Chapter Three: Emotional Smorgasbord
Taylor woke up the next day with a frown on her face. That night, as said, she had dreams of Madison's reaction to the horrific prank she had played.
And one of her mother.
Annette Hebert was a perfect woman in Taylor's opinion. She had never been overly busty, but curved in just the right places, in just the right amount, to make everyone around her turn their heads. Her father had always said that he was lucky she chose him. She was intelligent, kind, beautiful. Perfect.
Last night, her perfect frown had looked in Taylor's direction. It was just a dream. It could only be a dream. Her mother had been dead for nearly three years. But still, it felt real, that quiet disapproval. Something the teen girl had down disappointed her mother.
And she could guess what.
Even if it was only a dream version, she knew the woman didn't like the prank she had played on Madison Clemens. She didn't like the pranks that Taylor had planned to pull on Sophia and Emma. Annette Hebert had not believed in revenge, nor escalation.
She believed in equality and justice.
She knew that her mother had been one of Lustrum's followers once, believing the parahuman to be an activist for gender equality. She quit that the moment that the members of that gang started attacking men for daring to be born male. That was not equality, that was terrorism.
"Damn it…" Taylor muttered to her cereal, "I'm pathetic. I can't even get revenge without feeling bad for it." She munched on her cold breakfast for another couple of moments, thinking about everything her mother had ever taught her.
She didn't believe in revenge. She believed in justice.
Justice.
Justice.
"Aha," she nodded into her bowl, glad that her father went into work early, so he didn't see her talking to herself, "I'm not going to prank them, I'm not going to get vengeance. I'm going to get justice. Even if I have to take it into my own hands to make sure it happens." She grinned an unfriendly grin.
That said, she had no plans on cleaning up the prank she had pulled on Clemens. It was too good to waste like that. They'd never find out it was her, and she could consider the one, small, payback she'd have for a year and a half of hell.
She'd get her justice, though. Of that there was no doubt.
She began to like the word, the more she rolled it over in her head. Justice. Justice! JusticejusticejusticeJUSTICE!
She repeated it again and again to herself until the syllables became mush and the letters meaningless. She kept going, dissecting each part of the word like a frog in a science class. It was said in different accents, with different insinuations, in different languages. She actually had to look up the word in some of the bilingual dictionaries they had around the house.
She stopped after noon came around.
Taylor had told Danny that she was going to start running during the day and she meant it. She had a little bit of pudge around her middle, and a daily jog would get rid of that in no time flat. So, she put on her best sneakers, sweatpants and a hoodie. It was a brisk January day, but she knew that when you were physically active, even on a cold day, you could easily overheat if you were wearing too many layers.
She took a deep breath of the freezing air, let it out through her nose, making her look like she was snorting steam, and started a light jog.
Fifty feet in and her lungs started to burn. Once around the block and it felt like her legs were turning into noodles. Second lap and it felt like her heart was going to burst out of her ribcage and her veins were pumping liquid pain.
She all but collapsed on the couch, sweat pouring off of her forehead. It was five degrees outside, but to her, it felt like it was a hundred and twelve. Her hair stuck to her forehead and neck, feeling icky, and the back of her shirt clung to her skin, also drenched.
"Oh, god, I hope that gets a lot easier," she moaned, practically melting into the sofa.
Not wanting to move, but not feeling like sitting there in silence, she turned on the TV. There was a cartoon on that she had never really cared for. Some asian show about training pets to be murder beasts and shoot lightning from their faces.
It reminded her of something she had been thinking recently. She could gain abilities from anything she ate. Simple enough. She ate a calculator, she got math skills. She ate pepper spray and could blast it from her mouth or hands.
What if she ate a book? What if she ate a comic book?
If she ate manual on martial arts, would she instantly know that martial art?
She'd have to find out. She went to stand, then groaned as her legs protested.
"I'll test it later," she turned it over to the Discovery channel, and spent the rest of that afternoon watching a show about life on an African savannah.
-9002-
That evening, after a brief, mostly quiet dinner with her father, she went to her room and pulled out a journal, eagerly writing down some of the abilities she had gained since her time in the locker and what she knew about them so far.
"My next test," she said to herself quietly as she wrote it down, "is to eat a book, to see what, if any, power is to be gained. Starting with an old dictionary." She pulled the out of date tome in front of herself, briefly wondering if it would taste good, but knowing it had to have a better flavor that some of the other things she had eaten recently.
The first bite yielded no results, the same for the second. It wasn't until the third, then the seventh after that, that she gained anything else at all.
Ability ([Paper Light]) gained.
Ability ([Paper Cut]) gained.
"The hell? That has nothing to do with the dictionary," she grumbled, but tried them out, anyway.
