Phew, a week straight of uploading chapters.

It's been a little bit hectic trying to push words to paper to keep up, but hey, I pulled it off...I think I did at least. Maybe the quality of my writing slipped when I wasn't noticing, I don't know.

So hey, hope you enjoyed, because I ain't doing daily uploads again for a long time.

Chapter 4

Watching the bird land on the windowsill outside the main office she had picked, Taylor had a moment of doubt.

What if the PRT managed to silence them and Sophia got away with it all? Well, actually, that was highly unlikely. Body-Taylor had already finished editing together all of the content they'd recorded of Shadow Stalker ignoring a mugging then literally killing someone. A Merchant, sure, and he had a gun, but she could easily have handled him non-lethally. Instead, she executed him in cold blood, then made false evidence by shooting him.

That content was set to go out to the PRT, as well as every major and minor news outlet they could think of. At Ciara's suggestion, they even found an anonymous tip email address for the PRT Head Office in Washington. Ciara had also suggested that she ensure that Body-Taylor be plainly visible and in public when everything went down so she'd have plausible deniability. If she was in a restaurant or just anywhere where there were security cameras, that was as good as proof as she could get. Since she was going to use a puppet to send those emails, she wasn't too worried about that.

It'd be annoying ditching the laptop she had gotten to go with the drone, but she didn't doubt that a tinker would be able to trace it easily, and having that in her room was basically a big red flag that she was the one to do it. She was already going to be under scrutiny, there was no need to leave the equivalent of a flag flying telling the world she sent the emails.

Shaking her head, she rid herself of doubts and had the bird tap its beak against the window a few times, attracting the attention of the man inside, he turned in his chair then rolled his eyes even as he got up. When the window opened, he folded his arms. "Let me guess, anonymous information donation?" She had the bird nod. "Right, and why is this important enough for me to look at?"

Taylor directed her puppeted bird to raise a wing, pointing it at the PRT building. "What, you have information on a cape?" The bird shook its head, making him frown. "What then?" Thinking for a moment, Taylor dragged the folder inside, leaving it on the floor as she flapped up onto the desk, gesturing at the computer. "Right, no communication through a bird I guess." He sat back down, following along as the bird tapped on a browser, then watching as the bird tapped out, with its beak, 'Shadow Stalker'.

That caught his attention as he got up and picked the folder up, planting it on his desk. When he flicked it open, he frowned, looking at the bird. "You're breaking the unspoken rules here you know." Taylor got the bird to erase what it had written and tapped out an explanation, telling him that she was going to be releasing more information that was going to basically kill Shadow Stalker legally but without breaking the unspoken rules. All she needed him to do was an issue which contained that information, to get it out into the world so that when Shadow Stalker's actions came to light, it would put the PRT in serious hot water.

"So, let me get this straight. You want me to have an issue written with this information documented, so that when you reveal actions on Shadow Stalker's part, it'll put more pressure on the PRT to do something about it?" The bird nodded twice, making him sigh. "And what's in it for me and the company? Reporting on this will put us in a bad light, since the public will never know who Shadow Stalker is."

That...was actually a very good point. All the public would see was that Shadow Stalker was a killer, and that this media company had randomly put to print a story about bullying at Winslow High, there was nothing actually tying them together. Not visibly at least. She could, of course, break the unspoken rules and reveal who Shadow Stalker is, but that'd put the media company in hot water as well, since they would be the ones to profit from it.

Slightly dejected, Taylor tried to come up with a way to frame things. Maybe she could engineer things so that Shadow Stalker accidentally let her mask slip or something...no that was too direct and obvious, someone would probably scream Master/Stranger protocols and then the murder could get tossed onto that pile. Maybe some random criminal reveals the fact, finding Sophia's house and catching her out, then dragging the fight out into the street where Sophia's face would be on full display.

