2.3 Taylor
The large, rusted iron door groans loudly as Taylor shoulders her way through. She should probably get some WD40 for that.
The temporary base of operations that Val had scouted out for her is a small, forgettable building located in the Docks, which is the go-to place for finding businesses and buildings that have gone long abandoned since the crumbling of Brockton Bay's status as a major import and export hub. Val had told her it would be smarter to spend more time watching the building to make sure it was truly abandoned, but Taylor has long grown impatient and is willing to take the risk.
The building itself seems to have previously been a storage room of some kind and boasts a basement that's more spacious than the room above. Upon her first arrival, boxes and other detritus had been haphazardly scattered throughout the room, leaving it looking almost like a tornado had passed through. She's managed to curtail the madness slightly, but 'messy' would still be too kind of an adjective. Still, there's now space cleared on some of the metal racks that line the walls and she can actually manage to see most of the floor. She's also managed to set up a plastic folding table she had purchased the day prior to begin using as her experimental workbench. Humble beginnings, certainly, but this doesn't bother her.
It's dark out, around 10 pm. Taylor has been sneaking out at the same time for the past few nights to spend some time organizing the room and dragging in supplies that she can feel she will need. It's about a forty-minute jog from her house, so she's stopped running in the mornings, her daily exercise quota now filled simply through travel requirements. It's obviously dangerous to be out after dark in Brockton Bay as a young woman, but before she had left for the Wards Val had woven an enchantment over her jacket that she assures will have curious eyes sliding off of her. Taylor finds herself more than a bit jealous that Val's magic seems to be so much more free-form than what she's been given. She wonders why her power has placed so many seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what she can do and how she can do it. She's going to have to be creative to get value out of it.
She has a goal, tonight. Now that she's managed to clear enough space on the ground of her workshop, she can finally call in some more help. The similarities in scenery and circumstances to Val's summoning are obvious enough that there's a low thrill of anxiousness running through her. She has absolutely no idea what will be coming out of this circle, only that it's going to be able to serve as some kind of 'hired help' so to say, and that it's not going to be anything with a sentience level similar to Val's.
She grabs her chalk from her workbench and gets down on her hands and knees. As she has done once before, she begins the process of scrawling out those elegant, curling lines whose designs leave no doubt to their arcane nature. The summoning circle that she's making is vastly less complex than the one that she had drawn for Val, but it still takes a decent amount of time to finish. Her hand has become a little steadier while drawing than her first attempt, but she knows it doesn't really matter. Her power is doing all of the hard parts and she happily lets it guide her. She just wishes it weren't so stingy in regards to the other branches of magic available to her.
Summoning circle complete, Taylor leans back and takes a moment to admire her creation. There's a certain sense of fascination present in observing the designs. The lines are almost hard to follow in the way they seem to split and merge into lesser or greater patterns and it leaves her head hurting when she tries too hard to understand them as a whole. She shakes her head, ignores the oddity, and goes about invoking the ritual.
Like the first time, the lines begin to coruscate, and the room is washed in white rays of light that bounce off the walls. It builds to a crescendo, a flash, and then blinks out. Something is left hunched over in the circle.
It's… not what she was expecting, as is becoming a recurring trend in her life.
The words that immediately come to mind are "rock golem", but it's not entirely accurate. It's a hunched, vaguely humanoid figure with two arms, two legs, and a head, but it's made up of rocks and chunks of earth, and Taylor can see plant buds sprouting out of the cracks in its body. It's about three feet tall. There's a yellow flower budding on the top of its head and Taylor absolutely refuses to admit that it's cute.
She feels the mental acknowledgement that the thing has accepted the "Contract" embedded into the summoning circle, but it has yet to move, say, or do anything since its arrival. Taylor breaks the silence.
"Um, hello there?"
The thing continues to stare dumbly at her. She doesn't know how she can interpret the face of something that doesn't have a face, but she just did.
