Worm: She's Dead Jim Part Seven
DISCLAIMER: Worm, Parahumans, and the characters and settings of Earth Bet (and other places) were created by John "Wildbow" McCrae. I don't own them. I don't own the details of the Harry Potter franchise either.
This story was written for my own amusement, not for profit. If you are enjoying it, please write and post a review.
ADVISORY: Foul Language, graphic descriptions of violence. The setting is in Brockton Bay.
After talking to my Dad, I went upstairs and took a shower. I then gathered together the notebooks of my bullying at the hands of Sophia, Emma, and the rest of their clique. If this was a better world, I'd have handed these over to whatever the Protectorate's equivalent of Internal Affairs was and they'd go after Sophia and anybody else in the Protectorate who'd been coddling her. I'd since learned that it wasn't: I suspected that the Parahuman Response Team would only cover Sophia's murder and ignore the rest of her life before the Skull-Snake Guy killed her. Sophia's actions were an embarrassment, the sort of embarrassment bureaucrats automatically swept under the rug.
I then started doing housework. Something had changed after I came home from the hospital after I'd triggered. Dad still had problems with the bottle, but he'd somehow realized that he drank too much and was trying to cut back. Something had twitched inside him after Sophia was murdered: a feeling that while things were still bad for me, they might be starting to get a little better.
The doorbell rang while I was doing the wash. I walked over to a window and saw that a PRT van was parked out on the street. I went downstairs and looked through the peephole. Three people were standing outside on the porch. I turned around and saw Dad standing beside me. He'd heard the doorbell too.
"Who are they?" he said.
"I think they're the PRT," I said. "Should we let them in or not?"
Dad looked thoughtful. After a while he spoke. "We'll let them in."
Dad opened the door a crack.
"Yes?" he said.
One of the men stepped forward with his badge out. "Hello, I'm Lieutenant Harry Ridley, I'm an agent with the PRT. I called your house the other day. I'd like to talk to you and your daughter."
"About what?" Dad said skeptically.
"About the circumstances surrounding Miss Hess's death.," said Agent Ridley.
"All I'll say is that Miss Hess mercilessly bullied my daughter for over a year and a half," said Dad. "It got so bad that Hess and her friends threw my daughter into a locker filled with filth and locked her inside. She was left there for over two hours. It was so bad that that she spent weeks in the hospital, first for her physical injuries, then for mental trauma and you people didn't do one damn thing except help with the coverup."
Agent Ridley and the other two agents looked shocked, as if they were hearing this for the first time.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hebert," said Agent Ridley. "I didn't know. We've been reviewing Miss Hess's telephone and internet records. We knew that there was some bullying…"
Some bullying? I was tempted to laugh. I walked up to Dad and nudged the door a little more open.
"There was a lot of bullying," I said. "I was Sophia's main target, but I wasn't the only one. She bullied other kids as well. The school did nothing, the cops did nothing and I can't help but wonder if the PRT was also helping with the cover-up for reasons I can't even begin to guess."
"We've read some of the transcripts on Miss Hess's cell phones and e-mail," said one of the other agents, a woman. "We've learned that she and a couple of other girls were harassing people, but we'd like more like more information so that we can be put into context."
"I've got notebooks," I said. "I've been writing down the incidents since a few weeks after they started happening."
"You have notebooks?" said the female agent. "Can we see them?"
"We're reluctant to let you have them," said my Dad said. "We've been told they'd be useless in a court of law. That said, we might be willing to stop by a copy shop and let you have copies."
"We'd like to see them now if you don't mind," said the female agent. "I think you can rely on us to hand them back."
The way me and my classmates relied on you guys to keep what's-her-name under control?" I said sarcastically.
The woman's facial expression changed. 'You know that it is a federal offense to out a Ward."
"Was she a Ward?" I replied. "I never said that she was a Ward. All I know was that Thursday afternoon a bunch of PRT troopers went storming down the hallway to secure Sophia's locker at school. I can draw lines. She must have had dealings with he Protectorate. They wouldn't have done that if she was just some unpowered nobody."
The other agents looked at the woman.
"Would you be willing to sign non-disclosure agreements?" said the female agent.
"We're willing to sign such agreements if you're willing to run up your photocopier bill," said Dad.
Agent Ridley looked at the other two agents. The female agent nodded and the other agent shrugged.
"Since copying my notebook would take you guys forever, we could start by just copying specific dates," I said. "You could come back later if you need more." If you're really going to following up on Sophia's crap, I thought.
"Good idea," said the female agent.