([Paper Light]) as the name implied, made her weigh only as much as paper would, if someone had made a life sized origami human. She probably had only twenty pounds to her name when that was on. It wasn't something she could really see being useful at the moment.
The next, ([Paper Cut]), was freaking scary! She never really thought about how sharp paper was. Sure, she'd had cuts from them before, but she hadn't actually thought it as more than a fluke. A really annoying fluke.
But paper was sharp, extremely so. It was only it's flimsy rigidity that kept it from cutting people's fingers off, instead of superficial wounds at worst.
Taylor got to see, and experiment with, exactly what that kind of edge could do when some real power was put behind it. Using it on her fingernail, she had cut through the leather of an old shoe like it was butter. Applying it to the edge of her hand she swiped the top of an empty soda can and it separated as if it had never been attached in the first place.
The girl looked at her hand, wide eyed.
"Holy shit," she breathed, "I can only use this in emergencies. This'll kill somebody. On accident."
Shocked as she was, she still wrote the abilities down, then moved on to her next test.
Having planned most of this out, far in advance of the actual testing, she had scavenged some old metal tools from the basement and hidden them in her room. They were repairman tools that her grandfather on her dad's side used to have. Obviously, he didn't use them anymore. They had years of dust accrued on them, and it would take a real thorough washing to remove it all. Some of them were more rust than metal.
Still, they were perfect for her needs. Taylor picked a wrench out of the set and stuck it in her mouth, taking a bite and chewing.
"Huh," she mumbled after swallowing that first bite, "Tangy." Again, it wasn't until the third bite that she got anything.
Ability ([Hardness: Steel]) gained.
Ability ([Handy]) gained.
"Okay, what?"
She turned on the second power, and immediately knew how to make adjustments to the lighting fixtures of her room and understood how to fix almost everything she saw, should it break in simple ways. She had become a handyman.
"That's… useful?" Taylor mumbled, crossing her arms and tilting her head from one side to the next, "Suppose I could take Shop Class next year," she reasoned.
Turning on ([Hardness: Steel]) did exactly as it should, making her body as hard as steel. It didn't change the color of her skin, but tapping her fingers together made clinking sounds, like a steel pipes little clashing.
"Oho," she almost crowed, barely keeping the volume down and bringing her dad up to ask questions. She had the immediate thought of using this ability in conjunction with ([Paper Cut]). She had seen what using it with only her normal hand had done. What would happen if she applied it to herself when she was hard as steel? Literally?
Wondering if she could improve both of those abilities, she went back to the tool box and started eating more of the tools inside. She didn't stop until there were no tools left, then ate the metal box itself.
Ability ([Improved Hardness: Steel]) gained.
Ability ([Rust]) gained.
Ability ([Steel Skin]) gained.
Ability ([Adjustable]) gained.
Ability ([Contain]) gained.
The first replaced ([Hardness: Steel]), making her body heavy and more durable than she could believe. The second, after a quick moment of testing, could make any metal that could rust away, do so in seconds. The third made her skin grey and shine like a mirror.
The fourth was weird.
When Taylor activated it, she found that she could… well, adjust herself. Her height, the length of her hair, her skin color.
"Okay," she said, "Bullshit. I call bullshit." The knurl that appeared on her wrist, allowing her to dial her skin tone from pale white to black as night, sinking back into her skin, another appearing on her forehead, allowing her to change the length of her hair.
It seemed that, if she thought about what she wanted to change about herself, as long as she a before and after in mind, a knurl would appear and she could roll it up or down as she saw fit between the two pictures in her mind's eye. She grinned, her face tinged with a little bit of pink, as she made one appear on her chest.
With a few turns her barely A cups turned into obscene F cups.
"Ow! Ow! Ow!" She whimpered, quickly turning herself back down to normal. She hadn't even thought about what would happen should the bra she was wearing not transform with her bust. It hurt like the dickens, is what.
She removed her baggy shirt and looked at her chest, grimacing at the bloody red trenches she had carved into herself.
"Son of a bitch," Taylor cursed. Then an idea occurred to her. Another knurl appeared on her chest, and she spun it down. Instead of increasing or decreasing her bust, her wounds shrank then disappeared, leaving unblemished skin.
"I repeat," she said with a massive grin, "Bullshit. All kinds of bullshit."
She then turned to the mirror, imagining her face next to Angelina Jolie's. To her surprise, another adjustable wheel didn't appear. She frowned in thought.
She focused on the difference between their lips, hers and Angelina's, and one appeared on her chin. She tried thinking of their faces again, and nothing.
