It was a road that stretched out infinitely in either direction.
There were buildings to either side of her, sidewalks, stores, apartments - the entire range of things one typically found on a street in a metropolitan area.
But there were no people.
And she was not able to leave the road. Not allowed to.
She could travel the road as far as she wanted, forward or backward, and the scenery around her would change appropriately - but she would never actually get anywhere. There was never any traffic. Never anyone else to interact with. Just the smooth black asphalt of the road, and the endlessly changing tapestry of glowing whorls and patterns that ran across it in place of normal traffic lines.
The first time Jess had this dream, she had found the patterns comforting. To her, they resembled the patterns her power used to make when she planted it on a surface like a land mine. No, not just resembled, these were those self-same patterns. The only distinction between them was that these patterns were more... rounded. More aesthetically pleasing. Like someone had taken her old power, and artistically rendered it. It was clearly recognizable, and yet still different somehow.
That was a while ago though. At this point, she had been having the dream every night - and it was beginning to grate on her nerves. It would be one thing if it was just a dream. Most people don't fully remember their dreams upon waking, so how similar one is to another is immaterial to them. Jess always remembered this dream, with picture-perfect clarity - and she was always lucid while having it. It was to the point where she was starting to feel like she wasn't even sleeping because her mind was active the entire time.
Still, a dream was a dream, so she did what she always did when she had this one.
She picked a direction and walked in it.
{=}
Jess woke up groggy and irate.
Squinting at the ceiling, she slowly and ponderously lifted a hand to her face to rub the sleep from her eyes. She didn't so much get out of bed as flop out of it - rolling blindly to one side so that she eventually found herself on her hands and knees directly next to the bed.
She had no idea how Taylor could be so unflinching about waking up so early in the morning, but at this point, she wouldn't be surprised if the unreasonably powerful girl had just picked up a power for that at some point. It seemed like the kind of obscenely mundane task she would find a super powered solution to. She paused in the doorway - feeling like she was forgetting something, then shrugged and meandered out of the bedroom she shared with Danny at the Heap to head towards the attached bathroom.
As she went about her normal morning routine - brushing her hair, brushing her teeth, etc, etc - she considered her current living situation.
She had ID again, and was legally a citizen once more, instead of a strange sort of unperson in the legal framework of the nation. Danny had been helping her work through the Byzantine labyrinth of paperwork required to reassert her personhood for a while now, but it had been slow going. Thankfully, she had inadvertently benefited from Taylor's continued services to the PRT. The organization had realized the kinds of legal difficulties its people would suffer under the current conditions, and created a streamlined process for the recently dead to resume their lives,
She was pretty sure she was the only non PRT cape to have used it, and suspected that unless Taylor took to performing random acts of resurrection across the country, it would remain that way.
She was tentatively happy with her current lot in life, having long since determined to ignore the sinking feeling of abandonment Carol and Sarah had left her with when they had refused to help her immediately following her return to the land of the living. Sure, she was having some difficulties in some areas - she pointedly chose not to think about Mouse Protector at that exact moment - but things were more or less okay. She had a new family, of a type, and was determined to make the best of things.
Now if only she could muster up the courage to say any of that to Danny.
The thing about Danny that she found the most endearing was also the thing that made her life so bloody difficult. He was exceedingly loyal. Stupidly, ridiculously, unfathomably loyal. Even years after his wife's death, the man was as chaste as could be. He didn't eye other women, he didn't remove his wedding band - heck, she had practically bullied her way into sleeping in his bed, and he essentially slept half way off the thing in an attempt to ensure they never at any point ended up touching through the night.
Danny was like that in basically every area of his life. Bullheaded. If he decided to do something, he did it - even if it was obviously detrimental to him. Really, if Danny could just stop treating her like she mattered so much she could just let it all go and move on with her life. The problem was, he just didn't. He treated her like the most important person in his life, and the difference between that and the ancillary position she had always held in New Wave as the girl dating Mike was so stark a contrast that she often found herself questioning why she had even been there in the first place.
