Author's Note: Well, typical of this collection, this next chapter is neither of the prompts I mentioned at the end of last chapter. They're coming, though. Sooner or later.
Alt-Power AU: All is Clay
Winslow high was far less intimidating at night. The halls were empty, the rooms were locked, the doors all closed. No bells rang over the intercoms, no crowds pushed and shoved their way through the halls. No tormentors lurked in unseen corners, or walked brazenly.
Taylor thought she could like the school, even, if she only had to come at night, when there was nobody there to ruin the silence and the emptiness. The darkness covered many of the building's flaws, but the biggest flaw was entirely gone from its decrepit halls.
It was cynical, but she felt she had the right to be cynical. Tonight, and only tonight, she was letting herself do what she wanted. Not what was smart or safe or right, just… what she wanted.
She walked with her head held high, confident that there were no cameras or other recording devices to speak of. Oh, Winslow had them, but if the various gangs agreed on one thing, it was that they didn't want to be recorded going about their days. No security camera, no matter how well-hidden, went more than two hours between installation and defacement. Black paint on lenses, moving posters to cover them, or just breaking them out of their mounts… Blackwell had long since given up on replacing them. All of which fit Taylor's purposes.
She turned a corner, and as she walked she held her left hand out to graze the hard brick wall. It felt like clay, living clay reflecting her heartbeat. She clenched her fingers together, and the brick and mortar squished.
When she pulled away from the wall, she dragged a strand of brickery behind her like gum, stretching and thinning. Three steps, and she let go, but the brick remained, stretched, impossible, molded. Still brick, just… not. A shoulder-height tendril of solid brick stretched out into the hall, sharp at the edge and, she knew from her little experimentation, speckled with little barbs, fractal spurs jutting out from every flat surface. Like a cactus.
As she made her way into the depths of the school, she dragged more impossible gouges in the walls and doors. Doorknobs squished and smeared across doors, windows gained holes like someone had melted the glass and shaped the molten results into clever shapes. Posters were pushed into the depths of walls.
All done as she walked; she was taking stupid risks on this night, but only stupid in concept, not execution. She would be in and out of Winslow in less than ten minutes, and there was no chance the prickly, random barbs her works left behind would leave anything as identifiable as fingerprints.
She found herself on the end of the hall she had come for. The hall with her locker, though it was in the middle and she was on the end, fifty lockers away from her own.
It would be too suspicious to trash just her locker, of course. The entire row would have to go. That was what she had come for.
She paused for a moment, contemplating the blank canvas laid out in front of her in dull metal and bad memories. Terrible memories, not made better in the slightest by getting her powers… Was it an hour into her torment? Two? Long enough.
She was glad she hadn't managed to make any real impact on the locker before losing consciousness now, of course, but back then she would have traded anonymity for rescue in a heartbeat. Her power hadn't provided.
Now, though? Now she punched, her hand clenched and her teeth gritted, and sunk her fist into a locker down to the shoulder. She reached around, feeling clay in all directions, and sunk her other arm.
Spread, grip a handful of material, work it out into the open… She had never done pottery, but this had to be what it felt like, just on a larger scale. Everything was like clay, hard but pliable with a bit of force. And not like clay; when she hit something, it spiked out, growing a bit from the force, but that wasn't what she wanted here.
Here, she wanted to sculpt, to destroy and create with purpose. There were personal items inside a lot of the lockers around hers, things she could smear and drag out to add color. The personal effects of people who didn't care for her, people who could stand to sacrifice for her sake for once. They didn't give up their easy, comfortable daily lives to help someone being bullied, so it was their fault she was taking something else now.
Pencils made streaks of yellow-painted wood across the warped, twisted scene. Books smeared, compressed, rolled into balls and stuck to the rest, bristled menacingly. The lockers themselves provided raw material, raw mass for her to shape. The parts she pulled from furthest away were warping the further she brought them, stretching and turning a menacing black, but that worked perfectly with her vision. Everything was spiked and rough to the touch, and it looked like something out of a horror movie…
It was not perfect, but it was good. A hideous thing that would draw the eye, ugly and brutal, spikes framing a monstrous mouth she had shaped to hold shadows unless someone pointed a light directly inside. A poor facsimile of a maw, a representation of fear and terror made manifest.
It was half art and half her power, and it would cause an uproar. Impossible to fix, impossible to disassemble, a mass of sharp spikes and tripping hazards nestled in the crook of the wall like a malignant parasite pretending to be a row of lockers. Ugly, mesmerizing…
She leaned forward and pressed a single finger into one of the spikes, leaving it there. Her heartbeat pulsed, and tiny little barbs began bubbling up to the surface of the metal, beating in time.
As best she could tell, any sort of force she exerted on her material translated to it spreading, spiking out, reaching to form something akin to the arm of a snowflake, nestled fractally within itself. These small spikes, the ones that came with anything she created… They were formed because of her pulse, the miniscule force her blood exerted from under her skin on anything she touched.
It was good that she could decide not to affect something, that she had to be in the right mindset to create, to warp. Else she'd never be able to hide herself or even wear clothing.
She took her finger off the spike once it had bristled to her liking, then turned on her heel and walked away. This… statement… would lead to suspicion, it would cast doubt on her if she wanted to try and be a hero. Which she still did, even though she was going to take it slow. Maybe she'd get slapped with a fine for destruction of property if they ever figured out who did it.
She still considered this a night well spent. Winslow's budget would suffer, Blackwell would actually have to get off her ass and do something for a change. Classes wouldn't be canceled, she had left the classrooms untouched save for some of the doors, but everything would be hindered and awkward. The Protectorate would maybe be called in.
All sorts of eyes would be on Winslow and her particular group of lockers. On those nearby, those who might be connected to the incident. She didn't think anything would come of it, but that wasn't the point. The point was to make them look.
Because if there was anything she was growing to hate more than the Trio, it was being trapped and nobody noticing. Nobody caring.
The commotion at Winslow, at least the parts of it that Taylor got to see, was everything she had expected and more. They had roped the whole hallway off, which just ensured half the school found reason to be in the forbidden area, and pictures of her artwork were already gaining traction on PHO. A few users there had even thought to draw the line between rumors of a girl shoved into a locker and her art, and better yet, the line they were drawing was 'vigilante offended by the injustice', not 'victim acting out.' She doubted things would continue to go that well for long, but it was a promising start.
Said promising start took a kick to the face that very night, as trouble came from a direction she hadn't expected.
