Prologue 1.1:
I wake up feeling fairly refreshed, and immediately panic. I had stayed up late last night reading my kindle, and was dreading waking up for work in the morning. Given that I wasn't tired, I obviously overslept, again. I spent a few seconds thinking up an excuse for my boss, I had already used the slept through my alarm one last week, and somehow I don't think that staying up all night reading would impress him very much. Whatever, I'll just say I overslept and have no excuse and hope I'm not fired.
Groaning I pushed my blankets off of me as I sat up. I had a brief moment of confusion when I noticed that these were not my blankets, and a large dose of panic when I realized that I was not in fact in my room. I was in what looked to be an enormous dark room of some sort, I could see no floor, or horizon, except for my bed, and an elderly man standing in front of the bed (on NOTHING!) with a wide grin on his face who looked inordinately pleased with himself.
I froze in fear. I had no idea what was happening but something was clearly very wrong. Was I drugged, and kidnapped by some creepy old dude for reasons that I'm purposely not going to think too hard about? No, I feel completely alert and not groggy at all, besides I sleep with my door locked and there's no way anyone can get in without making noise. I felt lucid, so I was most likely not in fact hallucinating.
I had been staring at the old man for about 10 seconds now and he still had that fucking grin on his face. I took a second to think of an appropriate reply, and with all of my usual eloquence asked him, "What the fuck?" His grin, impossibly enough, seemed to get even bigger as he said "You know exactly what's happening".
I was in a physically impossible room, seemingly kidnapped in an impossible way, with a random person standing there when I woke up. Oh god, I know what the situation is. I'm being ROB'd.
"Judging by the look on your face you figured it out, good job on acting cool, usually at this point they're crying and screaming about how "not fair" it is, which is hilarious but gets boring after a while. So here's how it's going to go,"
He throws the folder with a pen clipped on that he's been carrying at me, "Fill this out, I put you into worm and observe for my own entertainment, fairly standard, you should know how this goes"
Arguing with a ROB is usually a bad idea, so I open it up and take a look without complaining. A thought occurs to me, so I ask him "If you don't mind me asking, do I have a time limit here or can I take a few minutes to read this through?" "Go ahead, take all the time you need" he replied.
Let's see here, a worm choose your own adventure story. The difficulty on the bottom already has "standard" picked, which while not ideal seems very generous especially with some of the hellish situations I could have been put through.
3 choices, self-insert, reincarnation, and Endbringer. Endbringer is out, since I don't want to deal with the inevitable headaches and issues that would cause. From the 2 options I'm leaning towards self-insert, but I'll look at the other pages before deciding.
I read through the powers list with a huge sense of relief, any one of these could curbstomp 99% of threats I can possibly face in worm. I don't want to commit to anything before reading everything, so I continue to the companions page, but compared to the previous one it's a huge letdown. I entertain the idea of friends coming with, but exposing people I care about to the grim darkness of a mid-apocalyptic setting like Worm seems like a Bad Idea, so I go to the next page.
I carefully read over the win conditions, perks, and complications. After reading that a reincarnate dying will automatically bring me back to my world with all my powers, I'm sold. I don't plan on dying, but knowing that no matter what happens I get to go back home makes reincarnation a no brainer. Plus, I can take being Taylor is suffering for free points, double yes! I check being Taylor is suffering, marked x3 (E88, ABB, Coil), I would end up fighting those groups anyway so being marked is effectively free points as well.
Looking over being Taylor is suffering, I notice the depression, trust issues, bad mental state. Some combination of Alexandria and invictus will take care of that. What could possibly go wrong?
Fighting off a feeling of foreboding, I go back to the powers page and take Alexandria, Eidolon, and Legend. Given that Eidolon managed to hold off scion for a decent amount of time, getting a better version of his powerset and the rest of the triumvirates that double in strength every 6-12 months should be far more than enough. The rest are tempting, but while it's fun to read about people munchkining their powers I don't know if I could do that really well in real life, much better to go for straightforward overwhelming firepower.
For perks I take blank to avoid Contessa and Simurgh interrupts. I also take shattered limiter, invictus, first impressions, and one purchase bottled superpowers for fixing that one tentacle girl and Noelle.
I make a move to hand the folder back to ROB, "Here you go, I'm done". Bastard doesn't even bother to take it before everything goes dark.
Difficulty Standard
Reincarnation: Taylor Hebert, start of canon
Powers
· Alexandria
· Legend
· Eidolon
Perks
· Blank -1
· Shattered limiter -1
· Invictus -1
· First impressions -1
· Bottled Superpowers -1
Complications
· Being Taylor is suffering +2
· Marked x3 ( E88, ABB, Coil) +3
1.2
I wake up covered in juice. I'm standing in front of a mirror with a ruined backpack on the floor and juice covered glasses in my hand. I'm madder than I ever remember being in my entire life. Holy shit, I want to kill something, anything. My knuckles hurt from gripping them so hard and I was breathing heavy. Why the hell was I so mad? A feeling of clarity swept through me, this was the juice incident, the one that pushed Taylor to going out as a hero for the first time. In canon, she was trying and barely succeeding in resisting the temptation to go Carrie on everyone. That plan doesn't really appeal to me either, but no way in hell was I going to be as passive as Taylor was. At that thought, memories of what the trio did and how she would do nothing in response swam to the edges of my perception.