That sounded a little more reasonable, but still dubious. Stumped, Taylor asked Ciara for help, grinning when she herself was a little stumped at coming up with a way to reveal the information in a way that couldn't be refuted and would actually be effective. Oh, no, she wasn't stumped, she was wondering why Taylor hadn't just told him that the fact Sophia Hess caused someone else to go through such a horrible experience would sell papers absurdly well, especially if the state of the locker was evidenced. Maybe even she could point out the horrific injuries that were sustained during her entrapment, since before Panacea had healed them they were photographed for record by the hospital, and that was something that only she was allowed to access.

Grinning, she had to focus a little to make her arm corporeal enough to give Ciara a sidelong hug, relaying that she could provide hospital-backed evidence of serious injuries stemming from Sophia's actions. That led back to the issue that it was Taylor's word against Sophia's, but if the media was the one publishing the information, it wouldn't be directly tied back to Taylor by anyone except Sophia, Emma, Madison and anyone else who knew she was in the locker. The best part was that it wasn't even illegal to do, since she would be presenting her own medical records.

She relayed this to the man, though leaving out any direct mention that it was her who was injured, and ended up managing to convince him that if she could produce those records somehow, he would see that they got published. Sure, just documented bullying wasn't enough to make headlines, but if serious injuries requiring Panacea herself to heal came to light, as well as Amy's own admittance that if Taylor had been found even an hour later, she would have been beyond even her abilities, it was definitely worthy of an attention-grabbing headline. Body-Taylor was already en-route to the hospital to get a copy of her own records, having not bothered when she left before.

If push really came to shove, she would directly puppet hospital staff to give her the records, since that'd also wipe their memories of the event...actually, that would be best. If nobody...no, it wouldn't work, the security cameras would record her being there. Being fair, if she was linked to what happened, she didn't really care. According to Panacea herself, her Corona Pollentia and Gemma were both basically dead matter, which meant any attempt to discern if she was a parahuman would come back negative. The only way Taylor could be discovered would be Body-Taylor telling them, and Body-Taylor only did what would either be best for Taylor, what Taylor wanted, or, third on the list, what she wanted. That meant someone trying to torture her for information would hit a brick wall, then probably have several hundred spiders bite them.

Sure, she didn't need Body-Taylor, but need was a far cry from want.

After receiving the records, Taylor had Body-Taylor give them to a seagull which flew it to the office and dropped them off.

She had to admit, the look on his face as his eyes trailed down the list of injuries sustained was amusing, but the real kicker was the fact he planted the records beside his computer and immediately called in an assistant of some sort, handing off the folder and the records and telling her, in no uncertain terms, to get a special issue written up before the morning. It was a little worrying that he intended such a rush-job, but maybe he really wanted that information put to press as soon as possible, reducing the chance of a gag order from the PRT.

Leaving him to it, she shifted back to her room where Ciara was idly searching for things using her laptop. "So, you never actually gave that information to anybody?" Taylor raised an eyebrow but shook her head, floating about languidly. "Hmm, I guess, in your position, it would have just been thrown out anyway. You could have...no, you couldn't. I must admit, you were in a pretty tight spot."

"Yeah, I know. Telling the head would just see me pitted against the popular girls, one of whom was a cape and had her PRT protection. Going up against it in a legal battle would see us bankrupted by Alan Barnes. The information would change nothing, it'd just be swept away and ignored. Doing it like this means that when I reveal what Shadow Stalker has done, the media could leverage that into drawing parallels between them. Nothing blatant that would break the unspoken rules, but it'd make it that much harder for the PRT to just ignore." Ciara hummed, idly kicking her legs as she browsed through the laptop.

While she did that, Taylor spent her time trying to make herself corporeal again. She'd done it to give Ciara a brief hug, but it took some focus to do. It was essentially the same thing she used to be able to touch the floor, except with her arm instead of her feet. Not that she intended to do it often, but by making herself selectively corporeal she'd be able to actually touch things like keyboard keys and whatnot.

Of course, if she wasn't actively trying, she was completely untouchable, and even when she was corporeal, even Ciara punching her as hard as she could and using a strength-enhancing power ended up with Ciara breaking most of the bones in her hand, as if she'd tried to punch Behemoth or something. Of course, she used another of her stolen powers to fix herself right up, so there was no real harm done, but the fact that when she wanted to be corporeal she was basically as tough as an Endbringer if not tougher was relieving.