She didn't practice her powers at home, for obvious reasons. Her usual spot, for all of three days before trashing Winslow, had been a larger boat in the boat graveyard. The graveyard was notorious for being a testing ground half the city's new capes ended up using, but that was because nobody had a reason to be out there, and there was no property to damage. It was perfect for her, despite its reputation, and she had been careful to only practice inside the larger ships, not out in plain sight.
Nobody had seen her; she had been fairly confident of it. But now, looking down from the deck, through a power-created knothole, she knew she was either extremely unlucky, or somehow attracting attention.
Not from the PRT or the gangs; the two figures in the shadowy hold weren't uniformed or obviously gang-affiliated. A morbidly obese man in a ludicrously large sweatshirt was sitting off to the side, watching a teenage girl in a green hood wandering the hold, the way a parent might watch a young child.
The girl, Taylor saw as she observed, was putting her hands on everything. The floor, the walls, the old metal scaffolding that used to keep crates in place for one reason or another. What was more, her hands were going to lumps, imperfections, breaks… Subtle disfigurements.
Places Taylor had damaged, and then practiced smoothing back with her power. It was hard to fix anything she did, but she could do it, more or less. Not well enough for this strange girl to be fooled, though. There was a distant air to her, something not quite right, but she found them like she was being drawn to them.
The man watched her for a while, patiently waiting for her to finish her inspection. When she finally sat down in the center of the cabin, he rose to go to her side. "Elle, do you want to go back now?" he asked.
"No," the girl said after a full minute's pause. "It's here."
"I must admit, I don't see anything different about this place," the man said kindly. "Maybe you could show me?"
"It's… thinner here." The girl's hands traced nonsensical patterns on the metal hold floor.
"Well, it's enough to get your attention like little else," he agreed.
There was movement in the depths of the hold. Taylor saw a marble pillar, of all things, crumbling out of the floor of the hold like it was rising from the depths of the earth, though she knew there was nothing below them but water and the bottom of the bay. There were carvings on the pillar, nonsensical designs she couldn't make out.
That was enough to tell her who these two were, though only because she had done her research once she knew she had powers. There was only one parahuman in the bay who could make architecture out of nothing, and that was one of Faultline's Crew, Labyrinth. Little was known of her except that…
Taylor had to think about it for a moment; she hadn't cared that much about researching Faultline's Crew, since they didn't take jobs in the Bay. She thought Labyrinth might have been kidnapped at some point, but it wasn't really a kidnapping… A mental hospital. That was it. She'd been taken from an asylum for parahumans, and there was some debate on whether she should be returned, given the other dirt Faultline's crew had unearthed on that job. That, and Labyrinth didn't seem bothered by living with a group of mercenaries nowadays, as far as anyone could tell.
Or maybe that last part was her own observation, here and now. The big man would be Gregor the Snail, if she assumed he was a parahuman too. Out here in the middle of the night, apparently having followed Labyrinth's directions, given he didn't know why they were there.
The marble pillars began sprouting in other places, too. Gregor looked around, then put a hand on Labyrinth's shoulder. "If you want to come back another time, we should not mark this place now," he said calmly.
Labyrinth brushed his hand off her shoulder. The big man looked down at his hand, then back at her, his movement so exaggerated Taylor had no trouble making it out in the shadowy darkness. "You are having a very good night," he said softly.
"It's thinner here," Labyrinth repeated absently. "Thinner…"
Taylor pulled back from her hole and began to pull the wood back into place, clenching her hands around the ragged edges to stop the wooden clay from spiking out like it would if not blocked. She heard a gasp from below, a low noise that was followed by Gregor asking what was wrong.
She cut and run, following her path out of the boat graveyard with practiced ease; whatever was happening here, she wanted no part of it. She would find another place to practice.
"I saw some pictures of the vandalism at Winslow," her father announced. He was making something in the kitchen, something that smelled of pepper.
Taylor tossed her backpack on the couch, fighting to hold back the apprehension that flooded her. "Really?" she called out. "Was it as weird as I said?"
"Lou accused the guy who showed us of taking pictures from a horror movie, and half of us believed him until somebody else pulled up the news report on their phone, so yeah," he replied. "Like the entire set of lockers decided to turn into an impressionist painting of the gates of hell. I can't believe Winslow is still open this week."
"If you want to take me out of school, feel free," Taylor volunteered. Her artwork had the trio on edge, so much so that they'd ignored her for the last two days, but she would happily skip class for a legitimate reason.
"If that thing starts making weird noises, you have my permission to leave immediately," he shot back. "How are your classes going?"
"I've mostly caught up," she said shortly. He didn't suspect it had been her; she wasn't surprised, but she was still glad.
"Any… any trouble?" he asked. Something hit a frying pan and sizzled fitfully.
"No," she said truthfully. She took her backpack and went upstairs, doing the dozen little things to unpack her things and check for nasty surprises hidden in her bag. It wouldn't be the first time she's had a good day only to come home and find an old roach trap at the bottom of her bag, or something equally disgusting. Today her bag was clean, but she couldn't count on that always being the case.
The front door opened and closed downstairs, followed by the distant creak of the front step. Taylor frowned to herself; she didn't know why her father would be abandoning his cooking to go outside.
Maybe it was her vandalism and close call at the ship graveyard the other night coloring her perception, but she was nervous. She headed back downstairs, poised to flip the mental switch that kept her powers from activating, ready to… something.
She hadn't really figured out any effective combat methods with her powers yet. If she punched a wall she could probably impale someone on the other side with a dozen spikes of brick or plastic siding, but that was decidedly lethal and situational at best.
She approached one of the windows in the living room and twitched the curtains aside, making a gap large enough to see through.
The reason her father had left the house was immediately apparent; a familiar duo of supposed strangers was struggling in front of their driveway, an obese man holding back a teenager from coming closer. Gregor and Labyrinth, there out of costume no less. Gregor had a few strange protrusions on his face, though they looked like some sort of disease from where Taylor was standing, not something obviously cape-like.
Her father was a few steps away from them, holding a baseball bat Taylor could have sworn was in the basement.
The basement. She winced. She had done a few little things down there this morning, mostly to work off some nervous stress and reassure herself that her powers weren't going to come on at some unfortunate moment because she hadn't used them enough lately. She'd played with the cement flooring, sculpting it into fractal valleys and ravines, and near the end she'd pulled a glob of the floor halfway across the room, where it had taken on a decidedly white, stoney color of its own accord.