I saw red, fuck restraint, fuck everyone, I'm going to do something drastic. I'm not nearly as good of a person as Taylor is. Despite how angry I was it wasn't clouding my thinking at all, it gave me a sense of purpose, I knew that I would make this better or kill everyone trying, but I was able to think about how I would do it and the consequences of doing so. Fact is, the trio don't matter, at all, if they die all of a sudden nothing bad would happen long term. I wasn't willing to kill them for the crime of bullying, vicious as it was, but I wasn't going to let it go either.
So, I need a plan. My Eidolon power is my best bet for this. It looks like my powers came in the "off" position, which I'm definitely thankful for. I close my eyes and try to mentally "reach" for something. After a few false starts, I finally get the trick, I "see" 3 greyed out clusters which I figure have to be my powers. Each one of them is emitting a feeling of potential.
One of them feels like resolve, unstoppable and immoveable. That one is Alexandria (I resist the urge to squee in delight) tempting, but not yet. The second one feels like light, movement, and energy, I figure it's the legend one, useful, but not for this, I need something that won't immediately out me/level Brockton bay. I reach for the last cluster, 10 equally sized large balls of light that felt like potential. Bingo, that one had to be Eidolon, as I'm reaching for it, it comes alive and jumps from a vague presence in the back of my head to FULL TILT POWER!
Resisting the urge to cackle madly I let it pick the powers that I would need, but prompt it to only do one at a time for now. The first one is similar to Aisha's ability, but with slight differences. People in it's radius would still remember me, but each one would invent their own reason to think of why everything I did wasn't important enough to remember. I haven't decided on what I'm going to do yet but my power apparently is planning for whatever I'm planning. Can I use my power precog ability as a precog ability? Apparently so, clearly whatever I'm going to do I can't have traced back to me, and I'm going to be in a position to be seen. I let the second one fill in, it's a digital storage manipulation power, long range fairly strong, I stagger for a second as I feel thousands of devices in my range, and as impossible as it was I could intuitively understand each one, camera's and cell phones and audio tapes, I can fake records on anything electronic easily. The third power is a master power, it can take control of a persons limbs, similar to Khepri but at a longer range, the downside being a limited number of people it's able to collect.
The fourth one is a matter separation power, a quick application on myself leaves me squeaky clean, which might be suspicious. I was busily thinking about how to fix it when I realized I had a stranger power that could make it so no one notices. I had it seconds before I needed it, neat.
The fifth power guided out a path to Sophia, who was happily chatting it up in the lunchroom. Sixth power is an emotional control ability, synchronizing well with my stranger power to make people not question the source of the emotions.
A plan was forming in my head, I let the rest of my powers choose themselves, a strong danger sense, brute power, another stranger ability to make people not question their memories too strongly, and a social charisma suite. The first three are obvious, the last one left me puzzled but I figured I'd let the precog selection work its magic.
As I was walking towards the lunchroom I plotted. I didn't necessarily need to do everything right away, I just wanted to start the process of ruining their lives. First, I needed to do something about the staff covering everything up. I could blackmail them, but that would backfire horribly. I could threaten the trio with their secrets I obtained with meta knowledge, but that could go horribly wrong. No, my initial plan was the best one. I just needed someone disposable to do my dirty work for me.
As I was walking into the lunchroom I saw one of my classmates, a tall boy named Devin dressed in E88 colors, I used digital manipulation to read his phone texts, and confirmed that he was a gangbanger. You'll do just fine. I seized control of him and set course to Sophia. Sitting down at a strategic table I used my digital manipulation to reach out to the camera in the corner of the lunchroom and edited myself out of the footage, and used my stranger powers to both edit myself out of everyone's memory and to make the rest of the scene seem more natural to them. This was crossing several lines, I was sure that I wouldn't do this before, but just thinking about everything they did makes this the easiest thing in the world to do.
Devin made it over to Sophia and I forced him to stare at her. "The fuck you want?" the dark skinned girl spat. Madison and Emma looked amused, fuckers, I forced him to grab Emma's fork from her hand and stabbed it into Sophia's shoulder and through Devin said "Nigger", OH god no that was too cheesy, seriously thanking Eidolon for the "this feels totally natural and not scripted" power. I fed anger into Sophia, enough that I knew that any more would actually start to get dangerous for her heart. I made her mad enough kill, and wished that I had popcorn for what would happen next, at the thought my brute power switches off and a variable matter creation template materializes a bag of kettle corn. Sweet.
Sophia roars and jumps onto him, "you fucker! I'm going to fucking kill you". She rips the fork out of her, without even a grunt of pain, phases into shadow and shoves the fork through his skull.
Everyone in the room is silent. Once again I resist the urge to cackle, then I realize with my stranger fields up no one would notice, I laugh and laugh.
Goddamn justice feels good.
