Current Energy: 10
Current Training: Primordial Rune (Warrior) B (9/10) - Complete!
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Hebert Household, Brockton Bay
It was nice to finally be home again.
The last few days hadn't exactly been relaxed, and the likelihood of something bad happening had been such that she really didn't have any choice but to sleep in her castle but-
Actually, did she just mentally complain sleeping in her castle? Her castle that she owned?
"Have I lost touch with normality?" She asked aloud, considering the thought for what it was. She had come a really long way. It had been... a month? Nearly two now? Since she had gotten her powers, and it felt like ever since then, she had been forced to fight and claw for every scrap of normalcy she had. To the point where she felt like 'normal' was something she aspired to, instead of something she just was. She just... didn't question things anymore.
Well. She did in so far as she was perfectly capable of applying her critical thinking skills to a problem. But when something weird happened, she barely thought of it. In fact, she was recently forced to accept that she barely even registered what 'weird' was anymore. It took basically her entire team to remind her that some of the things she could do were not, in fact, 'normal'.
"Normal is relative. You still go to school, do you not?" Emmy's voice replied to her immediately. His current emulation was always bland sounding when there was nothing exciting - er, dangerous, going on. He could talk about fighting armies of monsters as casually as he spoke about breakfast. The only thing that seemed to really get this emulation 'excited' was the theatrics of heroism. The mighty speech to the villain, and all that. She wasn't positive, but she was pretty sure he even adjusted himself so his cape was always blowing in the wind.
Of course, this mattered very little to her - because despite constant insistence that it embarrassed her she once more found herself turning her head just enough to catch the absolutely gorgeous man in her peripheral vision before quickly turning away again.
What was she thinking about again? Normalcy?
"Nu uh. Weird is weird. Taylor is weird. Hey, why do you sleep with a shirt on?" Her treacherous sword spirit asked, vanishing from the immaterial space she usually held it in, and appearing as a smaller, younger version of herself - sitting directly astride Emmy's chest. It was embarrassing to have some of her more embarrassing thoughts spoken aloud against her will, but what was even more embarrassing was that Nemesis wasn't even quoting her thoughts. Despite being a 'part' of her soul now, and looking like a tiny version of her, Nemesis was her own 'person'. She had a distinct mind and personality. She wasn't just a very strange slice of Taylor's own pscyhe. She was entirely separate.
She just so happened to be entirely without restraint. She actually shuddered at the idea of Nemesis being able to run about in her actual body, something she was apparently supposed to be able to achieve eventually, and that would - as the sword spirit put it - really let her cut loose.
Nemesis was a little on the bloodthirsty side, being a sword and all. Most of her problem solving boiled down to 'stab it and move on' or 'stab it multiple times and move on'. She was, in many respects, sort of a sadist. The idea of someone surviving the first attack from her didn't bother it. It excited her.
Taylor shivered, then pushed herself upright, relying heavily on her Inner Peace to be able to complete the motion without reacting to her swords verbal jab.
"Because it would be awkward otherwise." She answered instead, sliding off the bed in her family home and wandering across the greatly expanded space in her bedroom to her dresser. She didn't know how past Emmy had made this thing do it, but it seemed like it somehow shuffled all of her less flattering, more comfortable clothes to the bottom of any pile they were in. It wasn't enough of an inconvenience to make her stop using the thing - she had more clothes than she knew what to do with nowadays, so she needed the space - but it was definitely annoying. Annoying enough that one in every... three... times she gazed upon her wardrobe, she gave in and put on something more 'girly' than she was otherwise comfortable with.
Make no mistake, she wasn't under the impression that she was hideous anymore, no, she had an entirely different set of concerns nowadays.
Like dealing with catcalling - that Emmy never seemed to notice, because he almost never registered people she wasn't talking to as 'people' - or contending with the way she felt distinctly exposed wearing anything but her costume, or a pair of sweats. In her personal opinion she looked less like the hourglass figure that was typically associated with Hero's who wore spandex, and more like someone in the early stages of a body building career. She wouldn't complain - it was miles better than her upright frog appearance of yesteryear, but it certainly posed it's own problems.
Sighing, she gave in and pulled a pastel yellow dress from the top layer of clothing in the dresser, then opened a different drawer and pulled out two sets of tights and a pair of lycra shorts. If she was going to wear a skirt, she was going to have so much of an under layer beneath it that it could explode and she would be unbothered by it.
Also, it was sort of cold outside still.
"If you don't move, I can't get up." Emmy was explaining behind her.
