This was a painfully long week for Taylor. This torment started after her little talk with Lio about what are they going to do now.
Her father was recovering slowly after a car crash. From what doctors explained to Lio her father was relatively lucky. Nothing more than the broken leg and a few cuts with bruises. Nevertheless, that still meant that both of them left without much oversight for something around a month or two.
Apparently, the first thing that twins father done when he awoke after the crush was calling her and Lio. He wanted to reassure them and give them his support even if he wasn't able to do so face-to-face.
The second one was somewhat less of a nice thing. Danny Hebert managed to overcome his own fears and muster a call to Gram. In normal circumstances that was something that happened with a frequency of Easter or her and brother's birthday. Her grandma, Diane Boucher disliked her dad with a passion, but apparently agreed to look after them until he recovered enough to go home.
Taylor felt excitement as well as fear in equal proportion. While she never actually talked to her all that much and the amount of disdain that she radiated toward Dad didn't exactly fill one of the twins with confidence. However, the lack of personal interaction with her gave Taylor hope that once she talks with her for a little they could find something that both of them were interested and she could try to fix a rather bad relationship inside a family.
She is going to arrive on the weekends. So not much time is left. Two or three days to be precise. It depends when she will arrive.
While Taylor allowed herself to wonder a bit in thoughts, her power started without her will once again gather countless bugs on every surface in her room. The familiar buzzing sound forced Taylor to mind her surroundings and stopped her thought process. She looked at the bugs somewhat phlegmatic and ordered one of the caterpillars to crawl along her body to her fingers.
Her powers weren't exactly amazing or anything of that sort, but they still were far better than nothing was. An ability to control bugs and spiders. She could control individual bugs or a whole pack of them. Her orders didn't have a need to be precise or even make any sense to someone outside her head. It wasn't a verbal order that holds power, but a mental impulse. She still needed to use a verbal command, but even now with a little bit of training she needs only a few words to set something akin to a complex behavior pattern for them.
In some aspects, her bugs were superior to their "wild" brethren. She only tested a few things, but the recovery rate and the overall durability are higher. Still there was a drawback. The moment's something outside the pattern happens or the order done they return to their natural behavior patterns. It is necessary for Taylor to constantly repeat the command or to create a really complex system inside her mind. The most exact compression would be coding a program or artificial intelligence. In the second case, her little minions could act completely without her in whereabouts and she wasn't even forced to be awake for them to function.
It was a good thing because her area of an effect was really-really pitiful. Well, without her secondary ability anyway. Only a few meters away from her body in the form of the sphere. In this area, she was able to detect and command every insect, but the moment they exit this area she instantly lose direct control over them. Which left her with two options really, either keep a difficult set of commands and reactions to certain things that easily be destroyed by losing concentration or simply use her sub-ability.
She named it Hivemind. It allowed her to somewhat split her mind and transfer part of it to a chosen insect which it returns allowed the bug to be some kind of relay of her power. The area around her body doesn't change when the mind is split, but instead the same control zone appears around a host of her mind fragment. The more she split and gives her mind the larger each sphere becomes individually.
The problem is that it becomes progressively hard to think and comprehend what is going on around her when her mind split too much. If her vision without the shattering her mind into the fragments is to compare to a TV, then with each individually installed shard the original picture on the screen becomes smaller and smaller so others can be displayed too. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, but nothing except for a headache happens when the host is destroyed.
She didn't test what would happen if she tried to put most of the fragments into the single vessel, but Taylor preferred not to risk her human body. The lesser always goes to greater.
She could feel, see and hear distinctively clear trough the hosts, unnaturally so, but was absolutely deaf and blind when it came to any other minions in her control.
So there were a lot of things to be done with this power. It was not exactly the most "heroic" one, after all not everyone is capable of tolerating bugs, and the ability to control venomous and scary-looking creatures would remind average civilians about a villain from some old cartoon.
The other point of her concern was her twin brother. While she was happy that the invisible wall between them now disappeared, Taylor wasn't sure what to think about him now. Some of his attempts to be a brother are easily capable to give a really wrong expression. For one, the concept of personal space just didn't exist anymore. They might as well buy a bed for two now or connect theirs. He became a lot more personal and touchy. The mysterious air dispersed and now he truly felt like a younger goofy brother. Taylor knew for a long while that her brother was strange and sometimes bizarre. Now it started to become clear. Lio Hebert lost a few screws in the head. And plans to lose even more.
Apparently, he has some grandiose plan that he was preparing to show her for several days straight with little breaks. After each working session, a glint of insanity and the wideness of his smile increased. It honestly was weird seeing for her stoic and somewhat cold brother to be so childlike excited about something.
With each their joined moment in the last few days Taylor felt that the chance of her life transforming into some kind of Japanese cartoon. She would have preferred some old fantasy or just a plain adventure book.
The sudden sound of something rapidly going upstairs startled Taylor and she lost control over bugs. They started to quickly leave the room after she once again had got a hold on their minds. With a deep sigh, her head snapped to the door awaiting the appearance of her brother.