1.3
I...may have went too far. It looks like invictus might not work exactly like I thought it would. Taylor's memories are clearly affecting me more than I thought earlier. Strangely enough I don't feel guilty at all. I caused a death, but all I can think about is how much better my life would be without That Bitch there to ruin it. If I could do it again I wouldn't do it the same way, but I still can't bring myself to regret it. Still, I never would have acted like this before I got reincarnated. New plan: No making plans while angry. Picking up my backpack I run my art project through the variable matter power from earlier, restoring it after Taylor had thrown it against the wall just before I got here.
Emma is screaming, Madison is freaking out, and no one else is doing anything at all. Realizing that my stranger power was still on and affecting everyone, which might cause suspicion later, I acted fast, I dematerialize my popcorn, swap out my danger sense for a teleporter power, and move back to the bathroom where I was earlier, then drop the two stranger powers and try to will my powers towards something subtle and that would let me act naturally. Not paying attention to what I got I picked up the half empty juice cans on the ground and splashed some over myself, made a halfhearted attempt at cleaning it, and made my way to art.
I heard sirens in the distance, while I was curious I was still slightly freaked out over my massive overreaction earlier and decided to play it safe. The trio weren't in class. Strangely enough the teachers didn't say anything about anything that happened earlier. I turned it my project in and went through the rest of the day in a daze.
Getting home I threw my stuff into my room, got changed, and made a start to go onto my computer when I realized that I didn't have one. Seriously, what year is this? Eidelon helpfully gives me a power similar to the digital manipulation one from earlier, and I piggyback off a passerby cell phone's 3g connection from a few blocks over. Marveling for a few moments at how cool and intuitive the new power was (I'm a superhero!) I made an account and headed over to the Brockton Bay news section. I see a thread titled "Shadow stalker loses it - murders e88 thug in cafeteria" and opened it.
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► XxVoid_CowboyxX (Banned)
Replied on February 9, 2015:
I was just eating lunch like I do every day and then out of nowhere some kid in my class wearing e88 colors walks up, calls *redacted* a ni****, then stabs her with a fork. She nonchalantly pulls out the fork and then turned to shadow, and then phased it into his skull. HOLY SHIT! She ran off immediately, we had the PRT pulling people for interviews all day!
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► Tin Mother (Moderator)
Replied on February 9, 2015:
And that's a ban. This incident is still under active investigation by the PRT, use your brain and don't out parahumans, especially wards. Your IP has been logged and forwarded to the investigating team.
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► Chrome (The Guy In The Know)
Replied on February 9, 2015:
That's bullshit, everyone knows who did it, hundreds of people saw her, what's the point of censoring it here?
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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4 ... 33 , 34, 35
► bothad (Temp-banned)
Replied on February 9, 2015:
Good, finally someone that doesn't let those scum do whatever they want. Good riddance.
Please don't advocate violence, take a 3 day vacation to help you cool down
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End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 37 , 38, 39
Vista (Original Poster) (Verified Cape)
Replied on February 9, 2015:
I probably will get in trouble for this but honestly I really don't care. I'm not surprised something like this happened. She's a real psycho. She always finds some way to put me down while we are patrolling, going out of her way to make me feel bad. Not really a good team player. I heard she used to be a vigilante who was pretty brutal.
(Showing Page 46 of 125)
Breathing a sigh of relief that noone suspects my involvement yet, I turn off my power and head down to make dinner for Danny who should be here any minute, avoiding thinking about what this would mean for the future.
1.4
As I was walking towards the kitchen Eidolon helpfully swapped out 3 of my powers, some sort of thermokinesis with a thinker component for sensing heat distribution, an innate knowledge of cooking, and…matter creation again? Turns out we didn't have much of anything to cook so that was helpful, but Danny would get suspicious if I start pulling out anything exotic, so I decided to just change the composition of something plain to taste better. I decided on French toast, since it was fairly basic and we had most of the ingredients already.
Cooking with superpowers is an interesting experience, I could feel everything about the food, the imperfections, the way that heat would bunch up in parts of the pan and slightly decrease the quality by burning micro portions of the toast, thermokinesis mitigating most of it and the matter creation annihilation power replicating the few perfect parts over the rest. I've never made this before, but now it's just like driving, I thoughtlessly perform a dozen small actions, each one making the French toast slightly better, I was cooking incredibly quickly, every action creating some small perfection that would be replicated and combined with other parts to make the perfect meal. Just as I was finishing up, I heard someone approaching the door.
"Hey Taylor, I'm home," Danny said as he came in, "how was school today?", he sounded casual, but I knew from reading his interludes that he was trying to reach out to me any way he could. From my Taylor memories I knew that I would have been annoyed with the question before, I had wanted to keep home a safe place, away from all the bullshit I had to deal with day in and day out at school.
While fanfiction wasn't a particularly reliable source of information, telling Danny everything rarely turns out badly in those, so that was one option. I wasn't particularly keen on the idea, it would help me with some of my newly developed issues if I was the original Taylor, but I wasn't. I had memories of a stable home environment, and was considerably older to boot. It would be pretty awkward to unload everything on him, and my first reaction was just to hide everything.
