Taylor Hebert woke with a start to the beeping of a heart monitor. Her mouth was dry and her eyes stung as she tried to open them. She blinked in pain at the harsh fluorescent light from the overhead lights.

"T…Taylor?" It was her Dad's voice, but it sounded harsh and foreign and grated against the inside of her skull.

"Dad?" She rasped back, but the word came out more like a croak and forced her into a series of painful dry coughs.

"D… Don't say anything, I'll get a doctor, stay right there," He stammered before running from the room.

Taylor could hear him running and shouting for a doctor, his feet slapping heavily and haphazardly on the floor. She wasn't sure where he expected her to go. Her bones and muscles ached as if she hadn't moved for weeks. For all she knew she hadn't.

The last thing she remembered was…

She grimaced. The last thing she remembered was the locker. Being surrounded by stinking filth. Being trapped and the noise of her banging on the door being drowned out by the dinging of the school bell.

She'd passed out shortly after that and thinking about it made her stomach turn.

Taylor took a deep breath to try and calm the rising panic that was forcing its way up her throat in a hot rush of what was probably acrid bile.

It took a moment for her to clear her thoughts of the incident that had clearly led to her ending up in the hospital and as she did she began to feel a buzzing at the edge of her consciousness. It was like a section of her mind had been partitioned and raised up above the turmoil.

Taylor grabbed onto the pinprick of calm and breathed a momentary sigh of relief as her thoughts were drawn away from the pain in her head and the revulsion of what had happened in the locker.

But as she focused on it it was like a door had been opened. Blueprints. Schematics. Complex elements and ways to harness energy into technology that would have been right at home on a camp TV show flooded through Taylor's mind.

Taylor gasped, her fingers twitched and her palms became itchy as a quick sweat blossomed across her skin.

It was as if a switch had been flipped in her head and all of a sudden she felt the compulsion to build something. It was an overwhelming primal need that had to be sated that came deep from within.

The images in her head came at Taylor with speed, one right after the other, and at the time she could only understand glimpses of them. Suits of armour. Blasters that emerged from metal wrists with a heavy swish. Emotional dampers to keep the pain of it all at bay.

Taylor groaned and screwed her eyes shut at the onslaught. She breathed slowly, sucking air in through her nose for three counts before letting it out again for four. The images began to slow and fade, until Taylor was able to open her eyes again without feeling like her head was being torn in two.

There was only one explanation that came to mind, one impossible and absurd explanation, one that she barely even wanted to contemplate but seemed completely and utterly unavoidable.

"Shit," She breathed, "I'm a Cape."

Taylor didn't consider herself to be any kind of cape groupie but even she could figure out the telltale signs of the type of superpowered person she had become.

With flashes of technology and blueprints for strange devices rushing through her head the only logical leap of reasoning was that she had become a tinker, one with some kind of robotic specialisation.

She was disrupted from her thoughts when the door to her room opened and her dad walked back in, followed by a doctor who was mid-explanation.

"I'm sorry Mr Hebert, but it just doesn't happen that way," The doctor was saying, "Patients don't spontaneously wake from a coma with all their faculties, depending on the level of damage to the patient's brain they can be in a state of Post-traumatic amnesia for weeks."

"I'm telling you she responded to me, and she seemed just fine," Taylor's dad replied, "Taylor, sweetheart, tell the doctor you're fine."

"I might be a bit better when I have some water," Taylor croaked, her tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of her mouth and she could feel the dryness of her throat with every breath.

The doctor frowned and glanced at the pad he was holding.

"Hmm, unusual," He said to himself before turning his attention back to Taylor, "Could you tell me your name?"

"Taylor Hebert," Taylor rasped before letting out a little cough.

"I… I'll go get some water," Her dad said before scuttling out of the room.

She was grateful that someone was finally getting her a drink, but Taylor had to admit she felt a little less comfortable being left alone with the doctor.

"And what is the last thing you remember, Taylor?" The doctor asked.

The memory she was trying to keep at bay hit her like a truck, which caused her to lose grip on the schematics she was trying to keep at bay.

"L-Locker," She croaked, "War on Gallifrey, so much filth, the woman who stopped us, the warrior who almost succeeded, the secrets of regeneration, Sophia was there."

Taylor babbled incoherently, and most of what she was saying made no sense at all.

"Just as I thought," The doctor muttered, writing something down on his sketchpad, "A state of enhanced delirium as the patient comes out of the coma. She will have to be monitored until-"

He was cut off by the door opening once again.

"Taylor?" Her dad gasped as he saw his daughter twitching and muttering random strings of nonsense to herself, "What happened to her?"

