I woke to the harsh beeping of my alarm clock. I groaned, rolling over to grab the offending device and shut it off. As I did so my legs flared to life with a dozen different pains. My half-asleep mind, still reeling from the recently silenced alarm, fumbled trying to remember why I felt so sore.
It came back to me in a flash, the long run that had taken me from the edge of Merchant territory back to home, ignoring the burning muscles and aching bones in favor of putting more distance between me and… Aegis. Right.
I buried my face in my pillow as if I could undo last night through sheer willpower. I had failed to actually capture any of the gangsters, failed to call an ambulance when I screwed up and two of them needed it, and capped it all off by attacking a Ward. Maybe it wasn't technically a loss, I'd definitely screwed up some drug running, but I certainly couldn't call it a win. My attempt to go back to school on a high note had ended entirely in disaster.
Which was an oh-so wonderful reminder that it was now Monday morning, my first day of school since the locker incident. I groaned a muffled curse into my pillow and dragged myself out of bed to dress for the day. In the process I ignored the part of me that begged to go back to sleep, that was already starting to fall asleep again just because I was still in bed and not moving. With what had happened last night, I couldn't have gotten back before two in the morning, not that I had checked my clock before collapsing into bed. Five and a half hours to sleep, probably less, and I doubted I even used them. Running on nerves and residual adrenaline, I'd laid awake in that fugue state between wakefulness and sleep for hours.
Most of the time I'd been thinking, replaying what had happened, sometimes slipping into sleep as the memories transitioned into horribly realistic dreams of Aegis smashing through my window to drag me away. How those dreams ended varied but were always horrible. Thrown in jail, thrown off a roof, torn in half by the super-strong maniac, always waking me up when fear finally beat out exhaustion. More than once I'd nearly activated my power in the panicked instant I woke from a dream. If I'd gotten even an ounce of genuine, nightmare-free sleep, it had been in the five minutes before my alarm went off.
As I sorted through an assortment of equally featureless tops, my legs continued to twinge with soreness. My ankles, knees, and the bones of my shins all ached, every muscle from the waist down felt sore with every movement, and there was a point of pain on the side of one of my big toes that I was pretty sure was the beginnings of a blister. I was definitely paying the price for that extended run, especially with boots I hadn't fully broken in.
Body checked over, I turned my attention to my power. The energy was there as it always was, though notably less than it had been when I'd woken up yesterday. I remembered assessing it when I got home last night and finding it nearly half of what it had been when I'd gone out. It was more than that now, but still closer to that halfway point than its full amount. Interesting, if nothing else, to get this chance to feel how my power charged over time.
Clothes sorted, I limped more than walked to the shower. It dawned on me that I hadn't heard the shower this morning. Usually when Dad showered I woke up just a little, enough to register the rush of water through the pipes before falling back asleep for another hour. But today I'd slept right through it, or at least hadn't been in a state to register it. It was a small thing, but it made me feel off, the unofficial schedule that determined my day skewed from step one.
I showered quickly and dressed before making my way downstairs. I hesitated on the steps as the smell of bacon and toast reached me, along with the sound of Dad moving around in the kitchen. Usually he'd left for work by now, leaving me on my own to get ready for school, sometimes with a breakfast consisting of whatever extra food he'd made and set aside for me. But either today he didn't have to go in until later – unlikely, considering his job – or he'd decided to stay home an extra hour or so to see me off.
It was nice, and normally I would have felt touched by the gesture. But after what had happened last night, what I really wanted was some time alone, safe, and fully conscious to try and process it all. A father-daughter talk over breakfast was not what I wanted right now.
I shook my head to try and get my thoughts in order. I'd avoided him practically all last week, and even at dinner last night I had barely paying attention. If I ran from this now, tried to avoid another conversation with him when he just wanted to talk to me… After how much I'd resented him for it after Mom died, I refused to be the one to make us drift apart again.
Taking a deep breath, I walked into the kitchen, doing my best to hide my newly acquired limp. Dad half-turned towards me from where he was flipping bacon in the pan to give me a grin. "Hey, kiddo." Apparently I wasn't hiding the limp well enough, because whatever he was going to say next got cut off as his expression changed to one of concern. "Did you hurt yourself?"
I shook my head. "No, I'm fine. I just got antsy yesterday and went for a run. I'm just feeling it now." None of it a lie, but nothing close to the entire truth.