But that ended badly the first time around, and since being Taylor was suffering is apparently some sort of law in Worm, any impulses I had to compartmentalize and ignore my issues needed to be ignored. Besides, I didn't have to tell him everything, just some of the more immediate issues.
I turned to face him with a serious look on my face, "Dad, we need to talk, or rather I need to talk and I need you to listen from start to finish because this is kind of important".
His expression turned somber, and he started to look angry "Did something happen today? Those bastards at the school said they would look into it",
I cut him off right away, "this is the sort of thing where getting half the story is worse than getting none of it, I need you to listen from start to finish before deciding on anything, also, here is some French toast".
He sat down at the table and said "All right, I'm listening, go ahead".
I told him about the bullying, and everything they did, starting from just after Nature camp a few years ago. He got angrier and angrier as I went on. When I told him that Emma was one of the Trio he gripped the table so hard his knuckles where turning white. I told him about how they were escalating, making me think Mom dying was my fault, turning everything I confided in her into weapons to try to break me down. I told him about the flute, the comments, and the juice incident. How the staff would always look the other way, even when I knew the saw what was happening. I told a white lie about how Emma threatened me with bankruptcy via defamation lawsuits from her father if I tried to do anything about it.
Finally, I told him about what happened in the lunchroom, I lied that I had heard about it from another student, but that it would be in the news soon. How Sophia was shadow stalker, how I suspected that the school was getting a budget increase because of her and led the conversation to lead him to the conclusion that they were covering up for her.
"Taylor, I'm so sorry, I had no idea any of this was happening, I'm a horrible father, I was trying to give you space but I had no idea anything like this was happening, Why I'll go over and give Alan a piece of my mind right now!"
I quickly put a stop to that train of thought, "Dad, no! You might be friends but what his daughter did is criminal, he's a lawyer, there's no way he would risk her being expelled or charged with assault, she's his daughter!" I was tempted to apply mental powers, but as willing as I was to apply mind rape for justice, using it on innocents is taking it a few steps too far, even for me. "I have a notebook, I've been documenting everything they did, we should take it to the news, the fact that a ward has been bullying me so badly and the fact that it ties in with her breakdown today will draw a huge amount of attention. There will be a public outcry, it's a much better plan".
He looked like he wanted to argue, but he gave up on it right away. "All right, you're right, there's no good end to confronting Alan, but I want you to know that I'm not going to drop this, I may have been negligent so far but no more, I know a good reporter who's a family friend of one of my coworkers, If you're set on this I'll follow up with her on this and make sure that it gets covered".
I smiled, "thanks, hopefully this crap will stop soon." I went up to my room and retrieved the notebook, quickly making a perfect copy in the same hiding spot just in case.
I went back downstairs to hand it off to him and found him wolfing down his meal. "Taylor this is amazing! Is this a new recipe? I've literally never had a better meal in my life!"
I panicked for a second then replied with "yeah I found it on the internet today, decided I'd try something new today."
Barely pausing to breath he replied "well keep it up, this is great!" I handed off the notebook to him and went up to my room.
Operation get closer to Danny success. Smiling from happiness for the first time since I've got here, I bust out a clean notebook and start to plan. Tonight I was going to be a hero.
1.5
Back in the safety of my room I needed to plan for my first night out. First things first, no matter what else I'm planning, activating the rest of my power set will be helpful. I reach for the Alexandria power, bracing myself for sensory overload, and flick the switch. It's not nearly as dramatic or traumatizing as I thought it would be, the exact opposite in fact. It feels like I've been living my life with wearing headphones blaring music as well as dark sunglasses, and all of a sudden I take them off and can hear and see everything. I can hear the heartbeats of everything in a ridiculous range, a staccato orchestra fading in and out as I focus on different ranges. My vision is amazing, but not always on. If I focus on something it becomes clearer and clearer with no apparent limit, like focusing on something small is without powers, but if I'm not actively looking it feels like normal vision that's a little sharper. I stop actively concentrating on it and it falls back to the back of my mind, still active but easy to tune out. That went well enough, I take a few experimental steps around the room and don't notice anything odd, I have no issues picking up a pencil, so it looks like the classic brute/thinker problems aren't applying to me. Speaking of, I can think back to when I was focusing on said pencil and remember every individual grain and whorl, super memory is a go.
That went well enough, now for legend. As soon as I flick it on my vision explodes into a psychedelic mess, Eidolon goes active right away and some sort of variable physics field erupts around me, dampening all energy in my room and coincidently reducing my vision to normal. I ease up on the power, and slowly more and more impossible colors than I can't even start to describe become visible. I can see the heat trail my body left as I walked through the room, and there's hundreds of other colors that I can't even start to identify. It's like I've been given back door access to reality and can see the properties of everything overlaid across my vision. I flex the power a bit and everything in miles turns transparent, I focus on the floating Protectorate base and see a fat woman yelling at a young girl I assume to be vista, I flex back and my room comes back into focus.
I'll test the rest of it later, I disable the legend set and my vision goes back to the crisp sharpness of Alexandria. Tossing aside my notebook, which has become redundant by now, I start to plan.
