Quintessence Chapter 41: So Called Life, a Star Wars + Worm Crossover fanfic

A/N: Chap 40 review responses are in my forums. With this chapter, the team is assembled.

Chapter Forty-One: Her So-Called Life

Outside of the very expensive rehab clinic, Taylor sank down onto a bench between two beautiful crepe myrtle trees and just sat with her face in her hands. She wasn't crying; all she felt was a numbed exhaustion. What she wanted more than anything was to crawl into bed and sleep for the rest of her life.

However long that might be.

She looked up when she felt Seneca's presence in the Force. He walked alone on the sidewalk from the parking garage, his tie loose and his shirt sleeves rolled up. His PRT badge hung on his belt, with his side-arm on the other. He carried a manila folder in his hands.

"How is she?" He asked when he reached her.

"Bawling and screaming," Taylor said.

The Assistant Director sat on the bench beside her, the folder in his hand. He wordlessly handed it to her. She opened the folder to see the emergency court order within. "I'm surprised Director Foote went along with this."

Seneca chuckled darkly. "The director is very pragmatic. Idealists don't last long as directors. We couldn't hold Yuki in any prison except the Birdcage, and she's not done anything close to that level of punishment. This way, maybe we can get her the help she needs. The question is, will she stay this time? I can throw all the court orders in the world at her, but it won't matter if she can go ghost and just walk out."

Taylor looked down at her clasped hands. "She'll stay. Don't ask how, or why."

"Because you don't know, or because it'd be better for me not to?"

"Yes."

The two sat on the bench for the longest time. The air hung cool and damp, but the rain held off at least for the moment.

"You know, you might actually be one of the bravest, most decent human beings I've ever known, Taylor," he said finally.

She stared at the man; he gave her a lopsided grin. "You just have really, really shitty luck. Speaking off, Triumph and Miss Alcott arrived twenty minutes ago. They're waiting for you at headquarters. I'll take care of the paperwork and funding here."

That really surprised her. "PRT's paying for her treatment?"

"Yuki is a Ward now, in both senses of the word. Plus, Watchdog believes that if she can be rehabilitated and recruited into a PRT team she could be a very useful asset. A breaker of her power with a smidgen of yours? It's worth a little investment. Go on, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

The rehab clinic, like most of the more expensive services in the city, was in the North. So, it took only a ten-minute ride to reach the PRT headquarters. The moment she made it past security, she got a text from Sarah telling her to make her way to the Wards room.

When she entered, she found a truly odd tableau. Triumph, a former Ward from Brockton Bay that Taylor once had a crush on, stood in khakis and UNH Brockton Bay hoody with only a domino mask to protect his identity. He was trying his very best to ward off Alice, who was almost drooling as she kept trying to move in on him.

Aiding her cousin, Dinah Alcott wore a disgusted expression on her face as she managed to weave herself into Alice's path whenever the girl got too close to Triumph.

An attractive Asian teen leaned against the wall, arms crossed over a young Justine Bieber T-shirt from his last tour before the Siberian ate him. She watched the odd dance with a gaping jaw. Sarah, meanwhile, sat at the computer not even bothering to hide her laughter.

Triumph had gone beyond mortification, if the Force told her correctly. Though he managed to keep a good poker face, the young man was quickly growing angry.

Right. He just lost his entire family to the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Dinah saw Taylor first.

"Do something," the young girl begged desperately.

Alice, who was mostly sober, turned to face Taylor. "What? Do what? Oh hey, Taylor. Check out our new eye-candy!"

Taylor knew that Alice wasn't trying to be a bitch. She didn't sense any malice in the girl. In fact, all she sensed was a very deep physical attraction. But it was obvious he wanted nothing to do with her, and it was equally obvious that Alice wasn't getting the hint and had pushed past mere flirting and had now positioned herself well into the realms of sexual harassment.

"I know him, Alice," Taylor said, nodding to the tense, ready-to-fight hero. "We're both from Brockton Bay. Hey, do you have a minute? Something you need to know."

