by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings. I don't own the rights to…
TransformersWarning: utilitarian thievery, leading to an overpowered Mary-Sue. Oh well…
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More than Meets the EyeTaylor Hebert triggered in her Locker. End of story. The end? No: only the beginning. In fact, as she was pushed inside, a hand continued to push her while the door closed, in order to keep her from reaching out before it was locked. The hand was corporeal, but its owner had made it so her arm wasn't.
And as she triggered, Taylor grabbed at that hand with all her strength and despair… and ended up incorporeal. While, at the same time, the arm recovered its solidity… only to be intersected by the locker door. With a shout of dismay and pain, Sophia Hess walked back, holding her bleeding stump. As she turned to her accomplices, she sprayed them with blood, and all three started to scream and move haphazardly. Like headless chickens. Although it's not fair to the chickens, even headless: nothing is more stupid than a panicked crowd.
In the meantime, nobody noticed the shadowy shape escaping the locker by flowing through the wall behind it. The room it landed was the bathroom and Taylor solidified before throwing up everything she had ever eaten in her life – or so she thought.
Since Taylor was an outcast, she often had to associate with other outcasts for joint projects, and from her listening to Greg Veder prattle on capes endlessly, she was almost an expert on parahumans already. And with her knowledge, she realized that she must have had triggered. But when she realized that her powers made her intangible, she wondered why she had a copy of Shadow Stalker's powers.
After some washing of face, she left the school entirely, using her knowledge of its nooks and crannies (gained through the numerous times she had been hounded by her bullies) to weave around the crowd that surrounded Emma, Madison… and a severely diminished Sophia.
And something clicked in her mind. Sophia had pushed her, and closed the locker door through her own arm. Sophia was Shadow Stalker. Only… Taylor had triggered, pulled on the disembodied arm, and then… what? Eaten the bully's power? And removed her access to it? Was it permanent?
She didn't know. But she knew one thing, alright: at of that moment, she would be very cautious about what she did and told people. Because most parahumans would surely flip if they knew that she could steal their powers.
Especially heroes, even bullying ones like Sophia. That would be a one-way ticket to the Birdcage. That meant that she could never display Shadow Stalker's power. Ever.
In fact, she resolved to keep away from the various hero patrols and miscellaneous PR events. When her father asked why, after being invited to a presentation by the mayor, she mentioned having been bullied by some parahuman, and she didn't want any kind of contact with them. And then had to reassure him that it was now ended.
"Is this about Shadow Stalker?" he asked, unusually perceptive. Because, of course, there had been an inquiry about why Shadow Stalker was found bleeding in her school. It ended up going against her when her hand was found in Taylor's locked locker, and people had simply assumed that the depowered heroine had been preparing a prank.
Still, the inquiry revealed that Emma and Madison were guilty by association, and further digging showed the depths of their duplicity. All this was quickly buried, and Taylor didn't mention anything either. For her, having the bullying ended was enough.
That morning, her dad went to work, and she stayed home for a while. And then, a tank went through her living room, without a warning – because, of course, having a house near the Docks meant that Squealer could always run her vehicles through it.
The sudden threat to her life made her power react instinctively, and the tank stopped in its course. She now viewed it very differently, and could even send it on a wild goose chase: it only required her to open an outside control panel and tap some combination of keys.
So she did. The tank rolled backwards, flattening the two capes that had been following it on foot. Both Kid Win and Armsmaster were surprised by the unexpected high-speed manoeuver and found themselves crushed, the tank leaving the premises on its programmed route – which lead inside the depths of the Bay, actually.
Taylor felt awful about that, and rushed to help them. Besides, her first idea had been to call for the police, but the house landline had been disabled by the forceful entrance, and she didn't have a mobile one. She expected the heroes to have one, and to help in any way she could.
Kid Win had such a phone, and she dialled the number for the PRT. It took some time, but they reached Panacea, who came with her sister's aerial mean of transportation. She was able to stabilize them, and then heal them. But she ended up diagnosing them as having lost their powers. Both of them.
People had already theorized that near-death experiences could remove access to powers, in the same manner that trigger events could bring them to bear – the power-granting alien shard jumping ship, as it were. So they were sorry, but tried to integrate civilian life. Chris returned to his life as a dyscalculia-impaired high school student, leaving town soon afterwards to evade the pitying looks from the other Wards.
In the same way, the return to unpowered life failed spectacularly for Colin Wallis, unused as he was to be anything else than Armsmaster. He started to wear an armour and use a halberd and move around the country… as a civilian. Calling himself Defiant, there were instances where his reputation was enough to push villains to give in.
…and Taylor started to feel the itch to build a modular and efficient vehicle.
To begin with.
Because with Squealer's demise, some Merchants traced her last steps and ended up knocking on her barely-recovered backwall. Knocked out by the mundane expedient of having parts of her house fall on her, and put in a bag by the investigating Merchant cape, Taylor was brought in front of the two remaining ones.
"What do you cocksucking bitch know about my squealing cunt's whereabouts?" yelled the one called Skidmark, her hair held firmly in his hand. She winced, more because of his breath than the pain. And then another pain hit her when he threw her through one of his acceleration fields, only for her to hit the wall and then skid back to him. "So, little whore?"
"I'm not a whore, you shitstain!" Taylor exclaimed, standing up suddenly. And she pushed the villain through his own acceleration field. To their surprise, he was propelled against the wall just as she did. And since the field didn't change direction, he did hit said wall several times, even after having fallen unconscious. Without his secondary power allowing him to weather the worst of his drug abuse, the Merchant leader went into overdose mode immediately.
And, of course, his acceleration fields were now under Taylor's power. Resolute not to leave witnesses to her stealing powers, she put other fields near Mush and Trainwreck, pulling them towards her even faster – because they had been heading there, actually. That made them stumble, allowing Taylor to grab them by the arm, and pull with her primary power. Without their powers, the two capes were crushed by their respective armours, and Taylor gained the ability to use lower-quality materials to tinker. Garbage, even.