In the canon timeline I get caught by dad noticing me not in bed, Eidolon slots in a programmable hard light illusion power, a quick application of which creates a realistic hologram of me sleeping in bed, complete with sound effects, which is strange since nothing this power does should support sound. Focusing closer on it I see that the "illusion" is flickering a few hundredths of a millimeter back and forth, vibrating the air currents in specific patterns that replicate sound.
All right, one of the first things I need to take care of is my marked status, if I remember it right It would happen by itself if I don't take the chance to trigger it early, and given that I spend far more time as Taylor than as whatever my cape name is, is far more likely to make my civilian ID hated by the gangs, unacceptable. Getting the gangs to hate me as a cape should be easy enough.
I'll need a costume, which reminds me that I already spent a few months crafting one. I make a move to the coal chute to start unscrewing it when I remember that I'm deadly afraid of spiders, which is strange since I remember covering myself in them to make my costume. I briefly consider setting fire to the whole thing, but amusing as that would be it would wreck my costume, so I create an instant vacuum power with some sort of breaker ability to make sure that where the vacuum touches air, it stops and doesn't leak pressure across into the vacuum. I'm not trying to make an implosion bomb here after all. After a few minutes I judge it done and safe to open, shuddering as I noted the piles of dead spiders everywhere, and I reach for the compartment where I hid my costume. I feel some sort of large rectangular box there that definitely wasn't there before. I bring it out and it turns out to be a fancy silver briefcase with an 8 digit rotating number lock on it. I…don't know the password. Shit.
I try my full 8 digit birthday, my other birthday, and every number I can think of. After about 30 attempts I finally get it open, it's my bank pin repeated twice. I remember that I initially took these in order to cure Noelle and Sveta, so I guess this decides my agenda for tonight. I take my costume and use Eidolon to fix the gaps, and give it a proper paint job, dark black with splotches of yellow, and throw it into a convenient pocket dimension that recently came into my power wheel.
I spend a few hours scheming and thinking up fun things to do, and before I know it it's 11:00pm and I'm ready to go. I say goodnight to Danny, and go into my room, set up the hardlight clone, and then reactive legend. I materialize my costume from hammerspace directly around me, and then sweep my vision across all of Brockton bay, looking for a hidden base. Turns out there are a lot of them, endbringer shelters are located all over town. I spend a few minutes looking through them when I find what I'm looking for, a huge vault with a shadowy figure hulking through it, and a few rooms over has a man in a white costume with a coiled snake.
Eidolon helpfully gives me an immateriality power and mental communication ability. I fly straight to the vault and activate my communication power. A web of orbs, links, and lines transpose themselves onto my vision, and I intuitively know that I can send messeges alongside from or to any medium capable of it in my range. I focus on the one overlaid on Noelle in the darkness, and it glows brighter signaling that it's active.
"Hey, Noelle right, I'm a cape and I have a fix for your power, please don't move or acknowledge me in any way". In a display of subtlety typical of high end brutes she roars and smashes around the vault, fuck. Thankfully no alarms are raised so apparently this happens frequently.
"Soo, Coil is an asshole and actually has no intention of curing you, thankfully he'll be dead soon and I can and will fix you anyway". Well to be more precise I have a cure that I can give you.
She goes silent, and almost hesitantly asks "Are you serious?"
"Yup", I reply, "There's a small catch though." "Of course there is" she says, narrowing her eyes. "So what do you want?"
"You have to be my minion for a month" I say with a straight face, not that she can see me of course.
"I'm not really a villain, but if it means I can be normal again…that…sounds fair, I guess, what kind of things would I be doing?"
I didn't think she would actually accept, I was going to give her the cure no matter what. Shit. Well I have to think of something. I don't reply for a few seconds while I think of what to say. "Well…actually I was going to give it to you for free and I thought it would be fun to have a minion, I don't really have anything for you to do".
She snorts, "dork. Well I agreed anyway so what do I have to do?"
I removed the vial from my pocket dimension and said, "Just drink this, It's a special power formula that overwrites previous powers with new ones, you pass out for a few minutes and wake up with a whole new power, I'll teleport you out since you won't want to be in here in a few minutes."
"GREAT! We have a deal!" she says, eagerly taking the floating vial and downing it in one go. Immediately she falls dead to the ground as she starts sloughing off bits of dead skin and tissue. Eww. I teleport her out to an abandoned boat, and materialize a note saying that I had some business to take care of and would be back shortly.
I teleport back to coil's base, the alarms are blaring and mercenaries are taking defensive positions throughout the base. Before I do anything else I slot in a variant of my digital manipulation ability again, and peruse through coils computer system for phone numbers until I find the undersiders number, I memorize it and then I fire up my breaker form. The entire block erupts in light, my breaker state is so bright that I'm sure I'd be painful to look at.
While I was planning I was thinking about ways to munchkin my powers. I immediately found an obvious way that is potentially super lethal. I'm not going to do the math to figure out exactly how strong it is but it's somewhere between "A fuckload" and "holy shit balls".