"That's the point stupid. You gonna make me move?" Nemesis huffed, leaning forward to stare her friend in the eye intently.
"...I really don't understand why you insist on hanging off of me like this every morning." Emmy responded without malice, making absolutely zero move to remove the spirit.
Taylor could guess. All the more physical reasons for being attracted to her friends current form aside, Nemesis took a particular liking to this one. Most because she was competitive. In a general sense, Nemesis considered Emmy 'hers' as much as 'Taylors', and as a result, the fact that he walked around with a sword of legend that was - very pointedly - not her irked her to no end.
In short, her sword was jealous of Gram, and spent basically all of her free time trying to pick a fight with Emmy over it. The problem was, Emmy was somehow both painfully oblivious, and disturbingly friendly in his current form, and basically let the spirit do whatever she wanted with him. He would likely continue to do so until he... changed... again.
"Cus you're hot. Duh." Nemesis replied instantly, leaning back and waving her hands first at his face, then biceps and chest, before just waggling them randomly at whatever part of him caught her attention at that moment.
The absolutely perplexed expression on Emmy's face was probably one of the most adorable things she had ever seen.
Rolling her eyes and grinning faintly at the sight before her, Taylor shuffled off to the basement, already knowing Nemesis would appear in her hand when she was needed without prompting.
Then she paused.
Was it... weird that one of her powers was flirting with another one of her powers? It wasn't right?
Right?
"This... seems... really... unfair..." She gasped out through heaving breathes. The world inside her soul was, as always, chaotic. The insane melee that raged around her as the massive statue laid waste to the army of indistinct shadows around her was honestly one of the more harrowing experiences she could recall experiencing. It would be fine if she was just standing in the palm of the statue, like she had back at the beginning, but her current training regimen didn't really allow for that.
"If it was fair it wouldn't be training~" Nemesis chided her, looking completely different than she typically did when walking about out in the real world. For one thing, she was adult sized. For another, her hair ran down to her toes, only barely stopping before it would start brushing against the ground. She still looked like Taylor. Just... older.
She was also wearing what amounted to the slutty Halloween version of a pharaohs outfit for whatever reason, which made the resemblance less flattering and more infuriating. Suppressing a mild twitch in one eye, Taylor glanced around trying to figure out what her next course of action should be. She didn't have any of her other powers in here. She wasn't the strongest person around, she wasn't able to saturate the field with so much fire power that it eliminated any difficulty she might otherwise have had with her current 'task'.
She just had her mind, her spiritual power, and her sword.
No she didn't understand how she had her sword, while talking to her sword, while inside her sword. She chose not to think too hard about it.
"This is literally impossible. No, it's worse than impossible because-" She paused to dart to the side, quickly decapitating one of the shadow things and then rolling out of the way of the statue behind her as it's tremendous foot slammed into the ground where she had just been standing.
"-Because it's pure luck! How the hell am I supposed to find the single one of these things that has a sword!" She yelled in aggravation. She was sure Nemesis was controlling the statue. It had stepped on her entirely too many times for anything else to be true, especially given the size of the battlefield. She had tried running to literally the opposite side of the field from the thing, but no matter what she did, she always ended up underfoot of it.
"Don't worry Taylor, I believe in you." Nemesis offered her lazily, floating over the battlefield like a queen gazing upon something mildly amusing at best.
She suppressed a groan of frustration. She was going to have to kill literally everything in here wasn't she?
With a sigh, she set to it, giving up entirely on finding her target, and just opting to murder everything that wasn't her target until it was all that was left.
Honestly, it was even kind of cathartic.
Learning new powers was always weird.
Sometimes what she was learning was an actual skill - something with knowledge she could sink her teeth into, information she could consider and work with in her free time, trying to find the enlightenment that would bring her one step closer to mastery.
Other times, Emmy had her do something entirely arbitrary for a few days until everything just sort of... clicked. It was like there was a single moment of freefall, before she had landed on solid ground. Only the ground was a new super power.
...usually one that had something to do with magic?
She was getting the impression that she might have been born into the least magical part of the multiverse and the knowledge subtly irked her in a way she couldn't quite describe. Seriously, other places had literal dragons! A magic swords! And knights in shining armor! Earth Bet just had Endbringers.
Regardless, the mastery of Runes was a mix of the two. No matter how much she crammed knowledge of the eighteen primordial runes and their meanings, they just didn't do anything for her. They lacked greater meaning than Emmy insisted they had. This one meant sun, but so what? It was a word for sun. Sure. She could use it to throw fireballs possible. But she could already do most of that, which is why - despite the obvious benefits of the craft in the form of being able the enhance the physical capabilities of her friends and team mates - she hadn't considered the discipline particularly special.
