Her head craned downward, Taylor leaned heavily on the handrail, almost pivoting her way down the steps of the bus onto the pavement below. She took the half-hop between the bottom step and the curb badly, landing in an awkward position and ignoring the slight twinge in her ankle.
She made her way into the school, distracted, only narrowly avoiding collision with several objects. She was able to reach her first class without looking up, scaling two staircases and navigating several labyrinthine hallways by memory.
The morning bell rang at 8:00 precisely - Taylor sighed, then powered off her phone and shoved it under her leg, trapping it between herself and the seat.
She felt it underneath her for the entire class period. Felt the way that the case pressed unevenly against her pants. Felt it cooling down, felt its heat radiating into the chair, into the air, into her.
The lecture was on the second derivative test or something. Taylor didn't quite get it all.
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Lunchtime came after a quick eternity. History. Blech. She had better things to do than learn about boring shit that might as well not have happened.
She had spent the bus ride reading up on Brockton Bay, on the Parahumans Online Wiki. It didn't tell her where Brockton Bay had actually come from, or why it had replaced Providence, but at least she would be able to get up to speed on the "current" state of the city. It seemed that Brockton Bay, more than most cities, had a gang problem. In particular, there were three major gangs that consistently gave residents trouble. Taylor hadn't figured out the specifics of the relationship between the gangs, but the general picture was easy enough to grasp: the Merchants were a gang mostly of drug-addicts, the weakest of the three in both material assets and cape power, but they occupied mostly-abandoned turf, so nobody wanted to waste resources cleaning them out. The ABB had comparatively few capes, but they occupied a lot of valuable space, and their leader, Lung, was the strongest individual fighter in the city, so they were able to maintain their holdings through him. The largest gang by most measures was the Empire Eighty-Eight, a group of Neo-Nazis who, predictably, engaged in regular feuds with the ABB.
Taylor continued to read as she made her way to the cafeteria. She found herself in the rather strange position of being aware of the people around her without paying any attention to them at all - she knew where they were, at least, or she wouldn't have been able to navigate her way around them while staring at her phone; on the other hand, if asked, she knew that she wouldn't be able to identify a single one of her fellow walkers. The Pope could walk right by and she wouldn't notice.
Actually, come to think of it, she didn't really know what the Pope looked like, so that wasn't a great example. The President, perhaps. Rihanna. Jesus Christ.
"Hey, Taylor! Missed you yesterday!"
Jesus Christ.
It was Emma, unmistakably. Taylor had been hearing that voice since early childhood, and as far as she was concerned it had never changed.
Something had changed, though, because Emma's voice had transformed from something light and airy into a piercing treble, one which stirred up in Taylor a profound aggravation.
Rationally, she thought that Emma was trying to be nice. Taylor wondered, though, if Emma had ever learned how to be nice in the first place. She hadn't noticed it until recently, but looking back, it seemed that it had always been there - Emma was self-deprecating to a fault, which was pretty easy for her, considering that she had so few others. Neither Emma nor Taylor had ever pointed it out, but it was clear that Emma was the prettier of the two - Taylor could feel it, could feel the way that guys leaned into Emma in a way that Taylor had never experienced for herself. When they were younger, Emma had always complimented Taylor's hair, but in hindsight the compliments felt shallow. Emma had always given compliments from a position of strength - every compliment was a consolation prize, and, conversely, everything she said about herself was absolutely crushing to the rest of the world.
As far as Taylor was concerned, Emma was unbearably perfect - talking to her was like the strongest form of criticism, dispensed by somebody who didn't even mean to do it.
That was the real problem with Emma, Taylor decided. She wasn't aware of just how lucky she was to be born with what she had. If she knew, then at least it would be fair to criticize her for being so blatant about it, but she was so perfectly oblivious to herself that even that seemed unfair.
Taylor suddenly remembered that she had been addressed.
"Hey, Emma. Felt a little sick yesterday."
"Oh, that's too bad! I grabbed homework from your teachers so you won't get behind." Taylor looked down to see a grip of papers, no more than five sheets, in Emma's outstretched hand.
Fucking hell, she couldn't even mind her own business. She just had to make things better for everybody else, couldn't stand the thought of Taylor acting independently. It was infantilizing - Emma didn't believe that Taylor could handle herself for even the most basic tasks.
Somewhere, a small part of Taylor knew that if it weren't for Emma, she wouldn't have tried to learn about the work that she had missed. What would be the point, considering that she wouldn't do it anyway?
Taylor ignored that part. She was good at ignoring that part.