Eidelon slots in 3 powers. A vector control ability, a physics manipulation field, and some sort of dimensional field that would vent excess energy that the first two couldn't counter into an alternate dimension. I was finishing up encompassing the entire base in 3 spheres of increasingly powerful energy shields, leaving a small hole on top, when a fourth ability comes. It is a selective dimensional cutting power, that when used over an area affected by the dimensional field earlier allows viewing of an alternative dimension for a short period of time. Shrugging I set it up over the hole.
Preparations complete, I fly about a second into the air, and am high enough up that I can see the entirety of Brockton bay below me. I fly as fast as I can down into the base, letting go of my breaker state a split second before I hit the ground going REALLY fast.
Good news is that I'm alive, Alexandria makes me fully invulnerable to everything. Also, I'm pretty sure that coil is dead. Bad news? There's currently a huge ass fucking pillar of fire, plasma, and superheated energy venting from the hole I left for myself that will definitely attract attention from everyone in the US with a telescope. Only some weird interaction with the energy fields I set up prevents it from burning up the atmosphere.
All's well that ends well, right? I hijack a nearby cellphone and send Tattletale a text, "You're welcome ;)
1.6
My first instinct was to run, after all explosions tend to draw attention. Then I realize that I'm probably stronger than the rest of the protectorate combined, and have numerous escape strategies if I want to get away later. I decide to stick around and face the music, so to speak, it might be interesting to meet the heroes.
I exit my breaker state, and quickly vent most of the heat of the melted surroundings into the fields I set up earlier, and then let down all of fields. A quick application of telekinesis fashions a crude concrete and metal throne of the remaining melted slag, which I leave red hot and smoking, only my power keeping it from collapsing into a puddle.
I didn't have to wait long. Just three minutes later I hear an incoming motorcycle, a peek with my legend sight shows a sleek tinkertech machine that I have to admit looks really badass. A light blue armored figure I assume to be Armsmaster is on top of it, halberds hanging on his back with what looks like a magnetic clamp, but the surrounding energy field I can see with my enhanced vision shoots that theory down. Huh, I always got the impression that he was in some sort of large-ish mecha armor, but maybe I remember wrong. About a mile further down there is an approaching news van making its way to what's no doubt going to be all over the news tomorrow. Perfect.
He pulls up about 10 feet away from my throne, swerving the book sideways and coming to a complete stop in a second, which is impressive since he was going pretty fast, inertial dampeners? At the sight of me sitting on my throne, a bored expression on my face he reaches for one of his halberds, does some strange thing with the clipping mechanism, and then it expands and assembles itself as he swings it in my direction.
"Hero or Villain?" he shouts without even bothering to introduce himself.
He puts me on the defensive right away and makes the situation into a him vs me situation, granted I didn't exactly give the best first impression, but still it's the principle of the thing. If there's more heroes like him it might go a long way towards explaining the enormous gap between the number of villains and heroes. I was planning to play along with the whole thing up until now, but a surge of annoyance at his diplomacy methods sinks that plan.
"I'd say that I'm most definitely one or more of those things" I say, trying to stall. The Van is about 20 seconds away and I want what happens next to be witnessed. I have a half-baked plan from earlier that I was going to discard but now that the opportunity is next to me I can't resist. I stare at him without saying anything, hoping that he doesn't hurry too much, the Van is 20 seconds away.
A look of annoyance crosses his face, when he starts on his speech "If this is your first night out, it's understandable if you overdid it with your powers, that's why we have the Wards program, to help young people like you learn how to control your powers, so losing control like you so obviously had here won't happen. The villains in this city will recruit someone as strong as you by force, you need us to protect you!"
The news van had arrived, they were setting up in the background but one of them already had their camera out and rolling. Good enough.
I stand up from my throne and clear my throat "I did not in fact, lose control of my powers. I'm insulted that you can say something like straight to my face halbeard" at this point he face twitches, pretending not to notice I continue, "I fully intended to kill everyone in the base. Well, not everyone, I wanted to kill the villain coil, the mercenaries were just a bonus. Collateral damage if you will. If it makes you feel any better none of them were particularly nice people"
He growled at me "No that doesn't make me "feel better", you know there's no way I can let you go after admitting something like that right? Come in without resisting and it will look better in your trial."
Despite how tempting it is to keep on bantering, reinforcements will be here soon, and I actually liked the wards. While I could probably just teleport out, that would make me look weak, and I didn't want to actually hurt them. "Nice halberd" I quip, as I explode from my position, moving fast as I can with my Alexandria speed. The world slows down to a crawl around me, each step I take ripping out a small chunk of concrete behind me. I stop on a dime right in front of him, my perception still sped up fast enough to make everything slow enough that I might as well have stopped time. I flick him in the chest, with a decent amount of power behind it. As I do so with my other hand I unhook his halberd from his hand, carefully so that I don't crush his fingers. I let my speed go back to normal, the hero flies back and slams into the building hard enough to crack the wall, I wince, bit too much force there. A loud sonic boom exploding behind me, shattering the windows of the surrounding buildings and forcing everyone present to cover their ears.