Noticing the darkened glass panel, she went through it in shadow form, and caught two more people before they could escape: Whirlygig and Scrub. The first was the Merchants' keeper of the "power case", a briefcase with power-granting vials inside. The other was the beneficiary of the last ceremony that Skidmark organized regularly to empower his people. Whirlygig had the ability to turn on herself, which she used to charge Taylor in a dizzying flurry of blows; Scrub could disintegrate things, and he tried to do her in.
Using Skidmark's fields, Taylor disturbed their footing, allowing her to grab at a passing arm to pull Whirlygig into Scrub's attack vector (and take her power), before pulling at the man for him to fumble his own attack, disintegrating his own lower body. And she took his power as well, easing his pain by removing the rest of his body.
Taking the briefcase that had been chained to Whirlygig's waist for some reason, Taylor became shadow-like again and filtered outside of the room.
Thankfully, she had been brought in a bag – it was thankful because she was trying to escape: since the druggies in the other room hadn't seen her, she didn't need to kill them all.
Besides, she didn't have much time. About enough to pocket the largest-denomination bill stacks stacked there, before putting fire to the rest, the drugs taking fire explosively. But she was already insubstantial and leaving through the basement and sewers.
Nobody was home: her dad was still at the museum with the Mayor and the local heroes, and her trip at the Merchants had been short and to the point. It allowed her to stay hidden as she picked a change of clothes. Apparently, selective intangibility allowed her to remove her current outfit quickly (by phasing through it), and she was able to take a quick bath in the neighbours' bathroom before getting dressed again – whatever you do, drug scent stays with clothes, and she didn't want to be linked to the crumbling drug monopoly.
And she had to play with her powers, too, to discover the extent to which she could go when gathering others: was she limited in time? In content? Only time would tell. Time she would spend experimenting.
First was her current need to Tinker herself a modular and efficient vehicle… that could morph into a power armour when needed. Almost as if she could pilot a Transformers car. Or truck.
And since she could work from almost anything, she started by tracing her steps back to the Merchant territory, because of the treasure trove of old vehicles there. Armed with basic tools like pliers and shears, as well as a portable tank for fuel, she had soon arranged for a pick-up to roll, allowing her to gather even more materials.
Of course, she did all this under disguise: instead of using her own clothes, she had taken one of her dad's costumes, tie included, and enough layers under the shirt and vest to simulate a male set of shoulders, wide-but-not-feminine chest, and straight-hips-and-pauch. With her hair hidden, a hose over her head, a blue wig atop that, and leather gloves to complete the ensemble, she looked like a man twice her age. And quite stupid.
Until said man met the second gang in town. True, the clanking vehicle was making quite a racket, in the night, and it caught the attention of the people nearby. And soon, a cordon of Asian thugs barred her way, guns pointing her way, while the second-in-command of the ABB teleported next to her.
"What do you want?" she asked, lowering her voice to try to sound like the burly man she tried to impersonate. It doesn't seem to impress him.
"What are you doing?"
"Collecting materials."
"If so, you have reasons. Reasons that make you gain money. Money we want."
A little tug-of-war later, she ended up rushing towards where Oni Lee's hand was, his activated grenade still in it. And by pulling at it through the disappearing teleporting body, she succeeded in grabbing it early enough to throw it towards the barrage of Asian Bad Boys… who scrambled away.
Surprisingly for them all, the man that was a depowered Oni Lee caught the brunt of the explosion… and didn't teleport away.
Shrugging, Taylor climbed in her car again and left. With another power at her fingertips, she started to feel the limits of what she could do. She could take as many powers as she wanted… but she could only express three of them at the same time. Except for Tinker powers, because a Tinker fugue was spread over time, and she could mix-and-match her crafting powers to use several specialties during the same time period. It would lead to unusually long fugues, she felt, but also more productive ones.
In fact, she felt she was much like Eidolon and the Faerie Queen, in that she had three powers expressed, with many others in the wings.
After rounding up some more parts, Taylor ended up in what could be considered a paradise, given her current powerset: the scrap yard.
She immediately seized up a trailer truck, almost complete, and started working on it. Efficiency meant that it would run with the little fuel she brought, at least up to the nearest pump. And she dismantled several of the surrounding vehicles to make this one viable and sturdy… and to have its trailer made into her own tinker workshop. With restrooms, a shower stall, and a bed – even if there was already a small bedroom at the back of the tractor.
And then she headed back home, taking care to park her truck somewhere safe and to change into her own clothes too.
Her father was there, with the police and the firemen and everyone. Many of his friends from the dockworkers were here as well. When he noticed her, he hugged her. "You're safe." he said simply.
"I wanted to call." she said simply, knowing that the topic of cell phones was a sore subject – since her mother's death.
But he understood and nodded. "I'll get us portable phones. As soon as we get this behind us."
She nodded, and they headed to Kurt and Lacey's house, a couple blocks nearby. They were good friends, and would house them for the time being.
Taylor went to school the next day, trying very hard to be inconspicuous. And succeeding. Her tormentors being notably absent, it wasn't that difficult.
And, once free, she went to her truck to tinker, and tinker, and tinker some more. Soon, she was out of materials and had to make another run. Eating dinner seemed like a chore, and waiting for everyone to be asleep felt like a punishment. Especially as she had caught enough similar parts, from different powers, for the Noctis "gene" to come into effect: she was now unable to sleep.
It made easier to move around in the dead of night. But less to avoid problems: her truck wasn't silenced yet, and its rumble was enough to catch some unwanted attention. Again.
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Year of the DragonSuch as a man striding to the middle of her lane and stopping there, his arm extended. She wasn't even given enough time to recognize him before rolling over him.
But he wasn't dead, and pushed the truck off his regenerating body just as he stood up. His size increased, his skin covered in metal plates, and fire appeared in the intervening spaces.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" he roared to the sky, before jumping over the trailer, heading for the tractor cabin… which dodged. "WHAT?"
In a loud cacophony of metal sliding across metal and pneumatic hisses, the whole truck shook… and then stood up. "Not if I kill you first." it intoned, and rammed a person-sized fist into the growing dragon. Yes, a person-sized fist: a five-foot high fist.