Then it clicked.
Runes were more than just... symbols with meanings. They were levers connected to the underpinnings of reality itself. A rune for fire didn't make fire. It told existence that this space was on fire, and existence just shrugged and took it. It was a completely different application than her two other forms of magic - one an ability to communicate with spirits, and the other the ability to manipulate a part of her soul to achieve particular affects.
If Onmyoudo was like asking nicely, and Magic from Ozma's world was like a superpower, then Runes were like a programming language and the possibilities that opened up for her were endless.
"Master, I don't think this is wise." Emmy cautioned behind her as she concentrated. She'd seen him write runes on air before, but it hadn't occurred to her how difficult that was until she was actually attempting it.
"Why not? I came out to the bay and everything! Come on I've got like, thirty minutes before class!" She countered immediately. Was rushing out to play with her new 'toy' irresponsible? Probably. But as long as she didn't hurt anyone, then who cared? She was allowed to enjoy her powers now and then after all. Vicky certainly seemed to.
"Because-" Emmy tried to interject but she was already drawing Sowilo in the air, the Rune that represented the sun in all it's fiery glory. Interestingly, the calligraphy practice from Onmyoudo came in handy hear, as she found she was forced to cleave the rune widely in the air in front of her using Nemesis in order to be even semi successful.
Ofcourse, the second she did, pushing power into it just to see what would happen, she was deafened by an explosion of flames that settled over the open mouth of the bay with the kind of force she would have otherwise associated with a blowtorch.
A super tanker sized blowtorch.
"- You have drastically more power than your average magus, and very little control over it." Emmy finished tiredly, shaking his head at the handful of ships burning up. On the one hand, the mass of steel that had been blocking the entrance to the bay for as long as she had been alive was slowly melting into slag and being carried out to sea...
On the other, she was pretty sure the Endbringer sirens just went off back in the city.
Her embarrassed blush didn't abate even with Inner Peace helping her shunt most of it to the side. She continued that blush all the way back to the city, where she quickly reported to the PRT.
Honestly, she was just glad she didn't have to pay for the damages.
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Winslow High School, Brockton Bay
They were all looking at her. She knew why they were all looking at her. Morning classes had been cancelled because of the Endbringer 'drill' the city had decided to run that morning. It wouldn't otherwise be that embarrassing - she would have gotten over it eventually - but not fifteen minutes after showing up at the PRT she had found the cities capes convening.
Vicky had laughed herself half to death when she had sheepishly explained the mistake, and Brandish had shot her an aggrieved look that told her the woman was still less than pleased with how she chose to address the situation with Alexandria. She was of half a mind to try and talk to the woman then and there, but figured doing it in public might be sort of embarrassing for Vicky, so she'd held off.
Which did nothing to change the fact that she had triggered an Endbringer alarm by mistake so close to the expected date of an Endbringer attack. She had a lot of leeway with the Director, but even she felt that was pushing it.
Even worse, she was in Gladly's class for the afternoon, and the man apparently had absolutely zero shame. Where most of the faculty regarded her with a mixture of wariness and shame - more of one than the other depending on how complicit they had been in ignoring the trio's antics - Gladly had simply taken note of the fact that he had a Parahuman in his Parahuman Studies class, and run with it.
"Today we'll be talking about how Parahumans have affected our culture. Not just with things like toys or cartoons, but in other respects. Miss Hebert! Please, come to the front."
Well, she guessed it was better than group work.
Barely.
'Master, I have located a shrine on the roof that has a picture of me at the center of it.' Emmy sent to her just as she was standing up, causing her to falter slightly before regaining her balance and continuing onward.
She almost... almost could convince herself that she missed the bullying.
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
PRT Headquarters, Brockton Bay
Clockblocker was a weird guy, when she took the time to consider him. He was a Brockton Bay cape, which meant he had to have something approximating a survival instinct, especially given his lack of an actual Brute power - but he was also strangely willing to risk his life around her.
"You look really good in that dress. Warm colors really work for you." He was saying as she met him just outside the PRT headquarters. If he was going to send jabs at her over the fire this morning the entire time she was talking with him, she was going to have to implode. Not that she knew how long this would take in the first place. She didn't really know what he wanted, and Emmy seemed equally ignorant. The only thing she had to go on was that Oliver didn't seem to like it, which was fair - Clock worked for a group of people that had nominally given him a kill order, even if they didn't know it.