Which was why she felt it was so hard to just tell him what was on her mind. What she wanted from him. Because in a way, she respected and feared how that loyalty would effect his response.
Jess, as was becoming a habit for her, decided not to think about that for the moment. Her current operating procedure was effectively, 'don't rock the boat'. So instead, she meandered back to the bedroom, her morning ablutions complete, so she could get dressed and consider what she would make for the girls for breakfast. She was the defacto mother of the group, and while Danny found the idea of leaving all the cooking to her abhorrent - his late wife having been a staunch feminist and therefore, opposed to such stereotypical gender roles - her singular counter argument on the topic was that well... the man couldn't cook. Frying things in a pan without burning them was about the limit of his culinary skill, and she generally preferred not to have fried food for every meal.
By the time she had gotten back to the bedroom, Jess had pushed all her worries save for those pertaining to cooking to the back of her mind. Which was why she was surprised to find to bodies in the bed she had just left.
Irately, she leaned forward, ripping the blanket away with a swift admonition to Mouse Protector and her wanton ways on her lips - only to find that Mouse wasn't the woman in Danny's bed, arms wrapped firmly around his torso and head plastered sleepily to his broad shouldered back.
It was her.
Glancing down at herself, it finally dawned on her that she wasn't in her body right now, and that she had been wearing the odd black robes that always accompanied her breaker state. Turning, she found Mouse exactly where she should have been - on a mattress on the floor several feet away. Despite having her own room, and her own bed, the aggravating woman always seemed to find a way into their room.
She pointedly did not acknowledge the fact that she too had a separate bedroom.
Sighing, she dropped into her body, and reluctantly peeled herself off of Danny's sleeping form.
Then she went to wake up the girls for their first day of school.
{=}
"Got your lunches?" She asked, stopping in the middle of the roundabout at the front of the middle school she was dropping the girls off at and turning to look back at them from the drivers seat of Danny's truck.
""Yes,"" Memory and Munin - their full names according to the birth certificates that had arrived in the mail for them not too long ago - said, the white haired girl blandly, and the black haired one with an exasperated sigh.
"Gym clothes?" Jess continued, ignoring the roll of the eyes Munin sent her way.
"We don't need gym clothes, we don't have Gym." Mem pointed out.
"Why not? Is it because the class is full? I wasn't there when Danny took you to meet the principle but if she bullies you in any way-" Jess began to rattle off, instantly going from focused on the task in front of her, to aggressively concerned in the blink of an eye.
Jess had never been blessed with children, but she had always loved them. The years she had spent dead were basically a blur to her, so she could still remember sitting in bed with little Victoria and Amy, reading them bedtime stories under the covers at night. She had always been more suited for a domestic life than a cape one - at least, temperamentally speaking. It was just a shame that she had died before she and Mike could take that next step.
Still, as far as she was concerned, Mem and Mun were here kids, and if some jumped up public school teacher thought for even a single second that she wouldn't make use of every connection she had to rain unholy hell down on them for-
"Jesus Christ granny, chill the hell out. We don't take gym cus the school knows we're 'Parahumans' and they don't want us to dunk all over their precious minions with our superior physical ability." Mun explained quickly, marking quotation marks in the air with her fingers when she said 'Parahumans' and flinching slightly when Jess' gaze cut towards her.
"Why granny!" She exclaimed in protest, the previous argument instantly forgotten as she settled into a conversation she'd had dozens of times with the the black haired girl, the familiarity of it somehow soothing to her even if the term irked her to no end.
"Colloquially speaking, Taylor would be our Mother, which would make you and Danny our Grandparents." Mem chimed in helpfully. Jess new the quieter of her two girls did't actually have much of an opinion on the topic, but she did choose to show loyalty to her... not quite 'sister' but not quite anything else either... but well, loyalty to her sister in the most banal of ways.
Like insisting they call her Grandma.