"Her mind is still fragile, Mr. Hebert," The doctor said, "Over the course of the next day or so she will be in a strange state between waking and being asleep, this is not unusual and she will come out of it in time."

"How much time?" Danny asked.

"That will depend on any damage her brain has sustained during the coma," the doctor said, "It could be hours, it could be weeks. Most likely it will be days, but we can never really tell."

Danny nodded and knelt at Taylor's bed side.

"It's okay sweetheart, I'm here for you," He said, holding her hand.

The contact was enough to break Taylor out of her thoughts for a moment. She looked over at him with wild panic in her eyes. It was enough to break Danny's heart all over again.

"I'm here for you and I won't ever let you fall to the side again, you hear me," He said, "Now come on, drink this. Slowly. It'll help."

Taylor took her fast halting sip of water and grimaced as the cold liquid flowed down her throat.

Then the moment was broken and the thoughts were back.

xXx

It was a long day and a half for the elder and younger Hebert.

Danny was at the edge of his seat at every moment. One second he'd be talking to Taylor about the things she'd missed on TV and then next she'd be in the midst of a hallucination about a war on another world, or men of steel swarming the city of London with zeppelins hanging overhead.

None of it made any sense to him, though he was concerned by how much her hallucinations seemed to stick to the same subject.

The doctor said that was to be expected, though. Her mind was fixated on one thing, likely the event that put her in the hospital to begin with, and was stuck thinking about that and whatever dreams she had been having while in her coma.

As time progressed Taylor seemed to get a handle on her wayward thoughts and was able to stay lucid for longer periods of time until eventually, she seemed to have them at bay entirely.

That was when they let the girl and her father leave the hospital.

xXx

"Okay kiddo, home at last!" Taylor's Dad said cheerfully as he pushed open the front door and wheeled her through it.

She had wanted to tell the doctors that the wheelchair was completely over the top, but considering the fact she was still pretty shaky on her feet the walk from her hospital room to the car, and then from the car to the front door had all seemed too daunting to manage without one.

Her dad would take it back to the hospital on his way to work, she just hoped that bringing it back with her didn't add too much of an expense to the already hefty bill that had no doubt been caused by her time n the coma.

Taylor breathed in deeply as she crossed the threshold of the house.

There were little things that people tended to take for granted about home. One of those things was the smell. Stay in a place for too long then you can become nose blind to the smell of it, but coming back home and smelling it for the first time made Taylor feel relaxed in a way she hadn't been expecting. Especially when compared to the medicinal smells of the hospital.

With a hand from her Dad, Taylor managed to struggle to her feet. Her legs shook underneath her, not atrophied according to the doctors, just a little unused to being walked on.

He led her by the arm through the hallway and into the front room where she dropped onto the sofa with a huff.

"Feeling alright?" her Dad asked, concern written across his face.

"A little weak in the legs, but very glad to be home," Taylor replied with as easy a smile as she could muster, "Think we could grab some pizza? The hospital food was gross, and they said I need to get my calories up."

"Pizza sounds good to me, I'll go grab the menu and order," Her dad replied. She was more than happy to let him choose the pizza they ate, she just wanted to eat. Eating would help distract her.

While Taylor was happy to be home and happy to be out of the hospital she wasn't happy overall. In fact, her mental state was all over the place as her newfound power ran rampant. No matter where she looked her brain seemed to automatically catalogue each and every electronic item in the room. Somehow she had an instinctive knowledge on how every piece of technology had been constructed and what it was used for, and how the components of those pieces of technology could be repurposed into terrible weapons of war and destruction.

That wasn't even the scariest part for Taylor.

The scary part was the massive part of the girl that was urging her to just go ahead and build. Take apart the TV and the remote and use the components to build a scouting drone that could search for even more materials for her to build even more things.

She shut her eyes and breathed in for three counts and out for five.

She'd been told by the people at the hospital that her brain was basically fine, but things would still overwhelm her if she let them. They didn't know about her powers, but their advice of disconnecting herself from the situation and grounding herself with breathing exercises worked all the same.

"You okay Taylor?" Her Dad asked, he'd chosen the perfect time to walk back into the room to see her on the brink of freaking out.

"Yeah, I'm fine…" She replied just a little too quickly, "It's just… a lot, you know? I can hardly believe everything that's happened, let alone that I'm at home now and just expected to deal with it."

He nodded as he sat down and pulled her into a tight hug, "I can't even imagine what you're going through," He said into her hair, "Just so long as you know I'm here for you, and I'm not going to stop being here for you again."

She shut her eyes again and relaxed into the hug.

For just a moment everything felt fine.