If she'd accidentally left herself corporeal, gotten stabbed for it and died somehow, that'd put a dampener on things.

As it turned out, not much actually happened after the paper of Taylor being hospitalized and the bullying going on at Winslow High came out.

Sure, there was some notice, but, through observing Alan Barnes, it became clear he was running interference for Sophia on the grounds that she was one of Emma's friends. Emma herself never told him to do it, and broke down even harder when she was alone, her father having shown her the paper he'd been reading when he found out. Alan Barnes was a lawyer, and he was definitely willing to use that legal power to keep the other papers from printing 'slander' while he set about disproving what the paper she'd chosen had put to print.

Winslow High was closed for winter, obviously, but Blackwell issued her own statement that what had occurred was not nearly as severe as was being made out. What really confused Taylor was the fact that people seemed to be believing it. The records were literally right there in the paper, and were backed by Panacea herself, yet people seemed all too happy to ignore it. Maybe it was just a fact that in Brockton Bay, those who were cruel got away with it, and those who just tried to live got stuffed under-foot.

That was something she was not going to stand for, not even slightly. If it came down to it, she would use her power of controlling people to literally force villains to stop what they were doing, to surrender, but only if they really deserved it. Those who were just abused and hurt people like herself, they were the ones she would protect. There had to be those who triggered from hellish situations and had no choice but to become villains.

Looking at her own situation, especially if she learned that Sophia was a Ward, Taylor probably would have done the same, or at least been a rogue, which to society was basically a villain in the making. That didn't count for all cases of course, but public perception of rogues was that they were exactly that, rogue. They weren't yet evil and a villain, but they were a far cry from being good, being a hero. Thus, they were named rogues.

All she had to do to find out was puppet someone, have them tell her about themselves, then make a decision based off just that fact. As long as she didn't word her questions in a stupid way, she could easily figure out whether they were a villain by choice, circumstance, or just because of their powers. Some villains did actually end up pushed into their life based off that fact.

Bad Canary, a stage singer she used to listen to occasionally, she apparently triggered and accidentally told her boyfriend to slice off his genitals and penetrate himself with them. Of course, all she really said was 'go fuck yourself', but her power activated and he took that literally. She was...Taylor groaned, narrowing her eyes at Ciara. "You knew that I used to listen to Canary, didn't you?"

"Perhaps." Was all she said as she kept on searching random content on the laptop, apparently catching up with the world. Taylor went through what she knew peripherally. Canary had picked a very bad time to screw up, there was a lot of fear about the Simurgh since the Simurgh had attacked not two weeks before she told her boyfriend to do what he did, meaning she was going to be basically unable to speak out of fear she would control those who heard her. That meant it was looking more likely she would either get put in the Birdcage, or she'd get a kill order, but they would doll it up and pretend as though she was put in the Birdcage. After all, the only ones who knew who were really in there were Dragon, and those who were above her.

Idly, she focused on the spiders she was still controlling in Winslow High, sending them scuttling to the computer lab to investigate Canary. Taylor wanted to keep an eye on her, see exactly what was going down. As an afterthought, she then shifted out of the room, appearing above the Rig that was in the middle of the bay. She needed to test to see whether she could be detected, and the Rig was the fastest way to check it.

Shifting down in steps, she saw absolutely no reaction, even when she ended up inside of the forcefield. None of the defensive equipment on the rig turned to aim at her, no alarms started blaring, nothing to indicate she was there. Reaching out, she felt for the various lifeforms in the Rig, sensing maybe a hundred human-sized signals, then a few hundred flies, bugs and other tiny intruders. The security wasn't on the level of the Birdcage, and if the Birdcage still had flies she could use, the Rig definitely didn't have enough protection to stop a few from slipping the net.

Homing in on one human at random, she saw it was a roaming PRT trooper. Ignoring him, she moved on, picking through the lifeforms until she found one she recognized. It was Gallant, she could tell by the suit of armour that was on a stand, and that he was working on. It was a bit amusing to see that under the armour he was just a brown-haired kid that she wouldn't have ever picked out of a line-up, but she supposed that was the point. In the room was also who she presumed to be Kid Win, who was also working on some tech of his own. His appearance was much less surprising, since all he really protected was his body and his eyes, leaving his mouth, nose and hair exposed.