In public.
She didn't have a single grey hair! She hadn't even hit thirty before she died, and her current body and figure reflected that very nicely if she said so herself. If anything, Danny was the old man, being nearly twice her age - assuming you didn't count all the time she spent dead.
"Taylor is fifteen! She's not anyone's Mom! You're both biologically only a few years younger than her!" She whined.
"But the literal definition-" Mem tried to counter.
"I knoooow. Try not to be too literal at school okay? The other kids won't take kindly to it." She coached the somewhat socially oblivious - or perhaps apathetic was a better term - girl, before continuing. "Just... follow Munin's lead. But... not too closely. No pranks. Or swearing." She rattled off as the pair unsnapped their seat belts and disembarked from the car.
As much as the raven haired girl was something of a chaotic presence about the castle, prone to pranks and jokes that only she really found funny, Jess had to admit that Munin at least had something approaching common sense. She seemed to be the only person with enough context on the situation to fully understand how staggeringly beyond 'common sense' Taylor was. Everyone else just treated it as the new normal and moved on.
"Well, she didn't say no magic so- bye granny love you!" Munin declared the minute they were clear of the vehicle, grabbing Memory by the hand and dragging her off before Jess could get a word in edgewise.
She didn't want to believe that either of them was genuinely foolish enough to use their powers in school.
But she had a hard time ruling it out either.
Groaning, she put the truck in drive and pulled out of the school, already anxious about how the rest of the day might go.
{=}
It happened while she was in traffic.
Brockton Bay had seen a sudden decline in its crime rate recently. The presence of an ultra powerful parahuman in a city wasn't new, as far as she was aware. Lots of them had cropped up in Africa, but to a lesser extent, every country had a few local monsters. Tyrants who - as though following some heretofore unknown pattern - would use their insane power to lay claim to a geographical area and then hold it against all comers.
Every nation had a Nilbog.
But Brockton Bay was perhaps the first time it had happened, and the local tyrant hadn't been a raving megalomaniac. Or well, a villain. It was one of those things everyone knew, but no one talked about. The bad guys usually had better powers. Or perhaps better powers was a misleading phrase. The bad guys always made full use of their powers. It was a fact that lent a sort of desperation to anything most hero's did. The sure knowledge that ultimately, they were fighting a losing battle.
And Brockton Bay had flipped that dynamic on its head. Because Taylor was - against all odds - benevolent. Benevolent, and not even mildly abusive of the unstated power she carried over her city.
Or so it went. Jess doubted Taylor was even fully aware of the fact that the city was nominally her 'turf'. The girl could be weirdly airheaded at times.
Regardless, the local situation as it related to Capes had gotten weird lately. Since the situation was so unprecedented, no one really knew what to do about it. No villain wanted to be smeared across the pavement by the sudden arrival of Nexus, but at the same time, they were realizing that an all powerful hero actually made it safer to be a villain.
Because Nexus didn't kill people. And it wasn't like she could be everywhere at once either. She was a teenage girl. She had school, homework, friends. A life.
So there were basically two types of villains who came to Brockton nowadays.
The first were ladder climbers. True villains. People psychotic enough to think that beating Nexus or even just one of her much weaker teammates was their ticket to notoriety. To fame. To power. These people typically showed up, and just brazenly started picking fights in the city until one its many, many, veteran hero's showed up to smack them down. If there was one thing out of towners never seemed to grasp, it was the sheer depth of experience all the surviving heroes here had. Jess didn't like Carol, but she'd bet on that woman to win any fight against just about anyone who wasn't an s class threat already.
The second type - the much more common one, really - were cartoonish buffoons. Largely harmless petty criminals with powers, who had stupid names and a shtick. People who treated the relative lack of gangs as a free pass to do whatever they wanted, without fear of being press ganged. These idiots would often show up, announce themselves, and proceed to perform some incredibly stupid crime, like robbing a bank, or trying to perform some kind of stunt on livestream.
