by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings. This chapter goes around the obligatory parts of trigger, power training, and confrontation, only to end up with wires.
CellIn her youth, Annette loved hearing classical music while reading classical literature. In her mind, the two were related, sometimes literally: some books had been written while the music played, or one was the inspiration of the other. In any case, when she asked her parents for more of the same, they agreed to let her start music lessons.
She played the flute. Or flutes, plural, as she found that specializing in one instrument was quite limiting. In the same vein, she asked for lessons in violin and piano as well… which she didn't get, her parents not being that rich. Still, she played the transverse flute reasonably well, and the piccolo, tin whistle, and pan flutes too.
As mothers are wont to do everywhere, she transmitted some of her habits to her daughter. And she decided to indulge in one of her youthful wishes, and got her a stringed instrument – a cello. That way, she could learn to play it alongside her daughter (who was quite tall for her age), while she taught her to play her own instruments.
Because of a road accident, it didn't last very long.
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The obligatory triggerFor a girl in mourning, having her only-friend-turned-bully desecrate her mother's flute was the tipping point into raging madness. Seeing the beautiful instrument smashed to pieces in the bottom of her locker, half-visible due to the pestilential sludge at the bottom, it made her vomit onto it, adding to the hazardous materials. And then she felt a strong kick hitting her tail bone, so hard that something broke as she was propelled inside, hitting her head on the wall. Unconscious, she fell into the biohazard face first, her whole body sliding into a horizontal position.
Having collapsed face down, she had her long legs facing the floor, which made it difficult for Sophia and Emma to close the locker. They started to manhandle her to turn her around so as to raise her legs and finish their dismal task. However, the broken bones made a hideous sound, and Madison recoiled. Emma started to have second thoughts, even as Sophia egged her on. But it was Taylor who made them abandon ship: promptly awoken by the pain, she screamed like a banshee. And promptly tried to wipe her face… only succeeding in spreading the dangerous material into her eyes.
Taylor can't stand this. Well, in fact, she can't stand at all. And she's effectively blinded. Thinking that her bullies want to kill her (which wasn't far from the truth), she ends up triggering, finally. But then, her second bout of unconsciousness was shared by Sophia. Not pushed anymore, the two other members of the trio shuffled away, holding their leader up between them. They had heard Taylor's primal scream and were sure that damning witness would come forward.
Sure, they came. Surprisingly, most of them were of the normal sort (not gang members) and called for the cops and an ambulance. Equally surprisingly, the calls were heard, and followed. Taylor ended up in the hospital, where she was diagnosed with early sepsis, blindness, and paralysis below the kidneys. She needed intensive care for a few days. Her dad wasn't rich, though, and he had to accept a bargain with the school that he wouldn't sue them, in exchange for them paying the bills.
In the end, it was a visit by Panacea that healed her – learning that a teen her age or younger would end up blind and crippled by school bullies didn't sit well with Amy Dallon. It also made her willing to see Taylor several times, and they started to discuss about the school, and about themselves. Even when she later left the hospital, Taylor kept contact with the teen healer, and they would continue their discussion wherever they could – the hospital again, where Taylor volunteered some of her time, or a café on the Boardwalk.
In truth, having found a friend without her sister meant the world for the young healer: she could confide in some things that she had hidden from everyone else. And Taylor helped her get some distance from her sister and mother by inviting her home a few times. Nothing unusual among friends, and their cover story was the actual truth: Panacea had healed Taylor at the hospital, when the younger teen was victim of heavy abuse and bullying.
Carol Dallon saw the issue immediately, and offered her help to Danny, Taylor's father. Due to him having accepted the initial bargain, he couldn't sue the school, but Carol could bring attention to the dishonest procedure, equating it to an admission of guilt. They didn't, though: they directly attacked Sophia Hess – after a brief chat with Alan Barnes, who wasn't all that thrilled about her daughter being accused of bullying but also wasn't happy about her recent choices in life and friends. Choosing to paint Emma as a victim of an even more insidious bullying from Sophia, they went for the kill.
They didn't get it. As soon as her name has been called, Sophia Hess disappeared. The PRT came knocking, and it was revealed (after much signing of non-disclosure agreements) that Sophia Hess was the Ward Shadow Stalker, and that she had escaped her handlers. Taylor was given her own PRT handler, following her everywhere in case Shadow Stalker came for a vengeance. She only escaped said handler when she was with Panacea.