Lung flew. And, for once, it wasn't under his own power.
Taylor was inside the machine, directing it and feeling with its "nerves". But hitting someone with a remote-controlled fist wasn't the same as grabbing at a person with her own hands. And it appeared that she had to do it soon because Lung seemed out but he would escalate again as soon as he was up again.
So she set the truck across the fallen man again before opening a hatch to free her arm and grab his. It was just in time, too, because he awoke suddenly and pushed at her truck. Hard.
Apparently, her power had had just enough time to copy part of his, but not everything. Not only did it mean that his hadn't been removed, but also that Taylor's expression of Lung's power was haphazardly completed with information from other sources.
In clear, as Lung grew into a dragon, Taylor's truck grew as well and became a dragon too… but a mechanical one. Strangely enough, it was still able to fly… and to regenerate, too.
There was a place where fire dragons didn't dwell well, and that was water. Thankfully, there was a whole lot of water nearby, and Taylor half-dragged half-threw her opponent there, before maintaining his head underwater for a long time – she was ensconced in a mechanical beast, and isolated from the exterior.
Pulling the unconscious man out of the water, Taylor proceeded to come back where she had found him, initially. Only to have her way blocked by several Empire parahumans. And, given the noise, others were in other parts of the city, keeping the heroes at bay.
"You!" the voice came from Kaiser. "Whoever you are! Leave Lung to us! We'll take care of him."
"By "taking care", you mean you intend to kill him." Taylor said through her new voice, draconic and deep and powerful. "No thanks."
"You don't seem to understand: you have no choice." And metal spikes appeared around the metal dragon… and some even from said dragon, heading inside.
Taylor felt the metal bite into her legs and winced. But she also realized that the man's power was now touching her, and she pulled, again. The metal around her leg stayed but separated from the rest and surrounded her thigh, acting as a bandage. The spikes blocking her mechanical dragon disappeared, and the outside appearance of her power armour smoothed over.
"Wait…" Kaiser said in realization, taking a step back. But he didn't have time for more, as his costume extended inside, killing him instantly. Taylor made the full armour move towards her extended hand, before throwing the thing in the water behind her. She then recovered the metal, discreetly, by moving it under the water in which her mechanical dragon was still standing.
"For Kaiser!" yelled Fenja and Menja, charging her and increasing in size at the same time. Taylor let them hit and even penetrate the dragon's armour, only to reform around the Valkyries, holding them still for a few seconds – just enough for her to pull their power. Since they had the same power, Taylor could take its whole expression while letting the two giantesses keep half of it each.
Because, contrarily to her wishes to stay isolated from cape life, it seemed that it had found her nonetheless. And she couldn't keep killing those not really wanting to off her, because that would certainly lead her to the Birdcage. Or to a kill order, if her teleportation was known.
Still, you can't be a large dragon without being noticed. The Protectorate having overcome the barrage manned by Hookwolf, Miss Militia came right as Taylor was lowering the Valkyries to the ground.
"Who are you?" she asked, her weapon morphed into the largest cannon she could manage, but not aimed at her. Yet.
"I just want to be left in peace." the draconic voice said. "Kaiser tried to kill me, and he's dead. The twins attacked me, I defended myself. Lung wanted to put me on fire, I doused him. Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone."
Miss Militia was a veteran of cape combat. She knew that she would have difficulties getting such a massive opponent down. Especially as she didn't know its powers. "You can go, then. Can I have a name for you? Otherwise, the PRT will choose one, and it may not please you."
"Call me… Prime." It might give too much of a lead to her powers, but Taylor was young, and thought (with reason) that that franchise wasn't widely known anymore. In fact, the only reason she knew is because her father has shown her old reruns on VHS – their house having been the only one she had known with a workable VHS player (which was also because her parents hadn't moved to DVDs yet).
Besides, the original trailing truck wasn't visible anymore under the dragon scales. True to her words, Taylor stepped back and plunged into the Bay, disappearing under the surface.
There were enough large wrecks in the Boat Graveyard to hide the dragon under one (after morphing it into another wreck), possibly cannibalizing it for parts and matter (now that she had Kaiser's powers). Plus she could teleport anyways, so coming and going from there to home and back would be quite easy – she wasn't going to play the suicidal teleporter like Oni Lee, mostly because she was quite sure that it was the reason behind his rumoured insanity.
Once Taylor was back at her dragon, after some quality family time, she noticed several scavengers trying to get inside the "curiously sealed new wreck". They were all shaken off by the beast transforming again, though. And then, Taylor proceeded to eat away at some of the most hideous eyesores in the bay.
She had noticed, at some point, the fact that her fuel tank was emptying rapidly, but also that it never went below a certain threshold. Some introspection revealed that Mush and Trainwreck had started working on an organic compound that could be used as fuel, and by joining the two powers, she was able to pull ethanol out of the surrounding biomass to power her machinery.
She knew she could make a killing with that idea… if she wasn't killed by the oil moguls first.
Still, her truck's motor wasn't designed to work with ethanol all the time, and she'd have to refuel eventually, so she moved the "dragon" out of sight, and made it climb the coast at some deserted point, before transforming it back into a truck and driving back home… except that her trailer truck had gained an additional trailer to haul the excess matter taken from the shipwreck – it was so full, in fact, that it could be considered as solid steel. Thankfully, the road was sturdy (some people had moved a brick house, passing there).
A refuel later, Taylor was approaching one of the abandoned warehouses closest to her home… except that it wasn't that abandoned, in fact. The derelict aspect and boarded up windows hid another gang, called the Undersiders. At that moment, only one of them was home, though.
"Sorry, sorry." Taylor called when she noticed the light "upstairs" when she forced the door open. And the young man descending the stairs. "I didn't know there was someone here. Is the warehouse next to yours free? The one closer to the Docks."
"Well… yes." was all Regent could say. Taylor's appearance wasn't threatening, but he knew better than most than powers could trump appearances. And as he was without backup, he didn't want to engage in a fight. For now.
"Okay. I'll take it, then. Bye."
