Colour and form blurred and shifted around me geometrically, forming endless self-adapting vistas that almost hurt to look at. Technicolour ziggurats bloomed like flowers from both sides of a city-sized mobius strip, sending prismatic flashes of soundless lighting blazing down to dance on the fractal crowns of sky-piercing towers.

The other senses were just as overwhelmed. A million scents and tastes I had no name for filled my nose and mouth while my skin seemed to burn and freeze all at once.

Worst of all was the sound.

It surrounded me, enveloped me and resonated in my blood and bones. There was no escaping from it, and it was as loud as worlds colliding. It was as if every person in the world was shouting and screaming and crying at once, all howling of Confusion and Uncertainty.

I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to block out the madness.

It did nothing.

XxXxX

I woke to the sound of something sizzling, accompanied by my grumbling stomach. I groaned, sitting up and wringing out the crick in my neck as I sniffed.

Bacon. There was bacon in the house.

I was suddenly uncomfortably conscious that I hadn't eaten in about three days. I really hadn't noticed after climbing out of the cave. Another power-thing, or had I just been too distracted? I quickly decided that it really didn't matter, as I got a whiff of myself.

Ever spent three days in a cave without any real facilities for washing beyond a very suspect pool of water? You don't come out of it smelling like a rose, let me tell you.

Nicholas must have heard me shifting, because he popped a head around the corner of the living room.

"You're awake. You said last night that you hadn't had any food, so I got plenty out. You're not vegetarian, are you?"

"I'm not," I affirmed, then paused before continuing. "Um, do you have a shower or something I could use?"

"Mhmm. The door over there," he said, indicating the one he meant. "Careful with the water, though. The hot water really is hot. I burned myself a couple times on it."

I thanked him, then slunk off to the bathroom. Twenty minutes and an utterly luxurious shower later - I would never take hot water for granted again, even if I felt a little guilty for spending so long in there and using so much of their water - I stepped out again to find that the other - Gwen? - was awake and apparently in a good mood, given the way she was sticking her tongue down Nicholas' throat.

I felt the heat of a blush suffuse my face and looked away, quietly closing the door behind me. Not quietly enough, apparently, because there was a faint wet sound and then Gwen called out to me. "Nice shower?"

"Y-yeah," I replied, still feeling the blush. "I can't tell you how good it was after the cave."

"Well, you deserve it after that shit. You called your dad last night, didn't you? Did you arrange anything with him?"

"Uh, he wanted to drive up to pick me up, if that's OK?"

"Sure. Only...uh," Gwen paused, as if unsure of how to put what she wanted to say. "Does he know where we are?"

And there was the blush again. Dammit, why couldn't I think of these things?

Gwen chuckled softly. "Nevermind. Do you want to call him again, or do you want to do that after breakfast? Nick'll cook." She leaned in conspiratorially, nevermind that she was still halfway across the room and loudly stage-whispered with a grin. "It's why I agreed to marry him."

"Why, I am shocked, shocked I tell you!" shot back the bearded man, holding a hand to his mouth in a posture of exaggerated surprise. "And here I thought you liked me for my looks and scintillating personality."

"Well, they're nice bonuses," she replied, waving a hand in a don't-sweat-the-small-stuff gesture.

The breakfast lived up to the hype, and I was pretty sure that that was only partly because I was ravenously hungry. After I'd finished the third bacon butty, Nicholas' passed me my glasses - I hadn't even realized I wasn't wearing them. Was this something else that my powers had done? An extension of the healing? I wasn't sure, and that made me a little uncomfortable. Just the idea that there was something working in my body without me knowing was an unpleasant one.

Noticing Nicholas' questioning look, I smiled and said something about the food being so good I hadn't noticed. He smiled, but there was something in his eyes that made me think he hadn't bought it.

I called up Dad and gave him the address, then spent the couple of hours before he arrived huddled on the sofa watching television. A ranger with a paramedic in tow turned up at one point to see how I was doing - the Lawles had apparently called the police to say that I'd been found. Apparently there had been a search going on, but it had been concentrated out in the forest rather than in the caves. The paramedic gave me a once-over and asked whether I had experienced any dizziness, headaches, nausea or problems with eating. She had seemed puzzled when I'd reported that no, I hadn't really and almost looked as if she wanted to say something else, but stopped herself. In the end she just advised me to eat and drink little and often, and especially whenever I got hungry, and to take it easy on physical activity for a while.

It was past lunchtime when Dad arrived, pulling up in a spray of gravel. I was out the door almost before he had stopped and dived into his arms. I hadn't really realized just how much I'd missed him until he was there.

"I'm here, Little Owl," he whispered. Then he coughed. "I-if I could breathe, though?"

"Sorry!"

XxXxX

Returning home felt surreal. When I went up to my room, everything was just as I had left it. The bed was still unmade, the wardrobe still open and the bookshelf still pristine. I slotted White Fang back into its place with a feeling of finality.

I was back.

