by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings. This one is Taylor speaking to… someone.
Construction Complete"I'm Taylor, and this is my castle. I mean… it's a representation of the current state of my mind palace.
"I have been bullied badly, enough that I retreated in the privacy of my bedroom most days, even the weekend. There, searching for ways to pass the time, I played games on my old computer – it was not powerful enough for state-of-the-art games, nor could it play 3D immersive games, so I was relegated to building games: those in which you simply built things. Like a town. Or a house. Or a settlement.
"Passing in front of the telly, one day, I heard something (during one of Sherlock's reruns) that inspired me. It was about getting oneself a "mental palace".
"I took up meditation, read a few online pages, and imagined building myself an impregnable mental fortress so that the Emma' hateful words wouldn't reach me ever again. The first worked, surprisingly (or not). The second… not at all. At first.
"The bad thing, when you can ignore the bad words, is that bullies who are fixated on you resort to physical violence. Still not stupid enough to get caught red-handed (with my blood), they still get away with it. And I get bruises everywhere, with a new one each and every day.
"I thought that Christmas vacation would make them forget about me. Forget it! How could they? They prepared a prank before the break, and executed it afterwards.
"It was horrible.
"I thought I was going to die.
"I tried to meditate to alleviate my suffering, to take refuge in the mental castle I couldn't build… and suddenly I could see it. It was small, and hastily constructed, and on the verge of toppling over, but I quickly devised cranes and pullies with planks and shored it up.
"I didn't have to imagine them from scratch, you know? There are aficionados in all topics, and History is a big one. Online documentation is a thing… especially those videos of how they're building a new castle, in some place called Guédelon, using all the old ways.
"The power I was feeling swirling inside my head had started to get rid of the insects around me, but I could feel a strange curiosity that made it change its focus. And instead of micromanaging arthropods, I ended up managing small workers. A dozen, at first, who were appropriately-sized to work the construction site that was my mind palace. And then they built other structures around it: farms to support more workers, water mills, barracks… it was like those little video games!
"Even if my body wasn't any better, at first, my resilience increased quickly thanks to the little workers working their way through my mind… and then my body. I was unresponsive for a long time, though, after the janitor opened the locker and found me. They took me to the hospital, and I was diagnosed with PTSD. That's where they encouraged me to do these things like I do now: a video of myself speaking to… myself. I don't intend these to be seen by anyone. For obvious reasons.
"After the scandal, the school tried to cover their asses, but dad was incensed in my stead and pushed for a true investigation. When the police told him it was stopped by the PRT, he raised enough of a stink that Sophia's identity was compromised – he had to sign a NDA, which he promptly "forgot" when he told me the truth. Shadow Stalker was promptly moved to another department… in Alaska.
"In the meantime, I fortified my mind and body. I liked seeing the structures being constructed, and the pleasure exhibited by the miniature lemmings building them – I took care of them, too, choosing happiness-inducing buildings every now and again. I especially enjoyed when they shouted "Construction Complete" at the end, making a somersault or equally superfluous demonstration of happiness. I needed these sparks of happiness in my life, so sue me.
"At some point, I had my builders dig something up: something below the ground was preventing the expansion of my mind palace. As it happens, that underground place was my subconscious. And, as the story goes, it's like Merlin and Vortigern's castle: there were beasts sleeping, underground, and leaving them there prevented any construction to be built above since that awakened them and they rolled around.
"I quickly learned to deal with my remaining issues and the other unconscious biases I had: my grief at my mother's death, my rage at the world, my dad being absent, and, of course, my bullies. Not in a definitive way that actually impacted them, but in the way I perceived them and their attacks on me. And then, let's just say that if we meet again, I'll be much less meek than they were used to. Mentally and physically.
"Yes, physically too: those barrack buildings, with warriors inside, were not only there to protect my mental constructions from mental attacks (and I met Glory Girl, and I realized the utility of such a defence), but they also travelled through my body, metaphorically, in order to reinforce muscles and bones and skin, as well as nerves for heightened reaction times.
"When everything was in peak condition from my point of view, when nothing more could be improved inside my body and mind, those little workers gave me the idea of "colonizing" other bodies. At first, I was extremely reluctant to the idea.
"Until I tried to stop Lung from killing some children. Despite my enhanced strength, and resilience, the man was the king of escalation, and I knew he would roast me alive if I did nothing. So I accepted the new functionality, and sent a boatload of workers towards the dragon – thankfully, they didn't seem perceptible when travelling that way.
"It took precious seconds to reach their target, during which I lost many workers and warriors, both doing what they could to prevent me from dying. And then Lung stopped and stepped back. Confused, he yelled and turned around, searching for the new enemy that was assaulting his mind. But my little creatures were quick to establish a new settlement, taking control of the beast… and returning it to a normal size.
"And then Lung stepped away, nodding at me once on his way. I could only hope that my workers there would stay in control, and devised ways for me to get information about the status and location of my new… thrall.
"To create the new "mental buildings" to do so, I decided to infiltrate another person, and it happened to be one that was effectively an enemy, one that I saw everyday: Emma. With her nearby, I succeeded in creating what I needed… and finally got a semblance of peace in my school life.