His frown didn't lessen. If anything he seemed more unhappy, though he wasn't looking at me as he moved the bacon onto a plate with some toast. A few seconds passed in silence as he grabbed the plate and put it on the table for me.
"You sound tired too." He said as he got together a plate for himself.
"Yeah. I couldn't sleep much last night."
"You were thinking about school." It wasn't a question.
I didn't reply, which was as much of an answer as anything I could have said. I wasn't really surprised he knew, but I wasn't happy about it. He sat down across from me, plate of food left behind on the counter.
"If you want to take a few more days off…" He let it hang in the air, waiting for me to answer.
"No." I sighed. "I have to go back eventually. No use delaying or I'll just have more to make up."
He didn't seem entirely happy with that answer, but I didn't think there was any answer that would have made him happy in this situation. He got up to retrieve his plate while I started digging in. We sat quietly for a minute, just eating our food without talking.
"I have another meeting with your principal later this week." Dad finally said. "She seemed willing to cooperate last time we talked. I think we can get the school to cover the hospital costs."
I nodded without saying anything. I'd met with Principal Blackwell a few times in the early months of the bullying. When I realized that meeting with her never actually did anything while only making the Trio more aggressive, I stopped bringing anything to her. If she was willing to cooperate, I doubted it was out of any genuine desire to help. If I had to guess, it was more likely he'd met with her in "rage mode" as the dock workers called it and she'd been cowed into at least pretending to be sympathetic. I'd only ever actually seen him fly off the handle once, when I was little and he brought me along on a work meeting that went sour, but I'd heard enough from the dock workers to know his temper was a thing to be feared.
He must have taken my silent reflection for nervousness, because he put down his food and reached across the table to put a hand on mine. "Hey." He said quietly. "You know if anything happens, even if it's not nearly as bad, you can tell me."
The words sent a hot pang of frustration through me. The idea was nice, I couldn't count the number of times I'd run through the conversation in my imagination where I told him everything about the bullying, about the Trio, about Emma. But I wasn't sure I believed it. When it had first started, I hadn't told him because he was still a wreck over Mom's death. Better than he had been, but not well enough that I could drop that on him to deal with too. He'd gotten better in bits and pieces, but the habits from those early days stuck, and even now I wasn't sure if telling him would do any good.
"Yeah. I know." I said. My voice cracked a bit, but he didn't comment. My thoughts turned to the locker. Fear churned in my stomach as I imagined returning to school. Would they have something like that waiting for me again? I'd thought that it must have been a one time thing, a major point in their campaign against me, but with the prospect of returning looming so soon, I couldn't help but dread that it might have been the first step in a new level of their torments. The locker had been bad enough that I'd spent a week and a half in a coma. I wasn't sure if I could handle that being the new norm.
Fishing around for some other thought to try and distract me, I remembered last night. The Merchant with the gun who had cornered me in the alley and tried to shoot me. Aegis, flying towards me with intent to maim or kill. I actually found some measure of resolve in those thoughts. I'd faced down actual threats, people who genuinely wanted me dead, and walked away without a scratch. And thanks to my power, they'd actually come out of it worse. If worst came to worst, I wasn't helpless.
"I have to go to work soon. Do you have your pepper spray?" Dad asked, shaking me out of my thoughts. I didn't miss the unspoken implications of the question, that he was essentially giving his approval to use it on someone if it seemed like there would be a repeat incident.
"Yeah." I said. I'd taken it out of the pocket of my costume jeans and stuck it in the pocket of the pants I was wearing now when I'd picked out my clothes earlier. I hadn't even thought of a reason when I'd done it, I just wanted it close to me after it saved me last night. Though thinking about it now…
I thought it over and made myself a promise. I'd decided last night that I would keep school separate from my cape life, and that went both ways. I wouldn't be a victim as a cape like I was at school, and I wouldn't sully that by being a cape at school. I'd use the pepper spray if I had to, but not my power, never my power. No matter what happened or what they did, I wouldn't use my power.
It wasn't worth it. They weren't worth it.
I was hardly on the bus when I caught the glances whenever they thought I wasn't looking, heard the whispers as hushed as the general noise of the bus would let them be. I ignored them as best I could, moving to the seat at the back that I always sat it. It was amusing in a way that despite every torment I'd been put through, no one ever just sat in my seat on the bus. The rules of the school were things to be broken and ignored, but the unspoken code that said people always sat in the same seats? That was ironclad.