He didn't disappoint opening the door with a Spartan kick. Lio looked bad to say the least. His perfect hair was now a mess; the giant eye bags under his eyes that didn't exist in the morning and he somewhere lost his shirt. However, Taylor felt a spike of warmness in her mind when she saw a satisfied smile on his face.
Before she could ask him when he became a male stripper and lost his shirt, he moved with such speed that for Taylor he nearly teleported. His palms grabbed her by the shoulders and jerked her off in a standing position. She could feel his sharp and ragged breathing on her face.
"Menthol, huh" Quick though appeared in Taylor's mind when she breathed in.
He was looking right into her eyes as if trying to find something. The previously present madness and goofiness were been replaced by great enthusiasm and concern. Lio thoroughly looked around and then a weird sensation passed through her whole body. By using her bug control and feeling that her control area somehow reduced even further, she understood that another spherical barrier appeared around them. One that isolated them both from the outside world. Neat trick.
"I just finished my work on our little secret base of operation. Would you like to come and see it for yourself, my dear sister?" His way of talking was a bit too formal and sometimes felt like he was being sarcastic. It felt like he tried not to offend her, but at the same didn't have any idea how he actually supposed to interact with Taylor.
Then a realization hit her like a truck.
"Did you just say an "our little secret base"?" Taylor asked dumbfounded.
"Yes, I am just said that. Do you have a problem with it?"He asked somewhat offended. Lio sounded like someone just criticized his life work and ordered him to dismantle and redo from scratch.
Before the unrepairable was done and her brother started to build another base no longer a "secret" or "little" Taylor reassured him:
"No! Everything is fine. No need to destroy everything!" She answered with a bit of panic in her voice. Then Lio just laughed the most genuine laughter that Taylor heard from him.
"Of course it is… Anyway, if you want to see it today and not return home in the middle of the night, I advise you to start preparing right around…" He glanced at the clock. "Now"
And then the isolation barrier disappeared, he rushed to somewhere inside the house. Taylor guessed that he probably was in the basement collecting some of his things. She decided to see what the hell Lio has done and gone along with his wish.
After several minutes of going through her rather small selection of clothes and giving a quick glance to the outside, she decided to wear her rather mundane clothes. Nothing too colorful or special, but comfortable. On her way to the entrance door, Taylor continued to hear some weird sounds from the basement. She simply decided to ignore them and better prepare the future dialogue in her head. After all, despite living with him for more than a decade and becoming closer during this week his powers were a mystery.
From what Taylor understood and gathered, he had them for a long time. Not just long, but LONG. Either for several years or since birth and he somehow managed to hide them from his family. That meant that Lio was rather good at hiding things, or his power didn't have that much of the physical effect. Such an occurrence was not exactly rare, most of the Master's or Thinker's powers didn't have a visible indication. Tinkers too, well, until they started to build something.
Seeing how her brother's barrier managed to restrict her powers and create an isolated space, he was probably some kind of Shaker-Trump combo. Possibly, some kind Master qualification too, if the restriction was forced mentally on the target.
However, before she managed to dive deeper into her conspiracy theories regarding her brother's abilities, he appeared from the basement with a small box in his hand. He looked quite happy with what he found so he moved past her, grabbing his winter coat and wearing it on bare skin.
"Just follow me." He ordered with rather a playful voice.
And then twins walked through their neighborhood into the Docks. This place felt rather familiar for Taylor, mostly because she and her brother were there countless thanks to her dad being practically an overlord here. She followed her brother as they moved around a place for some time. Then without saying another word, he changed his direction to the opposite, and they entered an alley between two boxcars. And Lio just stopped there between two ordinary boxcars that laid everywhere there.
The male twin decided to answer an unspoken question that was now in the air by sliding his finger along the metal surface of the right boxcar. Some kind of connection of dots and lines that reminded her of the small dipper. After he had stopped, he then twisted on his heels to look at her face with anticipation and then reality changed. Space started to extend and warp creating a whole new unseen before "world" in the middle of a graveyard for ordinary boxcars. Under Taylor's legs appeared familiar from her dreams stone and after the transformation twins were standing in place best described as a "floating island in the middle of space."
The ancient-looking architecture looked somewhat out of place on space background. But Taylor didn't care for one bit about such a thing. Her eyes were wide open and before she fully realized where she was Lio decided completely throw her out of her mental balance. He grabbed a giant board and twisted it to show Taylor what was on the other side of it.
"Plan to Conquer the World. Phase №1." It was written by a blue marker on the very top of the board. There were a bunch of pictures of different people, places, and symbols that represented different organizations. Taylor knew some of them, but most of them still were new to her. She started her research less than a week ago, so it wasn't anything unexpected.
She looked wide-eyed at her brother, and Taylor couldn't even say a word, silently opening and closing it.
"So what do you think?" The familiar satisfied and shit-eating green appeared on Lio's face.
Taylor finally understood that her life isn't going to become ease and with a deep sigh simply accepted the fact.