"This is mine now." I deadpan. I turn to look at the cameraman who despite the probable ear damage is still steadfastly filming the whole thing "Also, this is a message to the rest of the gangs in the city, be out by tomorrow night or who knows what I'll do, I don't care about your "unwritten rules" or anything else. I'll level your buildings to slag, see you all dead by the end of the week, hear the lamentations of your women, etcetera, etcetera." That being said it was time to make an exit, I could see that the rest of the heroes were almost here.
I might as well make this flashy. I enter my breaker state again, consciously making the attempt to make it less bright so I won't blind the camera. Eidolon supplies me with a light manipulation power as well as macro aeorokenisis. I fly at the pillar of fire from earlier, which has been guttering out, winding around it as I fly higher and higher, leaving a trail of light behind me. When I hit the clouds several seconds later, I flash my breaker state to its brightest setting, and use my light manipulation power to "fix" the light in place, leaving an always glowing sphere that should last several hours. I push as hard as I can with it, the rest of Brockton Bay erupts in light, practically bright as day. I push the clouds out from around the ball of light, and then away as fast as I can, creating what looks like an enormous shock wave centered on my mini sun.
I turn myself invisible and slowly start to fly back to where I stashed Noelle as I started debating the most important question tonight raised, what the hell was I going to do with a minion?
1.7
I took me about 30 seconds to get back to the abandoned boat. The halberd no doubt has some sort of tracking system enabled so I throw it into my pocket dimension to deal with later.
Noelle was still unconscious, surprisingly enough. She was lying face down in a pile of Echnida bits. It smelled very rank and I was suddenly very grateful that she hasn't woken up yet. Well, what she doesn't know won't hurt her right?
With an assortment of my earlier powers I raised the temperature in the boat to be much warmer, and locked it into place. I disintegrated the flesh pile around her. I sealed most of the windows and all of the holes and rusted out chunks of walls, and got rid of the accumulated grime and dust. I filtered out the air and then made a latch on the wall and twisted the metal around to make a hidden door that she could use to exit if she wanted to. I materialized some clothes and a blanket over Noelle, and then lifted her up and created a bed to put her in. I still had a template of the French toast I had cooked earlier today so I made one of those in a fancy ceramic plate with golden cutlery, as well as a cup of cocoa. Preparations complete, I leaned against the wall and began to wait.
About 10 minutes later her eyes fluttered open and she started to get up. All of a sudden she started blinking quickly and ran her hands over herself, a disbelieving smile slowly growing over her face.
"Oh my god oh my god oh my god "
She jumped off the bed and engulfed me in a hug.
"thank you thank you thank you thank you so much! I was starting to lose hope that I'd ever be normal again."
She stiffened slightly, almost hesitatingly asked me "Ummm, not that I'm ungrateful or anything...but these clothes...how exactly did you...?"
I winked at her, and snorted when she blushed. "Relax, I used my power to create them around you"
"How long was I out?" she asked, looking at the "sunlight" streaming in through the window.
"Err," I started, "about 15 minutes maybe?"
Her eyes widened and she dashed towards the window. I followed her gaze and saw the smoke in the distance, as well as a sun hanging in the sky, a mile wide cloudless hole surrounding it. A panicked look crossed her face. I realized what it must look like so I was quick to reassure her.
"That was me by the way, not that one girl on your team, they're fine but most likely freaking out thinking you're dead or something"
She grimaced, and then turned to face me fully "I'm really really thankful for everything you've done, but is there any chance I could.."
"Go ahead." I replicate a phone about a mile from where we are, while quietly sabotaging the original. I felt mildly guilty for a second but then again I have no idea how phones work and it might break something or draw attention if there's 2 identical ones. Better safe than sorry.
"We can discuss the minion thing later, for now take care of whatever you have to do and figure out whatever your power is. Here, you can use this to call them, make sure to break it when you're done since this might technically count as stealing. You'll probably want some privacy, so I'll leave you for alone for a while. Word of warning, I think that Krouse is functionally insane from some combination of being an douchebag and the ziz, watch your back around him. I'll be in touch."
Not waiting for a reply I turned around and teleported back to my room, ready to turn into bed when I saw Danny standing there with his arms crossed.
I was so caught off guard that I just barely managed to ramble off the first thing that came to mind, "Umm...S..ss..surpise?"
He didn't look terribly impressed.
1.9
"This isn't…this is…," I sigh as I pull off my mask, throwing it into hammerspace, "This is exactly what it looks like."
Danny scowled at me, "Can you guess how my last half hour went, Taylor? I'll give you a hint, I woke up from an enourmous explosion, which nearly gave me a heart attack by the way. I immediately went to make sure you're ok, when I find you cheerfully sleeping away. I tried shaking you awake, but you wouldn't wake up no matter what I did. I was about to call an ambulance before I noticed your skin texture was off, and it was slightly glowing."
I made a move as if to interrupt him, but he continues his rant, talking over me "And then I had a suspicion, something potentially terrible, what if, what if whatever the explosion was had some sort of effect on people throughout the city? So I ran downstairs to our TV and turned on the news to see if there was an announcement from the protectorate about a new villain in the area, and guess what I saw there?"
"I can explain! It's not nearly as bad as it looks!" I blurt out as he takes a breath.