Basically, against all odds, Taylor had managed to accidentally create conditions that made it preferable for most villains to act like hammy cartoon characters.
She had made it effective to copy Uber and Leet.
Despite the relative harmlessness of the second type compared to the first, Jess found herself disliking the second much more.
"Trollo has laid claim to 4th and Main! If you wish to escape this hole, you will pay the toll!" Declared the twelve foot toll man made of stone beating his chest and just generally making an ass of himself.
Which is how she found herself stuck in traffic, ten cars away from a major intersection, while this moron made her late for her job interview at the Bank. She has graduated from BCU with a business major, thinking she could contribute to New Wave as a manager of sorts.
It obviously hadn't worked out.
She was trying trying to figure out if it was safe to leave her body in the truck while she dealt with this idiot, when the car nearest to him started to carefully go around him.
Trollo, of course, wasn't having any of it, because he hopped to one side and stomped on the hood of the car, obliterating the engine inside.
"Now you have to pay Trollo's uh..." the giant paused awkwardly, apparently trying to find something that rhymed with 'Trollo'.
"Toll-o?" He tried. A few people booed at him from their vehicles.
"Hey! English isn't Trollo's first languge! Don't be dicks!" He yelled at them, pointing sternly around himself.
'Oh just kill me now.' Jess whined to herself, checking her phone for the time. She only had ten minutes to make her appointment, so she was kind of hoping someone else would show up to handle this jackass.
Alas, that was not meant to be. She could already see people holding folded bills out the drivers side windows of their vehicles.
Screw it, she'd figure something out.
With an effort of will, she popped out of her body, phases through the door of her car, and walked invisibly up to Trollo in the middle of the intersection.
She eyed him up and down, before drawing her sword, taking a stance - and attempted to cleave one of his arms off.
It was amazing what you could get away with when you had healing tags in your purse and no one could see you.
Less amazingly, despite her enhanced strength, her blade bounced almost harmlessly off the idiots rocky body, and she was forced to step away from a wild swing in her direction that - enhances durability or not - she suspected would have hurt quite a bit.
"Who's there? Do you dare?!" Trollo yelped, spinning around to try and locate his attacker. Jess glowered at the idiot, checking the time display inside a nearby vehicle with a glance and then sidling around him to his rear so she could try again. Maybe she'd been to ambitious. He was a Brute, after all. She might be stronger than before, but she was still more of a Stranger than a Brute nowadays.
So this time, she tried to cut his hand off.
She was rewarded for her trouble by being backhanded at the nearest car, bouncing off its hood and landing with all the air having been forced out of her lungs.
Jess could phase through things if she had enough time to think of it before hand, but it was slow. Less intangibility, and more just sort of slowly permeating through objects in her way.
So yes, she could still be attacked even while invisible.
And no, she did not like it.
Growling to herself Jess pushed herself to her feet, then was quickly forced to roll out of the way as Trollo the Rhyming Moron slammed into where shed just been, having obviously guessed her location based on the Jess shaped dent in the car behind her.
"Trollo has heard of you witch! There are many tales of the invisible bitch!" He yelled again, haphazardly swiping his hands through the air around him like a lunatic while she stealthily moves to the opposite side of the intersection.
To say she was vastly annoyed by Trainwrecks teasing name for her would be an understatement. She didn't like him all that much on a normal day, and while she knew he hadn't purposely spread it around, he still used it so much that a few people had noticed.
Even more annoying, she now had eight minutes to get to her job interview, and this asshole had clearly only used the name because it was easy to rhyme with.
She quickly spent another two of those minutes try out other targets. She tried to stab her foe in the eyes, the ears, honestly she had even tried to shove her sword up the blundering stoney douchebags ass at one point.
"You aren't going to be successful like this." A soft lilting voice teased her.
She was out of breath, tired, and angry when she heard the voice. These were all factors that distracted her enough that she - instead of immediately screaming Master and fleeing the voice in her head - just sort of responded to it.