"Can you understand me?"
It continues to stare, well, dumbly.
Right. Not intelligent, she reminds herself. And no mouth to respond, anyways.
"Lift your arms up if you can understand me."
The thing lifts its rocky arms up into the air. That's a good sign, at least. She wonders if it had responded instinctually to the command or if it's actually comprehending her.
"Okay, awesome. I'm going to grab my brush and break the binding array for you. Hold tight."
She thinks it might be silly talking to it like a person, but it understands commands, so there's something going on behind that emotionless rock face. Probably.
She walks over to her workbench and grabs the brush and begins to scrub away the outermost portion of the ritual.
Once it's been broken, she holds the brush towards the golem thing and says to it,
"Here, take this and finish clearing off the ground. I'm going to call you in a friend."
Rituals can't be reused and need to be redrawn for each summoning. Taylor doesn't know why, as usual.
The thing shambles clumsily over to her and reaches out to grab the brush. She notices that it only has three large, clumsy-looking rocky digits on its hands. She wonders if the lack of dexterity will be an issue.
The thing subserviently begins to scrub away at the floor and Taylor is hit by the surrealness of the situation, but forces herself to push through it. While the golem takes care of the floor, Taylor spends some time clearing away the junk on the shelves and reorganizing the boxes. She's going to want to throw most of this stuff away at some point, but it's going to be hard moving it out of the building without being seen. She trusts her enchanted hoodie to protect her while running through the streets, but she doesn't know if it'll hold up if she does something more likely to be seen as suspicious or attention-gathering. She's sure that once she's more proficient in her powers, she'll be able to cook up some solutions.
"I see you've managed to find some help."
The voice breaks the silence of the quiet room and Taylor almost lets out a scream.
"What, am I not enough for you?" Val continues.
"Oh my god, stop doing that!" This isn't the first time she's tried to scare her by appearing suddenly. If there's one word that Taylor has learned accurately describes her first summons, it's 'mischievous'. It had taken a few days for her to fall fully into this personality, but Taylor suspects that the girl was still getting used to the new world. And probably getting a feel for who Taylor was, as well.
"Doing what?" Val asks, too innocently, and Taylor just gives her the evil eye.
"Well, since you're here, make yourself useful. You can help move these boxes to the top shelves for now. Do that floaty thing of yours."
Val looks amused at her choice of words but does as she's asked. She's perched on a pile of boxes as is, and Taylor wonders how she could have gotten there without making any noise. The door practically screams when it opens, and she had closed it behind her.
The boxes and other random items she's set aside to not be thrown away yet begin to float to the top shelves of the metal racks.
"Have I told you how jealous I am that you can do that?"
"You've mentioned it once or twice, yes," Val says.
It's just not fair that Taylor has magic and it's not even useful magic. Most of the stuff she can do is going to take a bunch of prep time. The fact that Val doesn't even seem to care about magic beyond the set of utility spells she has is nothing less than baffling to Taylor.
"The Wards are letting you out now?" Taylor asks.
"Yup." She pops the P as she says this. "I think it's pretty obvious my whole situation is more than a bit suspicious, but like you said, they don't really have the choice to turn down prospective heroes. Especially strong ones. I'll give props to your world, they know how to take things in stride."
"When a floating golden man comes out of nowhere and people start to develop superpowers, it tends to set a pretty high bar for 'unbelievable'," Taylor says.
Val laughs at that.
"The higher ups still obviously don't completely trust me, but I think they don't see me as any major threat, if at all. I'm just happy they're finally letting me out of the HQ, I was starting to go a bit stir crazy after three days stuck in there. I'm sure there's going to be some not so subtle questioning on what I'm getting up to when I leave, but they don't seem to be willing to outright keep me under lockdown."
"You going to be fine?"
"Probably. Worst case scenario I become too suspicious and they revoke my solo privileges or something. We'll worry about that when and if it happens. If things become too much to deal with, I can always just abandon ship."