Alice nodded, completely oblivious to the tension in the room. Taylor placed her arms gently over the shorter girl's shoulders and walked her back toward her room.

"Triumph's entire family just got murdered by the Slaughterhouse 9," she whispered softly to Alice. "His parents, and his little sister. Plus, his aunt's entire family. That little girl's his last surviving family, and she's only a cousin. And you just blundered into that like you didn't care."

Alice had grown tense with the news, and now thrummed with confused regret. "I didn't know!" she hissed angrily.

"I know. But you should have, because it was in your day brief. The one you never read. And now Triumph thinks you're an insensitive slag."

"I'm not insensitive!" Alice said, her eyes quickly growing moist. "I just didn't know!"

"I get it. I know you, Alice. I think you're a good person, you just don't always pay attention to what's happening around you. It's probably too late to make a move on him, but if you give him some space for a few days and then try again, nicely, you could probably be friends."

The older Ward sank down onto her bed, tears streaming up from under her mask. "Fuck, I messed it up again!"

She started hitting her head hard enough to redden the skin with the heels of her hand until Taylor sat beside her and hugged her again.

"You know Bill really likes you."

"He's got a zit on his forehead bigger than Mount Rainier," she said.

"He's sixteen, Alice. He's going to grow out of it."

"He's so goofy."

"He's going to grow out of that too. Probably. I mean, he's got to grow up eventually, right?"

Alice snorted, then wiped her eyes. "I feel like shit. You sure he doesn't hate me? Triumph, I mean?"

"I'm sure. Just give him some space, then in a few days tell him you didn't know about his family. That you're sorry, and you'd just like to be friends. Just give it a few days, okay?"

"Right. Okay. Thanks."

Taylor left her there in her room, closing the door behind her as she walked out into the Ward room. Triumph had drifted toward the cape Taylor knew was probably Flechette.

"So, I guess everyone knows everyone else?" Sarah said. "Taylor, this is Triumph."

"He guarded me a few times before my trial," Taylor said. "And you're Flechette?"

The Asian girl nodded. "Yeah."

Taylor looked at Sarah, who shrugged. "Horizon's back in Los Angeles working things out with Alexandria. Ward duty doesn't officially start 'til 3, and Romulus is on Console. We're free to go."

Taylor looked at the others. Dinah stood with her arms crossed, her face set in stone. In the Force, though, she could feel the girl fighting back an urge to cry.

With a bitter sigh at her own failure to keep Dinah safe, Taylor walked across the floor and hugged her. Dinah hugged her back desperately, and only then did the sob she'd been holding in finally erupt.

~~Quintessence~~

Despite the invitation, Triumph elected to stay in a guest room at the Protectorate Headquarters. Given he would have been alone in a house filled with teenaged girls, Taylor could understand his reluctance.

Flechette, however, happily accepted the invitation to a room at Casa de Quintessence. Dinah made it clear she was staying with Taylor. Since Sarah had the car, she drove Dinah and Flechette, while Taylor took her bike.

Taylor felt no surprise when she saw work crews with heavy equipment digging out the basement space for the headquarters. The plans called for only a single sub-level because of the general instability of the soil and the rest of earthquakes. However, the sublevel would still be very large and would serve as the armory and lab.

She parked her bike far enough up for Sarah to get her cherry-red sports car into their house. The garage door closed behind them.

"This is a nice place," Flechette said. "And it's yours?"

Taylor pulled off her helmet. "I paid for it with my clinic proceeds," she said. "Sarah, could you show her around? I need to check on my lab."

"Yes, captain my captain," Sarah said with a snark. She pulled her mask off. "By the way, I'm Sarah Livsey. Pleasure to have you on the team."

Flechette didn't even blink; evidently unmasking to teammates was normal. She did so herself, revealing a long, occidental face with a pale complexion and dark, dark brown eyes. She looked nothing like Yuki, with a much more oval shape to her features and smaller, less doll-like eyes.

