by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings.
RestartTaylor awoke when her radio switched itself on, as it was programmed to do every school day. And, in almost the same automatic way, she had barely heard the first seconds before she screamed.
It was January 3rd, 2011… Monday again. First day of school after the Christmas break. She will get up, shower, eat breakfast, take the bus, go to school…
…and she will go into that locker. And she will trigger. Again. With a power or another, no matter which. Because of the first time she had triggered there, on the very first iteration of that fateful day.
Like some capes (Alabaster, for instance), her body restarted to some fixed state. Too bad for her, that state included the time. As soon as she loses consciousness, she gets barely a wink of pause before the same music wakes her up, fully rested. With her memories slowly filling with the on-going iterations.
She had tried to escape her fate. The first repetition was strange, as she discovered that she relived the same day, with mostly the same results. And then she started experimenting.
Sometimes, she arranged not to go to school, or into the locker, shoving Sophia inside instead, a couple of much satisfying times.
Most of the time, the bullies win, whether with the assistance of Blackwell and Piggot, or the whole Protectorate setting behind their insufferable Ward (because she found out about that, too). She even died. Several times. A few of those by her own imprudence… or volition. Talk about a traumatic event! Still, on the next awakening, she was right as rain.
At other times, they were caught, either by the police or by a judicious amount of preparation from Taylor. She even had the pleasure of being the one to deliver the smack down, a couple times.
But, no matter what she did, she never left her loop.
In fact, after spending a few dozen iterations on finding everything she could about Coil (among the hundreds she had spent on the other gangs in the city), she had realized that her power was likely similar. Except that, instead of seeing two realities and choosing which one to close, she has to see (and experience) all the possibilities of a single given day.
Coil's power is bullshit: he can interact in the two realities he has running in parallel. Information from one comes to him as the other progresses. Either it's a weird precognition talent… or he really has the power to create and destroy whole realities – of which the impact is still limited to his own cone of future events, but, still…
With Taylor, it could be her power pushing her towards madness with successive views of what-could-happen, or it really rewinds time. Or recreates the reality each time.
She even had thought to escape it, when she went into the Locker and triggered with a time-travelling power: she went into the far future (for her, that meant "the next day") and had the relative surprise of living events that she didn't know by heart already. But! As soon as she went to bed, that evening… she restarted her fateful repetitive day. Time-travelling to the past didn't work either, even if she removed the wake-up call. She spent a bit of time with another Taylor, and the two of them ignored several paradoxes as they went on with their day.
And then she fell asleep. And woke on that Monday morning again. It was enough to make you hate Mondays.
She thought that her power had set a goal she had to achieve, and had tried to be good, to save everyone. It hadn't worked. She had tried to kill indiscriminately, too, after a particularly horrid repetition. Not worked either, thankfully – she wouldn't want ending in the Birdcage, paraplegic from the numerous wounds she had gotten during her capture.
She still thinks that she has some obscure goal, but she has absolutely no idea of what it is, and has long since stopped searching for it.
And now, she triggers in her locker (again) and gains a grab-bag of powers which she uses to amuse herself and confuse the others. And she doesn't feels sleepy at the end of the day, strangely.
A visit to Panacea later (because she knows that Amy Dallon is a good person and often spends some of her better restarts with her), it's established that her current iteration's trigger granted her something that other people already shared, so many that it wasn't a power in itself. She's a Noctis cape. She doesn't need to sleep.
She starts to get invested in things, very quickly, and after some difficult years and some massive luck, she helps in getting rid of Scion. She died of old age with her family around her.
And she wakes up again on that fateful January 3rd, 2011.
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To be continued… no… NOOO!Author's Notes: Author's Notes: Author's Notes: Author's Notes: Author's Notes…