Fortunately my seat was unmarked by vandalism or some pile of garbage. If I was being generous I'd say because the other riders didn't want to be so cruel on my first day back, but it was more likely that they just didn't have anything prepared because they didn't know I was returning today. I took my seat, letting myself slide down so people in more distant rows couldn't see me past the passengers between us. It was, I was sure, a futile move. Anyone looking for me had already seen me when I got on the bus, but it made me feel a little more secure.
The bus ride seemed over too soon. I didn't get up as the bus pulled to a stop, letting everyone else file past me as I delayed getting off. I briefly contemplated trying to hide back her and not getting off at all. But that wasn't an option. What I'd said to Dad was true, delaying things more wouldn't help anything. I reluctantly pulled myself up and shuffled off the bus.
It didn't take long before I spotted the Trio. Madison Clements, one of the traditionally popular girls at Winslow, though more due to who she knew than anything on her part. Sophia Hess, one of the better track and field members. A petty bully and a psycho, respectively. Rounding out their little bully triumvirate was Emma Barnes, my one time best friend, though that time had long since passed.
I saw Emma laugh at something Madison said, the exact same laugh I used to hear when I made a dumb joke or someone took a pratfall in the cartoons we watched together when we were little, another little reminder of what she used to be to me. Of what we used to be to each other. I still didn't know why she had turned on me a year and a half ago, not only falling in with those two but leading them in making me miserable. At this point, I didn't think I really cared.
They were hanging around the entrance to the school, surrounded by a group of their lesser minions. Minions, not friends. The thought made me a bit uncomfortable. It reminded me a little too much of when I'd been testing my power, trying everything I could think of to get my beetleings to talk to me. None of it had worked. My power let me surround myself with things that would obey my orders, but it still left me alone.
I shook the thought off. No cape thinking, not here. Had to keep the two lives separate. I needed to focus on the here and now, ground myself. I wasn't sure if someone had texted the Trio to tell them I was on the bus today or if they'd just been waiting out here every morning since the locker, but if I wanted to get into the school I'd have to go by them. Waiting them out and taking a tardy for first period was an option, but when the crowds of people going into the school thinned they'd have no trouble spotting me. Luckily, that wasn't the only way into the school. One of the first things I'd done when I realized the bullying wasn't going to stop was look into ways to get in and out of the school that would let me avoid the Trio. By then my social standing had been trashed enough I couldn't just ask people about things like that, but I was good enough at blending into the background, and the kind of people who broke into a school overnight to drink weren't exactly the most subtle in their conversations.
I went sideways from the bus drop-off area, circling the school. I was taking the long way but going the shorter way would have meant getting closer to the Trio and their gang. It took me long enough to get around the whole school that I wasn't certain that it wouldn't have been easier to just wait them out, but I eventually arrived at a small door by the outside of the gymnasium. From there it was just a matter of turning the door handle upwards sharply enough that the long worn-out locking mechanism popped out of place and I was free to slip inside.
I managed to make it to my first period classroom without incident. Monday, so it was math with Mr. Quinlan. He was an older man, heavyset and balding, with a tendency to drone on in the lesson long past the point where I already understood what he was trying to say. Not the best way to start off my return, but not the worst either.
I had a few glorious minutes of peace before Emma came in, just seconds before the bell. I caught a glimpse of her surprised expression when she saw me already here and couldn't help but feel smug. That was quickly dashed when Mr. Quinlan loudly announced my return to class and asked whoever had been collecting the work for me to deliver it. Naturally, no one had anything to give me. Apparently two girls had both thought the other was collecting it for me, though their show of confusion and remorse was ruined by the smirk one of them shot me. I noticed Emma was grinning about that too, satisfied at pulling another one over on me.
I wouldn't do her the favor of getting upset about it. I accepted their apologies with the sincerest tone I could muster and let the issue drop. Mr. Quinlan seemed to accept that and launched right into a lecture about sines and cosines.
I could tell the girls weren't satisfied by my lack of reaction, but I ignored them. Just about everyone had made some move against me at some point or another, whether because the Trio encouraged it or they wanted to be like the "cool kids," but only the Trio was committed enough to make it a persistent thing. They wouldn't try doing something to make up for it, at least not so soon.
