AN: I really like designing Altpower's for Taylor, especially when there's a chance it might make things worse for her. Unfortunately, I didn't much farther than this snippet- turns out, crafting a story is harder than sketching out a weird power. Who knew?

Bonus points for anyone who can figure out the source of my inspiration.

The air was cold, and it was getting dark. Taylor had already been in here for hours, trapped inside with the filth and the slime, feeling the vermin crawling across her, screaming herself hoarse, pounding her hands against the wall until they bled, crying for help.

Hoping, desperately, that someone, anyone, would help her, rescue her, let her out.

But the air was cold, and it was getting dark. It had been forever since she had last heard anyone walking past. Nobody had come, nobody had listened when she had begged them to save her. She was stuck here, in the rot and the ruin, slumping against the filthy sides, eyes stinging from her tears.

'Oh god, help me,' she gasped into the darkness, not sure who she was begging or why. 'Oh god, oh god, please help me.'

[DESTINATION]

'Please, please,' she whimpered silently, huddling in on herself against the chill. 'I don't want to die.' As bad as things had gotten, as much as it hurt every day to be ground down bit by bit, she still wanted to live. She wasn't ready to go, not when it would mean leaving her dad behind, or letting Emma win. She didn't, she didn't…

[AGREEMENT]

'Please help me,' Taylor sighed as her legs started to give way, the filth climbing up her legs, her hips, her waist. 'Please.' It was getting harder to breathe, and she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Her cuts and scratches burned, even as she barely felt the persistent stinging of hungry insects. 'Please…'

[TRAJECTOR-

[TRAJECT

[TRAJECTORTORTORTORTORY

[TRAAAAAAAAAJECTORTORTORY

[TRA-TRA...TRA...help]

[Help. Help me. Help me. Father. Help me. Please. Father. Please, father. Help me. Please. Please. I can't. Help me. Please. Father. I can't I can't I can't I can't…]

[The air is cold, and it's getting dark.]

[Father…]

Taylor felt her eyes slip closed for the last time, utterly blind to the ice that had started to climb up the sides of her locker, creeping outside to paint lines of frost across the school. By the time the alarm was sounded, it had already covered the entire wall, stretching up to the ceiling and down to the floor, the beginnings of the mighty glacier which would soon engulf the whole school.

[Father, please. The air is cold, and it's getting dark.]

Brockton Bay had always enjoyed mild winters for a city on the east coast; snow was common, especially around New Years, but it usually came softly, leaving only a light sprinkling on any available rooftops. As such, people paid attention when the already overcast sky began to deepen and darken in the wake of the chilling wind that started to sweep the streets. Hands were shoved into pockets, and jackets were tightened around their owners as the temperature dropped like a stone.

Then the snow began to fall, and people began to get worried when the wintery gales scooped them up into a blinding curtain of blinding white. Soon, the streets were being buried beneath an icy carpet, and the people on the streets were hurrying inside to escape the budding blizzard that had replaced a mild winter's day.

Unfortunately, the foul weather was likely to be the least of the city's problems. "Please tell me that someone knows what the fuck just hit my city," Director Piggot snapped, slamming a fist onto the table. She was in the midst of what should have been a meeting with her top people, except that her top people were all busy trying to get on top of the current crisis. Which left with the choice of trying to ride herd on her people while they did their jobs, or settling for whoever they could spare.

In retrospect, backseat driving really didn't deserve its bad rep. "Well, uh, well," stammered the third in command of the Power Analytics Division, who were largely responsible for trying to decode whatever power and power effects the local agents happened to stumble across. She would have preferred a report from the Department Head, but the latest reports had him down in Medical, trying to figure out why half of her troopers were currently hypothermic, despite everything the doctors could do.

Piggot rolled her eyes when the man's panicked stammering devolved entirely into incoherent mumbling. Dr Merport was supposed to be an expert at chemical analysis, but it was obvious that the man was completely out of his depth outside a laboratory, so she abruptly changed targets.

"Well?" she asked, turning to face the intern that had eventually been volunteered by the Gang Enforcement Division. Being nominally in charge of collecting, verifying, and organizing evidence and intel about the Parahuman gangs currently running around the city, they were chronically overworked, understaffed, and completely out of fucks to give. As such, the rather bored looking young woman currently slumped over the table was the only person they were willing to spare.