"Uh...huh..." She said dubiously, lifting one eyebrow and crossing her arms. Clockblocker lifted his hands in mock surrender.
"Why do you suddenly become Amy whenever I talk to you?" He asked in dismay. She tilted her head to one side in thought, another mannerism acquired from her the one single time Emmy had been of a more cerebral bent and considered. Amy was always grumpy when they ran into each other. More so than that, the girl seemed to have a deep and abiding distrust of her that had only recently started to abate. She could see why. Even she thought it was weird how fast Vicky got over Emmy beating her up. And she had apologized for it multiple times. But more so than that, in Amy she found something she hadn't really been expecting. She had found someone who wasn't too afraid of her power to call her a bitch. Not that she wanted to be insulted or anything, but having someone around who didn't think of her more as Nexus than Taylor was kind of nice. More so than that, she and Amy shared a sort of... 'tired of the bullshit' demeanor, her from her long time suffering under the bullying campaign, and Amy from... whatever Amy suffered from. Not nothing, if the girls overwhelming bitchiness was anything to go by.
So she could understand the shared mannerisms. Partially.
"I have no idea what you're talking about." She answered instead of voicing any of that, causing Clockblocker to sigh exaggeratedly.
"Sure. Um. I have to get changed into my civies, but can you meet me like, on the corner over there?" He asked, suddenly changing the subject. This caught Taylor off guard for a second.
"Your... civies?" She queried warily. This felt distinctly like something Clock wasn't supposed to be doing. She didn't really have a secret identity, but he did.
"Yeah uh. Can I tell you after?" The other Cape asked her anxiously, as though expecting a frank denial. Which wasn't really in character for her so...
"Sure. Corner over there right?" She asked, picking out a sandwich place along the way and figuring she might as well have a snack.
Fifteen minutes and a footlong turkey club later, she was sitting on the roof of a building nearby while Emmy invisibly watched for Clock. She'd have waited down there herself - she was aware that she had no idea what Clockblocker looked like without a costume - but the number of people who started to take notice of her eventually if she stood still for too long was embarrassing, so she opted to avoid the problem entirely.
'There's a boy here who is looking both confused and sad. I assume this is Clockblocker.' Emmy informed her eventually causing her to blink part way through her sandwich, then shrug and scarf the rest down so that it wouldn't fall apart when she leapt from the rooftop to the ground.
"Hey. Red head huh?" She asked as she landed. Clockblockers face immediately shifted to a look of relief as she did so.
"Yeah, yeah. I've heard all the jokes." He said before leaning in closer, as if telling a secret, "It's why I know all the best ones to use on whats-her-bitch."
She blinked, having managed to sort of intentionally forget that Emma was technically a Ward now.
"That's... nice..." She answered in a strained tone that had Clock immediately changing the subject - again.
"I'm Dennis, by the way." He blurted, sticking a hand out to shake that she quickly took, letting him do the actual shaking so she wouldn't have to do anything but modulate how strongly she was gripping his hand. If nothing else, she appreciated how quickly he was able to pick out her mood and change topics.
"So, what do you need to talk to me about?" She asked eventually.
"Actually... I kind of wanted to ask a favor. You can heal, right?"
She quirked an eyebrow at him.
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Anders Memorial Hospital, Brockton Bay
Private hospitals were strange. Where everything in Brockton General had a sort of scuffed look to it, Anders Memorial looked more like what she might expect a hospital in a soap opera would look like. It was orderly, quiet, and distinctly lacking in anything resembling a trauma victim. The hospital was more for research purposes than for emergency treatment, and so most of the people here were undergoing experimental treatments in the hopes that Medhall would crack the code and be able to save them.
She immediately noted the problem inherent to this, for her at least.
She couldn't heal genetic disorders. If she pushed it she could absolutely heal a person of anything caused by a foreign substance - a virus or disease, but more generally, any kind of injury that was inflicted from the outside - but healing with Chi wasn't really a workable solution to something like, say, Parkinson's. The problem came from how the healing worked. Chi was, at it's core, life energy. When she healed a person, she was directing their body to fight whatever was wrong with it, and then providing an outside energy source for it to do it with, completely bypassing most biological restraints on healing quickly and cleanly, but also, following pathways and logic that the body already had to work with.
Hence;
"I can't heal him." She said after a few minutes of staring at the middle aged man on the hospital bed in front of her.
