Jishin 4.1
Taylor got off the bus and walked through the dark residential neighborhood. More insects entered into her radius of control as she approached her destination. She saw her target ahead when she detected the bugs she'd planted in Mr. Barnes car as it approached to drop off Madison at home.
She walked across a lawn and crouched out of sight behind some bushes as Mr. Barnes car drove past. Now that Emma was sure to have another hair-loss freak out tomorrow morning and more inevitable fruitless doctors visits and the associated expense she could move on to the next phase of the plan.
Taylor knew she had to keep the pressure on and not lose momentum this time. Before Madison had even undone her seatbelt Taylor sent swarms of insects inside to retrieve the items she had previously stashed there gradually over the course of many weeks of early morning jogs. It was less work than it took to undermine a driveway, anyway.
Madison said goodnight to her parents and clomped up the stairs in her platform shoes. When she powered on her computer, Taylor had already stilled her swarms out of sight. Madison massaged her feet after she removed the cute, but overly tight, foot crushing lifts. Gnats and tiny insects had already flown into her keyboard underneath the keys just like she'd practiced in Ms. Knott's class earlier in the week. Madison logged onto Parahumans Online, Taylor kept track of the girl's keystrokes, leaned her back against a fence where she sat behind some bushes, created a throwaway PHO account, and shadowed what the petite teen was doing on the computer with her own phone.
The first mosquito of many sucked in its liquid cargo and took flight to transfer it to Madison.
Eventually Madison was face down on the floor and Taylor moved her swarms to stage the scene of a drug overdose. It had taken more dosing by mosquito than she had planned until Madison finally fell unconscious.
Insects wrapped and loosely tied a length of surgical tubing around the prone girls left bicep. More bugs maneuvered a large syringe into position and punctured her skin inexpertly, which disguised where so many drug-transporting mosquitoes had landed and injected her over the past hour or so. Other swarms of bugs dragged crumpled paper lunch bags which held samples of all the finest product Winslow's drug pushers had unwillingly and unknowingly donated to the cause one joint or pill at a time.
Even with the knowledge gained as she observed the stoner community at Winslow, Taylor had to admit to herself she didn't know that much about drugs. However, she figured as long as she dosed the girl incrementally and stopped when the petite pest passed out it would be fine. Madison was young and healthy, so there shouldn't be any long lasting after effects. Probably.
One of the faked up paper bags of incriminating evidence included a list of drug dealers with names like Smoothy, Shifty, and D-Money and a schedule when to pick up more 'supply' to distribute along with several old fives, tens and twenties. Taylor had already planned how to complete the frame of Madison as a druggie with the contraband she had pre-positioned behind the girl's locker over the past month.
It was the difference between the possible, the probable, and the practical. When Madison's parents entered her room in the morning, what would they believe? The protestations of their drug-addled daughter spouting denial after denial, or the grim narrative laid out in evidence before their own eyes and literally at their feet. As good parents they would take whatever action to rescue their poor unfortunately rebellious daughter from her pursuit of the life of a drug addict.
All the flyers and brochures for out of town recovery centers and addiction help programs Taylor had stuffed into their mailbox every few mornings while jogging past over the past month had been like planting seeds. Taylor had no doubt that Madison's parents would make the connection and enroll their daughter before the weekend was up and reap what she had sown.
She hefted her backpack filled with the selection of bugs from Immaculata, the ones she hadn't fed to each other immediately after Sophia got splashed with paint and pasta sauce to keep the useful parts of the swarm alive anyway. Her duffel of black widows was also weighed down by the lengths of silk she'd had them braid into strong, useful short lengths to be joined together as needed.
Madison's neighborhood faded from awareness as Taylor walked back home ready to put an end to this day.
Taylor awoke, her body still ached too much to resume her morning jogging routine.
Taylor lay in bed and plotted where her most likely successes and failures from last night would come, and then set up other plans with fallbacks and options to take if setbacks occurred. She had to let the dominoes fall where they may, but now that she had more experience and better ideas, she could better plan ahead for when things didn't go her way.
Taylor had been caught by Emma's bitches coven just as she was setting up the last bit of the paint pendulum on stage. She had used her own height to estimate where the swing would end up. If only she hadn't had to pop the top off the can of paint with a screwdriver by hand, it all could have gone smoother without exposing herself.