Emma, on the other hand, was clearly pissed. I could see her shooting me looks out of the corner of my eye. That was harder to ignore, but I did my best. Long hair does wonders for blocking peripheral vision when arranged the right way. That was a temporary solution though. I'd picked my seat in math class carefully, tucked in the back away from the pencil sharpener, trashcan, and anything else someone could use as an excuse to go past me. She wouldn't be able to do anything to me now and she hadn't had the chance to set up something before class, but I was definitely going to suffer afterwards.
I tried to distract myself with the worksheet Mr. Quinlan was passing out. Two weeks away meant the equations weren't familiar to me, but what he'd written on the board was enough for me to find the section in the textbook and read through it. I half payed attention to his droning lecture as I tried to figure out the new types of equations presented to me. All the while I was ignoring all the students around me.
Class went by, mercifully, without a single prank or jab against me. As the downside, it seemed to go by much too fast. I was finishing up the last question on the first side when the bell rang to signal the end of the period. My first thought was to drag my feet, delay leaving the classroom and the barely-protective presence of the teacher. But I'd learned my lesson months ago. If I delayed leaving, I just gave them that much more time to prepare for me. Everything on my desk got hastily arranged and shoved into my bag in the blink of an eye. I was one of the first people out the door, despite sitting in the back.
It wasn't fast enough. Madison was waiting there, standing in the way of my fastest route to my next class. I hesitated, preparing to turn around and go the other way. That brief pause was enough for Sophia to step in. I wasn't sure where she'd been, but suddenly she was in my face, much too close for comfort. I shied away from her, realized my mistake when my shoulder bumped against the wall and they moved to box me in.
There were only two of them, so it wasn't the most effective. One side was still left open, but I'd have to get closer to Sophia to get through. That was a surefire way to get tripped and sent sprawling in the middle of the hallway. I stayed where I was. Better to put up with this now than make it worse. They didn't say anything, apparently content to just trap me here. A few seconds later Emma came out of the classroom, leisurely taking her place in the center of their little formation.
Anyone walking by would have seen three girls crowded around a fourth whose back was literally against the wall. Had to have seen, even, the rush of students through the hallway was the sort of thing that went from wall to wall. A stationary group like this was akin to a blockage in an artery, forcing the whole flow to shift around them. Dozens of students going by, all forced to adjust around the obstacle, looking around in annoyance to find the cause. None of them did anything. They never did. The group actually seemed to grow over the following seconds as passing girls realized what was going on and joined the cluster, eager to get in on the latest drama.
"So Taylor," Emma said, starting off their little show, "Finally decided to come back? I hope you showered, but from the smell of it, you didn't."
"I bet she likes it." Maddison piped up. "Covered in trash and gunk like that, I bet her room's just like that."
"I've seen her room." Emma replied, though she didn't look away from me. "The garbage would be an improvement."
I didn't reply, keeping my gaze lowered. Sure enough, whatever grace period I might have gotten was gone. They were going right for the locker. I'd had time to think about it, try to come to grips with the memory, but the mention of it still made my gut turn. My grip tightened on my backpack, my stance keeping it behind me against the wall. There was no way I'd ever use my locker again, which meant I'd packed my backpack with everything I needed for the day. Maybe a stupid decision, given the number of my backpacks they'd ruined, but the only one I was willing to make.
They started building up steam, the other girls pitching in their own little jabs and comments, splitting into two or three little groups that each kept up a continual barrage. The filth had reminded me of home, I'd been gone for two weeks because I was trying to become a crack whore, I still smelled like the locker, a dozen different insults every few seconds. They weren't brilliant, mostly just whatever insulting or demeaning twist they could think of for the locker incident or my two-week absence, but it was still recent enough, raw enough that it was still a sore subject. I wasn't even sure if would ever be anything else.
It was a consistent pressure, meant to keep me off balance without a second to think or retort. They'd used the tactic before, but recognizing it didn't mean I could do anything about it. Worse, some of the insults did strike home, and the sheer volume of them and the way they built on each other meant those were hammered in over and over with little variations and twists.