And that was all. Taylor drove her trailer inside the warehouse, and used the solid steel the second trailer was made of to coat the whole building by an inch of metal – even the ground and the spikes she added to dig into the earth below.
She left her "Prime" truck there, and left in search of another vehicle – Prime had been primed to be her workshop (thankfully, everything was stowed at its proper place when the thing moved) and she wanted something smaller and more inconspicuous to gather more materials.
What was theft when one was already a killer? A depressing thought, but one that kept Taylor going when she continued to "steal" abandoned car parts… starting by a pickup truck, as before. Except that, by using Kaiser's powers, the pickup became larger as she retrieved matter, with a dump trailer and a crane. And then, more and more rusty vehicles ended up as nothing more than their component parts in the bed of the dumpster.
Tailor knew that she should be wary of traffic cameras, in the streets, but the Merchant side of the town had non-functional ones, and she could still use Kaiser's power to disable them as needed. For later considerations, Squealer's powers would allow her to craft cloaking devices for her vehicles, hiding them from visibility.
Once home, she made three of those devices in one go: one for Prime, another for the dumpster, and a third for the personal vehicle she intended to make next. Because, even if it was useful (and could hold a car or two), a trailer truck is unwieldy and unfit for a soon-to-be sixteen teenager – a month to go before she could legally drive.
Said month passed quickly enough, the three gangs reeling from their losses. During that time, Taylor built herself a moped so that she could still move around in a vehicle she had built herself – given her multiple specialties, that gave her numerous options. For instance, she had two engines, one "normal", with fuel, and the other electric (for stealth, mainly). She had no speed limit, even if the display seemed to stop at the usual speed limitation for mopeds. She had weapons, too, with a cannon aiming forward and a little gun turret for behind and the sides. And, more importantly, the wheels could rotate and become parallel to the ground, transforming into rotors and making the thing hover. But, from afar, it looked like a clunky moped.
The event of importance, during that month, was her meeting the Undersiders. Because they knocked. Of course. She teleported there when needed, so she hadn't seen them wait outside, or even put notes on the door. And even when they knocked, the thick metal sheet under their knuckles didn't sound like the normally thin ones.
"Nice protection you have." the tall one said when she appeared (in her disguise) around the corner. He had seemed to wait for the lithe blonde girl to take the lead, but said girl had complained of a sudden spike in her current headache, and was led to their base by Rachel, of all people.
"Thank you." Taylor intoned. She had worked out a steel "armour" that looked like her fake body, with a deeper voice. She could even have the armour move by itself, using Kaiser's ability to move metal telekinetically. And said armour was able to be made heavier, by having more metal. Or "hosting" someone else. In fact, she could even have duplicates of herself.
"You don't happen to have seen my little sister Aisha, do you?"
"Well, if you give me a picture, I could check, but I don't recall having seen someone named Aisha, ever."
And it was true. Taylor didn't know the name of the invisible and unnoticeable person she had flattened in one of her nightly runs. Only when she had noticed the body parts stuck under the machinery did she realize she had had an accident. And the cooling brain gave her a similar power, too: when selecting that power, she was hidden from everyone's notice and perceptions unless she concentrated on being seen.
She was given a picture of a black girl she didn't recognize, and that was all.
She still saw the Undersiders more often than before. Because of his sister's disappearance, Grue was adrift from Coil's leash, and Tattletale seemed to have outlived her usefulness… except that Coil was drunk, once (given his body type, a single beer had been sufficient) and ended the wrong timeline when he wanted her killed. All in all, they were left to their own devices, relying on Tattletale for managing their money.
The fact that they had no backer also meant that they had no help when Fate struck. Alongside Über, Leet… and Bakuda. Taylor passing nearby with her hovering motorcycle (in reconnaissance for more auto parts, since she wanted to make one for her dad, now) meant that the battlefield could be flattened… and then upended.
The two cosplayers were pushed back when they insisted on forcing their antics on the comatose bomb victims, and as it happened, a black hole bomb caught them. As for Bakuda, after trampling the Undersiders, she tried to do the same with Taylor. Literally.
Except that when Taylor grabbed her leg, the bomb Tinker became a baseline human too fast to realize it, and when she growled and rubbed her toes together to activate more bombs, the needed power didn't interact correctly – in fact, she had built a failsafe mechanism: if her stuff got stolen, they would explode on anyone using them. And they exploded. On her.
Taylor got the rest, though. And more ideas for her vehicles – most notably weapons and explosives. She also got futuristic ideas from Leet… with the knowledge that she would only ever build one of each. Which made her wary: she could make an assembly line to create more of the same stuff, if needed, but then she wouldn't be able to make another assembly line…
…unless she made a highly-customizable assembly line for anything and everything. With modular ideas to expand the size of the required output, be they nanotubes or intergalactic vessels. She could even pack it and expand it on demand, allowing for moving the thing around. She realized that, if she got around to build it, she would be able to provide anything, mostly for free. Futuristic telephones, small cars, clothing, even food… anything was possible.
Something put a damper on her good mood, though: the Endbringer sirens. They were a reminder that anything she put on a stationary building and needed time to install… was vulnerable. She might make a trip to Toybox, if the Endbringer alert ended with her alive.
Because, apparently, it was coming at Brockton Bay!
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Baby StepsTaylor thought about her father, about her need to protect him and their (newly rebuilt) house, now that she could.
She could? Of course, she could. As a point of fact, she realized that she was much like Dragon: her powers allowed her to manipulate gigantic power armours as if she was inside them… and she was gearing up to build an assembly line.
She decided that she would participate to the city defence against the beast. She would have to be hidden, so as not to steal other capes' powers by accident, but she could still manage her armours from afar. And start by exchanging Prime's workshop trailer with one she could fill with grenade launchers.
Leviathan was a leviathan. That's the most evident leap of logic one could make without knowing anything about the beast. It had powers largely above those of the parahumans around it, and could one-shot most of them. Even the higher-tier ones (the Triumvirate) had some weaknesses that the beast could use – apparently, even Alexandria could drown.
In that context, it was surprising that someone like Taylor, who was just a couple days shy of being sixteen, could bring up enough power to make everyone pause. Even the beast.