"I saw what looked like a new villain in the city, standing over the melted ruins of her enemies on a steaming red iron chair. I was thinking she did something to everyone, maybe was responsible for your..condition, when she started to talk. Did you really think I wouldn't recognize your voice?"
"Really? You can explain? Explain then, what the hell you were doing tonight! You killed people Taylor, and you attacked and robbed Armsmaster on live television."
He was practically shouting by now, "Then you threatened the entire villain population of Brockton bay, villain shithole of the US, with fucking MURDER! Then you leave a display that will draw national attention, guaranteeing that there's no way that there's going to be a peaceful end to this."
Eidolon was feeding me social powers, as well as mental ones. With these, I knew I could pull of a reasonable path to social victory, but really that's not what I wanted. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't too distraught over this thing with Danny. I was going to explain this without the aid of powers, or I wouldn't, I didn't particularly care either way.
"Ok so first off, those people I killed, they totally deserved it. Coil was a kidnapping, murdering, rapist pig. And his power makes it hard to deal with him without judicious overkill. His mercenaries…were maybe bad people as well, and I think they deserved it too cause of all the stuff they let him do! And I rescued a girl from a basement in his prison, so that makes me a hero! And Armsmaster, a total asshole!"
He just stares at me, a disappointed look on his face, then sighs "That's why we have a judicial system Taylor, so these sorts of people can get a fair trial, you have no right to be the judge, jury, and executioner. I know you've been frustrated with the bullying lately, some of it may even be my fault, but that's no excuse to lash out like this, you need help Taylor, your powers are clearly messing with your head. You can't just…kill people you don't like!"
My good mood from earlier rapidly evaporating. He stood by and did nothing while I was going through hell for years, not even bothering to notice. I just saved so many lives and averted at least 1 S class threat, and made the world a better place. I even had fun while doing it too~. And now that I'm finally doing better, he decides to interfere!
I tried to stop it, but a surge of bitterness from everything that's been happening lately overcame everything. I haven't been happy in what feels like forever, and hell, even the stupid recruitment pitch I gave Noelle was more than I've talked to anyone besides my Dad in months. I knew this wasn't fair of me, but the fact that no one would take my fucking side, even now, after I confessed everything about the bullying campaign earlier, had me up in arms.
"Help? Where the hell do you get off offering me help, now of all times? I'm stronger than the entire triumvirate rolled into one. Bar scion I'm the strongest hero in the fucking world. I'm invincible, and have effectively infinite firepower. I'm going to change the way this stupid ass world works, make everything better. The closest thing you ever did to helping me was doing absolutely nothings so I could learn to rely on myself. I don't want or need any more of your fucking help. Besides, traditional morality is a crutch developed to help powerless people feel better about their own helplessness, it's totally non applicable to me."
A half dozen expressions went through his face as I was ranting; angry, concerned, disbelief, and rage again, sadness, and eventually resignation. "Go ahead and get changed, we can talk about this tomorrow. And we are going to talk about it."
He made his way out of my room, stomping down to the kitchen. I was just finishing up getting out of my costume when I heard him pick up the phone.
There's no way he's going to do what I think he's going to do, right? A mental signal to Eidolon lets the powers I've been holding back slot in. Precognition, the future and present collapse into something that can be approximated to vision. Electronic dampening overlays and highlights the power running through everything for several blocks in my radius.
I looked seconds into the future, staring in shock as I saw him call the protectorate, asking for help with his daughter. He was starting to explain to them them she seems to have suddenly developed powers and how he needed help.
I thought I was mad before, when I just got here in the bathroom with the juice incident. But the feeling now was so much more intense. A haze was settling over me, I wasn't going to let this one go. Memories of betrayal by Emma were making me angrier and angrier as I saw parallels with my situation now.
I teleport down to the living room, dampen the phone right before it would have started ringing, and glare at Danny.
Danny looks at me guiltily, "Taylor, I'm sorry…"
Emotionlessly I stare at him. It would be inconvenient to kill him, and I had enough of Taylors memories to know that while it would be easy enough to do, I would feel horribly guilty afterwards. I can just wipe his memories of the last hour, but that was unsatisfying as well. I knew I couldn't bring myself to trust him after this, and I was feeling plenty vindictive. How could I spite him and get rid of him as a problem without feeling guilty?
"Taylor, I know this was the wrong thing to do, but the protectorate can help you. You've been different lately, just listen to you talk, you have a god complex, you bit off more than you can chew, and you have what looks like zero problem killing people. I'm a little concerned you're not more concerned. You're going to get yourself killed!"
I was busy thinking of appropriate revenge, but was having trouble thinking of something that wouldn't leave me feeling guilty as hell. I decided to be the better person, just this once. Besides, there are worthier targets for my anger.
I cut him off, imbuing a stranger effect onto him that impedes communication of types of information, and then locked down anything related to my being a cape.
"I don't take betrayal well, try something like this again and I'll wipe all your memories of me".
He paled, then said "The Taylor I know wouldn't do something like this"
I chuckle darkly, completely ignoring what he just said as I rematerialized my costume around me "heh, god complex you say? I'll show you, I'll show everyone!" Then twisted space around me as I expanded my legend sight to full bore.
Target acquired