The main reason a lot of heroes didn't follow Alexandria's example and have part of their face exposed was twofold. Firstly, because it was a vulnerable point for attacks for anybody who wasn't partially a brute. With the mouth and nose exposed, there was a big gap in protection that an attack could blast through. Secondly, it gave away parts of an identity. By hiding everything, hair, skin, even using the armour to make a fake body shape, it meant nobody could really even guess who they were behind the mask. Sure, there were unspoken rules, but there was a problem with that. New Wave already proved that they were just that, rules.

And rules were made to be broken.

Taylor pushed her focus outwards, connecting to the vision of all the puppets she was currently controlling.

She had yet to seriously push her own ability, the countless perspectives being disorienting as she almost lost her own sense of perspective amongst the billions of her perspectives, each fly and every other insect with a compound eye collectively giving her thousands of pipelined perspectives. Of course, if she was biological then having so many perspectives would probably fry her brain. As it was, it was a matter mostly of collating the visual data she received, focusing carefully and yet on every single one at once.

Being able to see out of so many pairs of eyes made her wonder if this was how Nilbog felt with so many creations, so many perspectives to manage. She could see how it'd drive anyone insane, especially since some of his creations definitely had compound eyes. She had to take a good minute to order herself and actually use the countless perspectives, eventually managing to do so, watching the world through so many different points of view as her puppets all acted naturally, not a hint that anything was wrong. Occasionally she lost vision as puppets died and her power disconnected from them, but that wasn't a huge deal.

She kept her connection, never directly focusing on one but letting the puppets go about their business. Many, mostly the flies, were busily either eating or laying eggs, but some of the more complicated puppets like the birds were busy soaring through the air. She still retained control of the Albatross that she'd used to deliver her folder, but it had been ocean-diving for fish and would have gotten the folder wet if it grabbed it.

Currently, it was settling on a flight path to go to sleep, which interested her enough to focus on more than the rest of her perspectives. She could still see through them all, but attributed more focus to one than the rest. It was like having billions of security cameras that she could perceive, and was able to look at some of them, but not all of them, at once. It wasn't quite right to describe how she was seeing through so many perspectives at once, but as close as she could place it. By focusing on the Albatross, she was less focused on the rest, meaning if one saw something interesting she'd probably not register it until she stopped focusing and her mind properly realized what she had seen.

Kind of like how seeing something when distracted sometimes meant it took a few moments before you properly saw it. Well, maybe not quite the same, but to explain it was pretty much impossible. All she could do was equate it to as close an example as possible. Shifting her focus away from the now-sleeping bird, she saw nothing particularly noteworthy going on, and by that she meant she could see at least a dozen violent muggings, two murders, a rape, and those were just the more major events she could see across Brockton Bay.

Being able to see so much meant she could really appreciate how fucked up the town she lived in was. Idly she shifted to be above the on-going rape, reaching out to control the two pieces of trash perpetrating it. It wasn't even a typical rape, where two guys were pinning a woman down. No, a pair of women were raping a man, and the worst part was that it was likely nobody would even believe him. Guys would probably even say he got 'lucky'.

She had the two women immediately stop, getting them to reclothe themselves, then sending them orders to fuck off away from the heavily-confused man. Leaving him behind, she intervened in the other events she had seen, each time taking control of the perpetrators. However, this time she had them drop down to the floor unconscious. She couldn't do that with the rape, it would be the man's word against theirs, and a man would always have the short end of the stick in that argument.

Two unconscious women, one of whom would have sexual fluids on and inside of her, and him, with the same fluids on himself? That was no contest. It irked her to know that she couldn't really do anything, but at least she'd stopped it before it went too far. She didn't really discriminate much on what kind of crime was occurring, be it robbery, assault, defacement, or really anything else, she took control of the ones doing it and had them go unconscious. Exactly how they went unconscious was a question even to her, she simply ordered them to do so and they dropped like, well, a puppet with its strings cut.