Dad was downstairs, calling up the school. All the way back he had been quietly furious at them, and I could only imagine what he'd been doing to the school administration while I was lost. For all that he was a pleasant man generally, he could make someone verbally skin themselves if he really wanted to. I grinned at the thought of Principal Blackwell facing Dad in full flood. I hoped he'd get something off of the school for leaving me there, but I didn't hold out too much hope. However, he'd declared in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't be returning. It was only a couple of weeks until the Christmas holidays anyway. The early break would give me both a much-needed escape from Emma and time to experiment, research and plan what I was going to do.

Before I did anything, though, I wanted to know what I could do. So far I had healing, glowing, dulled pain and possibly enhanced strength, as looking back I doubted that I would have been able to climb out of the cave as I was. I had ideas for how I could test out the healing and strength, but the glowing kind of puzzled me. I'd never heard of a cape whose power didn't who just glowed.

Purity from the Empire 88 (Brockton Bay's very own gang of neo-nazis) glowed when she used her powers - hell, Legend did - but both of them could shoot lasers. I was pretty sure that I couldn't, although I'd definitely put that on the list to test at some point when I was surrounded by fewer things that I'd care about if they exploded or got set on fire.

I indulged for a moment in a fantasy of setting Emma's hair on fire with laser eyes, then shook my head. I couldn't go that way. That was the kind of thing a villain would do, and I'd be damned if I let her do that to me.

I pulled pulled out my drawer and took out a notebook and a pencil before plopping down on the bed.

First things first, I thought to myself, pushing on the mental switch that called the glow up and out of my skin. I lifted up an arm and squinted at it, watching the play of the light and trying to imagine what kinds of things it might do. Maybe I could make the little particles… link together, somehow? Form objects and forcefields and stuff with them? How to do it, though?

With nothing better to try, I intended for the lights to form a ball between my hands. They responded quickly, coursing up and around my wrists to create a rough, shifting orb. Mentally anchoring it to one hand, I poked a finger from the other against it. It shifted like smoke around the digit.

I frowned and concentrated again, picturing the sphere freezing like water into ice. It changed, extending out into a giant golden snowflake but when I poked it again it just faded away around my fingertip. I sighed. No forcefields for me.

I let the snowflake disperse back into glowing streams as I pulled my notepad over and scribbled down 'forcefields' before crossing it out. I wrote down 'lasers?' as well, then chewed on the end of the pencil, trying to think of other ideas. Was this how all powers worked? Did Legend have to fumble around in the dark to work out what he could do?

I could have slapped myself. Look it up, Taylor! Computers are a thing!

I grabbed up the notepad and pulled the light back in before opening the door and trotting downstairs to Dad's 'study', the only room in the house with a computer.

It was an ancient, clunky white thing and the screen was almost as deep as it was wide, but it had an internet connection. I pressed the power button and waited for the two or three minutes for it to whirr into life. Once It was going, I fired up the browser and ran a search on becoming a cape, then (after a number of scams, a forum war and a lot of not-very-useful waffling from the PRT website) for trigger events. That was more useful, and it confirmed my suspicions that no, people didn't know exactly what their powers did right away. However, the information also seemed to imply that parahumans should have some kind of instinctual idea of heir powers, which I didn't really seem to.

Next I ran a search for types of powers. In this the PRT was rather more helpful, having a set of twelve nicely-defined categories into which they slotted any given power. By their measure I'd probably be a Brute and a Shaker, but only very minor on both. I tried not to feel disappointed, but it was difficult. Some nazi got the power to shoot laser beams and fly and I could heal a bit and glow. How was that fair?

I sighed heavily and typed 'north america tinkers' into the search field. With any luck I'd be able to find whoever had made the glow and left it in the cave. I'd come up with a theory that the glow was meant to do something or other that wasn't very friendly to humans, and that I'd got powers that let me survive it, somehow incorporating it into me. I didn't really have any proof, but it was the best guess I had.

As it turned out, there was an entire website dedicated to listing as many parahumans as possible, along with as much as could be found about them in general; their powers, areas of operation and status with regards to the law. The uncreatively named Parahumans Wiki used the same system as the PRT, so I had a nice, clean list of a couple hundred capes to look at.

Half an hour later, I'd found no-one that really fit. The closest two still alive were probably Armsmaster - there was plenty of speculation on what his 'tinker specialty' was but the vast majority leaned towards either efficiency or miniaturisation, with the number of gadgets he had in his armour and halberd - and Dragon, whose thing was thought to be reverse-engineering the work of other tinkers. There had been a tinker down in Miami during the late nineties and early 2000s named Doc Wonder who had once dissolved a couple of blocks in a nanomachine soup, but he'd died as a result of the same nanoplague and the machines had been eradicated by Scion. All of this left me with a fat lot of nothing to go on.

Was it possible that the lights had been some kind of natural phenomenon? It was probably more likely that the creator had just been some kind of unknown tinker, I decided, but in that case I probably wouldn't ever find them anyway.

I growled in frustration and massaged my face with my hands. Outside, I could hear Dad on the phone, talking in the dangerously level tone that I knew he used when he was inches away from exploding at someone. I looked back at the screen. I'd probably go back on later, or maybe go out and use the library computers tomorrow, but I was done for the moment. I shut the desktop down and spun the office chair around before going back upstairs.

Yes, I'd drop by the library tomorrow and try to find somewhere where I could test out what I could do without being seen. After that… well, I'd come up with something.