Ten minutes of messing around, and another ten of putting it all back in order like smoothing a clay sculpture back into a ball. Somehow, that was enough to have Labyrinth all but dragging Gregor to her front door in broad daylight.
Taylor considered letting her father handle it, but the fact of the matter was that he was a guy with a baseball bat dealing with two parahuman mercenaries. He might need her help if they got ugly… And they were here because of her.
There wasn't anything out there for her to work with, though. Except the car, and the pavement…
She kicked her shoes off, pulled off her socks, and opened the front door, going out barefoot. If worse came to worst, her power worked with any bare skin; she could maybe kick a nasty set of spikes at them at a moment's notice.
The step creaked as she stepped on it, drawing the attention of her father and the mercenaries. "Dad, what's going on?" she asked as innocently as she could manage.
"That's what I was trying to find out," her father said coldly. "Explain to me again why you were chasing a teenage girl in front of our house?" he asked Gregor. The bat hung loosely from his hand, adding what would have been a credible threat to his words if Taylor didn't know what she knew.
"There," Elle said quietly, pointing somewhere to the left and down of Taylor. Down toward the basement.
"Elle has trouble sometimes with boundaries," Gregor explained in a voice that made it very hard to distrust him, reasonable and apologetic. "We were out for a walk, and she decided that she wanted to go into your house. I didn't want her to startle anyone, that is the way accidents happen. I suppose it might have looked suspicious."
"That's a nice story," her father said, "but you wouldn't happen to have proof of any kind?"
"I do, as a matter of fact," Gregor assured him, one hand on Labyrinth's shoulder while dug around in the front pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a wallet, then deftly flipped it. "Licensed caretaker," he explained, tapping an ID of some sort in the translucent sleeve of the wallet. "If you want to call my employer, I can give her your number."
"I'd like that, yes," was her father's response. He believed; she could tell. Not that he shouldn't; she was pretty sure Gregor was Labyrinth's caretaker, whether or not that was technically legal since he was nominally a wanted criminal. It wasn't an abduction in progress or any of the things her father would have been worried about, anyway. Not really. Sort of.
Gregor passed Danny a pair of cards. "One for your daughter, too," he said. "My employer is always looking for those who can help care for Elle, and she pays well. Elle doesn't give many indications of what she wants, even on good days, and your house was interesting enough to cause all of this…" He shrugged his broad shoulders. "If you have reason to think she might like you, drop by. Otherwise, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. It's a bad habit to disturb people in their homes, and I'm truly sorry for that."
"Well, that's… generous?" Danny shook his head. "Have a good day."
"And you," Gregor said with a wide smile that did unfortunate things to the crescent growth on his cheek. He led Elle away with gentle tugs on her sleeve and murmured words. She looked back no less than four times before they were a dozen steps away.
Taylor retreated into the house, feeling like she had just been in a fight. Her toes scrunched on the carpet, which abruptly felt like clay, and she had to smooth it out with her heel before her father closed the door.
"That," he said faintly after he had clicked the lock and drawn the curtains closed, "was Gregor the Snail."
"Really?" Taylor asked.
"Yes, really," he replied, turning to look at her. "Do you know what he meant with all that double talk about hiring us? Because I've been on the receiving end of bribes and threats before, and that wasn't either."
"Why would I know?" Taylor asked nervously.
"Because something in this house got his attention, and I know I haven't been doing anything different lately," her father said firmly. "Taylor, this, the lockers…" He let the question hang, unasked.
Taylor held no illusions as to whether she could bluff her way out of this. "I may have gotten into sculpting recently," she allowed.
Danny collapsed onto the couch. "Sculpting…" he trailed off.
Taylor sat down next to him and kicked her heel into the ground. Spikes of carpet and wooden flooring shot out a good two feet past her toes, blatantly defying common sense.
"That's something," he said softly. "And Faultline's Crew came to our home because of your… sculpting?"
"Something about it attracts Labyrinth like a magnet does another magnet," She admitted. "They found my practice spot without me even being there, and I was doing stuff in the basement this morning."
"Capes don't usually find each other in civilian identities," Danny mused. "I've heard it's against some sort of rule. So I would like to think they didn't mean to be here…"
"But Labyrinth might not care about that," Taylor concluded. "So… yeah. Are we going to go... check it out?"
Danny looked down at the card he had been given. "Well, if she can find you anywhere... We don't have much to lose by seeing what they want... with proper precautions."
The Palanquin was something of an urban legend in Brockton Bay, even though it was definitely real and open every night of the week. Not just anyone got in, and those who did, at least among the high schoolers of Winslow, liked to talk it up. Except the Empire kids, of course; they didn't like Case 53s, and the Palanquin's biggest claim to fame was Newter and his non-addictive hallucinatory bodily fluids… Which Taylor thought was the the grossest claim to fame possible, though that was beside the point.
The point being that she'd heard plenty about the Palanquin before getting her own standing invitation, and actually seeing it put none of those rumors to rest. It was an expansive building in a seedy part of town, sporting no obvious signs or decorations. A line waited in front of the door, and the bouncer wasn't letting anyone in.
"Around the back is the way this usually works," Danny whispered to her as they walked by the back of the line and circled around the building. He had his business card in one hand, and she hers. He fished two cheap domino masks out of his pocket once they were in the alley, handing one to her.
"They don't know which of us is their sculptor," he had said back at the house, "and we don't have to tell them until we know what's what." Thus, both of them posing as capes.
There was another bouncer at the back door, this one even more intimidating than the one out front. Danny flashed his card with all the confidence in the world. "We have a standing invitation to discuss employment," he said smoothly.
"Don't let the girl drink," the bouncer grunted, moving aside to let them through the door. "Go to the second floor, ask for whoever gave you the card."
"I thought this was a haven of villainy," Taylor muttered as they made their way up the stairs. Not that she had wanted to drink here, but it seemed strange that they'd be worried about it.
"Being mercenaries and facilitating underaged drinking are different things," her father replied. "And I'm betting the actual business here is above-board, so they have to care about these things."
Then they were out on the dimly-lit second floor, and Taylor was too busy looking around to hear anything else he might have said. It looked like every club she had ever seen on TV, minus the crowd and with the addition of a bright orange-skinned guy lounging on a couch with some drugged-out women around him. He didn't have a shirt on.