"Right then, specific changes-no," she grinned a little to herself, "adjustments only. Nothing broad." She could probably look like the actress, if she took her time and changed her features, one by one, but that would take a lot of time. And, despite the obvious uses for this, she realized she'd need to do a lot more testing before she used it for anything more than some fun and temporary body modding.
She quickly discovered there were two ways for her to gain and reduce her height, the first was changing the length of her torso, the second was changing the length of her legs. Nothing else changed, though. Not her arms for one, or her shoulders. It made her look mutate, with arms too short for her torso, or legs too long. She undid every change before moving onto the next one, thankfully, not wanting to know what would happen if she didn't. She didn't trust herself enough to rely on her own body image to return it back to normal should she mess up.
That said, she removed her bra, put on an extremely baggy hoodie, and ratcheted up her bust until the zipper strained. She grinned down at her new boobs, even knowing she couldn't keep them. She left the final knurl on, wrote down her findings, and moved on to her final ability.
([Contain]) was cool, and somewhat creepy. It allowed her to open a compartment, anywhere on her body, and put things inside of it. It wasn't a magical doorway to an infinite space, or a bag of holding, or anything else like that, but, within the space of her forearm, she could easily store several pencils, or even a knife. Within her chest, she could store a couple of books, or even a change of clothes, should the need arise.
That was, her actual chest and not her currently gargantuan mammaries. She didn't see the point in seeing what she could hold there, since she wouldn't have them for long.
Again, Taylor wrote down what she had discovered so far. Her abilities made her rather powerful, all told. A cutting edge as fine as paper, hard as steel, with the propensity to be changed to suit her needs.
Having a sudden flash of inspiration, she dialed her chest back to normal. She then turned on ([Improved Hardness: Steel]) and ([Adjustable]). A knurl appeared on her stomach and she pushed it all the way up, making herself as hard as diamond.
"Holy crap," she uttered to her room, "This is so goddamn overpowered. I freakin' love it!"
For the rest of that evening, she played with her ([Adjustable]) ability. Figuring out it's limits and changing things about herself to look ridiculous, then turning them back. As it would turn out, she couldn't change anything metaphorical about herself with one of her knurls. Like her thoughts, she couldn't adjust the way she thought about things. But she could change the number of connective nerves in her brain.
The first time she tried it, it hurt like the dickens. Taylor resolved not to try that again until she knew exactly what she was doing. Sure, she took a biology class at Winslow, but a brain surgeon that did not make.
That night, Taylor Hebert fell asleep with a bit more muscle tone and full A cups. She planned to grow them out to a mild C by the end of the year, and bloating them enormously any time she felt like it in private. It felt good to have something about herself be feminine, aside from her hair.
-9002-
When she went back to school on Monday, Taylor made eye contact with Principal Blackwell, miming tapping on her watch, indicating that the time was ticking down. The woman frowned at her, but nothing else.
As usual, the trio were vicious in return for her lambasting of them, by proxy, on the Friday previous. That morning she found her locker filled with, thankfully sealed, tampons. It did its purpose in reminding her of her entrapment in that pit by their hands. It also served to ruin her mood.
She had been indifferent about the day, now she was hateful. She contemplated all the ways she could get each over them back, now that she had the power to do so, even with the voice of her mother in the back of her head.
Justice, not revenge. It kept saying to her.
But it didn't stop her from daydreaming about it.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to brighten her day. Nothing did. Not getting a passing wave from Vincent. Not being thankfully ignored by Gladly. Not even finding a new spot to eat her lunch that three of them hadn't found yet.
No, the only thing that brought up her mood was when she heard that Emma's family would be going out of town on Wednesday for a shoot. The teen model was going to be doing some stock photos for a clothing company, or something. It really didn't matter.
"Daddy says it will be a major step up from all of the usual rigmarole, and open some major doors in modelling for me," Emma boasted in the last class of the day.
"So, where are you going?" Madison asked.
"Just to Boston, but I'll be gone for a couple of days," the redhead shrugged.
"Bare your teeth," Sophia said by way of encouragement.
Taylor would have scoffed, if it wouldn't have brought their attention on her again.
Still, now she had an opening. She would hit Emma's house tomorrow. She wouldn't do anything to her like she had Madison, but she would look for evidence, anything she could use, of the girl's wrongs against her.
-9002-
If Taylor was a thief, breaking into people's houses would be ridiculously easy with her ([Shadow Form]). No security system in the world was set to stop shadows from existing in a room. Taylor even surmised that, as long as it wasn't airtight, she could get into any room on the planet.
So, breaking into Emma's upscale home in the upper class suburbs wasn't even worth mentioning for difficulty.
Just like with the Clemens home, the skinny girl came up through the pipes, and started slithering about the house, looking through cabinets and drawers and a few hidden compartments for her mother's flute before she turned her attention on Emma's room.