Emma kept trying to establish a conversation, and Taylor kept deftly avoiding one. She couldn't remember the last time she had opened up to Emma. She had been lying to her for a while - lying about doing her homework, lying about being on track, lying about wanting to talk in the first place. Lies lies lies.
Eventually Emma picked up on the fact that Taylor wasn't up to talk and went to find some other friend. Oblivious bitch.
Taylor caught herself - she wasn't sure where that had come from. She really didn't hate Emma, or at least, she didn't think that Emma deserved to be hated. Sure, she was blind as a bat when it came to reality, and pretty insufferable when it came to any sort of interpersonal interaction, and she didn't even care about Taylor in the first place, they had just happened to meet because their moms had worked together forever ago, and the only reason Emma kept trying to maintain the friendship was so that her mom wouldn't think that anything was wrong . . .
Taylor took a deep breath, putting all those issues aside. It wasn't fair to focus on everything that was wrong with Emma, even if it was all she could see anymore. If somebody were to focus on everything that was wrong with her, then they would definitely come away with a negative image of her, although that wasn't entirely undeserved.
She had to put aside that line of thought as well. Self-loathing was a distraction.
The point was that Emma wasn't evil the same way that, say, Hitler was evil. She didn't do it on purpose.
There were other differences, but that seemed like the big one, at least in an abstract sense.
In some ways, it would be convenient if Emma were just a bitch to everybody all day all week all year. At least then, Taylor's disgust would be justified. As things stood, Taylor loathed Emma more than words could say, which reflected negatively on Taylor much more than it did on Emma.
She grabbed her homework from the table on which Emma had left it, hastily stuffing it into her backpack. She could plausibly retrieve it later - she would have to dig a bit through the rolling sea of loose papers, but it wouldn't be impossible. At home, where she could afford to spread out a bit, it would take less than five minutes of riffling through old assignments before she found them again.
Come to think of it, she really had to clean out her backpack. There was stuff in there from last year, for God's sake. There were maybe a hundred loose sheets of paper in there, some crumpled up and molded to the bottom of the bag, some neatly stacked in an apparently random order. With a good half-hour of work she could sort it out completely. Recycle everything she didn't need, get the remainder in order and really get back on track in terms of completing assignments.
She had time. She could do it right when she got home. It wouldn't be difficult.
Shame that she wouldn't follow through with it.
Her homework safely stowed away and left to rot, she reached into her backpack's front pocket and retrieved a slightly smushed sandwich wrapped in cellophane. It took her a few seconds to find where the plastic stuff was stuck to itself so that she could peel it back, which was kind of annoying. Once she had removed it from the sandwich, she compressed the plastic wrap into a ball with her fist and threw it at a gentle arc towards the nearest trash can.
She missed by a couple of inches, prompting her to walk to the can, grab her trash from the floor, and drop it in properly.
Ten minutes later Taylor found herself holed up in a stairwell, scrolling through the Brockton Bay boards on Parahumans Online.
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️ Topic: Surprise Assembly at Arcadia - Wards Action?
In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay ► Speculation
HannahAmerica (Original Poster)
Posted on January 12, 2010:
Hey all,
So I go to Arcadia High, and its not really a secret that a bunch of Wards go here as well. So today in the middle of the day they announced a school-wide assembly and gathered everybody in the auditorium. The really weird thing is that nobody knew that there was an assembly, so Im thinking maybe it was a coverup for some sort of Wards mission that they didn't want to publicize? Idk it just seems weird to me.
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► Robby
Replied on January 12, 2010:
Probably not the best thing to speculate about - I don't know if this falls outside the rules about speculation on cape identities, but it seems to be skirting the line at the very least.
► HannahAmerica (Original Poster)
Replied on January 12, 2010:
OMG I totally didn't think of that! I didn't mean to speculate about who the Wards are or anything I just thought that it was weird and might be cape related.
► Alathea (Moderator: Brockton Bay)
Replied on January 12, 2010:
Yeah, gonna go ahead and lock this. I won't give an infraction because I don't think that the post itself breaks any rules, but I don't see how this discussion could go anywhere without speculation that would itself be rule-breaking, so there's no reason to leave the bomb ticking.
End of page. 1.
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Well, that was certainly a weird interaction. Had the original poster been taking too much liberty with the story? If so, it was weird that the moderator had woven it into the tapestry rather than deleting the thread entirely. Taylor wasn't sure what sort of power the moderating team had over the events as portrayed - they didn't seem to be omnipotent, but beyond that, it wasn't clear what sort of discussion that would shut down and what they would allow. The canonical timeline seemed to be built arbitrarily.
