by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings. Additional trigger for this chapter: boredom, leading to insanity, and suicide.
Don't Mess With TimeIt could have been anyone else, really. Anyone in Brockton Bay was cursed with a hard life, enough to generate plenty of trigger events.
Didn't you know? It was all the fault of the government, of course.
In a bid for power, in the form of a high number of parahumans, they repeated what they did after the second world war: they imported German ideas and tried to make them work. Tangentially, that allowed gangs like the Empire 88 to thrive.
When the Gesellschaft, the Empire's progenitor, had boasted about having a method to generate cape, spies did what they could to repeat the experience. And thus came the apparent lack of effort to deal with gangs and crimes in Brockton Bay. It was all a single effort to gain more parahumans, through more triggers, through a more difficult and violent environment.
And it worked! The Bay was the city with the largest proportion of super-powered individuals, with more appearing all the time due to the harsh conditions imposed by the gangs' fighting… among other things.
Anyone among its inhabitant could trigger quite easily. Especially when water poured from both the air and the sea, with a water-themed Endbringer coming for its scheduled apparition.
Taylor Hebert was someone unusually hardened. Despite what life and the city threw at her, she was still alive and sane. Mostly. She hadn't triggered when she had been bullied, nor when her mother died. She had resigned herself to being among those who couldn't trigger at all.
But, apparently, seeing Leviathan's tail ravaging the insides of the shelter she had taken refuge in, with her father… was enough for her to change.
Or not.
She didn't change. At all.
But everything around her stopped. At first, she couldn't move. Or see. She started to panic, especially when she felt foreign emotions leaking through her mind.
It felt like shame, about the fact that her power, while powerful, prevented her from doing anything.
She could stop time. Nice, no?
Actually… not so much. If you stopped time, the first thing that would happen would be a total blackout of your senses: no time means that light doesn't travel. Or sound. Or nerve impulses, really. Even if those worked, trying to feel your way around would be hazardous, as each item, and even each atom frozen in time would shatter your body. Even air.
The alien shard worked a bit more (all normally hidden in the dream about space whales) and inserted all the normal exceptions and failsafe conditions that parahumans enjoyed, most notably an immunity to their own power – otherwise Ash Beast would have been nothing more than a single random explosion. In fact, most parahumans would be dead as soon as they try their powers out. Try to fly with insane acceleration, or to punch a wall with your bare knuckles…
It worked, but the entity didn't write instructions, afterwards. In fact, no parahuman ever got a manual about how their powers worked. It was quite bad, because, even if Taylor saw the light come back (in a strange greenish and uniform tint) and could move and breathe again (not that she needed it, apparently), she had no idea about how to start time again. And she would try everything. For a long time.
She was stuck in a place where she would inevitably die… of old age. In fact, her father was already dead, having tried to shield her body with his – she purposely avoided looking in that direction, voluntarily missing the gory details… and something vitally important. But she wasn't dead yet, and she could move.
And, apparently, she could move things, too: after a bit of testing, she established that her powers made it so anything she came in contact with could, after a time which depended on its size, be swallowed in her bubble of still-going time in the immobile world.
That thought made her stop trying to climb the damaged stairs for a second: had her power stopped time for the shelter only? For the city? For the world?
She had to know. She got out. The sky was uniformly green. Leviathan was immobile. The many capes around it were immobile. All in shades of green and grey which left nothing completely lit or completely dark.
She saw Armsmaster, his notorious weapon immobile while he was trying to use its ultra-thin blade to slice through the hardened skin of the Endbringer – who avoided it. She wanted help, and she knew he was the local Protectorate cape, so she approached him, expecting him to awake when she was close enough.
It didn't work. She could free his armour from the stop, but not his body. Even when she shook him. In fact, she noticed that she was harming him, in doing so, so she hurriedly stepped back… and almost cut her own foot off by stepping on the halberd, which had fallen during her experiment. With no sound. The whole world had no sound. Even when she tried to speak.
Her sanity already eroding, she pulled the halberd up and turned towards the thing that had caused her to change instead of doing what had been expected: die. At least, she would have been with her father. If she was the slightest bit religious.
She tried, and succeeded, in poking the Endbringer with Armsmaster's blade. It could even slice through the hard material. Took a bit of time, though. Especially when she tried to go deeper. Because, as she was testing the thing, she saw the beast's tail still into the shelter, where it had acted as a blender. And she wanted to cut that tail off.