Some heroes paused, too, and it was clearly not something one ought to do on a battlefield. As it was, Dauntless was caught in the middle by Leviathan's tail, and cut in two, each part landing in a separate district. As Taylor's luck would have it, she got a grab of his torso just before he died, and recovered his power.
Which was of electricity-related tinkering. The man had worked hard to imbue his equipment with an electric charge on par with a small city's consumption. And parts of it had merely singed his opponent before he died.
With the related knowledge in mind, Taylor thought that she could refine her own ideas for energy sources, mixing electricity, efficiency, modularity, and perhaps even bombs – because before nuclear energy became a source of steady electricity, it began by being a bomb, and if one could make a black hole bomb, one could envision a power source based on the same technology.
But not today. Today, the city wasn't safe enough for this kind of shenanigans.
Today, Leviathan had come and gone, destroying most of the shore but leaving with more holes in its body… as well as two missing limbs: one of its arms had ended up sucked into a black hole, and a leg had been sheared through by several attacks, the last of which being a nanothorn lance wielded by a Dragon suit – apparently, she had followed in Armsmaster's footsteps.
Taylor wanted that leg to study it, but she was a lower priority compared to the other Tinkers and Think Tanks (and the government storage centres). Instead, she had debris from its arm, taken where the small black hole hadn't eaten everything.
Often, disasters kept piling on each other: after an Endbringer, gangs with no real base keep trying to make use of the chaos to gain a foothold, and Brockton Bay was no different.
After Leviathan left to lick its wounds, others came.
It started by the Teeth. And Taylor met them before everyone else because her father was taking her for lessons in driving on the outskirts of the city – a place relatively untouched by Leviathan and its waves. As Taylor was driving around, the evil group pulled against their car and started to display their ugly mugs with ugly grins.
The Heberts were brought out of the car and put on their knees in front of the Butcher, when Taylor surprised everyone by jumping and hugging the Asian-looking woman. And then, taking advantage of their surprise, she proceeded to hug the others, starting by Animos and Hemorrhagia, on the Butcher's right. Vex and Reaver reacted first, because they were on the Butcher's other side. Taylor still had time to hug Spree.
And then she smiled madly, manifested a knife made of blood thanks to Hemorrhagia's power, and six clones rushed forward to kill the shell-shocked Teeth. And since she didn't receive anything from Reaver and Vex, she confirmed that Spree's power didn't allow her to harvest the powers of those they touched.
"What happened? Taylor?"
"Dad, when we spoke about the bullying at Winslow… I triggered. I became a cape. But you can't tell anyone, ever. Especially the PRT."
"Why? Aren't they used to cape business? I'm just your dad, you know."
"And you're a wonderful dad and I love you. What you saw me do, here… I steal powers from other parahumans, dad. I don't borrow them, or copy them. If the PRT learns about it, they will put me in the Birdcage as a precaution. They will stow me with the worst parahuman criminals just so that I wouldn't threaten their idealized life.
"They mustn't know. Nobody must know. That's why I only use my power when I'm certain that what will follow is only death. Them? They are (or were) the Teeth. They were murderous villains, with a kill order and some reward money. You can take their corpse to the PRT, say you killed them with a knife, and they'll give you money."
"What knife? I'm not…"
"This one." Taylor answered, as she pulled one from her handbag. And, in truth, the blood knife she had manifested was shaped exactly like it.
"Why do you have a knife, Taylor?"
"Because I'm a cape, dad, and capes do stupid things. This was to keep me alive if I ended up in a melee situation with nothing else. I don't need it anymore."
Daniel Hebert sat heavily on the ground, looking up at the daughter he didn't recognize anymore. "You leave the house?"
"I can't sleep anymore, dad. And our powers give us urges, like itches, that you need to scratch to feel better for a time."
"The need to kill?"
"To fight, mostly… or to build. Several powers I took were from Tinkers who had unfortunate accidents – I don't intend for most of this to happen, you now? Since then, I spend the nights in a heavily protected warehouse, working on… things. Do you want to see them? I'll drive."
He nodded. And she drove with no hesitation, all the way to her warehouse. Opening the door with her power, she rolled inside before closing the thing again. And he gasped. Inside were two trucks, two cars, and two motorcycles. The largest truck was held almost vertically, as if it was an anthropomorphic creation standing at attention. The other had its hatch open, parts available for tinkering.
One of the "cars" was a sturdy pickup, much like his own, but he could see several improvements already – the first being the lack of rust. The other was a Volkswagen Beetle, still a popular model for young drivers. Both had their hoods open, showing a normal motor, but side panels were also open, showing things that were clearly tinkertech. As if they had to show the normal things people expected to see when opening the hood, while working somewhat differently.
Same with the motorcycles: one was done, but the other was clearly in the process of being assembled… and it didn't seem to have wheels. At all.
"This will be yours, as soon as I finish with the Bluetooth connectivity." Taylor pointed at the truck. "This one will be mine." she continued with the Beetle. "If I pass the exam, of course."
"Which, given how you drove here without hesitation, will be both easy and a headache for me, because you clearly drove before. Those trucks, too?"
She nodded. "I needed a large container to move the various cars that people leave in the Merchant territory. I recycle them for parts and matter: with some of my powers, I can make steel out of rust. Better steel, even. Shaped as I want." She concentrated, and plastic flew to her from the waiting parts, reshaping itself on its way. "And now, with the Eighth Butcher's power, I can do the same with other matter."
"Yes, you killed the Butcher… isn't that supposed to be a death sentence for you too?" Daniel asked.
"No, because I took her powers before she was dead. In fact, I can do what she did, including the extra strength and other abilities, but I don't have the voices in my head."
He nodded, and approached her for a bear hug. "Okay. I can understand. You are growing up. You are going to have adventures for which your old dad won't be able to save you. Promise me one thing or two?"
"Of course, dad."
"Stay safe, as much as you can. And call me when you need help. Or just to chat."
"I promise. Thank you, dad."
"I thought I had a few more years before my little owl would unfurl her wings and leave the nest. It appears that time flew too fast lately, and you're already outgrowing me."
