Gaiatsu 2.5
It was another perfect start to her school day.
Taylor had just taken a picture in the school office to cement any subsequent pictures from the disposable camera in her pocket in time and place.
Then it happened.
A tap on her left shoulder to made Taylor turn and look, momentarily confused that there was no one there. An explosion of pain filled her universe when an elbow smashed into the side of her head. She stumbled away from the unexpected blow, tripped over something and was shoved headfirst into a garbage can at the juncture of two hallways. A quick lift and Taylor's face was buried in trash, her legs flailed helplessly up in the air.
With a scowl Sophia stared down any potential witnesses, watched their eyes flick away from her own as they all broke eye contact one by one. Sophia basked in her return to power over these pitiful losers, until some upperclassmen Track Team members walked around the corner. She knew they would rat her out to Jesse if she beat down Hebert a little more so she sprinted up the stairs three at a time to her in-school suspension.
It felt good to blow off a little steam after being ambushed by the Merchants last night.
"What kind of asshole junk-robot makes a whip out of jumper cables, anyway?" Sophia thought.
At least the PRT vans had dropped them off at Anders Memorial where Panacea was finishing up her rounds. The New Wave cape had healed Kid Win and her before leaving for the night, with the usual blah, blah, blah; eat more and build more muscle over the next three days. No clue why the girl had babbled at her about Lyme Disease for so long though.
As soon as Sophia got home last night she choked down an entire package of sliced turkey and rummaged in the hiding place on top of her closet door to give herself an injection before bed.
"Hey, if one boost is good, then more is better, right?" Sophia thought as she drifted off to sleep.
The needle and bottle of steroids lay on her nightstand for her next injection when she woke up. The all too familiar 'roid rage was upon her by the time she got to school and spotted Hebert in the hall. With her back turned, oblivious, it was too perfect to pass up.
As Sophia entered the in-school suspension room she thought, "Maybe I can goad Kenny the Skinhead into arm wrestling and make tomorrow be 'leg day' instead..."
By the time Taylor had ungracefully extracted herself from the garbage can the bell rang for first period. With practically empty hallways she cleaned herself off as she walked and was grateful the garbage can held mostly paper at this time of day and not half-eaten food like it would later.
She apologized to Mrs. Knott and took her desk in the computer class and reached out with her senses to her insects while she worked on the assignment.
Taylor fumed silently as her thoughts raced,. "How the hell had Sophia got rid of that tick? It had been buried all the way under her skin for weeks, why had bitchcakes decided to do something about it now? I guess I probably should have stuck around longer last night to see what happened in the aftermath. I also shouldn't have fed the rest of the ticks to her Black Widows, now I have to find more before I can tag Sophia again."
In the third floor detention room, her bugs confirmed it was Sophia by the sagging sock elastic. The tick Taylor had used to track her was nowhere to be found. The situation was like the computer problem Mrs. Knott had assigned, too much depended on a single point of failure. Taylor had grown too used to noting Sophia by the only tick in her range so that when it was gone she merged into the crowd, overlooked and effectively invisible.
Taylor mentally sorted through the bugs in her range and didn't even find any ticks on a mangy dog who accompanied a homeless guy dumpster diving behind the school kitchen. Too bad she couldn't conceive of a vector to get his master's tapeworm into Sophia as well. However his crabs infestation would find its way to Sophia by way of the exercise gear in her gym locker before the end of the school day. Taylor would have to swing by Sophia's house and set the crotch crickets to breed once the infestation had set in so she would always have a secondary way to tell where Sophia was from now on.
If only she could find another tick...
Taylor had made it to World Affairs class before Mr. Gladly again. From the hallway she heard a guy say, "Hey, Boo-Boo Buttsu..."
Madison interrupted him in a slow sarcastic monotone, "Oh... Take... Me... You... (yawn) Stallion... Take... Me... Now."
"Uh, what?" he replied urbanely.
"OK, studmuffin," Madison said venomously, "If that's what you want, whip it out, right here, right now."
"Um. Listen, I..." he began apologetically.
"No? Then go back to dating Rosie Palm and her five sisters," Madison interrupted with an over-exaggerated wave of her hand, "using such a deathgrip you'll end up looking like a lopsided Popeye!"
"But I didn't..."
"No, you DIDN'T. Guess what, I DIDN'T either. It was an April Fool's day joke. LAST. WEEK. Acknowledge. Move on."
"I'm not..."
"You're not going to harass me anymore?" Madison pointed at the boy and said sweetly, "Oh, so kind of you."
Madison pointed at him with her left hand as well and said, "But if you keep it up, I'll tell everyone you claimed that... this," she pointed both index fingers to the sky as she brought her curled fingers into contact, "was ten inches."
The erstwhile bandwagon-jumping bully paled in terror and tried to apologize, "OK, Ok, ok, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
While the socially defeated boy retreated to his desk, Julia high-fived Madison and said, "Oh my god, that gets better every time you do it."
"Wait until I break out some of the lines from Real Genius and Pump Up the Volume," Madison said, "I'm so glad my Mom showed me clips from those movies after I asked for her advice on how to handle this."
At lunch Emma wouldn't shut up about this fashion shoot she had last night and how 'Phillippe loved the new haircut' and on and on about other fashion minutiae. Julia and Madison were just part of the gathering as Emma held court, Madison fed her a line or asked a question which kept the topic of Emma's conversation focused on Emma. It was practically a lesson in how to ingratiate oneself to a narcissist.
Sophia had skipped lunch and remained upstairs in detention and was in the middle of a tricep dip competition against her fellow delinquents.