Scrolling to the top of the page, Taylor saw the numeral (1) next to a notification bell, indicating . . . something. She was logged into the site, but she hadn't interacted with any content, so she wasn't sure what sort of information would be connected to her account.
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️ Private Message from TheWingedOne (moderator)
TheWingedOne: Hello, and welcome to Parahumans Online! This is a pretty sprawling project, and we know that it can be a bit intimidating for new members, so we on the mod team try to make contact with all of our new users just to provide an explanation of what's going on.
Parahumans Online is a roleplay project set in Earth Bet, an Earth-proper spinoff whose defining characteristic is its superpowers. I can provide a more detailed history if you'd like - the short of it is that in the early 1980s, people started spontaneously developing superpowers in moments of extreme stress. We call these individuals parahumans, or capes, and although some of them find a living in the private sector, a vast majority end up in superhero or supervillain roles, just as the comic books predicted.
On Earth Bet, Parahumans Online was developed as a way to centralize cape discussion on the internet. Its userbase is comprised almost entirely of non-powered individuals with a passion for cape affairs, although we do have a few cape accounts that interact with people directly and reveal the more intricate points in the storyline.
What this means for you, the reader, is that you're essentially playing a regular person on Earth Bet, reacting to the news as you see it. In fact, we encourage you to develop a specific persona - conjure up in your mind an image of the type of person who would be interested in cape affairs, and try to inject that personality into your interactions with other users on the site. This may sound strange at first blush, but it really is the easiest way to interact with the site.
The most important and attractive feature of Parahumans Online is the broad yet coherent storyline, which is mostly managed by the moderating team. We try our best to make sure that our users are the ones telling the story - our job, then, is to make sure that they're telling the correct story. We distribute information about major events to our more frequent users so that they can agree on the broad strokes of the story, then we monitor the ensuing news threads to make sure that the specific details are filled in consistently. Occasionally, we have issues with users disagreeing, in which case we have to step in and resolve things, but the beautiful thing about this project is that our users tend to do a great job of cooperating with one another, so that adding more voices contributes to the overall effect, rather than introducing cacophony.
Feel free to ask me if you have any uncertainties about our site. Your account has been assigned to my karass, as it were, so I am in charge of making sure that you can find a place within our community.
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Taylor had plenty of questions, but it was time for chemistry. Actually, if she remembered correctly, there was a test today. She hadn't studied, but it was on related rates, which wasn't even a real chemistry concept, so she would probably be fine. The calm before the storm, as it were.
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It was eight fifteen, somehow.
Taylor was sure that it hadn't been eight o'clock fifteen minutes ago. It had been just after noon. She had been taking a chemistry test, balancing equations and doing some math. She remembered it vividly, and it hadn't been all that long ago.
But here she was, lying across the couch, waiting for the sun to go down, so it really was eight fifteen.
She tossed her feet off of the top of the couch and onto the ground, a kind of rotational motion that accomplished a lot of motion without much work. Pushing herself up off of the couch, Taylor meandered her way to the refrigerator with the intent of retrieving a frozen chimichanga.
Once she had reached the refrigerator, Taylor realized that the chimichangas were actually in the freezer in the garage. Unfortunately, she actually needed to eat, so it seemed like her trek was not yet completed.
It was cold in the garage and Taylor wasn't wearing any shoes. She was wearing socks, but they were thin nylon socks, not really effective against the chilled cement. She tiptoed her way to the freezer, keeping the area of contact between her foot and the floor as small as possible, then stepping her way onto an abandoned mat once she reached the freezer. She didn't know what the mat was for - it had certainly never been used in the house - but for now, it was doing a serviceable job of keeping her poor innocent toes away from the mean concrete, so she was grateful for it.
Taylor heard the garage door opening behind her and felt a sudden urge to run. She seized a chimichanga from the box in which they were kept, slammed the freezer door shut and scampered back inside, closing the door behind her. From there, she grabbed her blanket from off of the couch and deftly made her way down the stairs, staying low to the ground while traversing three or four stairs per step. She heard a door open behind her just as she turned the corner toward her room.
She wasn't sure why, but she really didn't want to see her mother, and the opening of the garage door had triggered a sort of fight-or-flight response in her.
Of course, the chimichanga was still cold, so she would have to make her way back upstairs if she wanted to eat it.