She tore her gaze away from Newter before he noticed her, feeling her cheeks flush, and followed her dad to the bar. He still seemed perfectly at ease in this setting, which raised questions she was going to have to ask later, and slid the card across the bar to the bartender as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "Here to see Gregor, maybe Faultline," he said simply.
The bartender nodded and pointed behind them. Taylor spun around to see Gregor the Snail. He was much more obviously parahuman without his obscuring coats and sweatshirts, his skin partially translucent below the neck, and dotted with barnacle-like growths.
"I wasn't entirely sure either of you knew what was going on," Gregor said. "No hard feelings at the way we met?"
"We'll see," Danny said ominously. Taylor resisted the urge to elbow her father. "What, exactly, do you want?"
"Let's talk privately," Gregor answered, leading them behind the bar and into the hallway beyond. The room he brought them to was stark, furnished with an old-looking table, a few chairs, and nothing else. He left them there, slipping out the door with a grace that belied his bulk.
"Now is when we spill all sorts of secrets because we think we're alone," her father said, reclining in one of the chairs.
"You're way too good at this," Taylor muttered. "A little warning, or a lot of warning, would have been nice."
"Come on, you didn't think this was my first parahuman negotiation?" her father asked with a mysterious smile. "Given my job, our job…"
Taylor shrugged her shoulders, mindful of the possibility that they were being overheard. She knew, in a way, that being what amounted to the boss of the dockworkers union was a big deal, but she hadn't thought it was big enough to attract parahumans the way he was implying.
Gregor returned, leading Labyrinth, in full costume. A severe-looking woman in what Taylor could only describe as a battle-dress and mask followed after them, taking a seat on the other side of the table. Labyrinth drifted off to the corner of the room, moving slowly and taking no particular notice of anyone else present.
"Before we begin, I'd like to see a demonstration of whatever has Labyrinth so worked up," Faultline said.
Taylor looked to her father. He shrugged. "The ambiguity was good while it lasted?" he offered.
If she was being honest with herself, she was glad at least one of his oddly competent plans had failed. "Sure," she agreed. She reached out and grabbed a handful of table, pulling it back toward herself.
Labyrinth turned from her contemplation of the corner, facing Taylor directly. Behind the mask, Taylor was certain she was staring at the deformation.
Faultline took in Labyrinth's reaction with an impassive glance. "So it's a power interaction," she concluded. "You're not doing anything specific to get her attention?"
"This is just what I do," Taylor said. "I'm not trying to do anything specific." She did notice that the tip of her table-sourced spike had turned a honey-brown instead of the dark oak of the rest of it, though she hadn't stretched it all that far. That was a little odd.
"What you do draws more of a reaction out of her than anything we have ever seen," Faultline said candidly. "On her bad days, Labyrinth can barely feed herself, let alone talk or react to anything quickly. Her good days are better, we might get a few words out of her, or a smile."
That didn't match up with what Taylor had seen, but she held her tongue.
"In the middle of a bad day, she left the Palanquin and made a beeline directly for the ship graveyard," Faultline continued. "She talked more than she had in the last week combined, and then the next day she dragged Gregor to a house. This is significant improvement, and I am willing to pay to see exactly how far it can go, and if we are lucky, to determine why."
"Like a therapist?" Taylor asked. "But with powers?"
"Not a terrible comparison, but you may not be able to do much except get her attention," Faultline cautioned. "Or maybe you can help her communicate more regularly. Or something else entirely. We would have to see what you two can do before I commit to anything long-term."
"Would you be willing to pay us for a one-time experiment tonight, just to establish what you're hiring?" her father asked. "We can renegotiate afterward."
"That was exactly what I was thinking," Faultline agreed. "As for the method and amount you'll be compensated…"
She and Danny settled into a pattern Taylor had seen before, that of negotiation. She would have listened, but the unwavering stare Labyrinth was fixing her with was distracting. Instead, she tuned them out and began molding her bit of table, squishing and pulling it in her hands like silly putty. Little spikes started spreading out across the rest of the table, but Faultline just leaned back and continued talking.
Labyrinth, on the other hand, came closer. She reached out, running her fingers over the table near Taylor's hands. The wall near the door was beginning to turn into old, mossy wood paneling.
"We should move this to a larger room," Gregor suggested. "Assuming a deal will eventually be reached?"
Faultline nodded. "It is a matter of what, not if," she confirmed. "Go ahead."
"Stay safe," her father advised, quite unnecessarily.
Gregor led them across the hall and down another flight of stairs, into what looked like a garage that someone had tried to turn into a Greek palace. Marble, greenery, and other strange things intersected concrete seemingly at random. "This is as good a place as any, though you should try to keep your efforts constrained to this room," he advised. "I will stay to watch. Just in case."
Taylor nodded, distracted by the architecture. She reached out to one of the unfinished pillars, just running her hand across it. It was beautiful in itself, not like the things she usually made. Architecture, where she distorted reality like Escher.
Now there was someone she was glad had lived and died before Scion. Who knew what kind of power he might have gotten, if a perfectly normal person like her could end up able to bring his works to life.
She realized that she was actually smoothing over the jagged top of the pillar, rubbing her hand into the clay, and decided to go with it. There were plenty of examples of artwork around, and she could copy something right in front of her… Even if whatever parts she touched first ended up spiky by the time she finished.
Taylor lost herself in her work for a little while. A low humming started up from behind her, but she ignored it until she finished with one pillar; it was now sporting an irregular lump on top, the material drawn up from the base, which was thinner now. Her power sometimes seemed to make more mass, but this was not one of those times.
Labyrinth reached around her, pushing the bulb of drawn material. Nothing happened, but Taylor turned to follow the other girl as she strode, with some purpose, toward a plank of rotting wood that had popped up nearby, jutting from the ground.
"Want me to work with this, too?" Taylor asked.
Labyrinth continued to hum tonelessly, which Taylor took as a yes. She reached down and tried to pull the plank from the ground, no powers involved, but it was stuck. So, she did the next best thing and took two handfuls across the room with her, stretching out the wood between them like gum stretched thin.
There was a bright laugh from beside her, and she jumped a little when something hit the floor just as she was molding the wood onto the marble lump. She glanced over and saw that Labyrinth had tossed her mask aside and dropped her hood.
The girl was maybe fourteen, though Taylor wasn't good at determining ages from appearances so she might be wrong, and had platinum-blond hair paired with cloudy green eyes. Somehow, this was the first time Taylor had really looked at her, though she'd shown up to her house in civilian guise.