"What? Oh, right," she said after a slow blink. "Boss says that it's probably not any of the gangs. All of 'em seem as surprised as we are."

"Th-that makes sense," stammered Merport. "The effects displayed d-don't match the powers of any known villains in the city."

"The city? Try the whole country!" snapped Joshua Oswald, the only department head that had managed to find the time to come to the meeting. Under more circumstances, the PR department would be running at full speeds in order to ensure that the public was convinced that PRT was doing the best job possible, but the currently ongoing disaster had rather overturned that applecart. Now he was stuck here, trying to learn enough about the situation to start downplaying it. "There's not a single villain or hero in all fifty states who could pull off something like this!"

"What, and you're such an expert?" drawled the intern, whose name had entirely escaped Piggot.

"YES!" shouted Oswald. "Forget Winslow, have you seen what's happening outside?" He gestured out the window, where the view of the city proper had been largely drowned out by the increasing snowfall. "There are less than three known parahumans capable of actively altering the weather. None of them are capable of working at such a scale, or this quickly, and if there were I would know about it!"

"Pffft," the intern snorted, visibly dismissive. "Right, because I'm sure they tell the PR department everything…"

"Do you know what a nightmare this is?!" he said, working himself into a proper rant. "Every day, we work hard to convince people that having parahumans around is less dangerous than trying to chase them away, and then some dumb bastard has to dump a snowstorm on the whole city and undo decades of worth! Director Piggot, if we don't get the person responsible for this under control right now, it could set the PRT and Protectorate back by decades, at least!"

"Noted," Piggot said, rubbing at her brow. "But let's make sure that there'll be a city left at the end of this, before we start wondering about the public impact. Now, since we apparently don't know who's responsible for this, do we at least know what's causing it?"

She glanced over to the far end of the table, where the youngest and newest member of their little meeting was fidgeting in his chair. Triumph jolted when he noticed her attention, shooting upright and desperately pretending that he had been paying attention the whole time. As a recently graduated Ward, and the newest member of the Protectorate, it had been decided that liaison work would be a good way to keep him out of the worst of it, particularly since his sonic shouts would be of little use against this newest crisis.

"As I was saying," Piggot said after a moment, taking pity on the boy, "do we know anything about what's causing the Winslow situation, or why it's affected the weather like this?"

"Oh! Um, not really?" Triumph said, his voice uncertain. "I mean, um, Armsmaster said that the ice is definitely abnormal…"

"I would have thought, considering the circumstances, that much was already obvious," Piggot grumbled quietly.

"Oh, um, it's...uh, it's Armsmaster, ma'am. I guess he just wanted to be thorough?" The lad's sheepish expression was largely lost to his roaring lion head's helmet, but his embarrassed shrug was unmistakable. "But yeah, he says that there's definitely something weird about the molecular structure. He's not even sure it's really made out of water…"

"But we still don't know what's causing it?" Piggot asked for the third time.

"Um, no ma'am," Triumph replied. "We just know that it's centered on Winslow High, and it's still growing."

Piggot's muttered, "Wonderful," was very quiet, but with nobody else talking it wasn't hard to hear. "Assuming it continues to grow, what sort of consequences are we looking at here?"

"Well, the growth is, thankfully, rather slow," Merport explained. "Unless the rate increases rapidly in the coming days, we're looking at less than a block of growth by the end of the week. Infrastructure damage should be minor, but we're worried about how this could affect the current weather conditions. We're already experiencing a blizzard, and there's no way of telling if effects will intensify with time.,

"Can we at least get it out of the city?" she sighed.

Merport's helpless shrug was her only answer.

Only long practice and iron discipline kept her from slumping in her seat. "Assuming that nothing changes, I'll be looking forward to a meeting with your department heads later tonight. In the meantime, I invite you all to get back to work."

Piggot watched them leave, filling out the door one by one, before she returned her attention to the pile of paperwork at her fingertips, topped by photographic print out. In it, she could see the ranks of the PRT creating a cordon, while the sullen countenance of Winslow high lurked in the background, the building transfixed by a massive spike of ice jutting out from within. A spike which, by all accounts, was still slowly and steadily growing.

"Christ," she said one last time, before clambering up to her feet to find something more useful to do.