I wasn't sure how long it had been going on by the time they started to lose momentum, just that the bell hadn't rung to give me an out. My grip on the straps of my backpack was white knuckled, teeth gritted in frustration, but I didn't give them the satisfaction of crying. I distracted myself by trying to pick apart their offensive in my head. Insults they repeated because they couldn't think of anything else, insults that contradicted each other. They were little things, but they were flaws in the otherwise endless torrent of insults that I could focus on, ignoring the whole.
Emma seemed to realize they were losing tract, because she clapped her hands with an expression of exaggerated revelation, silencing the others and drawing attention back to her. "Oh! I almost forgot. Your stuff all got trashed in the locker, right?" Her tone was sickening in how fake her concern was. It only got worse when she shifted to a peppy, happy tone as she said, "They threw most of it out, but lucky for you, I managed to save something of yours!"
I felt a mix of dread and confusion. My first fear was that she'd saved a lump of that vile mass, but there was no way she'd be willing to touch it. I was a loss trying to think of alternatives as she rummaged in her bag. I hadn't come up with anything before she pulled out a ziploc back and upended it, dumping the contents at my feet.
It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. A flute. Mom's flute. When the bullying had started I'd taken to keeping it in my bag as a security blanket of sorts. It had only taken a little more than a month for them to find out and take it from me, delivering it back a week later smeared with and crammed full of gunk I avoided thinking about. It had been a blow, but it didn't stop me. The flute was one of the few things I had left of Mom, so I cleaned it out, wrapped it up, and hid it in my locker. I'd thought they hadn't known I still had it.
Apparently I had been wrong. It was barely recognizable as a flute now. It looked like someone had battered or crushed it, leaving it with two sharp bends in its length. More distinctive was that someone had taken a knife or file to it, scratching in words before going over them in sharpie to outline the scrapes. The whole thing was now decorated with profanities, the kind that no one used unless they genuinely meant to offend someone. One of the more prominent ones was a full sentence, mentioning Mom by name. Emma's handiwork. Besides that there were discolored patches on it that marred the metal and obscured some of the words. I doubted that she'd actually reached into the mess they'd put in my locker just to dirty it, but they'd done something else they must have considered disgusting enough to match that.
Ever since I realized the bullying wasn't going to go away, I'd told myself that violence wouldn't work. They had too many connections to pull, were too popular for a fight to get recorded as anything but my fault. Besides that, I suspected that not only could Sophia beat my teeth in if I tried, she'd do it with glee and claim self-defense.
All of those thoughts had helped me keep myself in check, but seeing the flute like this, it was very hard to consider them. Confusion and shock twisted into anger in the instant it clicked for me what I was seeing. In different circumstances I might have cried or gone numb, but the raw hurt of seeing Mom's flute like this and the additional insult that it was Emma to do this was too much.
I'd told her, the first time she'd taken the flute, that she was crossing a line. That she had known my mom, shouldn't insult her memory like this no matter how much she hated me. It hadn't helped then, and the months between then and now clearly hadn't changed anything. I was acutely aware of the pepper spray in my pocket. It wouldn't take much to pull it out and spray the whole ring of girls in front of me, then escape.
No, even as I imagined it I knew I wouldn't try to escape. If I did that, gave myself that opening, I'd attack her, damn the consequences. I hated her too much in this moment to do anything else. My hand clenched tighter on the strap of my bag as I warred with myself about what to do. Emma was still looking at me, a wide grin spread across her face.
My power surged to the surface.
Anger immediately gave way to fear. I tried to clamp down on my power, prevent the energy from forming into some monster, but it was hard. I'd likened the feeling of the energy to a stomach when I was first trying to get a grasp of it, and that felt appropriate now. When my pool of energy had been full, it had felt like my stomach did when I ate to the point of being sick, where I felt like I could throw up at any moment if I got jostled too much. It wasn't as full now as it had been then, but it was even more insistent to empty itself. If being full had felt like being stuffed and bloated, this was like actually having to throw up.
I couldn't let that happen. If I summoned something, I doubted it would be a beetleing. Memories flashed through my mind of last night, the way my monster had torn through those two Merchants, had mangled one of the toughest capes in the city. If I let that thing form here it would be a bloodbath. With how fast it had moved, even the brief second it would take me to order it to stand down would be enough for it to maul at least one person.