A dark pillar of what looked like obsidian jutted out from the far wall. Labyrinth pointed. Taylor knew what she wanted.
They continued like that under the watchful eyes of Gregor; Labyrinth would manifest something, a different type of material, and Taylor would stretch it out from where it originated to her conglomerate in the middle of the room. Wood, marble, obsidian, glass, rusted iron, dirty cloth… Some of the things Labyrinth brought out were disturbing, others beautiful, and Taylor got the impression she was only seeing the tip of an iceberg with each new addition to their environment.
Still, seeing a fraction of it or not, Taylor wove her web. She was forced to duck under past strands of stretched material to reach new sources, and some of her constructs looked impossibly unstable even in comparison to her normal fare, but it all went as it was meant to. Her power never failed, or snapped, or did anything but what she expected. The congregation of materials she was fashioning in the center of the room was eye-wateringly confusing to look at, but it wasn't actually harmful.
"What are you making in here?" Her father's voice broke her out of the pleasant trance of repetitive action and artistic design… But she didn't get a chance to answer.
"Making a lighthouse," Labyrinth said in her dreamy, faraway voice. "A guide. A crossroads. An eyesore. A beacon. For me."
"This is certainly something," Faultline observed from the doorway. "But it's getting quite late. Labyrinth, can you continue some other day?"
"It isn't something to finish, it can only be made better," Labyrinth said quietly. "But… A little longer?" She gave Faultline a pleading look that seemed to shock the woman more than anything else.
"It's past midnight, but I guess we can stay a little longer if you want to, Taylor," Danny agreed, taking a seat next to Gregor. "This is… impressive."
"I'm good to keep going," Taylor assured him. They had been working without speech this entire time, but now that Labyrinth seemed more talkative. "Where's the next source, Labyrinth?"
"Elle," the girl replied absently. "North. The glacial castle." She pointed to something off to the side, and Taylor saw an ice sculpture emerging from the ground, a horse with no head and six legs instead of four.
Taylor ducked under a thread of stainless steel and stepped over one of old clothing, placing both hands on the horse statue's cold front legs and pulling them away like taffy. She felt as if she could do this all night, and judging by the way Gregor and Faultline were beaming at Labyrinth, she might have a new job in the future. Even if she didn't quite understand what she and Elle were making.
"I see places," Elle said on another night. She had grown more lucid with every session, every addition to their room-encompassing structure of dreams and nightmares. Gone was the absent look, mostly, and gone was the girl who stood in corners and stared off into the distance.
In her place was an uncertain girl both unused to normal human interaction, and craving it. They kept up a constant conversation as Taylor sculpted, a task that was becoming more and more difficult with every new source Elle added. There would be a hard limit to the number of threads she could weave before she physically couldn't reach anything new; she was already resorting to making tunnels for herself through old lines just to reach new things.
"These places?" Taylor asked.
"These places, and many more, as many as I can imagine," Elle said slowly. "It's… immense. I can only bring things through if I choose a place and spend a long time… wandering. There are so many, and the places… I did not have good places, at first. I get lost. Wandering."
"And this beacon brings you back," Taylor concluded.
"No," Elle said quietly. "It is a… landmark. I still have to find it. But I wander, I go between places, and the more I… bring… here. The more have landmarks. The faster I can come back. The easier it is… to stay."
"So you can concentrate on what is going on around you, talking, and all of that?" she asked. In one hand, she held what might actually be cotton candy, and with the other she parted a path through the thicket in front of her.
"Yes," Elle agreed. "But… It is only… so useful. This landmark. When you're not here, it's… dull. When I go too far from it or you… dull. Now is the brightest."
Taylor though she knew why now was the brighter; she was actively weaving new components from other dimensions into the mix. She thought she understood what she was doing; if each of Labyrinth's dimensions was a page in a book, Taylor was gluing the pages together. Merging them in one specific place, so Elle could find the book's cover from any page without issue.
"I could do something to your clothing," she suggested. Her works were permanent, as far as anyone knew; Winslow's little art exhibit was still there, since the PRT had declared it clear of lingering effects and left it. Not like Winslow had the budget to hire contractors to dig it up and get rid of it; they'd just blocked the hall off for good and rerouted traffic.
"Maybe," Elle said doubtfully. "But I can't make my worlds happen on my clothes. Too small… Too precise. So it would just be… you. Good, but… not bright."
"And I can't break things off," Taylor said thoughtfully. That was one limitation to her sculpting that she hadn't found a way around; she could distort, pull, poke holes in, but not disconnect-
"Or can I?" she murmured, looking at the pencil-thin strand of cotton candy she was dragging. She let go, and it stayed where it was in the air, held up under its own power… Wilting… falling to the floor because she hadn't connected the other end. It was just cotton candy now that she wasn't touching it.
She felt like a massive idiot for not thinking of this immediately. Getting a separate piece of the material was as simple as stretching it and then breaking it like a normal person would. Her power didn't make the things she distorted invulnerable, after all.
"We can make you clothes," she suggested. "Want to try it?"
"I do," Elle said with a smile.
After a productive Saturday spent at the Palanquin, Taylor was sprawled out on the couch at home. Danny was in the kitchen trying to fix something… Or maybe break it. Whatever he was doing required a hammer and sporadic thumping.
"Your first payment came in today," he said from the kitchen. "It's… a lot. We need to go set up a bank account for you."
"Yeah, but I was thinking that first payment could go to fixing things around the house," Taylor replied. She was getting paid a lot for how easy the work, if it could even be called that, was. It came out to something like fifty dollars an hour, an absolutely ludicrous rate by her standards.
"I can't say we don't need to patch up a few things," her father conceded. "But after that… College savings?"
"Maybe." She wasn't doing so hot in school, though that was mostly the fault of the Trio, not her own academic shortcomings. They were still weirdly restrained with their usual taunting, but she was chalking that up to the commotion around her art not having died down yet.
Someone knocked on the front door; two hard taps and a third that was decidedly half-hearted.
"I've got it," Taylor called out, abandoning her spot on the couch. She checked the window first.
And it was a good thing she had, too; having a miniature panic attack at the blue-armored figure of Armsmaster was something best done before he could see her. She could feel her eyes bulging and her heart pounding. Some of it was admittedly hero worship, but some of it was anxiety. The Protectorate had reason to be looking for her… Several reasons, though they almost certainly didn't know about her subcontracting to a group of mercenaries.
"It's… Armsmaster!" she yelled. And someone else, a shadowy shorter figure behind him. A Ward, probably. They were the furthest thing from important. "Should I open the door?"