"How the hell did everything I've set up against them come crashing down already?" Taylor thought frustratedly. The rest of the school day dragged on interminably, she longingly awaited her Dad to finally fall asleep so she could put on her Butterfly costume and take out her frustrations on the criminal element somewhere in town.
Butterfly had jogged across that vague line which separated gang territories a few minutes ago when insects at the edge of the range detected something odd.
Two men in suits were trying to force open a locked door at an otherwise nondescript windowless building with several expensive cars parked in front of it.
As her bugs investigated further they entered an area where sounds were deadened and some quality of the air itself apparently thickened into a miasma, somehow slightly more difficult for her bugs to move through it.
Electrical junction boxes on the back of the building had the same swampy effect cloaking them as well as security cameras positioned at the ends of the alley behind the building.
Oddest of all were the armored lizard-horses or buffalo-dinosaurs and a human form who waited in that alley.
She could detect from a few of the bugs inside a moving bubble devoid of whatever shrouded the rest of the interior of the building.
Inside that bubble were three people who each carried a bag or two as they strode purposefully toward the rear exit and deftly avoided whoever groped their way near their bubble.
Grue guided Regent and Tattletale past guards and gamblers as they made their way out of the Casino they had just robbed. Tattletale shifted the full bag to a more comfortable position on her shoulders and brushed a fly away from her face.
A bug had landed on each of them. Bugs on furniture in the room to delineate space, Bugs keeping pace with them as they walked, Insects under Master control…
Tattletale said, "Regent, scan the roofs as we exit. That cape, the Merchant's mercenary I told you about is out there."
"Roger, dodger."
Butterfly walked in a crouch across the roof as quietly as she could after she climbed up the fire escape on the side of the building and finally got a look at the alley below with her own eyes.
Tendrils of darkness oozed around a doorframe and enveloped the lights in the alley save for the bulb over the door itself, suddenly kicked open noiselessly by a well built young black man who carried two large duffel bags.
She leaned forward to get a better look at his companions, a masked young woman in an evening dress with her hair up and a slighter man in a mask.
The thinner guy glanced her way right when her calves spasmed which caused her to pitch forward and fall gracelessly off the two storey building to land painfully amidst a heap of garbage bags piled in a dumpster.
Butterfly flailed in the darkness which now surrounded her as she struggled to get to her feet in the odd enveloping blackout, the bugs she had placed on the robbers moved her way rapidly.
Her swarms moved to attack them even one of the huge mutated things body checked the dumpster she was in into the wall behind her. She was knocked back into the garbage bags split open by her fall as she sensed the gargantuan animals as their riders goaded them to run further away.
Butterfly still felt the effects of that fall in earnest as she cautiously forced her aching body out of the alley which was still cloaked by the cloying, pervasive darkness. Her bugs sensed Casino guards with submachine guns venture out into the enshrouded area, yet even in her injured state Butterfly avoided them and turned the corner to make her own getaway.
At least they weren't firing blindly and... too late, they actually were shooting at each other in the sound-enveloping darkness. She sensed two fall prone, probably shot, while three others pulled their triggers and aimlessly sprayed bullets to ricochet in the darkened alley.
Butterfly limped away from the just-robbed Casino and dug in her storage compartment for painkillers in her First Aid kit. The long slog back home would be excruciating without them, and it was still early enough that she considered it worth the risk to catch a bus most of the way home. A twist and pull removed the plug for the hole she'd drilled through her mask. She placed the pill inside the end of the straw, an ersatz proboscis, she fit through her mask, swallowed the pill and leaned her free hand on the brick wall as she drank from the small bottle of water taken from her storage compartment.
A disturbance at the far end of the narrow road in front of her moved aside bugs without her control, just barely nudging them out of the way. Her head snapped up, but she wasn't sure she saw anything as she sensed… whatever it was disappear again while the insects it had displaced were hardly perturbed when whatever it had been appeared in the first place.
"Oh crap," she thought, "It's Oni Lee…"
Then the same thing happened close to the edge of her range a few blocks behind her, she sensed him raise a hand to his ear as if he talked to someone by radio but he'd disappeared again before she could turn to look.
She discarded the water bottle, scrambled for her pepper spray and forced herself to move ahead faster despite her pain. A shock of adrenalin flooded her body as she prepared for another fight against the homicidal teleporter, but without backup this time.
"I don't know what's worse, if he thinks I had something to do with the robbery or if he doesn't," She didn't know if which she dreaded more; the possibility of torture for information or just being killed summarily because she didn't know anything.
Once was happenstance. Twice is coincidence, Three times is enemy action, the old saying goes. This was confirmed as she sensed another disturbance shift her bugs on the far side of the office park on the opposite side of the road.
Fear gripped her guts as she thought, "He's toying with me…" and considered whether to draw her collapsible baton or that large hunting knife.
He spoke again, but she couldn't make out what he said with her dispersed insects over two and a half blocks away.
What she could hear was a muffled yet dreadfully familiar voice answer "OK, got her centered in my sights." from her swarms a not even a block away above and behind her.
"Oh no… no, no, no, no, no…." Taylor's mind froze as her pepper spray dropped from her limp fingers.
Dauntless teleported into the vacant street beside her, walked toward her slowly with a glowing shield held defensively before him while he gestured toward her with a raised Arclance and said, " You would be Butterfly, I presume?"
"Butterfly, really?" her swarms heard Shadow Stalker mutter. "I ought to shoot her just for picking such a candy-ass name."
With the Protectorates' rising star in front of her, as her unknowing school bully pointed a loaded crossbow at her back she thought, "This day just keeps on sucking more than the Hoover test facility."