The energy refused to be forced back down. I'd stopped it from forming something for now, but it was still just below the surface on the superpowered equivalent of a hair trigger. I was aware Emma was still saying something, but I wasn't paying attention to her anymore. Normally I would have loved to be able to tune her out so effectively, but I wasn't in any state to enjoy it. I had to get out of there.
I moved abruptly, pushing between Madison and one of the random hangers-on that had gathered around me. They didn't move out of my way but they didn't deliberately try to stop me either, their hands-off attitude to bullying finally working in my favor. Someone grabbed my backpack and I slid my arms out of it without looking back, letting them have it. Losing everything in it would be a blow, but better than whatever else might happen if I tried to fight for it.
I shoved my way out of the group and ran. I heard Emma yelling after me but I couldn't tell what she said. All that mattered was getting away from them. I didn't head to my next class. Instead I went for an exit. If I stayed, there'd just be another meeting like this waiting during lunch or after school, dozens of tiny insults and pranks scattered throughout the day in between. There was no way things would end well if I let that happen.
The energy was still roiling as I pushed through the exit and half-ran to the nearest bus stop. What I needed to do was get away, get somewhere safe. And what I wanted to do was hit something. A lot.
Hitting things hurt, or at least it did when you were a scrawny teenager punching the side of an old railcar. Frustration carried me through the first few blows, but by the tenth the ache in my knuckles overruled my pent-up anger. Luckily, I had other avenues for my frustration.
My power had been a continuous pressure the whole trip here, making the bus ride and walk away from the school seem torturously long. By the time I reached the little section of the Trainyard I'd come to think of as mine it had died down a little, but kept coming back to the surface every time I thought about Emma. It had been laughably easy to summon my monster this time, to the point that I just let it happen more than I tried to do anything.
After setting it to throw junk around and generally have a tantrum on my behalf, I had finally calmed down enough to focus. The warm front Brockton Bay had enjoyed last week was ending, bringing back the frigid January temperatures, but sating my curiosity was a stronger impulse than getting out of the cold.
The creature that stood before me was the same thing I'd summoned last night, I was certain of that. Seeing it in the daylight felt weird, like seeing some half-remembered dream creature in real life. Without the dim flickering light of the alley I could make out more details as I circled it while it stood still.
Naked and gaunt as it was, it wasn't thin. It was more of a lean kind of strength with muscles tight to bone. Speaking of which, its muscles were definitely different from a humans, or at least from mine. I had it go through some ranges of motion so I could see the muscles move. It should have felt weird, standing and watching this thing's body as it moved, but it didn't. It didn't even feel like I was looking at someone else. It was more like watching my own hand as I flexed it to see the tendons move under the skin.
It was still a strange feeling, though more because it didn't innately feel strange, but I filed it away for now. I didn't want to get into some existential crisis about whether I considered my monsters to be a part of myself. When I decided I'd examined it enough, it was less out of satisfaction with what I'd learned and more because I realized what I was seeing didn't really mean anything to me. I wasn't a biologist or a doctor, just someone who thought the way its body was set up was interesting.
And it was definitely interesting. Different muscles around the head and neck to work its split jaw, different arrangements of muscles in its lower body that I assumed was to help it balance with its multi-jointed legs. The torso was definitely strange, with the muscles of its chest and shoulders arranged unlike any diagram I'd ever seen in my science textbook for either sex. Maybe it was because its hunched posture and differently proportioned limbs needed different things from its muscles than a human, but I didn't have the knowledge to do anything with that information. It was just a curiosity.
Gawking at my own creature aside, it was time to test. I summoned a beetleing so I could compare the two and started giving them challenges. Almost instantly it proved it was better at almost everything, not surprising even when only taking the size difference into account. It was strong, fast, not to the point of being superhuman but still a level of fitness that would take me months of hard work to even approach.
The only thing it wasn't better at was the sabotage. While the beetleing quickly stripped down a padlock, the monster didn't seem to have a clue how to even start. I'd suspected as much before I'd started but I wanted to be sure. The claws, the fanged mouth, the strength, everything about it spoke to it serving a different role. The beetleings were small, stealthy, skilled at sabotage, while this thing was a fighter.