"You'll always be my dad."
A long pause ensued, during which each of them tried not to let a few tears roll, failed, and pretended not to notice the other's.
"Now that the heavy stuff is done, you want to take your new drive for a ride?"
"What about the… hey, those are the same!" he said, noticing the licence plates.
She nodded with a smile. "Same motor, even."
"If it's the same, then what…"
"Bluetooth for the phone, soon. Except that, I have set up a radio, a GPS screen with which you can also target my own car and phone. Between the tank and the motor, there are my additions to give you ten times more mileage. You have a sixth and seventh position for the gears, too, with a doubled cruise speed for each, with an increase in fuel consumption. Also, if you engage those positions, a cloaking device hides your car from view. Security is reinforced, with automatic slowing if you approach an obstacle that can't be driven around at your speed, reinforced glasses, panels, and tires. Automatic atmosphere and temperature regulation. And let's not forget… a chill box."
Daniel was silent for a long time. "All that… from the garbage you find in the street? You're a genius, Little Owl." A pause. "I imagine your car does the same."
"Well… I don't have the chill box." the girl replied, hesitating. "And the tires aren't reinforced either."
"You should do them, Taylor."
"I won't need them to be reinforced, dad." she said, and plunged her arm under the board to pull at a lever. Without the car dropping or moving anywhere, the wheels rotated inside, disappearing. "It floats."
"You've made… a landspeeder." He looked at the motorcycle that was being assembled. "And a hoverbike, too. I like the Star Wars references. I imagine that this is… Optimus Prime?" he asked, pointing at the standing folded-over truck.
"That would be correct." the thing replied in its deep voice, making him jump in fright.
"Sorry, dad, that would have been too funny to pass."
"But… it's alive?"
"No, it was me. I can control it remotely. Also… it can take other forms. Like… a dragon."
Daniel wondered why Taylor seemed hesitant, all of a sudden. But he remembered where he had seen a mechanical dragon and remembered the newsflashes after Leviathan had struck the city – without that many deaths and much damage, actually. "Remotely… is good." He ended up saying.
That done, they worked a bit. Taylor didn't have a cooling box for her car, but she had one for her workshop, and tinkering herself a large freezer wasn't in the domain of the impossible. Even one to hold several bodies, in order to store the Teeth for a while – despite the gory aspect of killing, taking away a corpse, and storing it, she thought it necessary in order to hide her tracks (and Hemorrhagia's power was ideal to remove traces of blood, too).
That done, they worked a bit on their knife fighting, Daniel having insisted to teach Taylor a few moves learned during his time in the military, while she made him sweat a bit.
And, finally, they transferred everything useable from the old pickup to the new (including the fuel), before Taylor tore it up for the parts.
"Impressive." Daniel commented as he saw his old car end up as a much smaller cube of metal and a few buckets of plastic and electronics. And then he drove home with his daughter.
Of course, with his new phone, he could stay in touch all the time, now, but he ended up accompanying her several times, still uneasy about her newfound independence. But the couch she had set in a corner wasn't as comfortable as his bed, and he ended up leaving her to her new affairs.
That is… until the Slaughterhouse came in town.
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Like LambsTaylor's gravity-defying vehicles could actually fly higher, appearing as small helicopters or planes, depending on her needs – her current configuration for her futuristic assembly line was to produce repulsor coils, allowing for faster flight, and everything else was pure vehicle-related tinkering.
Said flight, as well as a judicious application of Skidmark's acceleration fields for instant take-off, was useful to intercept Shatterbird when the woman came flying over Brockton Bay. Taylor's stuff was mostly insulated from the blasts because of their origins as tinkertech plastics, and the fact that her workshop was almost completely sealed from the outside, but it still broke a few glass parts.
Knowing from her cape geek years that most of the Nine were land-bound, she used the hoverbike to hunt the glassblower… and blew her out of the sky. And she positioned her flying vehicle under the falling criminal, too, to both get her powers (because manufacturing glass items would be better with the related power) and to store her in her "bounty fridge".
"Got the bird." she texted her dad, both reassuring him that she was good, and that glass panes weren't dangerous anymore. From that particular power, at least.
The next she saw was flying too, but more haphazardly. Its whole body was moving haphazardly. As if it was uncoordinated. On top of that, its outside was hard plastic that blocked her powers.
But fear not, because Taylor still had Shadow Stalker's abilities, and could reach inside Mannequin's shell to scramble its organs… and grab its powers. And her Tinkering itch increased, as she now wanted to build self-sufficient bases. In fact, she was now able to completely seal her steel warehouse, with whatever Mannequin's powers were able to devise to refresh the air and produce food and water. And treat garbage.
Mannequin down, Taylor barely escaped the clutches of the monster known as The Siberian: the woman-shaped instrument of destruction could jump really high, and she scratched at her dangling feet, her claws casually going through the leather, the skin, and the bone there.
In serious pain, Taylor gritted her teeth and dropped the Mannequin "corpse" that the Siberian had taken a hold of, but she wasn't fast enough for the creature. The naked woman jumped through the hovering vehicle's engine and tried to rip her to shreds, provoking the instinctive reaction of trying to block her blows with her hand.
And she succeeded. But not in the way you might think: it was her power, activating because of her acute distress, which pulled at the Siberian's… only to have the stripped body pop like a bubble, disappearing completely. And upon inspection of her new power, Taylor realized that the Siberian wasn't a monster: she was a projection. An indestructible projection which could grant her invulnerability to those it touched.
At the same time, she noticed two things: first, she was dropping from the sky, her vehicle losing altitude rapidly. And second, there was a white van in the street underneath, conspicuous because it was the only moving vehicle there, and it was following her from the ground.
Since the projection was hollow, she chose to project it around herself, with the same appearance as before. That way, she was as indestructible as it was, when her speeded crashed – she still manufactured her own metallic band-aids for her foot and other scratches.
A man jumped out of the van, and looked at the Siberian. "Sarah?" he asked. "Are you… autonomous, now?"