Just like the last time she had visited it, over two years ago, the walls were a pastel blue and plastered with pictures of boy bands, though they had changed to match the current hot groups. On a shelf sat well over a dozen stuffed animals and expensive dolls, including an Alexandria figure that Taylor had wanted so much when she was younger. The model's closet was big enough to need several long legged strides to cross from the entrance to the back, and it was full of every kind of clothing Taylor could remember ever seeing the other girl in.
The dresser was made of mahogany and had a huge vanity mirror on it, decorated with more pictures from Emma's vacations. She noticed that none of the ones with herself in them remained on the tableau.
Taylor began searching for clues, evidence, proof of what this traitorous bitch had put her through. A diary, hopefully. Pictures, unlikely. A video, with Sophia, Madison, and Emma claiming full responsibility for everything they had ever done, only in her dreams.
As luck would have it, Emma's that is, the model had only kept proof of their bullying on her phone, which she was never without.
What she had left behind though, having no way to transport it, nor any reason to, was the bent and dirty form of Annette Hebert's flute.
Taylor found it, hidden well, behind one of the boy band posters. She only knew to look there because she had been the one to find this secret cubby in the model's room when they were nine. Back then, they had stored pictures of handsome actors there.
Now, she found one of the few things in this world that meant more to her than anything else.
Even dirty and bent, the esper held it reverently, pulling it close to her chest. She was unprepared for the wave of emotion that hit her like a hammerblow to the face.
The girl almost panicked. She needed to turn back to normal, she needed to be solid for this, she needed to be herself! She quickly flew into the drain of the sink in Emma's private bathroom, down into the sewers. It took only a couple minutes to find a large enough chamber.
She shut off ([Shadow Form]) and fell to her knees, clutching the irreparably damaged instrument to herself, and cried.
It started small at first, just a few tears and some quiet sobs, but that quickly turned into wails of grief and regret. Only a few moments after she started, she was almost screaming with intensity of her emotional surge.
It wasn't just the flute. It wasn't the locker. It wasn't the hurtful words, the petty pranks, or the outright physical abuse. It was all of it. Three years of suppressed emotion came pouring out of her. Every negative emotion from the time of her mother's death until the locker. Every single useless meeting with the Winslow staff, every silent dinner with her father, every instance of isolation. Everything.
For more than an hour the girl cried. She knew the stink of the sewer had long since seeped into her clothing and hair, but she couldn't care less. Taylor was venting her entire heart into that alcove of the sewers. The stink could be washed off later.
Later that night, when Danny came home, it was to find his daughter sitting at the kitchen table, her hair still wet from a recent shower, and her eyes red and puffy.
"Kiddo?" He asked tentatively, "What happened?"
In answer, Taylor placed the bent, though cleaned, flute on the table. At first, the man didn't recognize it. It looked so… different from the last time he saw it.
Then it dawned on him.
Just as slowly and lovingly as Taylor had, he picked it up, inspecting the instrument.
"I found it," the girl said, "They took it, but I finally found it," she sniffed, wiping a fresh set of tears from her eyes, "I'm sorry."
The man set the silver flute down and pulled his little girl into a tight embrace, his own eyes watering freely. He had been waiting for this, ever since he had picked her up from the hospital. To him, it was obvious the girl was in shock, or something similar, there was no other way for her to be so chipper after such a horrible event. Nothing healthy could make her act that way.
So this, this was what she really needed. Closure, of one kind or another, to help her. Finding Annette's instrument was just the trigger.
"It's okay," he said to her, brushing her hair with his fingers and kissing the side of her head, "It's all going to be okay. I promise."
Taylor began to cry again, without the loud sobs this time, and clutched her father tighter, burying her face into his chest. She loved her dad, but it wasn't until this moment that she realized just how much. For awhile now, it felt like they had been growing apart, but she knew that, if she lost him too, her entire world would implode.
There had been days, regretful dark days, where she had wished it had been him, instead of her mother, that had died in the wreck. She cursed herself for ever thinking such a thing. It would hurt just as much if it had been him that had been lost.
"I love you, Daddy," she said, "I love you."
"I love you, too, kiddo," he whispered to her, "Never doubt it." The family of two held onto one another for the entire evening, going so far as to fall asleep on the couch, rather than going to their individual rooms. They had spent the evening cheering up and bonding with some of their favorite movies from happier days.
It wasn't perfect, without Taylor's mother it would never be perfect, but it was getting better.
-9002-
Yes, 'Knurl' is a real word. I invite you to type it into google images. I can say, from personal experience, that you shouldn't find pictures that are not safe for work.
Please Enjoy.