In the meantime, she found out about Emma's reasons for sticking with Sophia: the ex-ward, who had been a "simple" vigilante at the time, had saved her against a gang attack. Emma got her own handler, after she outlined several caches where Shadow Stalker had hidden lethal weapons. Her dad negotiated for that help to count against a possible trial of her daughter – for being accessory to murder, in some cases, because she had been with Sophia at the time. But he pulled her away too, and put her in a year-round school in another State.
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The obligatory power discovery and trainingThe first time Amy had seen Taylor, it was in the hospital, and she had had to inform her about her new status as a parahuman. Since her patient's dad hadn't been there at that precise moment, she had pushed that revelation for later. And, later, she had become quite friendly with Taylor, and the two of them agreed to wait a little before telling everything – mostly because they didn't know anything about the power itself.
Thanks to Amy's help, Taylor was faster in discovering her power and its limits – the bio-shaper was able to feel what was happening in her brain when she concentrated. It made Taylor infer that she could heal brains, too, something which made Amy react in a predictable way: she rejected the case wholesale. Taylor was quite inquisitive, though, and needled the real reason out of her: it was because Amy thought it was too easy, and was fearful of going too far.
Applying a bit of logic, Taylor was able to give her new friend an impossible choice: she could train on simple creatures first, get her shtick right before starting on bigger ones, and finally the human ones… or she could find herself needing the ability and floundering because she wouldn't have had the training. Taylor being quite new in Amy's life, the healer couldn't placate her the same way she had done to everyone else, and she accepted – but only if Taylor swore not to tell anyone, because people rightfully feared Masters, and she didn't want to be seen in the same light as Heartbreaker, who brainwashed people into servitude (she especially didn't want to be seen as Nilbog, the monster-generating parahuman, because the true scope of her power included the creation of whole new creatures).
And the two girls worked together to explore their powers. While Panacea worked on using her power on small animals, Taylor explored her own, and its limits.
Her abilities? Sound.
Or, to be more detailed, Taylor could transform acoustic vibrations into physical forces. In opposition to Triumph, who could only transform his own shouts, Taylor could do it with any sound coming from around her… but not her voice. She could clap her hands and generate a cone-shaped field where things were pushed away from her. She could transform sharp and high notes from a flute into a piercing force. She could transform the notes from a string into a slashing edge that could be projected from the string itself.
Discovering that last one made both girls pale, as it was very much like Jack Slash's power, and she was also finally quite glad that her voice wouldn't be a weapon: that would have been like Shatterbird's power, and she didn't want to have more links to powers of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Especially as her power could make her fly, like the aforementioned killer.
That discovery was completely accidental, and happened when she was sitting on a hi-fi loudspeaker: using the sonic vibrations, she could move the wooden cube around, and her as well. From side to side… and up.
Each aspect of her power depending on the vibration she transformed, she had to take numerous notes, and ended up refining her meagre computing skills to use a spreadsheet software, filling its cells with formulas. It would help, too, to investigate the wavelengths she had missed with her initial tests.
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The obligatory confrontationsBy then, Taylor was almost ready to tell her father – she hadn't wanted it, initially, because she knew that his reaction would be to send her to the Wards, and she was quite angry about the whole mess with Shadow Stalker.
And the very day before she wanted to do it, she was attacked, at home, by a rabid ex-Ward. A bolt went to her stomach, and another in his, before Shadow Stalker removed her mask and sneered at her, mocking her weakness and rejoicing in her prompt demise.
And Taylor clapped. That made the next bolt, fired towards her head, turn back and bury itself into the home invader's guts.
"What have you done?" she complained. "It hurts!"
"And it's me you treat as weak?" Taylor mocked her, before stopping. First, because gloating attracts all kinds of problems. And second, because Shadow Stalker readied another shot, towards her father, who had scrambled for the phone. "Do that, and I'll disarm you."
"As if." was the answer, as Sophia pulled the trigger.