Taylor didn't know who he was, but if people assumed that she was the Siberian, she could easily reach the others in the Slaughterhouse. Like in a Trojan horse.
And she did. The projection's hard shell protected her from being detected by Jack Slash, from having her powers nullified by Hatchet Face, and from inhaling Bonesaw's plague agents – she just needed a short time for her to take the girl's power and reverse her bacteriological attack, while the girl's mechanical spiders were destroyed by her power on metal.
Taylor couldn't get Hatchet Face's power, because it nullified hers as long as he was alive, and then she had an unpowered corpse – but she still had Animos' ability to nullify powers at range.
And Jack was knocked out as soon as the Siberian could touch him, leaving Taylor able to grab both his ability to melee attacks at range, and to connect to nearby power shards.
That done, she killed the man in the van, too. A dangerous witness he was, and also the originator of the murderous Siberian. Taking the van to take the corpses away, she drove back to where her hoverbike crashed, and moved its parts in the back, too – with her ability to shape metal, she had no risk of further damaging the bodies.
And then she returned to her workshop.
"Done Mannequin, Siberian, Jack Slash, Hatchet Face, and Bonesaw." she sent to her father.
"Thank you. You fine?" he replied quickly.
"Just a cut in my foot. Being treated now." she replied. Which was true: with Bonesaw's power, it was quite easy. In fact, she itched to use the bio-tinker's power in a self-improvement fugue. Soon.
She didn't really have the time to do so, though, because a truly massive attack shook the building. Given how solid it was, Taylor thought of very few possible causes. With her current hosts, she had only one: Crawler. For some reason, the monstrous monster had been guided to her lair, and she had to take care of the problem immediately.
Thankfully, the beast was quite simple in its attacks, so all Taylor had to do was to reinforce the side it attacked, and leave to take him from another angle. Above was good, but she had already noticed the numerous police choppers already there, and didn't want to be discovered. Instead, she teleported behind Crawler.
It had good ears and reaction time, because he noticed her presence and charged… right through a disintegration attack from Scrub's power. The disintegration effect wasn't large enough to affect the monster in its entirety, but given its charge, and then the reflective effort it made to escape, the attack destroyed most of its body. And by touching its head before disintegrating it as well (because it was regrowing a body) Taylor obtained the power to become inured to anything that might kill her.
Strangely, her next feeling wasn't elation but a sudden anguish. It was almost enough to drive her to suicide, which was unusual enough for her to understand that it was an attack. On the surface, it appeared as if Gallant had hit her with one of his emotion-changing beams, but those were visible. And nobody was around, making her realize that it was likely an area attack.
Still, some area attacks can have their source discerned because they had to obey a few rules. And this one wasn't different: it emanated from the parahuman, and grew in strength as you neared her. "Her" because it was a girl.
Gritting her teeth not to impale herself in one of her own spikes of metal, Taylor found the direction in which the feeling was the worst, and propagated Kaiser's power along that vector. After several seconds, implying some distance away, she felt the depressing feelings lift suddenly and hurried forward, only to catch the dying girl in her arms. And her power too: she could now detect people by their emotions, in a wide range, and affect them. Obviously, Cherish's range was larger than Jack Slash, otherwise she would have felt her power before the depression.
With it, she felt Burnscar's madness nearby, but also her longing for her friend, a friend that she knew could bend space and create whole worlds. One that Taylor associated with the nickname Labyrinth, one of Faultline's crew. Noticing that, without the others' influence, Burnscar wasn't the mad arsonist everyone portrayed her as, she changed her appearance a bit (using Bonesaw's powers) before taking her to the parahuman mercenaries.
And it was the end of the Slaughterhouse.
Another disaster-provoking group was the Travellers. Apparently guided here by chance, or the Simurgh's influence, they ended up with Noelle, branded as Echidna, spitting clones of any hero reaching her.
As such, Taylor didn't want to touch her. Given how massive Echidna was, she sought to attack from a distance. Her metamorphic vehicles being in her warehouse, quite far, she opted to use Cherish's power first.
Thankfully, it worked, in the sense that it made Echidna suicidal, pushing all the clones to kill her, and then themselves. No earth-shattering revelation was made, and no secret identity was betrayed – the clones were mostly of Glory Girl and others from New Wave.
The other members of the Travellers gave themselves up to the Protectorate after that, and ended up rebranded as heroes, with Jess' legs healed by Panacea.
You might wonder about the fact that, if the Simurgh controlled Noelle, she might had pushed for her to show herself somewhere else. An answer could be found in the numerous powers Taylor had already gotten: a few of them predicted the future, somewhat, making her a precognitive thinker. And it was well-known that precogs were blinded by other precogs.
With the last threat dealt with, Taylor worked with her father on several ideas. The first was for the two of them to undergo a change in their physiology: thanks to Bonesaw's power, Taylor was able to reinforce skin, muscles, bones, and nerves, making the two of them equal to low-level Brutes – for Taylor, already super-strong thanks to the Butcher's powers, it wasn't a great difference; for Daniel, it meant that he had to be careful with how he held everyday items, lest they break.
Another idea was to give him real powers. Bonesaw had worked on brains, and knew how to isolate the brain structures unique to parahuman physiology: the Corona Pollentia and Gemma. Taylor felt that she could do it, provided that she was completely insulated, in order not to steal the power for herself – which would defeat the purpose.
Or they could simply have him drink a Cauldron vial. With the Siberian's power helping break through the locks, Taylor had explored the briefcase obtained from the Merchants, and it held half a dozen vials, and a documentation.
Using the fact that a gang member tried to kill the two of them in a dark alley, they established the fact that the documentation was factual about the vials: the one they fed the downed man gave him a Tinker power in link with the cell phone he desperately wanted to use to call reinforcements.
But they killed him before he could call, Taylor gaining another Tinker specialty – the documentation said that the vials didn't work on people with powers already, but, apparently, that didn't prevent her from gaining the corresponding powers anyways.
Using Jack's ability to communicate with powers, she had already determined the global scope of the vial's power, and the experiment with the mugger reinforced her feelings. With that in mind, she selected one of the vials for her father, but mixed it with parts of others. That led to an increased Brute rating, because he was suddenly much stronger.