Her casual disregard helps to set Taylor at ease.
Val switches topics and says,
"So what's with short, dumb, and ugly over there?" She's gesturing to the rock golem.
"Hey!" Taylor says, feeling protective of her newest summons. "Don't be mean."
"Mean?" She looks amused. "Those things aren't people. They can understand complex commands, because magic I guess, but they have close to no free-thinking ability. Less than an animal. Be careful what you tell them to do."
"You've seen them before?" Taylor asks.
"Yeah. Elementals are pretty standard worker bees for many summoners. They're great for busy work and don't have any upkeep costs. My sister has a couple of theories on what they might be, but nobody knows for sure."
"Theories?" Taylor prompts, curious.
"She's not totally certain, but her working hypothesis," she says the last two words in a mock voice that Taylor suspects is making fun of her sister, "is that the thing accepting the Contract is a deceased human's soul that was pulled into random clumpings of elemental material. Explains the 'call' command written into the summoning circle and the rudimentary intelligence. She thinks that the intelligence drop off is because rock and dirt and such is obviously not an, uh, ideal thing to try to serve as hardware for a brain. Or maybe dying isn't good for your intelligence. Then again, maybe they're natural creatures pulled from their home dimension. My sister could be wrong."
Taylor's kind of horrified at the description.
"That's… awful?"
Val doesn't seem particularly affected.
"Just a theory. But my sister's pretty smart."
The rock golem has finished scrubbing down the small summoning circle and has bumbled over to stand proudly at Taylor's side. Okay, fine, she'll say it. It's cute. Even if its origins might be the stuff of existential nightmares.
Taylor says to Val, "I'm going to call in another one, if you want to watch? Otherwise, can you try to sneak some of the garbage out of this room? It's practically claustrophobic in here."
"Sure. I'll do that while you finish the circle. Don't start without me, the lightshow is fun to watch."
She says this while floating up a decent chunk of the room's debris and walking out the door. Doing that manually would have taken Taylor like ten times as long. She had certainly missed Val's usefulness in the days she had been caught up in the Ward's in-processing.
She tells her little rock golem, "Go start trying to organize the basement a bit. It's a total mess down there." She wonders if "organize the basement" is too unclear, but Val had said they can understand 'complex commands', so she'll hope for the best. It's not like anything valuable is down there and it's good to start testing limits early on.
Taylor starts to work on her second summoning circle of the night. Her hand starts to cramp halfway through. After Val has very quickly come back for her third trip, Taylor finds that she needs to ask,
"Where are you taking all this stuff? How are you making the trips so fast?"
Val gives her an amused look and says, "Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to."
A great policy. Taylor turns back to her circle and continues to scrawl away, blissful in her ignorance.
By the time Val has finished her fifth trip, Taylor is ready to begin. She lets Val know.
"Try to get one of the air ones. They can float around, super useful. Can't carry as much weight, though," Val says.
"There's different kinds?"
"Yeah, bunches. They sometimes mix-and-match what they're made of, too. The combinations can get pretty funny. You can't pick what you get, though, that was a joke. Just have to hope."
This intrigues Taylor, as most things about her power do.
"Well, lets find out." She feels like she's playing a game at a casino.
She presses her hands to the circle, and the usual fanfare occurs.
She gets…
Water? There's chunks of ice, too, floating in the thing, and little mini whirlpools are swirling randomly throughout its body. This one is a lot less humanoid in figure than the rock golem.
"Is this one good?" She asks, looking at Val.
"They're all useful in certain situations." She pauses. "Except probably the fire ones. Those aren't used very often. The water ones are useful because they can shift their body around and wiggle their way into tight places."
There's a joke to be made there, but Taylor is above such immaturity.
"Hey," Val says, realizing something, "that's what she said."
