realization sank in. Her father was in the hospital with a coma thanks to the ABB. Her mother was gone, too. There was no way the Wards would take her in as a hero after she attacked one of their own. Shadow Stalker. No. Sophia Hess. To top everything off, she had probably burned the only bridge back to a normal life in doing so. What could she say? 'Sorry I freaked out and attacked a Ward and scared the piss out of two students who totally deserved it. Now let's put this behind us and not arrest me.'

Yeah, she doubted that that would work. Seeing nothing left for her, Taylor curled into a giant furry ball and began to weep.