January 10th, 2011 - Monday
Evening

Taylor's mind was once again focused on more practical matters. A roof above her head, food, a change of clothes (or at least a shower. A week...) Having almost no cash - again - made shopping for food complicated, and buying clothes impossible, but perhaps she could find a place to stay and not have to risk wandering around in daylight when she'd be so much easier to recognize?

It was this line of thinking that led to her walking a slow circle around a mostly boarded-up warehouse in a part of the Docks long abandoned by honest citizens. "Mostly" here meaning that one window on the second floor seemed to have no boards covering the missing glass. The bottom edge would've been several feet too high even for her beanstalk frame before her powers, but with her newfound strength she was sure she could make it. The first couple of attempts, however, fell a foot short. Irritated, she started turning away from it in search of something else, before the surge of energy and the hunger pangs fading brought her to a stop. Oh, right. Anger.

Taking a few quick breaths, Taylor sank into memories. Her mother's flute. She could see Emma's face clear as day, laughing at her while feigning innocence. Remembered the stench of the dumpster where she found the flute. What was left it. Her blood boiled, her mind buzzed, and her muscles screamed to move. So she did. A single jump had her grabbing the bottom of the window with ease and pulling herself up and inside in one smooth motion. Her shoes dusturbed far less dust than she'd expected them to, and there was no trace of shattered glass on it - wherever the window had gone, it was either not smashed in or cleaned up. Examining the rest of the room, she found herself in an office. A check of the drawers revealed several rings of spare keys, one of which unlocked the door. The rest of the first floor revealed another pair of offices, a restroom, a shower (both unfortunately out of water), and what seemed to be an archive room, covered in a significantly thicker layer of dust than the previous rooms. A glance around the ground floor where the goods used to be stored confirmed that it was also coated thickly, meaning the previous rooms had been cleaned at some point after the warehouse's abandonment. A fellow squatter, perhaps? Whoever they had been, they were apparently long gone by now, so Taylor went to sleep in one of the offices that didn't have a missing window.

~o~o~o~

Jan 11th, 2011 - Tuesday
Morning

Taylor woke with a rumbling stomach, and a faint buzzing sensation at the back of her mind. She focused on it, and it grew stronger... but now that she wasn't trying to push it aside to deal with people right next to her, she realized the sensation was neither distracting nor unpleasant, it just... was. Experimentally, she tried to get it to quiet down. To her great surprise, it disappeared from her mind completely. A few repetitions established that she could make it come and go as she pleased. It must be tied to my powers... the shopkeeper! It was getting stronger while he was getting angrier!

The explanation for his behaviour was welcome, but her thoughts quickly returned to the magazine and its contents. If I have a power that makes people angry, then that explains why they... why they did what they did. I have to get this under control. But she couldn't learn to control her power by speculation alone, and even if she found a place to stay, she still needed food and clothes, and for those, money. She thought back to the thugs in the alley, and decided to go patrolling. Maybe saving a few innocents from muggings (and she had a good power for that, she realized - Violent crime? Just follow the anger) would get people to second-guess the "Winslow Massacre".

Decision made, Taylor walked up to the missing window, checked outside for observers, and, finding none, jumped down. Bending her knees a little on the landing, she was pleasantly surprised by how gentle it felt. Then she made her way towards the residential areas, keeping an eye on what her power was telling her. After seeing the overlapping gang tags, she decided to look for Merchants - they were the most likely to commit their crimes in broad daylight, and their territory had the least police presence, with the people least likely to recognize her. It only took her an hour to wander into the first mugging, two strung-out goons holding a woman at knifepoint. One was getting much more hands-on than necessary.

"HELP!" the woman screamed. Her frantic eyes locked on Taylor at that point, desperate, hopeful. Taylor stepped in.

"Let her go", she declared in the most commanding voice she could muster. The thugs turned her way, their anger spiking. Taylor kicked the frisky one with little care for sportsmanship, and he went down squealing. His companion bellowed in anger and charged Taylor. She swung her fist into his wrist, breaking it and making him drop the knife. Anger gone from the sense of her power and fear replacing it on his face, he turned to run.

Then Taylor reached for the buzzing sensation and pushed it towards him. It flowed into him, his anger spiked again, rejuvenating her, and he turned around and started punching her in a frenzy, heedless of how he was injuring even his still-intact arm while doing about as much damage to her as a rolled-up newspaper.

Taylor reached for the buzzing again, this time pulling it back into herself. The thug's rage disappeared again, and after a moment's paralysis of confusion he fled the scene again. This time, Taylor let him.

"...Thank you, thank you!" the woman cried out, relieved.

"I'm glad to help. Are you alright?" Taylor asked, while pinning the downed thug to the ground with her boot. He whimpered.

"Yes, I am. What are you going to do with him?"

"Unless he's as dumb as he looks, not gonna hurt him more", Taylor answered, noticing the bulge of a wallet in one of the man's pockets. She pulled it out and walked away, leaving the woman to stare slack-jawed at the "hero" she'd just been saved by.

Safe back at her warehouse, Taylor counted the first $50 she'd made as the city's newest cape. If anyone told child me that this would be my cape career...