It took a week. Not that she had an objective way of measuring time. Nor a subjective one. She wasn't hungry, or even tired. She knew that there were time pieces with coils that could perhaps work when in close contact with her. It would probably be meaningless, as even the day cycle wasn't working anymore. But at least it would bring a semblance of normalcy.
After a long time peeling the monster's skin, she stopped for a while and headed towards the Boardwalk – the shopping district. It wasn't shoplifting if everything was stopped, right? Besides, it could help explain what was happening to her.
Honestly, stopping time? With no way of starting it again? Who thought up that power? It was more a curse, she thought as she wrapped her selected watch around her wrist. While waiting for it to attune to her own time frame, she headed towards the Library. With no bus, it took the best part of an hour to get there. Only to have a massive deception: the computers couldn't work.
Things had to be in close contact with her to function, and she couldn't really surround herself in computer bits just to have a blank window saying "No Internet" – time stopped, even light stopped (barring the strange green glow that replaced it, obviously generated by her power and possibly even only done so in her brain); there was no reason for electricity or electronics to work, either. As the thought hit her, she wanted to slam her head on the keyboard. And with nothing preventing her from doing so, she did.
So she spent the remaining time of that week hacking at the base of Leviathan's tail – thankfully, Armsmaster's halberd was powerful enough to keep working even though she used it non-stop for several effective days.
When she was too tired (even if that wasn't the proper term, as she didn't tire at all), she returned to the Library, pulled a book at random, and read. Thankfully, with her mother's passion being Literature, Taylor liked to read. Otherwise she would have sliced her own veins already. Perhaps.
Still, the work of ending the Endbringer returned to the forefront of her mind after she finished whatever book she had started, and she returned – she still expected her power to stop working at any time, and preferred the beast dealt with in a reasonable time frame.
When the tail was finally separated from the base, it stayed in the air, like everything Taylor had seen everywhere. But near the junction she had just sliced through, Taylor noticed a part that was slightly brighter, and she poked it several times, going as far as plunging the halberd into it. Strangely, or not, each time she sliced at the beast's body afterwards, it went easier and quicker with each blow she brought to the brighter part – she immediately thought that she had found the beast's shatter point: the weakness that could destroy it.
Going at it with a smile, she sliced through the whole beast, several times, ending up with the still-standing Endbringer neatly cut in small parts that would certainly crumble as soon as time restarted.
…as time restarted. That is, not now, Taylor thought sourly. Perhaps never, even. Still, she was happy about her deed, and she wondered if she could do other things.
Could she get the other Endbringers too? She didn't see how: if nothing electrical or chemical was working, she had no vehicle past her bike – or another one, really, as her house had disappeared, washed away with Leviathan's waves. She could still see it, mostly intact but frozen in time in the process of smashing its wood against the nearest brick warehouse.
And she was quite distraught when she realized that, in fact, she had very few things she actually wanted from her house. So, after taking a picture of her and her parents, that she liked the best, she headed to the nearest bike shop.
The way was uneven, due to the waves having damaged much of the infrastructure. But if she went fast enough, she could roll on water, actually – because if she went excruciatingly slowly, the water near her feet started to adapt to her time frame and became… water.
In navigating the city, she came across heroes and villains alike, and noticed one whose appearance made her stop and think for a bit: Shadow Stalker was running from the Endbringer. And her mask was askew, letting Taylor realize who the girl behind it was.
She removed the mask to be sure, and swore. Shadow Stalker, a Ward, a Hero, was Sophia Hess, her high school bully. Well, since she had taken care of the Endbringer, she suspected that Shadow Stalker wasn't needed anymore. She took several debris from the Endbringer shelter (an action that seemed easy, when her hands were on them), and set them around the girl. And atop her.
As soon as time would start again, she would probably die. Taylor didn't care. Or, rather, Taylor was already partly insane from her nonstop hacking at the Endbringer, and she had also two years of bad history with the girl. Some would have stabbed the girl, with her own bolts, before burying her.
Taylor reserved that choice for Emma. Since she had kept Sophia's weaponry, she could use it to transform the girl who had betrayed her into a porcupine of bolts. In her own bedroom – Endbringers had their patterns, and Emma's place on the hill (with the other rich people) meant that it was relatively safe. Or had been.