"Wait, let me–" Danny came out of the kitchen wearing a respirator mask and wielding a screwdriver in either hand. He fumbled with the doorknob for a moment, and then the door was open and the leader of the Brockton Bay Protectorate was staring at them both.
"What can we… What can we do for you?" Danny asked breathlessly.
"We're here to conduct an interview regarding the Winslow vandalism," Armsmaster said stiffly. The Ward behind him – Gallant, in his own smaller set of armor – smiled at her. "It's a parahuman incident, and your daughter had a locker in the row that was destroyed."
"Is this a bad time?" Gallant asked.
"I was looking for mold under the kitchen sink," Danny said, pulling his protective facemask off to give them a nervous smile. "But that's not time-sensitive, you can do the interview now. Come on in."
As the two armored individuals passed into the house, he shot her a worried look. She smiled reassuringly; she never left any signs of her work out in the open. The most incriminating thing she had in the house was some actual clay in a pot down in the basement, and she hadn't even gotten around to doing anything with that, powers or just by hand.
"This won't take long," Gallant assured her father as they trooped into the living room. "We're going through everyone with a locker nearby. Did you keep anything valuable in that locker?"
Taylor shook her head. "No. Nothing valuable." She didn't want to bring up the locker incident here; she had gotten powers in that locker, the same set of powers they were looking for now. Aside from that, and the dark joke she could have made about keeping herself in the locker one time, she didn't have anything to tell them about.
"Do you know anyone in that row who might have had reason to target you or another?" Armsmaster asked stiffly.
"Is this a joke?" Danny asked. "Or do you really not look up the people you're going to be interviewing beforehand? My daughter already has been targeted."
Taylor winced; she might have thought to let her father in on her logic before he blurted that out, but it was too late now. "I'm being bullied," she admitted. "But this doesn't seem like it was aimed at me. They would just have destroyed my locker." All of which had the benefit of being true; she highly doubted any of the Trio would have done so much property damage. They liked to hurt her, not the bystanders who covered for them.
"The hospital incident," Armsmaster said gruffly. Taylor wished she could see his eyes; his lower face might as well be covered for all the emotion it showed. "It wasn't registered as a parahuman incident at the time."
"And it wasn't, just petty children getting away with assault," Danny said bitterly. "Unless you're here to help with that, too." His tone implied he would not be surprised when the answer was no.
"We'll be looking into any crimes that are our jurisdiction, and passing on the relevant information to the Brockton Bay police when said crimes do not fall under our authority," Gallant said smoothly. "And we will be following up on that; it's a past event related to the lockers, which are under our jurisdiction right now."
"The names of those who you accuse of bullying?" Armsmaster demanded.
For once, Taylor was perfectly comfortable answering his question in the spirit it was asked, no second-guessing herself. "Emma Barnes, Madison Clements, Sophia Hess. And everyone else in that shitheap of a school who stood by and didn't do anything about it, but I don't know if bullying can have accomplices, so you might not care about that."
"We'll definitely be looking into it," Armsmaster said neutrally. "Were you witness to any predictions, threats, or insinuations that in hindsight seem to have been referring to the parahuman vandalism?"
The questioning went on for a while after that, but Taylor got the feeling Gallant and Armsmaster were thrown off by the complaint about bullying. Gallant stared at her more than she felt comfortable with, and Armsmaster was far too brisk and impersonal with the speed he pushed through the interview, but neither pushed her on her own motives, or whether she did it herself.
More importantly, they left without accusing her of being the vandal or trying to arrest her. She considered that a win, regardless of how it came about. When they were gone she slumped back down on the couch.
"Well, that was tense," Danny remarked. "Maybe it will even turn up some actual dirt on the things that matter. Like Emma."
Taylor was thankful she'd gotten around to telling him about her bullies a few days ago; having that reveal dropped on him in the middle of the interview would have been really, really awkward at best.
"I felt that," Elle said absently after Taylor had finished telling her about the school incident, and by extension why Armsmaster had shown up at her home. She was sitting on a flat strand of brick that was apparently strong enough to support her weight, running her fingers through the patchwork quilt Taylor was making while Taylor molded on another chunk. It was coming out to look like a cross between a texture sample at a hardware store and plate mail, though Elle seemed to like the look.
"The school thing?" Taylor asked as she used her thumb to smush clay-like bricks around.
"Yes, it was… big. Pulled on… bad places. That's why I… didn't try to find it."
"I didn't want nice things when I was making it," Taylor agreed. She was coming to think that her power pulled from the same sources Elle's did, just without her knowing what she was going to get beforehand. Compared to how Elle's powers traded awareness for choice, she was okay with how her power had compromised.
"You want nice things now, though," Elle said quietly, picking at a thread at the edge of the quilt. "Do you think… Armsmaster, Gallant… Will they do anything about your school?"
"Probably not," Taylor said bluntly. "I don't expect them to. My problems are normal, and they don't do normal." Though her problems had made her very much abnormal, so their approach was flawed… If that was indeed their approach.
"Why not… drop out?" Elle asked. "Hire a tutor. Faultline does for me."
"That's…" She would have said too expensive, but she had the money now. Plenty of it; tutors couldn't possibly cost more than she was making, and she didn't have any other expenses. Her dad wouldn't object, not when he wanted that money put toward education anyway. "Maybe."
"You can… afford it." Elle frowned, staring down at her hands. "I can, anyway. But…"
Taylor finished with the patch of brick and reached over for her next prepared bit of material. "Something wrong?" she asked.
"I am… More aware." Elle looked up, meeting her gaze. "Faultline, the others… They take care of me. But they take me on missions."
"And you don't want to go?" Taylor guessed.
"I did," Elle said. "But now… I don't. If it means leaving…" She gestured to the conglomerate globe in the center of the room, then to Taylor herself. "I don't… Want to go back to wandering. Not even for a day. But I make my cut… by participating. Helping. My cut pays for this."
Taylor wasn't sure Elle was supposed to be telling her any of this, as it sounded an awful lot like what Faultline had warned her against prying into, 'Crew business'. She didn't tell her friend – Elle was her friend – not to talk about it, though. If she had to guess, being told not to express herself would hurt more deeply than almost anything else.
"I… needed them." Elle tightened her hand into a fist, then relaxed it. There was a faraway look in her eyes, more than what was becoming normal while Taylor was around. "I care… about them. But I can be… closer to normal. Now. They don't need… almost normal."