"Lily Tomlinson," she said.

The two shook hands. Taylor stepped forward to do the same. "Glad to have you. See you in a few?"

"Come, Lily, let's go explore the mansion!" Sarah declared.

The two walked out of the garage, leaving Dinah and Taylor alone. She wasn't looking around the spacious but mostly empty space. Instead, she stared intently at Taylor. Smiling sadly, Taylor offered her hand to the girl, who accepted without question, and then led her down into the lab.

Dinah stopped two feet in. "Why's there a naked woman in your lab?"

"What? That's not…oh." Taylor couldn't help but grin, not because of Dinah's mistake, but because at first-glance she could understand it. "That's a gynoid—a robotic body. I call it a Human Replica Droid. Don't worry, it's not done. No brain yet."

Dinah drifted closer to the HRD Taylor had made for Dragon. She reached out and poked at one the HRD's breasts. She then cupped them. Taylor was waiting for the question on how she made the skin feel so real, and was ready to explain the keratinocyte material she'd merged into a denser silicate base to provide the most human-like skin ever seen on Earth.

"Wow," Dinah said, instead. "Why'd you make her boobs so big?"

Taylor stared a moment, her rehearsed answer melting away. "They're not that big. The specifications were Dragon's anyway."

"What cup size?"

"How do you…are you even wearing bras yet?"

"Are you?"

Taylor sputtered. Dinah turned and walked down to examine the pubic area. "Wow, you even gave her a pussy with hair? Are you making a sex robot?"

"Dinah! Of course not…"

It then hit Taylor, like a ton of bricks, that Dragon was good friends with Armsmaster. That Armsmaster cared for Dragon so much the man was willing to swallow his pride and come begging for help from the one person he held responsible for his life's collapse. Dragon had specifically asked for a completely anatomically correct body, with all of the artificial nerve clusters in her positronic matrix that a human body would have. She wanted a body capable of sensing and processing physical stimuli as close to a human as possible.

She wanted a body capable of having and enjoying sex.

"Holy shit, I might be," she admitted. Then, "Dinah, stop playing with that!"

"But it's so soft. How'd you make it feel like real hair?"

Shaking her head, Taylor grabbed a sheet and covered the HRD. "You're just playing with me, aren't you?"

Dinah shrugged. "What else are you doing?"

By the time the house intercom beeped to let her know that dinner was ready, Taylor had walked Dinah through her various projects. The two big ones were her droids—the gynoid for Dragon and the manufacturing droid for herself. Both were almost done.

"Once my droid's done, its first project will be a second manufacturing droid body. I have to make the brain myself—droid's can't really reproduce on their own. But with two manufacturing droids, I should be able to get started on equipment for the team."

"Cool. Can I have a laser sword?"

Taylor gave her a look. "What are the odds of you hurting yourself or someone else with it?"

Dinah's hopeful smile faded. "Spoilsport."

"I'll make you a cool suit of armor, though," Taylor said. "And when you're older, I'll give you a jetpack."

"That's fair."

~~Quintessence~~

LaDonna Franklin's enchiladas consisted of flour tortillas, a pound of cheese, a pound of hamburger cooked with a packet of taco seasoning, and a large can of red sauce. She garnished it with refried beans from a can, mixed with a jar of picante sauce, and a packaged salad.

Thinking of Mrs. Lopez's homemade chimichangas, Taylor felt vaguely guilty for enjoying the meal as much as she did. She realized, though, it wasn't just the food.

Lily and Ladonna discovered a mutual love of Earth Aleph vampire movies. They were having a lively discussion over whether vampires should sparkle or not. Sarah was on her phone while she ate, but Dinah kept flicking tomatoes at her from across the table with her spoon.

"I will put liquid heat in your underwear if you don't stop," Sarah said without looking up.

"No, you won't," Dinah said with calm assurance, before flicking a chunk of diced cucumber. This time Sarah managed to avoid it.

She couldn't avoid the piece of tomato from Taylor.