That was bad for a whole bunch of reasons, though. She was probably supposed to have eaten dinner by now. She didn't think that Mom would be mad about it, really, but it would certainly be awkward. Besides, she didn't want to go back upstairs while still holding a frozen chimichanga - that would tip Mom off to the fact that she had scurried downstairs without heating the thing up. She could hide it in her blanket, maybe, but she wasn't really an expert in sleight-of-hand, and if she got caught trying to smuggle a chimichanga to the microwave, that would just be the most awkward thing.
The package said "fully cooked and ready to eat."
Taylor shut her door and left the chimichanga out to thaw. Maybe it would be better cold.
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The chimichanga had emphatically not been better cold. The chimichangas were kind of crap even when well-heated, actually. This one had been positively wretched.
Luckily, Taylor had had a rather excellent distraction to keep her mind off of her food. Namely, "TheWingedOne" had provided her with a document detailing a brief history of Earth Bet and survey of Brockton Bay, which filled in a lot of the gaps in her knowledge. It was a monstrously long thing, coming in at just over one hundred pages, but Taylor had knocked the thing out in under two hours with no interruptions. It was incredible, the way that she was able to focus on the text and breeze her way through it - she couldn't remember having felt this way about any text at all in quite a long time.
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Perfect_Fit: Wow, that was really neat to read! It must have taken a lot of effort to put that whole thing together - I appreciate the time you guys put into this.
TheWingedOne: Don't mention it! It's really not a big deal - the moderating team is pretty big and we're all really passionate about the project, so it doesn't even feel like work to us.
TheWingedOne: Actually, come to think of it, we're planning a new Brockton Bay arc and I think you'd be perfect for it. Do you want the details?
Perfect_Fit: I'm not really sure what's going on yet, but I've had a lot of fun so far. I'd love to be a part of something if you think I'd fit in!
TheWingedOne: Great! Don't even worry about your experience level - in some ways, it's actually better if you come to this fresh.
Basically, we're thinking of introducing a new cape. They're probably a girl, sophomore in high school, but the personal details are flexible. The point is that she goes to Winslow, so she's more in-touch with a lot of the people on the ground than most of the Wards are, and she ends up raising a lot of questions about ethical use of superpowers because of that.
I'm pitching this to you because we like to have actual people behind our capes whenever possible, and the vibe I get from you is that you'd fit this role really well. If you think that you can maintain a decent level of activity, I'd love to put you in the driver's seat for this character, let you make the major decisions and really give some life to the character so that they don't feel like a plot contrivance.
Your activity level since you've joined the site has been more than sufficient for this job, so I don't think that you'll have any trouble staying active enough to make this work. If you think that there will be any problems, though, please don't feel pressured to take the character - I would have to ask that you don't mention anything hinting at this conversation until the character actually debuts, but for the most part, you could interact with the site as you normally would. What do you say?
Perfect_Fit: That seems like a pretty big responsibility, but if you can help me get comfortable with it then it sounds like a lot of fun! What do I need to do?
TheWingedOne: The first step isn't all that different from what I recommended in my first message - you should try to conceptualize your character in your mind, make them as real as possible. They don't have to be modelled on you, but it helps if they have some similar experiences; in particular, you want it to be easy to step into your character's headspace at any given moment.
Once you're done thinking about that, I want you to describe your character to me. Give me a name, give me some likes and dislikes, as much personal history as you can come up with. From there, it will be a sort of collaborative process: you'll describe your ideas to me, and I'll work with you to refine those ideas so that they fit into the wider narrative.
It's a very open-ended process, so don't feel like you have to have all the answers right away. For now, try to come up with a rough outline and message me once you feel solid enough to move forward.
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Taylor typed up a message, reread it with agonizing attention to detail, then hastily deleted it.
Creating a character to play turned out to be a really intensive process, because in order to step into somebody else's head, she first had to step out of her own, and that required her to pin herself down for a moment. She tried all sorts of things to create the required separation: she gave her avatar a different name, different hair, different parents, even a different gender, but nothing seemed to work.
The trouble was in creating a version of herself that was discernibly unlike herself. She couldn't figure out how to transport her worldview into another set of experiences. But that meant . . .
Taylor typed out a message in fifteen minutes, not deleting a single word. She pressed send without proofreading it.
This was the sort of thing that her Mom had told her never to do.
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Perfect_Fit: OK, so here's what I've got so far.
Her name is Taylor Hebert. She's fifteen years old, just started her sophomore year at Winslow . . .
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Somewhere far away, across the confines of space and time, in a place where reality had just a little more give to it, the Simurgh unfurled her wings and history began to change.
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A/N: Chapter is a bit longer than I intended, but we ended up in the right spot. Criticism is always appreciated!