This time, Taylor used the vibration of the crossbow's own string to slash down, through flesh and bone. The weapon fell to the floor in two pieces, alongside Sophia's whole hand. She screamed in pain, and fired the other weapon. Einstein would have called that (repeating the same failed experiment) as insanity. And Taylor dis-armed her again – thankfully, both times, the action on the string had removed all energy from it: as they had practised with Panacea, she knew that she could use the sonic vibrations as force, but they would then produce much less noise. Same here: the two bolts had fallen two mere feet in front of Shadow Stalker, and not where she had aimed them.
At that time, Taylor had been sitting in a comfortable chair. In a corner of the room was a wheelchair, which had been provided by the school's initial settling funds. In Sophia's mind, the crippling of her target was still quite real, and she imagined that she could still attack with her feet, even though Taylor had been trying a new instrument that evening – a Chinese violin, made of a single string. She hadn't used it yet, that night.
Her kick crashed through the fragile instrument, and pushed her earlier bolt further into Taylor's guts. The chair fell backwards, the teen girl following, in pain.
Taylor wasn't crippled, though, and she stood again, holding one end of her violin's string. Sophia was still attacking, like a rabid dog, and Taylor only succeeded in hitting her twice with the string – once by using it to generate a slashing edge across the room, the other by whipping it around. The problem was that Sophia's power allowed her to turn into a shadow just as her powers tried to reach her.
That's when her father came back from where he had been phoning for help, and gave Taylor an item he had fetched right afterwards: a Taser. After Shadow Stalker had gone rogue (in a bad way), the PRT had leaked that she was vulnerable to electricity, and Danny had bought two of them: one for him, one for Taylor. Point in case, he had the other one ready to strike, too.
Since Sophia stayed out of easy reach, Taylor decided to improvise, and she stuck her violin string to the Taser's end. Then, trying not to touch the metal cord with her hands, she activated the weapon and slashed with the flexible length of metal.
As the electrified wire hit Sophia, the pain made her turn solid, and the string coiled around her neck. Without hands, she couldn't remove it, and she tried to extract herself by pulling at it. Only… with their mutual powers acting against each other, the string acted not as a badly-wound lasso, but like a hot wire going through butter.
It started as painful, slowly crushing Sophia's trachea. It then cut into very important blood vessels. The unrepentant bully had a few seconds to realize that she was going to die, but she couldn't scream or plead her case anymore (not that Taylor would have heard her after having been shot), and her frantic attempts to get away only hastened her fate: pulling at the string by trying to move away from her nemesis, she made its vibration higher, and the result was a vastly increased effect… which beheaded her.
When that happens, the heart continues pumping blood for a few seconds, and the body that fell in two parts practically covered the floor in the sticky red liquid. Taylor hadn't been ready to kill, and felt bile going up. But with the bolt in her belly, she was already coughing blood, and she tried not to vomit and worsen her condition.
"You called the cops?" she asked her father, her voice weak.
He nodded. "They'll bring an ambulance." he added, before taking in the cooling corpse. "We'll have to discuss this, but… thank you."
"You're welcome, dad. And you're right: we'll discuss this."
When the ambulance came, the first person out wasn't a medical professional but Panacea herself.
"You didn't think that by giving me your address, I'll be notified if an ambulance goes there?" she asked before treating their wounds. "Hopefully, you won't get anymore life-threatening wounds for a while."
"Normally, no." Taylor said, looking at the body that the cops were inspecting.
"Oh. Right. Well… I can't do anything for her, now."
"Did you have to kill her?" a cop asked. "She was unarmed, at the end."
"Unarmed, she still kicked the crossbow bolt in my gut." Taylor said. "A little higher, I'd be dead."
"Besides," Panacea said, "she was a villain cape, intent on killing people. I healed a big guy with the same bolts in the chest, in the hospital. He was minutes away from dying."
"A cape, you say?" another cop said. "It's for the PRT, then."
"Fucking capes." the first one retorted in his moustache, his voice going weaker still as he walked away. "Always flouting the law. They belong in a prison cell, the whole lot."
Amy didn't say anything, but Taylor noticed the corner of her mouth getting up. When the policemen were out of hearing, she muttered "I'm the worst: my mom is a lawyer."
A few minutes later, Armsmaster was there, heading a few troopers. Panacea told him a bit, but the ambulance was waiting for her to finish her (self-assigned) shift at the hospital, so she didn't stay for more. Then, while the troopers did the ugly job of getting body parts together in a bag, the big man started discussing the Wards program with Taylor and her dad.