Taylor didn't know Madison that much, and she suspected that she was probably in a shelter. Or dead already. She shrugged at the lost opportunity, and continued to think about things to occupy her mind. And hands. Because idle minds and all that rot…
Really, with everything she had read recently, Taylor had enough philosophical justifications for getting rid of her enemies before they could stab her in the back again. The only better way (as in "poetic justice") would have been to stab them with her mother's flute – but that thing had disappeared months before.
Some villains participated in Endbringer fights. Taylor felt bad in offing them off the cuff, but there was a hierarchy there, too. If she eliminated the worst of the worst, she would already be better than before.
Hence Hookwolf's fate: using Armsmaster's trusty weapon, she cut the parahuman in small parts and threw them in the Bay. She did the same with Alabaster, although it was really small parts. Lung and Oni Lee weren't there, but she had all the time in the world to find them, and cut them too. Skidmark and Squealer had bunkered down as well, but she had no pity either.
And then she took her bike and headed southwest. She needed to find whether the whole world was immobilized too – given as the sky hasn't moved a bit during the whole happenstance, she thought so, but needed confirmation. Starting by Boston.
The city was stuck in time too. Taylor coming by bike, she went through quarters that were poor too, like home. And like home, villain gangs had established shop there. Seeing what appeared like a guard in a bone-themed armour, in a back alley, Taylor repeated her culling, this time getting hold of the Teeth. Even Butcher fell (or rather, she didn't fall, but still died) when Taylor sliced through her joints… including her neck.
Seeing the place, Taylor noticed large stacks of money, and wondered how villain gang managed their money. She couldn't use Butcher's phone, but the woman had kept a few things in a journal, which Taylor read. It left her with no doubt about why they needed to die. It also gave her the address of the villain lord called Accord.
She went, and went to kill the neat man, but something stopped her: the content of the printed document the man was reading. It was titled "Plan to deal with the Slaughterhouse". Other similar documents were neatly filling the shelves behind the man. "Plan to end world hunger", "Plan to colonize Mars", and so on.
In her memory, nothing truly negative showed when the name Accord was summoned up. But he still gave money to gangs. Was it for peace, or for war? She was indecisive, and chose to wait before passing judgement. Especially as, right there, was her next piece of homework.
In the document, the man had listed the various places the group was rumoured to have gone to, in recent times. And what was probably their last (and current) address. Of course, the "plan" required the willing cooperation of capes, with many heavy hitters that he didn't have, so he was still limited.
Taylor wasn't. She ran her faithful steed for the needed time, and arrived in a small village that was completely deserted – by regular humans. Armsmaster's nanothorn did cut Crawler in small pieces, which Taylor spread on the nearby pavement. It was like she had done with Alabaster, the difference being that Crawler was much bigger.
Mannequin followed, each of its cases opened and emptied. Then Jack, Shatterbird, Bonesaw, Burnscar… one after the other, they fell to the monoblade. Taylor made sure to slice Bonesaw in small parts (blood didn't flow, which made the process cleaner than what you would think) and stuck them in an electrical oven nearby, the button of which she turned to the maximum. It was perhaps insufficient, but she hoped that the girl's bio-tinkered defences hadn't triggered, or that they would be cooked before exploding into a world-ending plague.
And she kept reading. Philosophy was a must, especially as she felt disconnected from everything that she had done until now. Subjective days passed, while the world was stuck in the same femtosecond.
With her time spent reading and biking through the country, confirming the lack of movement everywhere, she expanded her worldview, and re-read school manuals. How to learn how to learn, too. Months passed, too. She felt herself getting better at things, but had no proof since no one could test her.
With no need to eat or sleep, she could travel quite far, and confirmed that the whole continent was stuck in time. And that neither heat and cold bothered her – those two feelings were linked to the agitation of atoms… of which there was none. Why? Because she ending her American trip at the end of Alaska, before trying her bike over the strait. Soon, she was doing the same over Russia and the continental Asian countries.
Using manuals to learn the symbols, she ended up learning the written language, something useful when you had only the road signs to orient yourself – well, that, and a compass.
Despite the immobility of the scenery, as well as the complete silence, she started to enjoy the trip, detouring to tourist attractions such as the Great Wall. Before the CUI slammed its frontiers closed, it had been a tourist attraction, and she even used her bike over its whole length – or whatever remained of it, the CUI having recycled parts of its masonry into housing for its increasing army.