As she did this, she also controlled several entirely unaffiliated people, having them ring the police and report what crime had occurred and where it had happened, as well as how many perpetrators there were. To end off the messages, she always had them essentially sign it by saying 'Esgal' before hanging up. If all of the reports had the same word tying them together, it meant they'd know some kind of master effect was occurring and would know that the people making the calls were essentially being controlled to do so, seemingly at random.

It'd also mean that the name Esgal would start gaining notoriety. It would start building a rapport for controlling people seemingly at random to report cases where the criminals dropped unconscious, stopping whatever crime they were committing. From petty theft and burglary to rape and murder, she stopped the crimes by simply shifting to their location, then directly controlling the criminals and directing them to unconsciousness. Sure, it was a small drop in the bucket of problems Brockton Bay had, but everyone had to start somewhere.

Her little streak of goodwill screeched to a halt as she saw that Shadow Stalker was again roaming the town. Still keeping her other puppet connections active she shifted in front of her, watching her flit across buildings. She had no ear-piece in her ear, and from the fact she was loaded just with lethal bolts, it was obvious she was doing her own renegade thing, detached from the PRT.

Following along behind her, Taylor considered having the Gronholme Drone come out and follow her, eventually deciding it didn't hurt to get even more evidence. She reached out towards the house, very briefly taking control of Body-Taylor, just long enough for a connection to form and for her memories to be shared. It also ended up that by tentatively connecting Body-Taylor as a puppet, she was able to sense through all her senses, just as she was able to through all of her other puppets. That meant she was able to watch as Body-Taylor set up the drone and flew it out the window, sending it soaring off towards Taylor.

Taking control over Shadow Stalker, she had her wait around and do nothing until the drone arrived. It took a good ten minutes, during which time Taylor intervened in another two violent assaults, but with the drone locked onto Shadow Stalker, she set the girl running again and released her, watching as she leapt the next gap between buildings, absolutely no hint of suspicion in her movements.

The camera caught quite clearly as Sophia utterly ignored a mugging, one that Taylor stopped in the same format as before, and then she saw as Sophia drew her crossbow upon spotting a suspicious group moving through the city, one of whom was carrying a moderately-full bag, and a trio of dogs trailing along with them. It only took a minute or two of trailing before she fired a bolt at the group, cursing as she missed her target, a guy wearing a black skull mask.

Taylor was honestly curious, since it seemed like she recognized the group from somewhere. Leaving Shadow Stalker up on the roof, she shifted down amongst the group, all of whom were masked and clearly some kind of villain group. Not recognizing them by sight, she relayed their appearances to Body-Taylor by temporarily disconnecting and reconnecting from her, watching as the three dogs bulked up massively. Two of them rounded the group and protected them while the third leapt up towards Shadow Stalker, forcing her into her shadow state to ignore the attack.

Sophia quickly reformed then loaded another bolt, leaping across the gap in buildings and getting an angle on the group, or more specifically the one she'd already targetted once. She let off the bolt, and it struck the guy in the leg. What happened next was interesting though, as Sophia's arm twitched violently, making her drop the crossbow she was holding even as she pulled another quarrel from her quiver, her hand flexing as she growled and probably glared behind her mask.

Deciding to step in before she fucked things up any further, she waited as Sophia picked her crossbow up, then when her arm spasmed again she took direct control and ordered her to flee. On top of that, she made sure Sophia negligently dropped another of her quarrels as she fled. Peeking back over the edge, she could see the confusion in the group. A brief investigate by shifting her perspective into the bag they were carrying revealed that they had been moving money, perhaps stolen. Shifting her perspective behind their masks vaguely revealed that they were all teenagers, or at least close enough to be called that.

She decided then to take a risk. Focusing on the one that Sophia had shot, she puppeted him, though made no explicit orders. Instead, she decided to delve into the side of control she hadn't considered, the connections. She had a memory connection to Body-Taylor, so it was possible it worked the other way. Since it was worth a shot, she decided to try it, focusing on him and demanding he tell her his name non-verbally and without a physical sign. 'Grue.' Despite deliberately doing it, she was just a mite bit surprised when she actually mentally received the equivalent of a message telling her his name.