"Why?" Dennis asked tiredly. He didn't seem angry. He didn't even seem sad. He just seemed tired and accepting. Like he held only a middling expectation of this working out for him in the first place. She had seen it as they had approached the building. Like every step forward he was taking was a strain for him. Like every moment he was here, a weight was building up on his shoulders, until it was all he could do to just stand up straight.
The man on the bed before them was asleep. There were no nurses present. She wasn't even positive these were normal visiting hours. She got the distinct impression that Dennis hadn't consulted anyone before attempting this, and it showed.
"My healing doesn't work on things like leukemia." She answered carefully, then pulled her cellphone out and continued.
"But give me a second here." She continued, dialing a number on the phone and waiting.
"What?" Was the immediate, rude response she got when the person on the other end of the line picked up.
Ah Amy. She hoped the girl never changed.
"I have a guy with leukemia over at Anders Memorial that I can't work on. Do you think maybe you could pop over and...?" She trailed off, glancing at Dennis who was staring at her with wide 'doe in the headlights' eyes.
Seriously, had he never just asked Panacea for help?
"Why?" Amy asked shrewdly.
"Clocks Dad. Don't be a bitch Amy." She snarked, rolling her eyes and getting an even more flabbergasted look from Dennis in return.
"Fuck. Fine. But you need to get Carol to relax. Me and Vicky are coming over this weekend and if she blows a fuse over it..." The other girl trailed off. Taylor was briefly taken aback.
"What like, a sleep over?" She asked suddenly on the back foot. When was the last time she had a sleep over?
"Sure, whatever you want to call it." Amy replied, then paused. "You gonna open one of those freaky portals of yours?"
"Where are you now?" She asked, snapping out of her mild panic and returning to the task at hand.
"Hospital. Where the hell else would I be?" Amy asked incredulously.
"Shopping with Vicky." She answered immediately. It wasn't her favourite pass time, but the few times Vicky had taken her out shopping had still been fun, even if she would rather fist fight Behemoth than directly admit it aloud.
"...Fair. Roof okay?" She responded.
"Yup." She answered, making a popping sound on the 'p', just to annoy the other girl. The conversation had been just slightly friendlier than was normal. She had a status quo to maintain.
A handful of minutes and a gap later, and Amy was standing in the hospital room with them - and she looked extremely unimpressed.
"Is he okay or did his brain finally stop working?" The healer asked after a few seconds of examining the room around her. Taylor turned to glance at Clock, only to realize that he was still staring blankly at the space she had been standing in, as if she hadn't moved at all.
"I also need him to be awake for this, because I need his permission to use my power on him." Amy added, crossing her arms and tapping her foot impatiently.
"Were you always this much of a cantankerous bitch?" Taylor asked rhetorically.
"No - she seriously just does this for you." Dennis finally answered, snapping out of his daze and shooting them both a roguish smile as genuine hope began to fill his eyes. Then his smile fell, as she and Amy both lifted an eyebrow at him.
"See!? What is this!?" He yelled in response, pointing frantically at them.
She shared a look with Amy, shrugged, and turned back to the boy.
""I don't know what you're talking about."" They said at once.
Dennis bit his tongue restraining the resulting scream.
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
The Heap, Brockton Bay
Well this was nerve wracking.
She had realized long ago that while Emmy was a capable friend, he made for a middling assistant. An overwhelming majority of his forms to date had been focused on fighting things, and the single one that hadn't seemed like she might find any kind of tedium an excuse to 'spice things up' for her.
More so than that, she needed a... proxy, she guessed. A majordomo of sorts. Someone who could help her keep things organized, who could defend the Heap when she was away, and who could assist her with her Magic in a way that basically everyone else simply couldn't. Emmy was helpful in that last respect, but he lost all knowledge of the subject whenever he changed, which meant that she was either forced to shift her studies into a different area every time he did so, or she would have to work at a slower pace to compensate.
Basically, she needed a familiar. A real, honest to goodness, wizard familiar. Like a black cat or something. Only with thumbs. For magic.
Honestly, this would be the first time she had done the Shikigami Creation ritual for herself, and more importantly, done it properly. She wasn't here to resurrect anyone, which was a blatantly incorrect way to use the ability, she was here to create an assistant. An ally. A friend.
Plus, one of the major benefits of a familiar is being able to cast spells through them, which opened another dimension of tactics up to her. Hopefully.
She wondered if it was strange that she enjoyed tactical planning so much when she largely didn't need it?
Shaking the thought off - she was normal, she swore - she set about performing the ritual.