morP 3.6
The clock struck nine.
Taylor had finally made it to the other entrance of the gymnasium and slipped inside. She wanted to see this with her own eyes.
And record it all with her phone, for posterity, of course.
As almost an afterthought, Taylor directed small bugs to infiltrate Emma's hair, bite off follicles at the base to create bald spots once her hair products wore off. It was so tempting to do a reverse-mohawk on her former friend, though.
Madison and the rest of the bitches coven would get theirs in due time. Attacking the seams of their prom dresses would add a Benny Hill flavor to the entire evening, but multiple simultaneous wardrobe malfunctions would be so out of the ordinary as to practically mandate a deep forensic search into why it happened. One little lost insect antennae would firmly point all the blame back at her cape persona, or worse link it to her real identity.
She banished the thought and focused on the control of her bugs as she recorded the events as they unfolded in front of her, her height allowed her to capture it all unobstructed from the far side of the gymnasium from the stage.
Jesse took the steps up the stage two at a time, picked up the microphone stand and walked to center stage as he flicked the switch to 'on' with a squeal of feedback and announced' "Hello everyone, may I have your attention?" to the confusion of almost everyone in the gym.
"First of all, I'm sure for everyone visiting from another school here tonight, let's all thank the students from Immaculata for hosting this great event, am I right?" said Jesse as he applauded into the mike to a spattering answer of applause from the floor.
He motioned to a group of Winslow Track Team members on the floor who pushed Sophia up the stairs of the stage.
Jesse held out his hand for Sophia to join him at the microphone stand. Sophia strode over with a slightly confused look on her face. "Now, just let me mention Sophia here. A great up and comer you may have noticed at the intramural track meets."
Sophia's look of confusion turned into a slight grin at the praise.
Taylor knew the timing of what came next had to be perfect as she set her swarms in motion.
Jesse cleared his throat and said, "You all have her to thank for replacing the chocolate on the cookie table with Ex Lax."
Sophia's face contorted through multiple emotions as the realization of what he had accused her of sunk in.
"Be sure to thank Sophia personally if you get a chance." With that, Jesse dropped the mike with a hollow echoing boom drowned out by angry muttering by the congregated students.
Taylor aimed for the bug she'd placed on the back of Sophia's belt.
Sophia hostilely turned to Jesse and hissed, "Why the fuck did you set me up like this?"
Jesse answered, "Your hazing? Stepped it up this afternoon, hope you like it…"
Taylor directed her bugs to push one opened pint can of red paint off of the lighting mounted over the gymnasium floor.
A length of surgical rubber tubing duct taped to the can let the weight swing like a pendulum toward the stage.
The rubber tubing stretched under the centripetal force to impact and splash Sophia around her waist and up her torso, then rebound up as the elastic de-stressed to dump the remaining red paint on her head from above.
The reason the timing was so important was because the Track Team had previously placed someone in the rigging directly above the stage who dumped a bucket of Marinara sauce directly down on Sophia's head.
Sounds of surprise and shock intermingled with the hooting and fist pumping of Track Team members clustered around the front of the stage.
A couple of Track Team members who knew what the original plan was stood at the front of the stage in shock at his unexpected turn of events, their plans to spray Sophia with the shaken 2 liter bottles of soda in their hands temporarily forgotten.
Sophia was pissed.
The only area of the stage in a large radius around her not splattered with paint or tomato sauce was under her own feet.
Sophia leapt to attack, her red-slicked arms shot forward, her hands encircled the boys' throat and Sophia throttled Jesse.
The stupid look on his face gave way to pain and anguish as her strong hands crushed his neck.
With her hands firmly wrapped around his throat she bore him down to the ground and kneed him in the groin.
Repeatedly.
Even through her rage Sophia could hear the reaction of the crowd, even if she couldn't see them in through the glare of the bright glaring lights which flooded the stage.
A Track Team member closest to the assault broke from his stupor, clambered up on stage and tried to pull her off of Jesse and she kicked him in the side of their knee to collapse in pain for his trouble.
To his power Sophia blazed like a dark red star over the most prominent background purple haze of confusion among the crowd.