"I know okay!? What do you want me to do about it huh!?" She yelled back at it before pausing, her mind finally catching up with what had just happened.
"You could use me properly for one." It replied dryly, blowing past her confusion in a heartbeat.
Now, as little as a month ago, she might have found this profoundly confusing.
Thankfully, she lived with that anomalous parahuman event called Taylor Hebert, who had - at the very least - given her a basic explanation of how her sword was supposed to work.
Special name, magic sword, etc etc.
So instead of freaking out she just cut to the chase while patiently avoiding Trollo - who was swinging his fists around so fast now that he kind of gave of the appearance of a spinning top.
Occasionally she would tap him with her sword to draw him away from any bystanders, but that was about it. She was stalemated.
"Oh? You didn't have any questions? I had a whole speech about trust and belief - all very thematic." It noted. Jess - again, familiar with Nemesis - was somewhat thrown off by how mature the thing sounded.
Also, kind of disappointed.
Had she mentioned she loved kids?
"Are we doing this or what?" She grumbled, still frustrated and pressed for time.
"Very well," the voice - her sword she supposed - and suddenly she just... knew. Knew it's name. Knew how to use it.
Which struck her as strange, because to all accounts, there should have been some kind of elaborate and annoying trial or vision or some such. She was just about to ask about it, when her sword beat her to the punch.
"It is because I am not a brat," it answered flatly.
Yeah, she supposed she could believe that.
Eyeing the hulking moron before her, she raised her sword, pointing it at him, and spoke.
"Witness, Eurydice," she called.
Two things happened at once then.
One, her sword lengthened, straightened, and thinned, until it was nothing more than a very large needle. The excess material seemed to flow down towards the handle, creating a wide pommel around her hand that sparkles with lustrous jewels and gold. Her sword effectively became a rapier.
Two, she felt like someone was sucking the life out of her, and she was abruptly brought to mind of all the work Taylor had to put in to be able to do this for more than about a minute.
Which was fine by her, she supposed. She was on a time limit anyway.
So thinking she darted forward, and instead of stabbing The villain before her - she lightly jabbed the tip of her sword into the ground at his feet.
Immediately, a pattern she very much recognized spread out beneath his feet, like vines of light growing along the asphalt. At their center, was an orb of light that rapidly grew to the size of a mans head between Trollo's feet.
Trollo was so distracted by the sudden light show that he didnt even try to attack her while she was obviously within reach, allowing her to duck behind him - stabbing him lightly in the back and causing another swirl of glowing patterns to grow from there.
The powers of this sword were perturbingly similar to her old powers in many ways. In fact, the blade seemed capable of perfectly replicating her old power if she wanted. But more than that, it could modify it. And deep down, she got the sense that it could do way more than that, if she could just figure out the swirling pattern of spiritual power it had shown her to use in order to cause the effect.
Because that... it didn't feel specific to her power. It felt malleable in a way.
Regardless, she had an interview to get to, and not much time to get to it, so she flicked her sword upward.
The motion caused the bulb of light on the grouns to detonate into a pillar of force, pushing Trollo the addled and confused into the air, well above any buildings in the are. At the apex of his flight, she brought the sword tip down again, like a conductor at a concert, and the bulb she had planted on his back likewise exploded.
Sending him soaring across the sky and into the nearby bay.
She hoped that guy could swim because she certainly didn't have time to worry about it anymore. Almost the minute the man had left her line of sight, Eurydice had return to a normal looking sword, and a wave of exhaustion washed over her.
She checked the time. She still had a few minutes. She could still make it!
A woman on a mission, Jess oriented herself in the direction of the bank, and started sprinting, using all of her enhanced strength to leap over obstacles in her way. She practically exploded through the front doors of the bank, and apology on the tip of her tongue as she saw she was two minutes late.
Then she looked down and realized she had forgotten her body in the car.
Again.
And so, she screamed.