"Since I still looked like a normal teenage girl, and because I insisted to walk around instead of taking the bus, and invariably ended up in gang territory, I got mugged a few times in the months that followed. Each time, my body didn't suffer much from the attacks, and my mind sent attack teams to take control of the gang members – small things, at the beginning, like letting me go, and then refraining from outright killing, and maiming, and raping their preys.
"And from one to the other, acting like a pandemic, I soon mapped every one of them, including their capes. And I stopped their illegal activities. Instead, they took control of the city perimeter, propagating my control over any cape and/or villain passing through. And when Endbringer fights occurred, I made sure to get to my side most of the survivors so that my control could expand further – besides, being herded allowed them to survive such fights better: they had a global knowledge of the battlefield, and could use their powers without needing to see their target.
"Some nuts were harder to crack than others. Tattletale seemed to realize what was happening, having her own mind palace already, and she succeeded in warning Coil before she killed herself – being a thrall was anathema to her. And the man was nothing if not inventive in his defences. But how do you avoid ghosts passing through walls and any kind of attack, only to get at your mind?
"The Butcher was also difficult, because there was the equivalent of fifteen minds to conquer, in a single person. And even if power nullifiers like Animos and Hatchet Face couldn't be invaded by my power, they could be killed by their own team mates. Yes, because I did get hold of Jack Slash, after getting at Cherish.
"All the while, I was staying home. Once I could direct people from afar, I was never in contact with any sort of cape, in any fashion. I continued to invent new buildings, though, requiring a larger mental landscape to do so… and my inventive workers modified my body too: first, to get the most of anything I absorbed, disintegrating whatever wasn't useable; and, second, to use the space gained by getting rid of my digestive system in order to build a secondary brain.
"From there, I had long-distance control (my thralls didn't need to get all my increases, so remote control was enough for me), and nobody caused any problem.
"The only dark cloud on the horizon was Cauldron – and I knew about it from the mind of the capes that had bought their powers, like Coil and Triumph. And Accord's Ambassadors (and, yes, my influence was spreading, as I had enough capes under my control to both keep Brockton Bay safe and infiltrate nearby cities). Cauldron was over (and behind) everything that was related to capes, to the point of having the Triumvirate in their employ.
"I also knew that I couldn't infiltrate the Triumvirate, even if my thralls had tried during Endbringer attacks: Alexandria's mind was as unyielding as her body; because of his own powers, Eidolon's mind was under strange effects I didn't want propagated back to me; and Legend's mind structure did reset each time he travelled as light.
"But they still served as hosts, and when my little attackers got a foothold in Cauldron, they disseminated and took control of Doormaker, Clairvoyant, and the others. Even the puppet of destiny named Contessa – from what I gathered, she could have gotten rid of me at any time, but her Path to Victory, aiming at getting rid of Scion, required her to let me control most of the capes in order to attack the golden man in a coherent manner.
"So I did. At the same time, and because I couldn't control the Triumvirate, Eidolon jumped the gun and engaged Scion… who simply absorbed his power. The golden man also told him about his failure at controlling the Endbringers, putting in a depowered Eidolon the guilt of billions of deaths. And when he fell to his death, afterwards, it was in a state of shock.
"Using Clairvoyant and Doormaker, I had windows opening in front of various capes, each of them doing something to attack our enemy. Or simply distract it, as the only trump card we needed was a trio made of Miss Militia, Flechette, and Bakuda. The ex-villain gave specialized ammo for Miss Militia's grenade launcher, and the Ward empowered the ranged weapon. It allowed the exotic bombs to fly true and kill the golden man with a localized black hole.
"It didn't kill Scion, though, as the golden man was only a localized representation of his power. Instead, it exposed the rift in spacetime that was the connexion between his body and his representation. We could actually see another planet through it, its surface covered in squirming matter.
"With Contessa's power telling us what to do, Miss Militia manifested a nuclear rocket launcher, and Flechette empowered it again. And several nukes flew through the hole in space – much like when she manifested a regular gun, the patriotic heroine simply had to manifest her weapon again and it came up charged. With a payload per nuke able to crack the planetary crust, Scion was soon much too preoccupied by his own demise to deal with us, and the rift closed. Thankfully, it happened before the detonated planet could reach the hole and pollute ours.
"And then, with the Endbringers ended and myself in control of most of the capes, I let myself dream about a humanity not constrained to a single planet… and did just that. Not through space, though. Or, in fact, not immediately. Since I had a perfectly compliant Doormaker in my employ, I could do it through dimension travel.
"As it happens, there are pioneers in many places in the worlds – plural, as it involves Earth Bet, but also the others (especially Aleph, seeing as they were much more overpopulated than us, because of the absence of Endbringers in their world). And they were ready to go forth and settle on these many New Worlds.
"I'm sure that, with a reduced need to please a population too large to manage efficiently, the powers of the worlds will tackle the first step of space expansion.
"And, if not, I'll be there to push them.
"The End."
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To be continued… in a galaxy far, far away