Dean saw Amy glow red also, slap a palm to her forehead and mutter, "Just ONE sonofabitching night off, is that too much to ask…."
The ebb and flow of the gamut of emotions around him mentally tossed him about like a swimmer caught in a powerful undertow.
Steely blue with determination and overconfidence, his date said, "I got this."
Dean couldn't even get the first syllable past his lips, "N…" before she ascended away from him. A fearful yellow wake followed after her.
Victoria rose into the air from amidst the crowd, her long Prom dress rippled and flowed down and around her legs as she flew forward.
She thought she heard Dean yell something after her, but it was lost among the noisy crowd she flew over.
Two more Track Team members from Winslow dashed up the stairs to rescue their teammate when Glory Girl's emotional manipulation aura affected them, and the rest of the students in the audience.
Their attempts to pull Sophia off of their Team Captain promptly devolved into a full-on brawl as the enraged girl abandoned the beaten and bloodied boy beneath her to deal with the newer threats.
Glory Girl hovered at the stage edge indecisively, her instinct to get stuck in conflicted with her desire to keep her expensive dress from being covered in red, like the combatants on stage were.
"Okay, break it up," She forcefully declared to no effect.
The congregated teens nearby felt the wave of awe and terror of her power crash over them, their base instincts to fight, flee, or freeze triggered without their conscious volition.
Panicked teens ran heedlessly into others who stood their ground and chivalrously defended their dates, which sparked multiple shoving matches which escalated into fights on the floor, spread via Brownian motion.
However, one of evolutions' responses to a life or death situation is to make oneself lighter in order to run away faster. Aided and abetted by the pranksters' choice to replace a bowl of chocolate with one of a stool softener and assisted by a power to induce terror, several people had their biology decide for them that now was the time to drop ballast.
Silk, chiffon, explosive diarrhea and its' associated smells wasn't usually the combination that made for a memorable dance night.
The entire gym erupted into chaos as violence spread, scared students panicked, as groups of stranger from other schools realized hey had few familiar faces among the riot which grew around them.
A streetwise teen pinned his friends arms to his side as he shook him yelled in his face, "Dude, MAINTAIN!"
Islands of calm grew as more level-headed teens attempted to calm their cohorts, with partial success as more belligerent students were swept up in the melee.
Victoria recognized most of the Wards had moved to action. Carlos and her boyfriend fought their way to the stage, Dennis was nowhere to be seen, but Kid Win just stood there gawping at a blonde girl in an Immaculata school uniform as if his brain had crawled out his ear and gone home without him.
"What did you just say?" Chris asked incredulously.
"Hmm? What?" Elisabeth asked.
"What you just said," Chris attempted to clarify, "Did I hear you right?"
"Oh, that… Well, of course if anyone was going to start trouble, it was going to be one of THEM, now, wasn't it."
"Except she didn't say 'THEM' originally," Chris thought to himself, "I've just spent the last hour trying to get into the pants of a Nazi…"
Chris regarded Elisabeth in a new light.
"Why do all the cute ones have to be crazy?" he thought as he moved away to break up a couple of meathead jocks pushing at each other in a macho-off over who had the most testosterone poisoning.
'Why is everyone here crazy?" Chris said as he called on his Wards close combat training to safely interpose himself between the fighting teens.
Taylor focused in on two well-built boys in now red-stained tuxedos who dragged Sophia away from continuing to beat up whoever approached her, a look of recognition in her eyes as she calmed down at last.
She stopped recording, slipped out of the gymnasium doors with a satisfied smirk, and jogged back around the exterior of the building to the entrance closer by the bathrooms.
Through her bugs Taylor sensed people finally manage to calm the fracas on stage, as Glory Girl floated there indecisively as the smell finally reached the heroine. Based on what she could parse together people around the heroine were all agitated and more likely to fight than elsewhere in the gym, her presence was not so subtly making things worse.
Taylor re-entered the other double doors to the gym and moved quickly down the hall to the bathrooms, all the stalls were full as she entered, splashed water on her face and a snatched a paper towel to wipe it off, pivoted, and exited at the same time as she sensed someone leave the boys side.