The true offensive power was his new ability to use weapons: if something could be used as a weapon, he was now expert in using it as such. Clubs, knives, barstools… anything. He had unerring aim and enough strength to hit things from ten times as far as regular humans, with ten times the lethality – same with ranged weapons.
Defensively, he was also good, despite the initial surprise of having a vividly green skin with reptilian scales – like others having tested the power vials from Cauldron (colloquially known as Case 53s), he was physically changed.
Thankfully, with Bonesaw's abilities, Taylor was able to revert his skin to its normal appearance. It helped that he had the power to regenerate quickly, and it included the space around his body, with a depth of several inches – not only would it regenerate any weapon and reasonably-sized body armour, but it would also allow him to regenerate other people too, by laying his hands on them. Or taking them in his arms, but the first image stayed with him, as he chose the nickname Paladin.
Given his proficiency with weapons, it was decided that he would be the one to ask for the bounty from the corpses in Taylor's ice box, using his abilities as proof – he would say he had had help from others, because some were obviously not dead from a regular weapon. For the others, using the claymore Taylor made him, he beheaded each of them, with Hemorrhagia's power helping to add some blood afterwards (so as to make it appear as if the beheading was close to the arch-villains' death, perhaps even its cause).
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First FlightTaylor finished her school year with good marks, even exceeding everyone's expectations in the fields for which she had a Tinker specialty. Given how these were ubiquitous, that meant that most of her science teacher's comment hesitated between "did she cheat" and "once the bullying stopped, Taylor was able to flourish, and we recommend advanced placement".
The latter won, and Taylor took some exams during the summer. To everyone's shock, she was able to enter her senior year easily, and could even have tried to enter some of the colleges where people didn't bat an eye at having an ex-mediocre sophomore join, skipping two years straight.
She also took advantage of the same summer holidays to explore the country with her Beetle. She made herself useful by driving near Ellisburg. Stopping for a minute or two, she used both Animos and Spree's powers to transform into wild animals and sending them towards the town. Each of them was a clone of her body, and thus armed with a bacteriological agent able to identify Nilbog and its creations, and turn them to pulp.
She also got herself kidnapped by Heartbreaker's thralls, which allowed her to be led to his protected location… and kill him (without touching him, because she didn't want his power or the urges it gave him).
In Boston, she visited some kind of museum, and when she returned to her car, she noticed the anti-technology tags on it as well as the other cars in the street, and the walls. Exploring the surroundings quickly, she finds the perpetrators… which were plant constructs. She followed them until she found their hiding place: a lab with their creator working on other creatures. Given the massive use of plants in everyday life (including specialized plants to provide oxygen for her base, to bear fruits, and also to aggregate wood and even pure carbon into elaborate structures), she decided to take what was essentially a villain's power.
Blasto found himself at the mercy of his own plants, and succeeded in killing them by flooding his lab in toxic gas, but he died at the same time. And Taylor made good use of plants, including the creation of some algae that could remove unwanted paint from her car.
But all of her stops were merely distractions: her goal was the Tinkertech convention that Toybox organized every year.
Toybox was the name for a group of Tinkers whose inventions were highly sought after. The admission fee was prohibitive, as was the price of the things sold therein. But Taylor wasn't intending to buy anything, at first. She knew that, just by being there, she would learn many things and get ideas for even more.
She met people like Glace and Big Rig, whose abilities she found interesting, but not for her. The one called Pyrotechnical was interesting, since he could create flames, special effects, and guns, but she already had Bakuda's power for this. Bauble was useless, given that she had Shatterbird's power.
The one she was most interested in was Dodge, for his ability to manipulate space. She offered him quite a sum of money for nothing, because she didn't want anything he could create: she wanted his power to do so. Now, it had been some time since she had awakened with her power, and she had learned how to use it better. She knew that she could pull select parts of someone's power, just enough so that they'd regenerate with time, while she would reconstruct everything with time, too.
That's why she sat down while he explained how his power worked, and she shook his hand afterwards. The explanation allowed her to select what she wanted, and the handshake to actually pull at it. Her ability to communicate with powers made everything smoother for everyone, and he had already forgotten the exchange a few minutes afterwards.
That made her able to open portals between places. Instead of his ability to create pocket dimensions, she could have a door, any door, open to somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with a door, still.
That allowed her to continue her world tour while staying home: as night fell, she would open a portal to another place, help for a time or find a nice power to add to her collection, and then go back home. She was also able to be present at each Endbringer battle from then on, without requiring transportation. In fact, no one knew she was there, even when she sent her best attacks at the massive engines of destruction: everything was done remotely. She had no Dragon-made armband either, and would leave as soon as she could.
During that time, she found out about the Simurgh and its victims… and the places quarantined because of its attacks. Returning to Toybox with an offer for Cranial's powers, she was then able to make a machine that would remove specific memories from people, notably the memory that were implanted by Masters. Putting such a machine over a doorway and then opening a portal to places still quarantined, she was able to exfiltrate many people back into a productive life – it helped that her bio-tinker powers could remove the tattoo indicating their otherworldly influence, now that it was removed. And since several people did trigger while in quarantine, she got a few more powers.
In one of these areas, she found a strange portal linking to another Earth. And the studies made by Professor Haywire about that portal. It meshed with her ability to make her own portals, allowing her to open them into other dimensions too.
When Scion will come, she'll be quite able to face him and help her world survive.
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To be continued… possiblyThe score: Shadow Stalker, Squealer, Armsmaster, Kid Win, Skidmark, Mush, Trainwreck, Whirlygig (got some vials), Scrub, Oni Lee, Lung (kept alive), Kaiser, Fenja/Menja (kept alive at half power each), Aisha, Über, Leet, Bakuda, Dauntless, Butcher, Animos, Hemorrhagia, Spree, Shatterbird, Mannequin, Siberian, Jack Slash, Hatchet Face, Bonesaw, Crawler, Cherish, vial (phone tinker), Blasto, Dodge (kept alive and powered), Cranial (kept alive), others.