by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings.
Stone ColdYet another universe, yet another manifestation of power for our resident heroine. In fact, as it happens, Taylor's power seems to be the main differentiating unit between the closely-related Worm universes based around "Earth Bet".
In the following one, her shtick wasn't to link to the insects skittering about in the locker, but to make herself impervious to their stings. She had always been interested in her mother's skills, and in this universe, Annette Rose Hebert had studied the arts in general instead of literature. And sculpture in particular.
That little change meant that, when faced with insects and acid and god what else lurked in the biohazardous matter she had been pushed in, her body and mind tensed in unison and she yearned for something that would prevent those from eating through her clothing and her flesh.
Upon triggering, Taylor's skin became hard as stone, taking its colouring at the same time. And then the transmutation to stone continued inwards, transforming her whole body into a statue. Thankfully, it was a living (and moving) one. And, also, using all available organic matter around her, the transformation increased her size – it meant that its new size made her quite unrecognizable, thankfully.
Now hard enough to punch through walls made of matter more fragile than she was, she pushed the locker door until it gave way, ruining it. In fact, because of the push against the front while using the wall as support, the whole row of lockers fell down as well. Thankfully (or not), it had taken time to reach that point, hours, even – Sophia had aimed for maximum effect, and done the deed in the evening.
Which means that it was night time when the stone golem broke free and got out. Nobody saw it. There was no report to the police or the PRT either, as Blackwell kept an iron hand on her school. As such, janitors threw bleach at the problem, before putting the lockers up again.
When Taylor came out of her enraged state, she was in the museum. It had always calmed her, especially after her mother's death. Now, she had pushed her way in, slamming into a backdoor she knew from her frequent visits with her mother (who had worked here, too).
The month was January, and the artificial lights came up before the sun. When they did, she raised her head in surprise… and noticed her face in a nearby mirror. Shock reflected back, etched in stone. And footsteps came forward, too.
Nearly jumping (before remembering herself that, as a stone statue, she would made a racket doing so), she looked everywhere for a place to hide.
Where could a seven-feet tall girl hide?
Where could a girl hide, when she was made of stone?
Where could a statue hide… in a museum, of all places?
She almost grinned before darting (on her tiptoes) towards another stone statue. Which was of a man sitting on a chair, torso bare and toga wrapped around his hips and legs, his index up as if to teach a lesson. Socrates, probably. And she carefully climbed on his lap, facing him (because she didn't want to show her front, even as a statue), latched her arms around his neck, and stopped moving.
She noticed two things, right then: her will of staying inconspicuous had adapted her initially stone-like grey "skin" colour to become the same white marble as the man; and when she had also stopped moving, it was in a literal manner. She was completely immobile, with no involuntary or automatic movement. And no breathing either – without negative consequences. She almost grinned, at that.
The watchman passed near the statue but didn't notice her. In his mind, watching the museum's art pieces got old after three days of work. Taylor thought about leaving just as he left, but other people started working in the room, moving some pieces around to prepare for the day. And then the museum opened its doors to the public, and the room was never empty.
Of course, someone noticed, especially as both the automated guides and the label had a picture of the statue before her addition. As she didn't move even when prodded (on a skin that stayed as hard and cold as the marble she mimicked), it was decided that it was too strange an occurrence, and the police deferred the call to the PRT.
And New Wave, too, because Panacea might be the only one to check the body for life and powers.
Victoria Dallon was the first on site, and saw a statue that had to be separated from another statue. In her simplistic mind, it meant lashing out with her fists. And it worked… somewhat.
Taylor was not a cape geek, and besides knowing of Glory Girl's existence, she didn't think that she'd risk anything just bracing herself for the impact.
Glory Girl's fists broke her arms into multiple shards of marble flying everywhere and damaging everything around her, including the original statue.
It was quite a shock, but she also noticed that the cuts were clean, with no bone protruding or blood pumping. She also didn't feel pain despite resembling the Venus de Milo.
While Victoria was called down by her mother, shouted at, and grounded for the foreseeable future (until her allowance had finished paying for the inestimable damage to the museum displays), Taylor had reacted by instinctively pulling matter from the man's statue, hollowing it a little but reconstructing her arms. She also extended her will to it, absorbing his fallen head and reconstructing it, before making the man stand up, protecting her (both from harm and from view).