Sarah put down her phone with a put-upon sight. "Right. I get it. No phones at the table."

Dinah gave a satisfied nod before she continued eating her enchilada. She had, with great precision, managed to remove every trace of ground beef from within each of her two enchiladas. Then, confusing Taylor's assumption that she didn't like meat, Dinah mixed the taco meat into her refried beans before eating it.

"Are you girls okay with a chore chart?" Sarah finally asked.

"You've already drawn one up," Taylor noted.

"Yeah, for three of us. Now there's five. I know you have Mrs. Lopez coming by for general cleaning. But I'm thinking for cooking, taking out the trash. Things like that."

"I can cook grilled cheese and eggs," Dinah announced proudly. "And cookies. If they come in the frozen roll."

Lily snorted. "More'n me. I can't even microwave popcorn without it burning."

"Taylor and LaDonna can cook," Sarah said. "I can."

"Bullshit." Taylor at least pretended to cough when she said it.

Dinah giggled. It was an infectious sound that soon had the others chuckling. Sarah's expression just made it worse. The young pre-cog seemed to stump her thinker abilities; or at least Dinah was able to work around it in such a way that left Sarah a little flabbergasted.

Tattletale would have used her power to attack and tear down. She'd have made vicious jokes about Dinah's dead parents and her role in those deaths. Taylor watched and sensed as Sarah worked through her initial surge of anger at being made fun of. She met Taylor's eyes and saw her watching, and for that one moment she might as well have been as psychic as she was.

Family.

Sarah flicked a glob of beans right between Dinah's eyes. The youngest of their team screamed in dismay, then dispensed with the spoon and went straight for the beans with her hands. Things devolved from there.

Taylor couldn't remember the last time she laughed so hard.

~~Quintessence~~

After they cleaned up and got all the dishes sorted, Taylor finished up her homework while Sarah walked their two newest members through their rooms to make wish lists of what they would need. After, Taylor went down to finish up her work in the lab.

Four hours later, after the others were sound asleep, Taylor shut everything down except the positronic interface where she was shaping the brain that would perhaps, if everything went well, hold Dragon's soul. She went to her suite and showered quickly.

She kept waiting for Yuki to offer to scrub her back even though she knew it was silly. Finally, her hair washed, combed and wrapped in a towel, she walked out into the bedroom to finish up some homework and catch the news. She'd just finished when she heard a light knock and felt a familiar presence on the other side.

Dinah walked in at her direction. She was dressed in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, clutching a ragged stuffed rabbit in her hand. The rabbit looked like it may have been white, once, but was now a well-loved but grungy gray color.

She didn't say anything, but then again, she didn't have to. She didn't quite meet Taylor's eyes, but until Taylor nodded. "Come on."

She ran, then, hopping up on the bed.

"Winnie the Pooh? Really?"

"My parents didn't know I grew up," she said. "'Sides, they're silk. Real silk."

"Huh."

Taylor turned out the light.

~~Quintessence~~

Campanile was eight feet tall.

It was hard to tell at first because his was not an awkward height. Rather, his body was so perfectly proportioned that it wasn't until stepped off the heliport platform and walked down the steps to meet Horizon that Taylor recognized that it wasn't a small helicopter, just a very big passenger.

Horizon, who was a completely average 5'4" barely reached the man's navel. It didn't help that he wore a skin-tight costume similar in nature to Sarah's but without the modesty-saving skirt. The color scheme wasn't exactly subtle. The gray wasn't too bad, but as the very long suit rose up from his ballet-style shoes, it grew into a screaming canary yellow that highlighted every bulge of his body in neon yellow.

The fact that Horizon's head rose just above his hips made all those bulges ridiculously obvious.

He had to bend down to shake her hand. "Nice to meet you," he said politely. He spoke with a Mid-West accent, like an extra from a Chicago gangster movie.

"Glad you could join us." Taylor admired how even Horizon kept her voice.