She was face to face with an uncomfortable looking redheaded boy with a hand held defensively across his abdomen.
"What the hell is happening in there?" Taylor asked him as she wiped the fake tears from her face.
"No clue," he said, "I was, ah… indisposed."
Pairs and groups of students fled past them, a few to the locker rooms in embarrassment, most out of the building as Taylor and the tall, cute redheaded boy made their way into the gym counter to the exiting flow of humanity.
One of the refreshment tables had been overturned, chips of all sorts crushed underfoot against the hardwood floors amongst ice and soda cans, some occasionally leaking in sticky puddles scattered across the floor.
Onstage one of the tuxedoed teens gave aid and assistance to the remnants of Winslow High's Track team smeared, sometimes literally, across the stage. The other one seemed to have an intense conversation with Sophia, most of which could be summed up as:
"Get out of my fucking way, I want to shower this crap off me before it dries."
and
"You can't do that Sophia, the police will need to see the evidence."
"Couldn't happen to a more deserving bitch" Taylor muttered.
"So you go to school with Sophia, I take it?" Dennis inquired.
Taylor decided to let the truth out. It wasn't as if it would make a real difference at this point. She said' "If you can call a year and a half of torment by her 'going to school', then yes.
Dennis asked, "Wait, Sophia bullies you?"
Taylor pointed to fresh scabs under her hair on her scalp, "Does breaking a glass bottle over my head this morning count?"
"What, seriously?"
"Yeah, she punched me in front of a teacher last week and she threatened to throw me out a third story window if I told anyone about her and her friends pouring juice on me today."
"Sophia really did that? I knew she was a bitch, but that's cold…"
Taylor said, "Yeah and the rest of them she arrived with too. How'd you know her?"
"Um…."
"Oh, do you work at the same afterschool job she does?"
"Yeah, that's it." Dennis prevaricated.
Taylor lied, "I figured she'd be at her job and I could get out and enjoy myself away from my regular lack-of social circle. And then they all showed up and it was business as usual."
"Why don't you take this to authorities?"
They had to pause their conversation as the police officers hauled the boys responsible for the pranks out past them
"But we didn't do the paint thing, that was someone else." one boy in a track suit protested.
"Riiight," the cop replied, "We'll be on the look-out for a one-armed man. Get moving."
When the parade of police and perpetrators filed past, "That." Taylor said, "That cop's attitude. Accept whatever 'good enough' explanation will wrap things up, not even bother to try and dig down to the truth. THAT'S why I don't take it to the authorities anymore. Easier to believe whatever bullshit story the bullies made up and stick to and my side of the story no longer matters. Plus it's Winslow. Everyone knows shit happens at Winslow. Unless someone tried to set the building on fire they don't care."
"I tried after what happened in January too, but it got buried, and we couldn't afford to sue with my medical bills, so we settled."
"What happened in January?" Dennis asked.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." Taylor said, "As bad as tonight was, what happened to me in January was worse."
"Maybe I..." Dennis began.
"No, the problem is now, and always was Sophia, " Taylor said, "She's been able to get away with murder and no one has really put her feet to the fire or held her accountable until last week when she punched me in front of two teachers so she couldn't palm it off on someone or something else for a change."
'She punched... " Dennis said, "That was you?"
"Yeah, you heard about it at your job, right? I bet she got a slap on the wrist and went back to work as normal, right?"
Dennis considered what this girl had told him. It all appeared to line up with the facts as he knew them.
Dennis pulled out his phone and said, "Look, let me get your number. I will talk to the people I work for and see if we can get more to happen about Sophia, OK?"
After they exchanged phone numbers, Dennis asked, "Can I take a picture of where Sophia broke the bottle over your head?"
"Um, yeah, OK"
"I' promise to show it to Sophia's, to our boss at work as soon as I can." Dennis said.
"Well, at least one thing good might come out of tonight, then," Taylor said.
Dennis went to catch up with his friends, and Taylor figured since she had her phone out anyway, she might as well get in touch with Squealer to get the reward she was owed.