"What is the meaning of this aggression?" she asked through him – hollowed insides allowed him speech, apparently. And given that they were both larger than ordinary humans, it was quite deep.
She noticed some of the PRT soldiers lifting rifles, and stood ready to use her connection with the marble halls, through her naked feet, to raise a wall between them, if it came to that – apparently, the night had brought to her mind many ways to use her new power.
But, instead of bullets, the two statues ended up encased in containment foam. She took advantage of being hidden from view to make good use of her newly-discovered ability to shapeshift stone: spearing through the foam, behind her, she recreated the sitting man on its pedestal, and hid inside it. Even Panacea touching it brought no information about her presence. As for the soldiers who brought an empty ball of foam to their base, they were scolded for being trigger-happy and for having forgotten to check if there was someone there – the fact that it lacked the weight of two marble statues should have been obvious.
As the night came, Taylor shifted into a flat expanse that took the appearance of the material behind it, before "flowing" down the steps, slowly, towards the exit. And beyond, too, because she noticed the two PRT troopers in the van opposite the museum doors, probably there to see if someone would get out.
She wanted to get home. And she did. Once out of sight of the surveillance team, she transformed into what she thought of as an inconspicuous animal – a cat. But she got the proportions slightly wrong (not that it mattered, as a statue) and looked more like a little lion. The few people outside who noticed called her a pygmy-lion, in their reports to the police, and Taylor reflected that she was leading them towards her own home. So, to evade detection, she created other pygmy-lions and ordered them to trot at random through the city. Which they did. With close to no survival instincts: as soon as they were hit, by anything, they lost cohesiveness and turned into pebbles, then sand, and then adhered with the nearby stone.
In some case, they even helped fill potholes in the roads. Once this was discovered, people herded them there before tapping them. And Taylor, who still had some measure of mental link with her creations, directed them herself. Once all were gone, she was home already. Repeating the trick she had used to escape the museum, she entered the house easily, and climbed the stairs up to her bedroom.
Once there, it took quite some time to revert into a human. In the end, she could only change the exterior aspect of her skin, the flesh beneath staying hard as stone. She was also able to sculpt her own stony flesh, and created a hole in her chest in order to keep her important stuff while in school. That way, she wouldn't need the locker anymore. She didn't need food either, she remarked, as she could "feed" by absorbing stone from around her. Or any by-product of earth, including brick and plaster, but also macadam. In a city full of debris (from the numerous cape fights), she had quite the banquet.
She didn't sleep either, which made her ready to get out to be the hero that her earlier self would have liked beside her, before her trigger event.
Now, without needing to get up, she could form her pygmy-lions in the streets nearby, and they would go fight if provoked by criminals, their spiky mane exploding in shards able to pierce skin – with backwards thorns making it impossible to remove quickly.
One such lion was found by Lung when the dragon-man and his men were on the prowl to fight some "children". It was quickly reduced to slag by the draconic breath, but, by then, the gangsters had fled, most of them bleeding, and the dragon was quite conspicuous, meaning his enemies would see him coming, and flee too.
With a growl, he turned back, and Taylor smiled (in her numerous incarnations). Mission accomplished.
On her last movements across town, she came across a group of small-time villains, and realized that they were the one Lung was targeting. She was thanked by the one called Tattletale, while the others wondered why their Thinker was speaking to an oversized cat – especially as one of them was a dog lover.
"That's Pygmalion." said Thinker said. "He helped us by occupying Lung for a while."
"Pygmalion?" Regent asks. "How do you know his name?"
"Easily: it's a pygmy-lion." Tattletale replied with her I-know-everything smile. "More seriously, it's a mythology figure, who gave life to statues. I don't know if it's our saviour's real name (or gender) but it fits."
And Taylor had the little lion nod regally, as it was as good a disguise as any.
Her good mood stayed until school the next day. Of course, she was docked points because of her unexplained absence the day prior, but she shrugged it off: it wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last.
But, now, she had other things to do. First was getting physical with the physical part of the trio. When Sophia went to trip her, putting her legs sideways between her ankles, Taylor's own leg didn't stop at the star athlete's, as it did before: with the inevitability of a landslide, it pushed against it, breaking it in several pieces. Try stopping a moving stone with a kick, and you'll see what happens. And then, Taylor continued walking, leaving a howling Sophia behind her.
