by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings.
ChanceLocked in her locker, with the mess inside, Taylor screamed for help. And when none came while she felt herself go weak from blood loss and poisoning, she prayed. When the gods stayed silent, she merely asked for "a power, any power" to get her out of there, to give her the strength to do so, and the resilience to live one more day.
If she felt unconscious, at that point, it wasn't because of unsanitary the locker was. It was because of the cosmic force at work there. Somewhere else in the building, the girl whose hidden identity was Shadow Stalker felt it too, and she froze. Too late, she remembered her own trigger event, and realized that she might have given Taylor a power or another.
Hurrying through the school, she could only gape, as others did, when she saw the state of the corridor where Hebert's locker had been: the whole row had been smashed. Metal rent as if mere paper.
In her sudden fear to have awoken something like the Siberian, she forgot about her previously hidden stash behind her own locker case, with a spare costume and weapons. Lethal ones.
Unbeknownst to all those in Winslow, Taylor was outside, running and jumping from rooftop to rooftop in her dash to get home. She wanted to shout in joy from the exhilarating feeling of freedom… but at the same time, no, she wanted to stay discreet.
Which wasn't easy: she was taller, at least seven feet, with the body (and curves) of a woman… with green skin. Everywhere. And it was even more visible, as she was mostly naked, her clothes not having resisted the change of size. Still, she was also much stronger, and could jump from the street level to low-rise roofs, and from there to higher ones. Even with bare hands and feet, she felt no pain when jumping and running, the lack of damage on her skin meaning that it was especially tough (and not just a lack of pain feelings).
She arrived home and paused, hidden, until she was sure that nobody was looking her way. And then she grabbed the hidden key and entered – there was always a hidden key, because she didn't want to be stuck outside if the bullies stole her key.
With the rest of her day, Taylor tested her new power. Blades wouldn't pierce her skin. Calm could return her to normalcy, and anger push her back into the green She-Hulk she had been. She also used her meagre proficiencies in sewing to make herself an outfit that could extend when her body would grow. Elastic fabric wasn't in abundance in her home, meaning that she got the first thing that was slightly palatable: a plain purple thing.
And she went to sleep with a smile, her head full of dreams of vengeance upon the trio of bullies.
She arrived at school and immediately noticed Emma and Madison. Not seeing Sophia, she looked around to confirm, the black athlete sometimes in the mood for a surprise attack. But, no, no Sophia.
"Look at what the tide brought today, girls." Emma crooned. "A wreck."
Taylor had to force herself to be angry. Eighteen months of bullying had taught her to swallow her inner rancour. But she had powers, now! She would show them! She would!
"What is it, Tay-Tay?" Madison asked, her mask of fake sincerity in place. "Constipated?"
They laughed, and Taylor fled. She had been trying to get angry enough to change, like she had practised the day before, but it hadn't worked. And, worse, she had looked really bad, there. Constipated, yes.
And as she was crying, in the loo, she heard the sound of other girls entering. Not Emma, no. Anonymous girls, complaining about… the weather?
"Yeah, so, they said, see, there'd be, like, sun, right?"
"Totally! And now, fuck, the rain! Sodden downpour!"
Completely random words strung like pearls in a collar, with only a couple of them useful, the rest acting as punctuation or emphasis. Like, yeah, totally teenagers. Though the last one seemed articulated enough to produce "downpour" with a pun on "sodden". They were drenched, their shoes making squelching noises when they walked. And as more and more girls came to clean themselves up, Taylor realized something.
The forecast had been clear for the whole day. Hence the fact that several girls didn't have a rain-appropriate attire, which caused them to get wet. The rain was unnatural. And you know what else what unnatural? Getting a super-power one day… and losing it the next!
She went outside to check. There were clouds, but quickly clearing. Trying to summon her sadness back, she noticed that the clouds darkened again, some drops falling down and making people hurry back inside.
The bell rang, precipitating everyone to their classes, and Taylor wondered. Did she really have a power over weather? What could she do with it? Could she create a thunderstorm? Call lightning? Call up winds? Fly? She felt she could, which would require some training. And she skipped school at the first opportunity, in order to check. It worked.
With a dad fan of some weird aspects of Earth Aleph culture, she had read upon strange comics about capes, as if they were fictional – their explanation about power sources had been hilarious, too: as if deadly exposure to radioactivity granted powers! But, anyways, with those comics back at the forefront of her mind due to the importance of a particular character who had power over the weather, she had her cape name for the day.