The giant then turned to Taylor. His walk looked so completely normal, except he had a meter and a half stride which meant one step and he was in front of her, his bulge just feet from her face. He bent over again and offered a hand which swallowed hers completely.

"Good to have you aboard," Taylor said. "Look, I've got to ask. What's with the costume?"

"My breaker field only extends a few millimeters from my skin," he said. Considering the man's size, he had a surprisingly normal pitch to his voice. Not high, per se, but not the deep, cavernous sound she would have expected. "If the clothing is too loose, it won't grow with me. Believe me, I'm not wearing this because it's comfortable."

Just like Yuki, Taylor realized. Then: "Why yellow, though?"

"Mom said if you can't hide it, decorate it."

Taylor pointedly did not ask what, specifically, was supposed to be decorated.

~~Quintessence~~

Shortly before Thanksgiving, while Mr. Lopez and his people were working on putting a roof on the mostly concrete structure that would make up the headquarters of the Rapid Reaction team, Armsmaster walked out onto the Protectorate Headquarters field training center in full armor, a new halberd attached to his back and his new arm indistinguishable from the organic one.

Taylor felt him coming in the Force, but didn't look away from their exercise. Scapetti's men were testing out her new blaster/stunner carbines in a coordinated strike with their capes against the Portland PRT and Protectorate.

Following the Overmind campaign, the Portland Protectorate team only had four adult members and two Wards. None were particularly powerful in the rating scale. Their PRT field agents were well trained, though, and when Horizon invited the Portland team to a joint exercise, their director accepted.

He sent fifty agents and all of their capes for the day. Five minutes into their third exercise for the day, most were already down at the nozzles of the carbine stun pulses. With Dinah beside her holding her hand, the Force seemed to unfold before Taylor like a tapestry, giving her a near omniscient understanding of the training field and those moving within it.

When Portland's only brute, a long-haired muscle man who called himself Samson, pushed down one of the cinder-block structures of the training center, hoping to crush Flechette and the two agents paired with her, Taylor had Triumph positioned before the first brick even fell. While he could never use his full power on a person, against a falling building to save his colleagues he didn't hesitate at all.

Taylor could see the air distort under his sonic roar—the masonry exploded into dust and pebbles, blown well away from Lily and her escorts. Before Samson could do anything else, Campanile suddenly expanded to thirty feet tall between one-step and another and kicked Samson hard enough to send the man screaming into the bay a fifth of a mile away.

One of the other Portland capes gathered a massive swarm of insects, but at an unconscious urging from Taylor, Scapetti and his men started firing their carbines on a broad stun setting that wiped out the swarm before the startled Ward could finish gathering it.

Flechette's empowered containment foam grenade blasted right through the wall the Ward hid behind before exploding in the startled girl's face, while Mujaji put the last two capes down so quickly Taylor couldn't sense who dropped first—Flechette's bug-girl or the two Mujaji took out.

Beside her in the observation both, Sarah whistled. "Damn, that only took nine-two seconds."

Beside her, Director Cavanaugh shook his head.

"I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified. They lasted longer than that even against Alexandria's team."

"Just imagine if Alexandria's Thinker power were perfectly synergized with the most powerful pre-cog in the world," Sarah said with a grin and a nod to Taylor and Dinah, who for the training session was wearing a tunic made out of black armorweave of Taylor's own creation and a helmet that hide her entire head that made her look like a miniature Shock Trooper from Cosmic Wars.

Sarah smirked. "Oh, and here comes the newest member of the Guild. Heya, Armsy!"

"It's Defiant now, thank you," the now former Armsmaster said.

His suit was more of an army green now.

"Director Cavanaugh. Good to see you."

"You too, Defiant," the young director said without missing a beat. "How's the Guild treating you?"

"Very well, thank you. And its Guild business that brings me here. Quintessence, the Guild has a mission for you. If you're willing to meet with me for a briefing in one hour, that would be appreciated."

Sarah clicked her tongue. "You found the Dragonslayers."

Defiant nodded. "We did. And with your help, we're taking them out."