In fact… Sophia was really in pain, and her usual way to deal with pain was to transform into her shadowy state. And she outed herself in front of everyone there. Everyone was looking, in fact, because her cries were quite loud. Not like before: when seeing her and Taylor into a collision course, everyone had turned their back – it was like that at Winslow: no witness means no retaliation from the star athlete… and no recourse for the underdog.
This time, the underdog was Sophia, and she was brought back to the PRT, leaving Winslow entirely. With the way things were, as an outed parahuman with a bad reputation, she was forced to change her name and relocate in another city – the PRT never threw away assets that could still serve.
Exchanges were made between several Ward locations until Flechette came to replace her, from New York. And Shadow Stalker was branded Black Cat and started operating with melee weapons, at Anchorage. Used to her ways, she complained all the time, and was happy to leave the "goody-two-shoes" for solo patrols across the town.
She was much less happy when she met villains that could fire tripwires and electrify them. Disabled, she was kidnapped by the Russian mafia and brought to their motherland. And we don't know what happened afterwards – not that it interests us that much, in fact. Karma is karma, after all, and it should shock no one that you "reap what you sow".
Now, Emma was the psychological warrior, but she had also seen the casual way Taylor has broken her friend's leg, and she was afraid… especially as her physical protector had disappeared. In addition, she was now seeing Taylor's face everywhere on the walls. As if Winslow had commissioned statues of it to put everywhere… only they disappeared as soon as she had seen them. Accusing faces. She went mad when she saw one in her locker, especially as that one was both accusing and in pain, her body drowning in used tampons.
Mad in a "crouch and don't move again, muttering gibberish while clawing at her own face", Emma was promptly sent to the local asylum – sorry: "mental hospital".
Deprived of her two friends, Madison tried to unite with Julia, another popular girl, and it worked for a while. But she found herself prone to accidents, all of a sudden. As if the ground under her feet was suddenly uneven, tripping her all the time. And she couldn't even blame Taylor, as that even happened when she was alone.
A few days of this were enough to put the girl in the bottom of the totem pole, leaving Taylor free to climb out herself. Without anyone stealing or damaging her stuff, her grades improved, and she could finally petition another high-school for a merit-based transfer. And not Arcadia, as being close to Panacea would create problems down the line if she was outed as a parahuman.
She went to Immaculata, which was just a step below Arcadia, in the national charts of successful schools in Brockton Bay (Winslow was not only last locally… but nationally, too). There, she took classes in art, of course – and not only sculpture, either. And as many internships as she could at the museum: she really wanted to work there.
Powers-wise, she continued to send her swarm of little lions to patrol the city during the night, often meeting with Tattletale. When her little lion started speaking, it surprised the Undersiders, but they rolled with it. Their discussions allowed her to put heroes and villains into another light, too.
Exploring her powers, she noticed that she could make statues of real people, too, before transforming the outer skin into a realistic appearance. That could help her when going out as herself, at night – as if that would ever happen, as she didn't need it. Still, she could do it with her father, for instance: she could have "him" accompany her for a parent-teacher conference, while he was instead working his ass off at the docks – he was so absent in her life that it didn't matter anymore.
At Immaculata, during her senior year, Taylor also met Tattletale out of costume: the girl had been apprehended by the PRT after they swarmed Coil's base. At her direction. The arch-villain had known her duplicity for a while and had had someone slit her throat, only for her power spark reacting immediately with a second trigger.
With her slit throat, and until Panacea helped her, she was mute. It means that to use her powers, she had to write. And she did. Apparently, a simple "stop" written on a sheet of paper had as much conceptual weight as a brick wall, when she was shot in the head, afterwards. Unless she was a mime that made her creations real – it happened.
All things done, she was actually a mime, but she liked trolling people (some things never changed) and took a Calligraphy class to write elaborately when she could use her papers to showcase her powers. Such as when she displayed a paper titled "rifle" and used it to shoot an enemy.
Once healed, she could speak again, but she didn't feel the same acute need to tell everything that she knew. Besides, tired of villainy, she was recruited into the Protectorate and rebranded as Seshat (as the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge… and writing).
Later, Taylor befriends Tecton (who had come from Chicago to help fill the Wards' roster after Leviathan's disaster) and Golem (under protection from the Empire, due to his revelations about his father) – with her ability to morph into any matter, he was able to have his hands in hers, for instance, to exert his power anywhere.
For some reason, the two of them don't release each other's hand after their last fight against the gangs.
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To be continued… if written in stone