Of course that raised even more questions. If I could make two monsters to serve specific functions, could I make others? My gut said yes, if only because it would be weird for a power to have the bizarre limit of only two types of creatures for only those two specific roles. But if it came down to actually summoning something new…
I'd first summoned a beetleing when locked in the locker, and I'd first summoned the second monster when being attacked. Both were first summoned in response to my need for a particular type of aid. The first to break me out of the locker and the second to fight off the Merchants. If the pattern held, and I had no reason to think it wouldn't, I'd need to be in similarly pressing situations with a particular need to fulfill to summon something new.
That was discouraging. Both of those occasions had been bad and I dreaded the thought of being cornered and helpless again. I tried to put it out of my mind. If that was how my power worked, I couldn't do anything about it. But if I was wrong, I couldn't afford to let myself get put in a situation like that out of some half-conscious hope that it would give me the push I needed to improve my power. No, I'd play it safe. Like the beginning, I'd act under the assumption that what I had now was all I would ever have.
Except that beginning was all of a day ago, and even then I'd been hasty. I shuddered as I remembered facing down that gun in the alley. If beetleings had been all my power was, I'd probably be dead now. I'd have to be more careful in the future.
Practice, that's what I needed. But going out as a cape within the next week or two would just be begging to be arrested for what I'd done to Aegis, even if it was an accident. I could spend that time laying low and practicing with my power, but sooner or later I'd hit the limit of what I could learn about my power and my monsters on my own. I'd find a way. Better to be bored and antsy than arrested.
I turned my attention back to my monster. "Can you talk?"
Just like the beetleing, the monster didn't answer. Also just like the beetleings, I needed a better name for these things than just "monster." It didn't look like any kind of animal, so some sort of theme naming between it and the beetleings was out. Something like mauler or mangler might work, but that was too villainous, plus it uncomfortably reminded me about what they'd done to Aegis. Savage, maybe? Yeah, that worked. It made sense whether you were looking at it as the adjective or the verb, couldn't go wrong with a double meaning.
Just like my beetleings, my savage didn't answer. Disappointing, but not unexpected. By now I was pretty certain my monsters were little more than mindless servants, with enough brainpower to understand and obey orders but not enough to think for themselves.
I could get into that later once I asked it more questions and gave it more orders. Hopefully I'd figure something out, it was getting more and more frustrating how I kept turning up more questions and theories than actual answers with my practice. Though I did have an idea of what to try next. Last night a beetleing had been about to smash a man's head with a tire iron, but it had stopped and hit him in the shoulder instead. Maybe it was coincidence, but I'd seen what it was going to do and didn't want it to. If I was right, I didn't need to actually speak to them to give them orders. Combined with my range, that had a lot of potential if I was right.
I thought it over, trying to decide what to tell my savage to do. Before I could decide I heard a loud crash. I spun around to see the chain link fence behind the caboose topple to the ground. I heard movement behind me as my savage rushed towards the disturbance, but I flung a hand out and stopped it. My mind was racing. Maybe it was just some chance collapse, but if it was something else I couldn't afford to let my minions show themselves.
The feeble hope that it was just some coincidental thing ended as I heard heavy footsteps moving around on the other side of the caboose. I didn't have my costume, or even anything to hide my face, but I walked towards the fallen fence. My minions moved forward in the same general direction but they stopped by the caboose as I went to walk around it. If I was lucky, whatever or whoever this was would focus on me and wouldn't go past the caboose.
I was only a few steps around the caboose when a massive metal hand reached around the side, clamping onto the corner. I stopped in my tracks as I saw the metal distort under the strength of grip. Heavy footsteps sounded as the owner of the hand stepped into view. The hand was part of a full suit, a messy, ramshackle thing of scrap metal and spare parts, with prominent smokestacks protruding from the back. There was no helmet, revealing the face of a man, Caucasian, heavy cheeked, and acne scarred. He had long greasy hair tied back in a ponytail and a pair of welding goggles over his eyes.
I wanted to step back and put distance between myself and him. Instead I forced myself to stay where I was and meet his gaze as he looked down at me. I knew him, or at least knew of him. Trainwreck, an independent supervillain who showed up a year or so ago. No murders that I knew of, but dangerous enough that the Protectorate had made at least two dedicated efforts to capture him and failed, despite having the likes of Armsmaster on the local team.
Now he was right in front of me. In a matter of two steps he could grab me, and I was definitely less sturdy than a metal train car. Three steps, and he could see my hiding minions. Potential maiming, or getting outed as a cape, both very possible in a matter of seconds. The morning wasn't going much better than the night.