She was Storm.
And, yesterday, she was She-Hulk.
Who would she be tomorrow? And why did she change from day to day?
She tried to remember about her trigger event, because cape lore told that those shaped the cape's powers. Seeing the sky darken ominously, she also remembered that those events were charged with negative emotions, and kept her temper in check as she forced herself to remember. And as lightning struck nearby, she did: she had asked for "a power, any power" to get her out of there, to give her the strength to do so, and the resilience to live… one more day.
Taylor felt the sudden and acute need to bash her head on a wall (and, this time, the wall wouldn't yield). If only she hadn't been so vague on the power! And so precise on its timespan!
The next morning, she awoke with some difficulty, right as her father yelled her to do so as he left for work. Not only had she had a fretful sleep, plagued with nightmares, but she also was uncomfortable, her tail painfully folded under her body.
Wait, what? Her tail? She jumped to her feet and hurried to the mirror, so fast that smoke appeared.
And she screamed.
She had a skin so black that it had blue highlights, completely white eyes, pointy teeth and ears, only three fingers per limb, and a tail. And she had teleported from the bed to the mirror. With smoke and a "bamf" sound.
She was Nightcrawler. And there was no hope in hell she could go to school like this.
It took a long time before Taylor got some control back in her life. Her day as Nightcrawler had the school call her father, and he came home with questions. Seeing her with powers, he did what most responsible parent would do: he called the authorities.
She was inducted into the Wards, right as Sophia Hess was escorted out. The lethal weapons found at Winslow, when Taylor had uprooted the whole row of lockers two days before, led to a careful search, including the caches found on her non-approved patrol itineraries. She was sacked from the program, and sent back to juvenile detention. With electrical bracers to prevent her from merely phasing through walls, as well as plans for cell walls including a mesh of live wires.
Taylor was surprised to hear that the girl had been Shadow Stalker, a hero – although said hero had fallen off her pedestal, right now, which helped her acclimatize to the situation. Otherwise, she'd have teleported out, her dad be damned. Or use another power: with her day-to-day change, she would always find new ways to escape, if she ever needed them.
Still, at the Wards and without Sophia, she warmed up to the team and worked freely with them. In return, they helped with training and suggestions, sometimes joined in that endeavour by one Protectorate hero or another. With their help, she found ways to use her power a little bit more reliably.
The first idea was that she changed upon waking up. Power naps were a thing, reinitializing her power. Building upon that, they found out that any period of non-consciousness could lead to the same, such as being whacked on the head (they didn't try, just suggested it… and got a bolt of lightning from the Dr Doom whom Taylor was then impersonating).
Being subjected to Clockblocker's ability worked, too, as said Dr Doom experienced.
Later, with various members of the Protectorate working with her, she tried injections, hypnosis, beverages, and even some surgically-inserted electrodes to trigger the appropriate parts of her brain to reproduce the "waking up" signal… enough times so that she could grab the cape persona the most useful for any situation.
The second idea occurred after they played some game together: they noticed that, if the game included a random choice with many possibilities (such as throwing dice, or picking a card in a deck), the same results in the last choice before she got to sleep got her the same set of powers upon her next wake-up call. It reduced the number of times she had to try to sleep and awaken, and, in time, she got the whole list.
The first thing about the list was that it wasn't sorted by any imaginable criterion.
The second thing was that it started at one, but had no real end.
The third thing was that, once determined, the entries never changed, even when another method was used: when rolling a single die to get a number between one to six, you got the same six choices, but when rolling two dice, you got results between two and twelve, and the results of the entries numbered two to six were the same as before.
Using more dice, or dice with more sides, picking a card, or other methods, led to the discovery that the list wasn't really infinite, the entries repeating after a while… with an alternate version of the same super-powered individuals. Or just plainly older or younger.
Taylor worked each of them at least once, getting the names and the corresponding powers. Of course, when she actually used the dice, they would be loaded – as some people say: if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying enough.
They called her Chance, in the end, and her power armour (courtesy of other Tinkers, so that it could adapt to her shape, whatever it was) included a picture of a die – without a standardized gimmick, her variable physical appearance would have been difficult to associate to the same heroic identity.
Still, sometimes, she went out without it, using a previously unused power, just to see what could happen. Just taking a chance.
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To be continued… perchanceAuthor's Notes: Beware of half-assed wishes. Again. As you saw, this has Marvel Crossover all over it. And perhaps more, if I continue down that road. But I don't own any of that stuff, obviously.