We drove over to Neversleep Office Supply, a local business that still kept Sunday hours. We parked and the PRT guys got out of the van. I saw Mickey, a guy I remembered being a senior in my freshman year at Winslow, take one look at them then go into the back room.
The PRT agents gave me some dates and I went looking through my journals and started photocopying. I remembered a lot of the events: the time my Mom's flute got stolen, Sophia tripping me and sending me down the stairs, times when my textbooks disappeared from inside my locker and then turned up in a toilet in one of the girls' restrooms and a couple of beatings Sophia had given me and the school's response had been to do nothing. I felt the tears and the anger form as I turned over the pages and handed them to the agents for photocopying. It hurt to remember them and I could feel the pain, the humiliation, and my despair because the school wouldn't do one damn thing to stop it. The female agent must have been watching me because she passed me some facial tissues when I started crying.
"Thanks," I said.
"We'll do what we can to get to the bottom of this," the female agent replied. "That girl…" she began and then stopped.
"You knew her?" I said.
"Please forget what I just said," said the agent. She must have known her, then. Then I had a flash of insight. Could this agent actually be a Cape?
We drove home after that. We went inside and the agents drove off. I wondered if it would do any good.
I was feeling exhausted. My Dad must have sensed it.
"Taylor?" he said.
"What, Dad?" I replied.
"I hope this works out," he said.
"So do I," I said. "I need to take a nap."
-XXX—XXX—XXX—
My Sunday evening was quiet. I got up from my nap and worked on my homework, pausing to help with dinner. My lessons completed, I turned in. Despite the pain I'd felt reliving some of the bullying while the PRT agents and I were making copies, I slept better than I had for a long time.
-XXX—XXX—XXX—
If Sunday evening had been quiet at my house, things were anything but over in the ABB territory. The Snake-Skull Guy had come back and looking for trouble. He found several ABB goons walking around and did them with his magic stick. The goons never saw him until he appeared right in front of them, wand at the ready, and did them. I wondered how he pulled it off, then I realized that this guy had Stranger powers.
Let me change that. He did have Stranger powers. He wasn't smart about using his power set, though, and paid for it. He should have done his homework about local supervillains. He'd just done the third set of ABB street muscle when he got to meet Oni Lee face-to-face. I don't know whether he'd actually seen Oni Lee or whether he'd chosen to ignore him. Either way, it was a fatal mistake.
I didn't see the gory details until much later and those were on a video on the Dark Web: someone had had a video camera running at the right place at the right time. The Death Eater had been picking the pockets of the ABB guys he'd just done when Oni Lee appeared on the scene. The Death Eater had just enough time to point his wand at the Oni Lee in front of him and zap him with his green curse.
That wasn't good enough. Another Oni Lee was already there behind him even before the one he'd killed crumbled to dust. This Oni Lee struck fast and hard, first stabbing the Death Eater in the kidneys, then using a combination of hand and foot moves to throw him off-balance, disarm him, then sending him sprawling on the ground. He then shot the Death Eater with one of his guns, several bullets in the torso, then one through his mask. The bullet made a nice round hole in the mask before traveling into his brain. Oni Lee then disappeared before any PRT capes could do anything about it.
I didn't learn that the Snake-Skull Guy died until the following day. Some people might have said that there was justice for Sophia. I wasn't one of them and I'm still not. All I know is that sometimes what goes around comes around.
Author's Notes:
Another loose end tied up for Taylor, although the Protectorate was probably going over the corpse and effects of the Death Eater, trying to identify him and find out where he'd been.
Some critics might think that the Death Eater's demise was too contrived. I don't think it was: I went to a well-known gamer's site and asked them for their thoughts. Most of them agreed that an unprepared Death Eater, not knowing the power-sets and tactics of the Bay's most powerful and capable supervillains, was probably dead meat, at least if they faced off against someone like Oni Lee or Lung.
For those who'd been wondering about why I included the Death Eater's demise, I'll be honest: the Death Eater was an irrelevant loose end who'd already served his purpose in this story. I knew that when I started writing this story and had been planning to kill him from the very beginning.
I'm sure some readers are wondering why there aren't any wizards and witches on Earth Bet. The answer is simple: they died out before the Entities arrived. On Earth Bet, the genetic traits that allowed men and women to manipulate magic were linked to other genetic traits that made them susceptible to other diseases that were either fatal or render them sterile. By the middle of Earth Bet's Nineteenth century, the numbers of wizards and witches on Earth Bet had already fallen below the numbers to maintain a viable breeding population and by the time of the Great Depression, the breeding population of wizarding people on Earth Bet had become extinct.