The next bit of material sat on Taylor's palm, all but forgotten save for the constant pulse of her heartbeat encouraging it to grow little spikes. "You shouldn't have to go into fights and stuff if you don't want to."
"Shouldn't and… don't… are two different things," Elle said sadly. "I can… fight. I just don't want to do it… because I have no… choice." She reached out and took the little chunk of material from Taylor's open palm. "And the more I am… normal… The slower I am to… bring things here. So I can be Labyrinth… or Elle… But not both. Not at the same time. But I cannot… just be… one or the other. If I am Elle, I am not… normal enough. To blend in without Faultline. If I am Labyrinth I am… wandering. Always wandering. I don't want that… either."
"You can't be a normal person because your power will give you away even like this, and you don't want to just be like you were before because it's stifling, not being able to focus on the real world." Taylor wished she had an answer for her friend, a way to make it all better, but Elle's dilemma wasn't something she could fix so easily. Even if Elle lived with her and her father, her power would give her away sooner or later, and the only reason Taylor could imagine her father supporting another mouth to feed was because she was counting on her payments from Faultline… which were coming on Elle's behalf, from her cut of the profits of being a mercenary. Which she wouldn't be, not in that scenario.
"Yes." Elle clutched at the quilt. "This is good… But it does not feel like it will be… enough. To be normal. Not even this room makes me… normal."
"Just to check," Taylor said warily, "you don't want to join the Wards, do you? Because they pay, they always say they don't force their Wards to fight, and they would want to make sure you could have a normal life." The Ward program promotional materials all emphasized how Wards were normal kids who led normal lives alongside their careers. Whether she believed it was actually like that or not, they surely paid lip service to the idea, and they definitely protected the identity of their Wards.
"That system… put me in… the Asylum." Elle shuddered, and a loose chain clinked somewhere in the room. Taylor had seen enough of Elle's 'asylum' architecture to know that was a deal-breaker on its own. "I am a… criminal. They would put me… back. Or worse."
Taylor had her doubts about whether Elle, in her mentally fogged state, could be held accountable for her actions as directed by others… But she also had her doubts about the system she'd be trusting to take that into account, so it evened out.
"Can't stay with you…" Elle continued. "No money. I'd out you. And I'd out me. All sorts of… problems. Won't join a… gang. Can't live on… my own. Stuck here."
"You're not stuck," Taylor promised. "I'll help you figure something out." If only because she finally had another friend, and she wasn't going to lose her. Not when she felt so trapped and helpless…
Taylor wasn't going to look away and pretend it wasn't her problem. Even if she had no idea how to go about helping Elle.
Well, one idea. A stupid, dangerous idea.
Taylor could hear the gawking gaggle of girls from half the hallway away. They were standing at the edge of the roped-off area, watching the Protectorate finally getting around to removing the locker art.
Said effort was attracting a crowd because the Wards were participating; Taylor suspected as much for the PR as because they might genuinely be needed, should something about her sculpture prove hazardous. Not that it would, but they wouldn't be sure.
The Wards in question were Gallant, who was single-handedly responsible for ninety percent of the attention, and Vista, who was the one who caught Taylor's attention. The deceptively small girl in the costume and visor was the next closest parahuman to her and Labyrinth in Brockton Bay, and Taylor had never seen her in action.
Today, that was going to change, and Taylor happily ignored the warning bell for the start of class to stay and watch. It made sense that they had called in Vista; an absent gesture and the lockers had shrunk from a wall-spanning mass of disturbing art, to a ruler-spanning diorama on the floor… and touching the ceiling… and the walls. The space had shrunk, not the lockers themselves. Or maybe extended was a better word; Vista tossed a little plastic ball into the area, and it shrunk as it bounced to a truncated stop.
Like looking down a telescope at something, but the telescope was flat and invisible, and it was all still there. Vista undid the distortion after a long moment, and it all popped back into place. A moment later, she was twisting space in a different way, grimacing at the abomination in front of herself.
"Come on, to class, to class," a teacher cried out, emerging from the sanctuary of her classroom and shooing the gawkers – and Taylor – away. "Don't bother them, you're all tardy already."
Taylor let herself get pushed along with the crowd, then ducked into a bathroom and returned the way she had come. Vista and Gallant were still there, and a few normal workers were busy sawing away at the place where molded locker met equally molded wall. Taylor remembered pulling out the wall in several places to add to her creation; they were going to have to cut out a lot more than that if they wanted to get rid of her distortion altogether.
"Hey…" Gallant came over to the police tape barrier between them, his armor clanking every step of the way. "Taylor, right?"
"Yeah, that's me." She was glad he remembered her name, but not at the same time. "I uh, have a question. For a friend."
"Really?" He stepped over the barrier. "Is this the sort of question your friend doesn't want overheard, or can it be asked here?"
"Not overheard," Taylor responded. This was stupid, she was only putting more suspicion on herself, but she had to ask and Gallant was at least familiar enough with her to believe she actually wasn't asking for herself, once she got into the details.
Gallant, by way of reply, ushered her behind the line and into an unaffected, but very much empty, classroom within the blocked-off section of hallway. It was an English class judging by the posters, but not one Taylor had been in before.
"I'm all ears," Gallant said, smiling kindly at her.
"My friend," Taylor emphasized, distinctly aware of the irony of the situation but not at all amused by it, "has powers. Her powers aren't… good for her. They make her distant, really distant, to the point where she might say a word or two a day and need to be taken care of. She's fifteen."
"That sounds familiar," Gallant said, but his easy smile had slipped into something a little more genuinely intrigued.
"She was like that," Taylor continued. "But now she's not, someone figured out how to help her out of it. She can function again, mostly. But while she was barely aware of what was happening, some people took her around and used her powers to commit crimes. She doesn't want to do that anymore, but they take care of her and she's really scared of going to the Protectorate, because she thinks she's a criminal."
"That's…" Gallant paused. His mouth opened, but no words came out for a moment. "Right," he finally finished, swallowing whatever else he had been about to say. "Nothing I say here is legally binding, obviously, but I would point out that what you're describing sounds like a Master power, except self-inflicted. We don't blame people for the things they are made to do under suggestion. Even if we did, we would probably still take her in as a Ward. You say she can function more or less normally now?"
"It isn't perfect, but it's close enough," Taylor said firmly. "She needs to set up certain things to stay lucid, and it might not work so well if she leaves the same building, but she's improving."
