Unlike what the saturday morning cartoons would have her believe, Villains were people too. And they needed to commute to work just like everyone else.
Her public execution of Kaiser seemed to get every gang in the city moving. Capes everywhere were in vehicles attempting to meet up, safety in numbers and all that.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Trapped in metal and glass coffins as they were, she was spoiled for choice. Eventually she settled on Othala and Victor. Neither of them were particularly threatening, but Othala's ability to grant invincibility could become quite the nuisance.
When they stopped at a red light, she simply let loose with her heat vision. It wasn't the unfocused heatwave she had used to melt the window back at Medhall, this was far more concentrated, appearing as pencil thin beams of actinic light. She raked the twin beams across the car, right to left, starting from the passenger side where Othala sat.
PHO forums said that she could only grant other people abilities, but Taylor thought it best not to take chances.
With a single pass, she'd cut the entire vehicle in half, burning through metal, glass, and flesh with ease.
They probably hadn't even felt it.
She could have picked them all off one by one in the same manner, but she didn't. She wanted to make a statement. And besides, it seemed far more efficient to allow them all to meet in one place.
She examined the city, keeping a close eye on all the various capes.
The Undersiders were barreling through the city on their massive dogs. Assuming they didn't deviate, they would arrive at the downtown PRT building within a few minutes. That was good, killing mass murderers was something she could do happily, killing petty thieves was not.
She frowned as she turned her attention towards Coils base. She still couldn't see what transpired inside the converted Endbringer shelter. Designed to protect against Behemoths radiation, it had a layer of lead embedded inside the thick concrete. Her Xray vision was useless, but she could still hear what went on in that dark void. For some reason he had stopped talking a few hours ago, in fact he had ordered all his men to only communicate through written messages. Something she had only found out thanks to a few disgruntled mercenaries complaining to each other in hushed whispers.
The timing of the strange order made her think it wasn't simply a coincidence. PHO speculated he was some sort of Thinker, and suddenly giving a unilateral gag order implied that he knew that someone was listening. It was annoying, but in the end it wouldn't matter.
Taylor turned towards the Merchants. Her eyes filled with fire when she found the Tinker. She would be last, she wanted the bitch to spend her last moments in terror, to see everything she cared about torn asunder before her eyes, just like–
She jerked her gaze away, if she spent another moment looking, she knew she wouldn't be able to control herself.
Taylor resumed watching the E88 capes journey through the city. Her eyes eventually settling on the one she thought would let her vent the most effectively.
/
Alabaster was a mistake.
Instead of the therapeutic stress relief she had hoped for, she was more frustrated now than when she'd started.
"You can't kill me, you stupid bitch." He laughed, once he reformed.
She pursed her lips, his rumored immortality was proving to be more than mere hearsay. Already, she had spent the last five minutes killing him on loop in an increasingly brutal fashion, to no apparent effect. His body would just flicker back together.
She had tried impaling him and leaving the object inside him, only for him to disappear and flicker back into existence next to the object, completely unharmed.
She'd punched him with so much force that he'd turned into a liquid, painting the alleyway white.
Decapitating him and throwing the head straight up had shown a slightly more interesting response in that he flickered back into existence up in the sky, his reforming completely negating his head's prior momentum.
The only thing she had learned from her attempts was that he was hard to kill and that his power seemed to be centered around his brain.
She tore his brain out of his skull and ripped it in half, separating the left and right hemispheres, tossing each section to either side of the alley way.
He reformed to her left. Interesting.
She repeated the test, but tore the left hemisphere in half again, and throwing the pieces in different directions. The frontal left quadrant was where he reformed.
Again and again, she repeated the test, unerringly cutting the brain into smaller and smaller pieces each time. Her perfect memory allowing her to narrow down exactly which chunk of gray matter he spawned from.
Finally, she had it narrowed down to a quarter sized lump of flesh. Attempting to destroy only that piece proved useless. Crushing, tearing, burning, freezing, she'd even tried stabbing it with a live power line. He would just reform after a few seconds.
She was wasting time and was getting nowhere.
"I told you, you can't-" Her hand flashed out, clamping his jaw shut with crushing force. She was careful not to actually harm him, lest his powers make him reform outside her grip. His voice was annoying.
Taylor couldn't kill him. But she couldn't leave him either, and taking him to the PRT left a sour taste in her mouth. It would set a poor precedent. She had said she would kill them, not that she would bring them in to live in a nice prison cell.
She glanced up at the sky in thought, she couldn't kill him. But then, she didn't need to kill him, did she? Taylor followed the thought to its conclusion. She only needed the world to think that she did.
Her eyes lingered on the visible moon in the daytime sky. An idea forming.
With a quick glance around for any witnesses, she accelerated upwards with Alabaster in tow. She spared a look at Alabaster every few seconds, just to make sure he hadn't reformed without her noticing. She was thankful for whatever aspect of her powers protected the things she carried, mainly it saw use in keeping her clothing from tearing right off her body, but it also worked adequately to shield people from the stresses caused by her speed.
Once they breached the clouds, Alabaster abruptly disappeared from her grip. Her powers, it seemed, couldn't protect against a lack of oxygen. She huffed, this would make things much more tedious if she would need to keep catching him every few seconds.
It took more time, but eventually she reached her goal. Space was beautiful, her eyes could see deep into the electromagnetic spectrum, what should have been a black void was a riot of colors, some she didn't even have a name for.
If it weren't for the Nazi she was ferrying and the threat of the Smiurgh, she would have loved to stay there for longer just to take in the view. She'd been sure to scan the skies for the winged monster on her way up, but she was more a little anxious to get back down to earth as soon as possible.
Just as she got past the cloud of satellites and was rearing her arm back to throw him, she hesitated. She hated him and everything his kind represented, but did that justify a possible eternity of floating in the void?
Taylor thought it over, her hand idly snapping out to catch the newly reformed Alabaster. She took a moment to watch as he choked over and over. His eyes bulging and his mouth opening and closing like a fish on land. Then he reset, only to go through the same motions. He looked pitiful.
How long would he float in space? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? Forever? Would he still be out here when the last stars went out? Could she really justify subjecting an eternity of this on someone?
With an angry huff, she turned and rocketed back towards Earth.
Back in the same alley she'd killed him in, she pinned him to the brick wall, locking eyes with the much more docile cape. "Alabaster, I am going to say this once and only once. I will drop you off at the PRT, you will submit yourself to their justice. And if you ever escape prison before your sentence is over, I will find you, and I will put you on the moon. Permanently."
He just stared at her with wide eyes. She shook him, "Do you understand?"
He nodded rapidly, pure terror on his face.
Still angry at having to make an exception not even an hour into her career, she flew to the PRT building. Feeling a bit more spiteful, she hurled the man at the pavement. The explosion of white coated everything for a few seconds before abruptly disappearing.
She didn't even spare a glance before shooting off to where the E88 capes were congregating. While she was busy with Alabaster, the capes had managed to get to their destination.
She floated above the warehouse in a foul mood. Her only consolation being that the capes below her would serve as an adequate way of blowing off steam.
Taylor waited impatiently for Hookwolf to arrive. He was still a few blocks away and the last one to arrive, running along in his wolf form. Traffic was terrible on his end, forcing him to abandon his car.
Once he finally arrived, she wasted no time bursting through the thin sheet metal ceiling.
The warehouse descended into chaos.