Taylor also came across stuck people in poor places, as well as parahumans using their powers against normal people. In her worldview, that was wrong, and those villains were smacked upon the nose. And cut at the knees.
Africa was a hot place, but she didn't feel it. Exploring it, she saw wild animals, but wild humans too. Each person seen taking advantage of others saw their weapons removed, sometimes with extreme prejudice.
Moord Nag died.
Europe's exploration went differently, because of the existing roads. It didn't mean that she took less time, because there were many interesting things to see in the same places.
It took her years. And like those people kept in time loops, or those prevented from communicating with others, such as Ash Beast, her sanity was quite frayed.
With years having been spent in that silent and immobile world, and expecting even more, she couldn't stand it, and ended it herself.
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
Time flowsAround the world, numerous people died and others suffered inexplicable wounds. At the same time. The "how" wasn't explained immediately, but the "why" was understandable: most, if not all, had been in the process of abusing others.
Others died because of on-going disasters. The people in the damaged Endbringer shelter, for instance, were mostly dead or dying. Especially when Leviathan was suddenly sliced in small bits that fell down in a heap.
Armsmaster fumbled when he found himself without his halberd, but with a dead Endbringer. Still, his stoic mind was able to process the data without stopping – other heroes (and villains), whether less experienced or less emotionless, had stopped their action, gaping at the scene.
"Dragon, status?" he asked, before coughing. Strangely (for him), his whole body was feeling like he had been in a boxing match with the Endbringer. Or Lung.
The Canadian Tinker (AI) was equally swift to get her mind on track, especially as she had the help of a silicium-based mainframe. "Leviathan seems dead. Massive casualties in the shelter. Search and rescue teams sent."
"Linked? Someone triggered and did… this?"
"Inconclusive. If there is, we are looking at… data's coming up… Colin, we might have a problem."
"What?"
"World-wide sources tell me people have died at the same time as Leviathan. Multiple people."
Armsmaster didn't answer immediately, occupied as he was at directing the people inspecting and evacuating the shelter – and moving aside the pile of Endbringer materials. And securing said material. "A world-wide effect wave from Leviathan's death?"
"No. It was instantaneous. And world-wide. We are looking at…"
"Sleeper?" His mind was still sharp.
"Yes. But that's the thing: he hasn't moved."
"How sure are you?"
"100%. I have video feeds of his cell, and he's still heavily sedated, with no sign of awakening. He has had no chance of awakening since we got hold of him, and is not able to use his time powers."
"By the… are you saying that we have another Sleeper on our hands?"
"Inconclusive."
"Damn."
Nearby, the team of rescuers continued to pull people out of the shelter, helped in their endeavour by the flying brutes who were able to remove the Endbringer tail and other debris. Most of the time, the people they brought out were dead. But there were some who were alive. Even if one of those, a crying teenage girl, was still holding onto her dead father.
Barely wounded herself, she was left for Othala to give slow regeneration – Panacea only treated the immediately deadly wounds (and since it was an Endbringer attack, she had enough on her plate for quite a while).
She didn't know anything about what had happened. Otherwise, she wouldn't have leaned on the nearby pile of debris – the one with Shadow Stalker crushed inside. She had no knowledge of the version of herself who had spent half a lifetime locked in a perpendicular timeline with no hope of returning.
And the world had no idea about what she could do, if pressed. Even the precognitive Thinkers had been surprised by the massive deaths around the world. They could only hope that the fact that most were villains was not a fluke.
And hope that it wouldn't happen again.
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
Causes and effectsUp in the air, Eidolon realizes that his sudden grief at Leviathan's death means something, and he finally accepts professional help from a therapist.
He realizes that he was seeing the Endbringers like his children, and further super-powered introspection (he had that power, and hadn't thought he could ever need it, before) made him realize that he was responsible for their appearance.
Ending up in quasi-permanent therapy after this, he becomes unavailable for future Endbringer fights… which don't happen, thankfully.
Contessa was quite happy about this, too, because all her Paths after Leviathan's death had stumbled upon the following Endbringer attacks. As if something massive would happen – on a scale of "one" to "the end of the world… with Cauldron still existing to continue its atrocities", it went beyond the pale. As if Sleeper awakened and took revenge on the whole organization.