"That…" He shook his head. "I'm going to level with you, that's hard. Not the criminal part, she'd get off in any court of law and I highly doubt anyone in the Protectorate would want to charge her once they verified her story. But everything else, her power and staying lucid… The Wards are definitely the best place for her, but I can't promise the higher-ups will see it that way. She might end up somewhere else better suited to providing for her needs…"
"An asylum," Taylor said bitterly. "Yeah, fuck that. Trust me, that's not going to fly."
"No, I don't think it would," Gallant agreed. "But there are ways to make sure that doesn't happen. Assuming you know the right people."
"Those being…" Taylor gestured for him to continue.
"Let's say, hypothetically," Gallant offered, "That you know another teenage parahuman who isn't in the Wards yet. Maybe she did some vandalism, maybe she had a good reason, or maybe she's fresh out of the woodwork. She's friends with this friend of yours, mutual friends. If they both went in together and brought somebody good at negotiating, all they'd have to do is make sure the 'partner' clause of their Ward contracts is included."
"That saves my friend from even the slightest chance of going somewhere she doesn't want to be?" Taylor asked, choosing to ignore how blatant he was being. He might just be bluffing, or trying to get her on his side to track down the vandal, he didn't necessarily suspect it was her–
"The partner clause is usually for vigilantes or independent heroes who will only join if they're not split up," Gallant explained. "It's written into the contract because there were a few internal issues a few years back with a rivalry and a team leader trying to get rid of one of such a pair while keeping the other, despite the promises that were made when they signed on. In your case, getting that clause would mean that to send your friend anywhere, they would have to send your other friend too. And nobody can swing getting a perfectly capable Ward sent to a mental institution just because her partner might be special needs."
"That sounds… exploitative." Not that she considered exploitative a bad thing; in this case, it was perfect. If she couldn't trust the Protectorate to do the right thing by Elle, she could force them to defer to her.
"It only works if your friend really can function normally with a little help," Gallant warned. "And your other friend would have to keep on top of making sure she has what she needs. You're circumventing the regulations that are meant to help people with special needs, so they won't be as helpful as they should be."
"They can handle that," Taylor said firmly. A way to protect Elle and get her into an environment where she could live without being forced to fight or worrying too much about money…
Something occurred to her, something important. "What if she's an orphan?" she asked. "My friend."
"The Protectorate can let her live with one of their employees; there's a vetting process anyone who indicates their willingness to foster Wards can go through, so there would be options," Gallant explained. "But if that hypothetical friend was a very good friend with a stable home situation, they could take her in and she would probably be more comfortable. The Protectorate would provide additional funds to take care of her."
"That's good to know, assuming any of this happens," Taylor said carefully. "And if it doesn't?"
"Well, we'll keep looking for the vandal, who really ought to make a public appearance and announce a better name before that one sticks," Gallant said with a small smile. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about her, would you?"
"It's probably a guy," Taylor shot back. "They like to wreck things. Have you checked the football team yet?"
"Winslow has a football team?" Gallant asked.
"No, they all got suspended for mass drug usage last fall." That had been a bit of drama crazy enough to distract Emma for a solid week. Taylor remembered it fondly. "So they've got reasons to act out, right?"
"Right…" Gallant eyed her suspiciously. "Good luck with your friend."
"Thanks for the advice." She really was thankful. He had handed her an answer, even if it would require her putting in something of her own to make it work.
Let it never be said she wasn't willing to inconvenience herself to help a friend out of a bad situation. She had vandalized lockers for less, and it would be annoying to have to vandalize her own locker for hypocrisy…
Especially as her locker was currently being cut out of the wall by men with hacksaws.
Two weeks later – it didn't feel like two weeks, it felt like a whirlwind that took place over a matter of hours or months – Taylor found herself in the back of a van, sitting next to Elle. Labyrinth, rather, though in a very different costume.
Gone were the green cloak and professionally-done costume; in their place was a coat of many colors – and textures and weights, a coat that Elle assured her was an absolute pain to balance – and a dirt-cheap domino mask. Taylor wore a similar outfit, though her coat was much less carefully crafted, since she didn't need it to be quite so intricate. They were a matching set, as per the image they needed to convey.
Elle was off wandering on some foreign plane of existence; her attention was more here than it would have been if she were on her own without the cloak, but she was still slow to react and even slower to talk. Taylor spent what little fraction of the ride wasn't taken up by worrying on mentally designing a better landmark for Elle. A crown, maybe, a miniature version of the setup they had in the Palanquin. There was something about the process of merging all of the pieces of different worlds together that got Elle's attention, more than just putting them all close to her but separate on a piece of fabric.
The van stopped; Gregor the Snail looked back at them from the driver's seat. "Your stop, girls," he said somberly. "Good luck, and remember, if you don't like how they treat you, we're not averse to being hired for kidnapping at a nominal fee."
"So long as it's us?" Taylor asked.
"So long as it's you," Gregor confirmed with a reluctant smile. "I hope you find what you're looking for, Elle."
It took Elle a few seconds to respond, but she did speak. "Sorry… to leave…" she said slowly.
"We were good for you for a time, but you are growing, and we will not hold you back," Gregor replied. "We can only hope to move forward as you have."
The van's door opened with a simple tug on the handle, and Taylor stepped out, before helping Elle down and closing the door. Gregor drove away, leaving them in front of the PRT building. Hand in hand – mostly because Elle needed the direction – they walked into the building and up to the front desk.
"Here for our twelve-thirty," Taylor said to the woman behind the computer. "Sculptor and Muse."
Author's Note: You know, I didn't mean for this to be a 'joining the Wards' type of story. I started with Elle's predicament, then just approached it the way Taylor would have. She really didn't have a lot of options, so Wards it was!
On a separate note, I really liked this alt-power in particular. It's not super overpowered, not as strong as Vista or Labyrinth, but it's interesting. It would be even without the multidimensional aspect, honestly. Or maybe I just have a thing for someone whose superpower is being able to mold the world like clay beneath her hands. If I was ever going to write a full alt-power story, this would be the alt-power I'd pick… So maybe someday another story of mine will reuse the power idea.
Alternatively, this setup might have the narrative space for a follow-up at some point; it wouldn't be a continuation of this story so much as an exploration of the idea of this alt-power Taylor and Labyrinth in the Wards in general, if that makes any sense… Eh. You may see this idea returning, is what I'm saying. There was a 'serious rivalry with Vista' subplot I didn't end up using...