Next, she told him to tell her the names of the others in the same format as before. 'Regent, Tattletale, Bitch.' She pressed further, asking for their real names. 'Brian Laborn is Grue, Jean-Paul Vasil is Regent, Lisa Wilbourn is Tattletale, Rachel Lindt is Bitch.' Dropping her connection to Grue, she then took control of Regent, asking the same questions and getting the same answers. She did it again with Bitch and again, same answers.

Then she connected to Tattletale. So far, she had basically ignored the fact she could control the powers of those she puppeted, since they were mostly active-use powers. With Tattletale, it was utterly impossible to ignore. She was looking at Grue, and from a short look she had diagnosed exactly what the bolt had done to his leg. As she flicked her gaze across the others, each time Taylor got a bunch of information that Tattletale's power put together about their current situation.

Even with her muted emotions, she felt herself drawn down by the fact that Tattletale's power identified each of the three and pretty much hand-delivered to her information on their pasts and how their fucked-up situations were going to affect the present and into the future. Regent she already knew of, basically everyone had heard of Heartbreaker, but what she didn't know was how fucking awfully he'd been treated by his father. Emotional manipulation didn't even begin to cover what Heartbreaker had done to Regent, according to Tattletale's power.

Grue was actually the one with the least amount of past trauma. Not to downplay what happened, he was abused repeatedly by his mother's boyfriend, but compared to the others, that was actually the mildest one. Bitch went through several foster homes, and in one of them, after accidentally displaying her love of dogs, she ended up chained outside to a post, naked, with the words 'If you love dogs so much, fucking act like one' ringing in her young head. Just contemplating that someone could do that sent Taylor for a spin, and it really made her heart go out, not just to Bitch, but to Tattletale as well.

After all, Tattletale was the one whose power repeatedly told her these things, even if she didn't want to know. Lisa, or rather Sarah, had grown up with a brother and a family, and her intuitiveness had told her that something was going wrong with her brother. She didn't know what, just that it was important, but he hung himself before she could figure it out, and she was the one who found the body. After her parents had beaten her for telling them that she knew something was wrong, she ended up triggering one night in her sleep. Her father started using her to his own ends, and eventually she stole money, left home and changed her name to Lisa.

All of that, she got in the brief moment that Lisa looked between her teammates. All of it, and all in an instant. Lisa probably had a slowed-down version that she could actually process, but Taylor didn't suffer that limitation, she could understand it all in a blink, the same way she was able to view so many perspectives at once. Releasing Lisa from being a puppet, Taylor drifted about aimlessly a moment as she looked at the four of them, the 'Undersiders'. Negligently she did a reconnect to Body-Taylor, letting her change her search direction and actually find the four of them.

Tattletale was honestly a little bit scary with how powerful she could be. Just from looking at the four of them, it tied her entire already-gained knowledge together, along with everything from their posture to their tone to their breathing pattern, collated that into usable data, and passed it on to Tattletale. It was useful as hell of course, it basically gave her a character sheet on each of the Undersiders, but it also meant that if she ever spent an amount of time looking into Body-Taylor, her power could possibly piece together what she was, just based off the fact her power was bullshit.

After all, how the fuck did it know what words were said to Bitch when she was younger, when she'd never told Tattletale? Getting a full life-picture of each member of the Undersiders was just too freaky by way more than half. And sure, a lot of it was stuff Lisa had dredged up researching them all, but there were some connections that made no logical sense but that her power had somehow stapled together anyway.

Taylor watched as they quickly decided what to do, snapped the bolt on both ends then bandaged the injury up to hold it in place before placing Grue on one of the dogs and mounting up. She puppeted Regent with orders to act completely and totally normal, since his power wasn't going to constantly distract her, but would also let her keep track of them, having been too busy observing to plant any puppets on them. As they bounded off into the distance, she turned her focus on the Gronholme Drone and grinned. It had captured the entire thing, which meant one simple and awesome fact.

Sophia was totally fucked.