The problem had been that over the previous week she had let up on the pressure and allowed Madison, Emma, and Sophia to adapt to the disruptions she'd worked so hard to arrange and they naturally had pushed back. Sophia's stepped-up threats in the restroom came from her having a week in detention to stew, marinate in her resentment of the situation, and plot and plan her own revenge. Taylor recognized now she had to keep up the pressure and disrupt whatever Sophia tried to come up with. The best defense was a good offense, after all.
Taylor paused, and realized she really had to stop eavesdropping on the history class for jocks taught by the Football Coach. The man couldn't seem to go a minute without a sports metaphor or ten minutes without one athlete or other getting him to segue into reminiscing about his own glory days. There was a reason his nickname was 'The Rock', and it refereed to 'as smart as one' rather than the Earth Aleph action movie star.
A memory from last night intruded into her consciousness, Taylor relived the regret of how she spilled her guts to that redheaded guy, but she'd been caught up in the moment.
Why had it been so easy to tell a stranger about what was going on in her life, and yet so much harder to talk about the same things with her own father?
She heard the muffled bangs of cookware from downstairs as her father made breakfast.
Taylor was still in her pajamas when she walked downstairs and leaned in the doorway of the kitchen.
"Good morning Taylor," Danny said, "Penny for your thoughts?"
Taylor walked next to refrigerator and dragged the five gallon water bottle half filled with coins across the floor and said, "That ought to cover it."
Danny turned off the burners on the stove. He could tell there was a lot on her mind, and it would be best if she could get it out without being interrupted. The pancakes could wait.
With how much Taylor had been out of the house these past couple of weeks he had finally realized that parenting was more than just making dinner.
Taylor held back tears as she said, "I feel we're not even a family anymore, we're just pretending. Ever since Mom died."
Danny slumped into a chair, the words hit him with more force than any fist ever could.
Danny got misty eyed and explained, "How it felt to have lost your mother, it... it felt like it had pulled the heart out of my chest, threw it on the floor in front of him and stomped on it, then something put it back in and forced him to keep going."
He sighed deeply and said, "After your mother died I had to be your shoulder to cry on when I need one to cry on myself. I had to take responsibility for all the day to day mundane things I had just taken for granted but now could not be ignored. So I just buried myself in attending to all the minor details, only trying to get through five seconds at a time. I removed all the highs and lows of everyday existence because if I felt more up than usual it felt like a betrayal to the memory of your mother, and if I was lower I turned to those same memories and tinged them with sadness. I just couldn't handle the big picture, but that also shrunk my worldview too small to see how it was affecting you."
Danny sniffed, wiped the welled up moisture from his eyes and said, "I guess I can't wallow in old miseries anymore just because they're familiar."
Taylor asked, "How did we get this way?"
"I just became resigned to it all," Danny said, "and resignation is just confirmed desperation."
"Wow, dad… that was existential." Taylor said.
Danny lifted an eyebrow over the top of his glasses a s he looked at her. "You've been taking a Philosophy class in school haven't you?"
Taylor thought of all the classes she'd 'audited' by listening in with her bugs. "Kinda, how'd you know?"
"Something your mother told me once," Danny said as he smirked at the memory, "She said she could always tell the ones in philosophy class, because they were the only ones who used the word 'existential'."
Taylor said, "I wonder what Mom would have said about this."
Danny said, "It's like that song... 'She's gone, tell me how did things go so wrong.'"
"Trust you to quote something with a guitar riff, Dad. It should be 'So it goes'. Vonnegut, it's a little more highbrow." Taylor said.
"Kiddo, it was your mother that was the English Professor, not me."
"Yeah, well I guess I picked up a lot through osmosis, then, didn't I."
"So tell me, what brought this on?" Danny asked.
"I guess the final straw was last night when Emma taunted me in front of her friends with how I cried after Mom's death."
"That's... that's horrible. Emma's... wait a minute, Emma taunted you in front of her friends? Not your friends?"
"No Dad, we haven't been friends since..." Taylor continued on and explained to her father how when she arrived home from Camp almost two years ago things turned for the worse and kept going.
It took quite a while.
"So even after all that, you still went to the dance?" Danny asked, "Why?"