Sleeper was an unknown, which is why he was kept in an out-of-country (and very illegal) cell, heavily sedated (hence his name). Despite him not being one of their owns, precogs couldn't predict his actions. Cauldron suspected that it was because the man's power was completely "outside of time".
He was also quite powerful, able to have all his enemies drop dead between two Planck times. That was the only reason why he was kept alive, rather than assassinated: Cauldron wanted to capitalize on that, if Scion awakened.
Now that the reason for Leviathan's death was properly classified, Cauldron was in quite the quandary: they had suspected that powers wanted to be used, and that by keeping Sleeper… asleep, someone else could trigger with the same power. So it could be seen as their fault – not that they cared, really: it wasn't the first nor the last atrocity they would have been responsible for.
Now that they had another suspected Sleeper in the United States, though, would they risk everything to contact him, or her? To use one to get rid of the other?
They didn't even knew who it was: Armsmaster being the efficient taskmaster, he had had everyone pulled out of the wreckage in a quick and orderly fashion, and hadn't paused to take everyone's name. And Panacea had her irksome habit of being true to the Hippocratic Oath – that she hasn't even sworn in a formal fashion, lacking the normal medical courses.
They ended up watching over Brockton Bay in the hope of catching their new trump card.
It was too bad, for them, that Taylor Hebert ended up living with the remaining Barnes: Zoe and Anne – they hadn't known that their daughter and sister had bullied her erstwhile friend. They also moved to Miami, Zoe's town of birth. Better climate, and now that Leviathan was dead, better opportunities to find another rich old man on the beach… or a boat.
The one she chose, in the end, was a Monacan man in his eighties. It was despite, or perhaps because, he wanted to bring them all to his opulent homes. Plural. One in Monaco itself, one in Sicily, and several apartments in Paris, London, Barcelona, Venice, Ibiza, and Barcelona.
It meant that Taylor was travelling, and also meeting people she was not used to: rich people, lazy people, models, singers, artists, hangers-on… she was never pushed to the point of stopping time to kill them despite the raw need. Why? Because the first one who provoked that specific trigger did so on the plane.
Stopping time on a flying plane, pressurized as it was, was a Bad Idea. Because Taylor couldn't get out. Well… she could, but she also happened to really look around, as soon as time stopped. She noticed her other self, with the grimace of intense disgust from the way the man beside her was crowding her.
Her need to act was countered by the fact that, if she killed him, she would have Problems. So she relied on props: slightly pushing the glass in the man's hand, she expected it to fall and drench him in expensive scotch. Doing the same with his obnoxious glasses, she expected them to fall too. And pushing the coke bottle on his little table, she expected it to fall and empty itself on his pants.
But then what? She had all the time in the world, and nothing to do. She couldn't even touch the other people too much, because she suspected that, at the speed she was going, they would explode.
Still, she had time for a bit of reading. And, that done, she did some writing too. Writing that she stuffed in her original self's pocket.
When she ended up killing herself (and let it be known that there aren't many ways of doing that, on a travelling plane, especially while staying discreet), time flowed again. The obnoxious man had his shirt full of scotch, his pants full of soda, and his glasses thrown across the cabin.
As he stood suddenly, excusing himself, Taylor breathed a sigh of relief at his bad luck, and found the paper in her pocket. Quite thick, too, because it was folded several times.
Congratulations, Taylor, you have powers! You can stop time! I know because you did it, and I'm your projection in the stopped time. Hint: don't do it in a plane again, it's boring as hell. Because, guess what, I have all the time in my life to do… nothing. And then I die, and you can breathe again. Stupid powers.
Speaking of… see the leech beside you? I'm the one who pushed his glasses, the four of them. I hope his reading glasses didn't explode in his eyes or something, but judging the effect of force in stopped time is difficult. You'll have to do some tests and report them to yourself like I did – because what I learn won't get back to you, otherwise.
Anyways, on a happier note: I have read the books you brought, and have given them scores for you to prioritize your reading of them: in the alphabetical order of titles, it's nope, dark but good, bad start but still good, hell no, too sappy for words, and another nope. Hope you like my review!
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
To be continued… or started againAuthor's Notes: When you look at it, "stopped time" has really wonky physics. I tried, and then had to make do with patches from Taylor's power.