/*****/
Taylor sneaks her way back into her house a few hours past midnight. She's going to try to get at least a few hours of sleep before school, but she has no doubt that she's going to be exhausted throughout the day. The recurring late night expeditions have been wreaking havoc on her general health and Chris has been skirting around asking her if everything is okay. He had somehow managed to whittle his way through her defenses over the days following the juice incident and has convinced her to sit with his friend group at lunch. They're a nice enough bunch, but she can't help but feel like she's being included out of pity.
Only being able to work a few hours each night is a serious problem. Fortunately, she thinks she's going to have a solution soon. With her workshop now functional, if humble and undersupplied, she's going to be able to start making potions and enchanting items. The first things that she's going to create are obvious to her. She needs stronger measures for remaining undetected, a way to reduce her need for sleep, and if possible, a way to reduce travel time to her workshop.
Her longer term goals of course are going to be much harder, but she has plenty of time. This is one of the reasons she had sent Val to join the Wards. Taylor just isn't ready to begin her assault on the gangs of Brockton Bay. She will eventually, though. The gangs are a rot on this city and if the system needs to be torn down to accommodate their removal, then that's what she'll do. She won't forget what they did to Dad, that day. The way they had laughed.
First, though, she needs allies, information, supplies, and concrete plans. Rushing in and hoping for the best is simply a terrible idea, no matter how big of a hammer Val represents. The problems present in this city can't be solved so easily. The information that Val has access to in the Wards is going to be invaluable in the formation of her plans in the following months. So much of what's going on with the Protectorate, PRT, and gangs are hidden from public knowledge, for obvious reasons, and now she has some limited access to that.
Her power has supplied the general process of enchanting but hasn't shared the exact details. It's going to take a lot of experimenting and there's a cap to how much she can do in a few hours each night. Still, she understands the basic process now. In order to enchant something, she first needs to 'empower' a carving tool. Taylor had chosen a stone-carving chisel from one of the hobby stores nearby. The process of empowering the tool leaves Taylor exhausted in a way that's hard to describe – It's not the weariness from extended hard labor, but neither is it the mental exhaustion present after too many hours spent focusing. She doesn't have the words to properly describe it, but it's there, and expending too much power leaves her ready to fall over.
Once she has the empowered tool, she's able to use it to carve symbols into different materials. Her power leads her hand on how to draw the symbol but hasn't shown her how best to get value. It's not as simple as thinking of an effect and drawing the appropriate symbol on. Intent behind the desired effect, the base material, and the symbols she chooses to draw all matter. Val had suggested that she try to stick with simple one-word effects that she can empathize with, and this had made it somewhat easier. Her power certainly works on an almost entirely different rule set than Val's magic, but her advice applies in some situations, so she continues to ask for it.
Once she has the material with the symbol of power carved into it, she's ready to apply it to some item. This is the most noticeably 'magical' part of the process. She grabs the tablet she's carved into and 'presses' it into the item she wants to enhance. The tablet glows an orangeish-yellow and melts into something resembling putty, which she's able to massage into the item. All that's left is the markings of the symbols. The process has some pretty significant tactical implications, but that's not something she needs to worry about yet. She hasn't had enough time to see what happens when she tries this on an item that's very small, but it's on the list of things to test. The list is just so long.
She hasn't even gotten a chance to begin experimenting with alchemy, though she's been gathering different plants and materials. She's also bought some chemistry equipment from that hobby store, so she'll probably be able to start soon. She knows intuitively that enchanting provides effects to items while potions provide effects to people, but she's far from having figured out the limits of each.
Though her public reveal is still far away, she's put some thought into what her cape name might be moving forward. Something to do with the words 'creating' and 'magic', definitely. Her summoning is more of a 'calling' than a 'creating', but the general idea fits, and she thinks she's going to try to keep her summoning mostly hidden, anyways.
Taylor has snuck back into her room through the window she had left unlocked. Laying in bed, now, she forces herself to calm her racing thoughts, and sleep takes her slowly.