"Enough kids at school were talking about not going, so I figured it would be a chance to at least experience what other schools' students were like." Taylor lied, "It turns out I couldn't escape the worst of Winslow even there because Emma tried to emotionally destroy me, and as I pulled myself together in the bathroom the Winslow Track team dumped paint on a girl onstage, and the place went nuts."
"How did you even know all this if you were in the bathroom?" Danny asked.
"Just try and keep a gym full of teenagers from gossiping afterwards... it can't be done." Taylor said, "I even talked with a boy who found out the hard way there was ex-lax in the snacks."
Danny nodded and asked, "So, this boy you talked to.. was he real or a 'Canadian Boyfriend'?"
Taylor rolled her eyes, "Daaad... His name was Dennis, I think, but he was with his own group."
"Do you want me to come to school on Monday? Help straighten things out?"
"No, I think I've got a pretty good handle on things…"
"Okay, Taylor. I'll support you in this, but trust me enough to ask for help from now on, OK?"
She hugged her Dad. For a long time.
Later in the morning after breakfast and further conversation with her father, Taylor caught the bus to run errands and shop for her cape persona's needs. She felt, not lighter, but cleansed after the morning reconnecting with her Dad. Catharsis was a good thing. Who knew?
She planned to stop at the drug store first and get more painkillers, but she could tough it out until then. Today was all about the future, being prepared and making redundant contingency plans so that what happened to her on Friday at school would never happen again.
Taylor asked at the desk at the Library for the Physician's Desk Reference in order to look up maladies that would fit Emma's symptoms. She included page numbers in her notes to incriminate Emma once Taylor planted them in a laundry basket to be discovered by Emma's mom.
It didn't take too long to type up her list, search online for medical journal articles about the diseases to print out and add to the few she'd already stashed in the ceiling of Emma's house.
It still rankled that she was caught by Emma and her tag-alongs after she went onstage to give her bugs a human sized target, adjust the swing of the pendulum for aim, and remove the top of the paint can for transport by swarm back to the overhead lights. Taylor resolved to practice fine manipulation with her bugs more so that in the future she would be forced to personally take a hand in the same way again.
Perhaps she should practice to figure out a way to sew all the seams on Emma's clothes just a little tighter. That way little miss fashion model would think she was getting fat. It would be a lot of work, but it was something to consider adding to the plans.
Maybe she should see what delights the section on infectious diseases held in store for Emma's soon-to-be-exposed fakery.
After an hour Taylor finished her research at the Library and walked towards the bait and tackle store. She'd had an inspiration that plastic fishing beads to scatter for area denial would be something light, compact, and good to have in an emergency. She could browse the aisles and see what else leapt out and said 'buy me' while she was there.
Taylor left the post office after another bus ride where she had mailed a copied set of all the evidence against her tormentors to herself. As she walked she noted another set of unused voids in the apartment building beside her left by construction. It was probably just easier to drywall over the eighteen inch wide floor to ceiling gap between the bathtub and the sink than it was to figure out how to turn it into useable space.
It was similar to the places as she had used to stash the ghosted camera and further copies of her evidence, at different locations in her neighborhood of course.
The parable about keeping all your eggs in one basket existed for a reason, after all.
On the bus ride back home Taylor directed her dispersed Black Widows she had made scatter to converge again at her house when she received a text from Squealer. She just woke up? It's after two… The Merchant Tinker wanted to meet Sunday evening, and when tried to get more information, all she got was a text that said, 'got a surprise for ya. L8R'. It looked like she was heading out in costume Sunday night, then.
Taylor knew it would take time to put all the armored panels in her costume back where they belonged. She wanted to watch a movie with her Dad like they had and reconnect a little.
In the meantime she would have her spiders continue to make short lengths of silk rope she could connect as she needed. She could start on a new silk bodysuit for more general wear at school on Monday anyway.
Taylor arrived back home, brought her supplies upstairs, and logged on to Parahumans Online. The original post of the Immaculata thread had been updated.
She clicked the link to the video. An image of Sophia behind a podium in some elementary school classroom filled the pop-up window as the video buffered and downloaded.
When it finally played, from her speakers issued, "How we treat each other matters…" Taylor watched the rest of the speech with an expression of shocked disbelief on her face.
Taylor wondered just how big a gun the PRT had to hold to Sophia's head to force her to go through with that speech? She had missed so much of it when she metaphorically picked her jaw up off the floor she just had to watch it again.