She already thought that being with the Wards was interesting, and that was mostly because she had thought about it in depths beforehand. As such, she didn't act as a pushover with the Image and PR departments. She wasn't dubbed "Princess Violetta" or something equally asinine.
Instead, she took the name Ludwig. She knew she wasn't the most feminine person around, and accepted that fact. Being a male hero further dissociated her two identities.
With her ideas about flying, she earned a low-grade Tinker rating, which in turn gave her enough budget to fabricate a flying chair – and since it was going to be her means of transportation, she made it quite comfortable too. And added a keyboard, as well as the various bells and whistles a DJ had on hand when playing with sound.
She kept a piccolo flute on her at all times, too, because it was small and easily transportable and concealable, and, in her hands (and mouth), it acted as a devastating blowgun.
But with the flying "throne" (as dubbed by Clockblocker) providing sound in any direction, she could sow chaos and destruction in the same directions. And get an intermediate Mover rating (because she could lift several people by simply increasing the volume of the infra-sounds she used).
Since she could counter gravity using the physical force generated from the sound waves, she could also push back against anything thrown at her. Adding more loudspeakers was trivial when compared to the advantage of having the equivalent of an all-encompassing force field impervious to projectiles. That could give her the equivalent of a Brute rating, but it was folded in the Tinker one.
Armsmaster and Kid Win were quite appreciative of her ideas, and took a few of them – if she ever found herself knocked off her throne, she could use sound generated by their armour, for instance. They also helped her shield her flying instrument against energy attacks, especially electricity.
Power testing also revealed more: she could use the sound arriving towards her as a source of information, and trained herself to recognize people with their footsteps. She could flood a room with blank noise and have that noise come back as information, revealing invisible presences. She could knock on exposed matter, and guess at the structure beyond. That gave her another weak rating: Thinker.
But, mostly, she was a Blaster. With some more training, she could choose which exact frequency to apply so that only specific matters would be affected. Or at a specific distance. She could pinpoint a single person in a crowd (or not), and also affect people behind walls without damaging the walls (provided that they didn't block out all sound). Or damage the walls themselves, like the infamous Tesla coils.
Most of these pieces of information weren't on the public PRT website, but it didn't matter for a certain high-level Thinker.
Taylor met Lisa Wilbourn in a café, where the freckled blonde ended up with a coffee cup falling and dirtying Taylor's pant leg. She apologized profusely and proposed to pay for the cleaning, or to buy her another one. The ice broken, the two chatted for a while, and Taylor finally discovered that the earlier spill was just an excuse. Apparently, this Lisa wanted to thank her for having offed Sophia. She was friends with the guy whom Panacea had talked about, and wanted to hang out with the new Ward.
At this, Taylor looked around in fear, because if her disguise couldn't keep her civilian identity a secret, there was no use of using it. Lisa apologized, again, and told her of her own views about how heroes and villains played their "game". Of course, Taylor wasn't interested in joining an admittedly villain and her group. But it made her think about the rules, especially when she'd find herself facing villains, later.
Being a Ward, she wasn't sent to patrol in the midst of gang territories, alone. But she happened to be there, in her civilian identity, when a group of ABB thugs hijacked her bus – they had chosen the perfect time to get many high-school girls, in order to fill their whorehouses. Initially knocked out, Taylor awoke to the sight of Lung walking back and forth in front of their group. They were in the basement of one of his casinos… and there was music playing from upstairs.
This she could use, not even revealing that she was the one to do so. Lung and his men were soon battered by high-powered physical forces from every sides, and they escaped in the chaos that ensued. Of course, the Dragon of Kyushu wasn't down for the count, but he didn't know where the attack came from, and his lack of targets prevented him from growing. And physical forces pushing him from underneath kept him aloft and unable to walk anywhere.
All this to be picked like a newbie by the arriving Armsmaster, who took advantage of Lung's immobility to shoot him with his specialized tranquilizers. And the PRT troopers who followed him everywhere took care of the logistics of returning the girls where they came from. Including a still-anonymous Taylor.
It was just the beginning.
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To be continued… prestissimoAuthor's Notes: if you couldn't guess, I like the cello. Inspiration for this chapter comes, for a small part, from the "violin" scene in the movie Kung Fu Hustle.