Quest

by Kahlil Johnson

Uhhhh

26. Pro 24

In the single day she had been gone, several things had apparently happened.

None of which were of particular interest to her - but they had certainly happened. The invaders - she still wasn't entirely sure what their purpose was in coming - had done quite the number on several of her fellows.

Little Zaraki was his usual self about it - which was to say, he'd learned precisely nothing from his loss and had proceeded to run around looking for a rematch. Mayuri had been defeated by a Quincy of all things, which she found both ironic and somewhat pathetic. If the man could have applied his bloodthirsty and brutal nature to the act of actually participating in combat, perhaps she could bring herself to like him, or at least respect him. Unfortunately, he was about as technically capable as a fresh recruit when it came to actually swinging his sword. Everything was a shortcut with him, his only interest in finding clever workarounds for things.

What was the use of all those tricks when you could just stab someone before they used them? It was pointless.

More so than that, a Captain of Soul Society losing to a Quincy, even while under heavy restrictions, was just shameful. Few people knew it nowadays, but killing Quincy was practically the whole reason the squads existed.

Speaking of restrictions, however…

"I would like you to explain your reasoning. Your reasoning for using 'that' without my approval," Gen asked her tiredly.

Oh, he was furious no doubt, and with anyone else he would have been exuding an air of menace and fury that would cow even the most hardened combatants into obedience.

But of all the Captains currently within Soul Society, only she and Yamamoto Genryusai were there at the start. Were part of the original thirteen.

Had fought in the war.

And they hadn't recruited her to that once legendary squad of monsters because they could control her. They'd recruited her because at the end of the day, they had no choice but to do so.

They couldn't stop her, so they'd given her something more interesting to murder for a few hundred years.

And even if she liked to think she'd mellowed out and developed some empathy in her old age, she sincerely doubted Yamamoto of all people would forget that she followed him out of respect - not fear.

Perhaps it was because of this that she felt no particular need to rush to answer the man's question, instead casting her gaze around the sparsely decorated room she sat in.

As with much of Soul Society, it was in a very traditional Japanese style. Paper doors sealed the room, and tatami mats lined the floor. A single small table that only came to about shin height sat on the floor between them, with two steaming cups of freshly brewed tea in earthenware cups resting atop it.

She gently lifted the one nearest to her to her lips to sip it, appreciating the scalding heat and pain it caused as it slid down her throat, then spoke.

"There was a Demon," She said plainly, appreciating the sudden look of concern and surprise that flitted across old Gen's face. Why he allowed himself to get so ancient looking when she was the same now as she had been at the beginning was beyond her.

Maybe he just had a fetish.

Of course, here in the heart of Soul Society, a Demon could be disastrous. They didn't have Spiritual Power but were absurdly strong all the same. Against a Shinigami, even against many Shinigami, all of whom had been trained to locate and react to spiritual power, the things were practically invisible killing machines.

"You handled it, then? Was it with the invaders? I haven't received permission from central to sortie all forces, so it's been hard tracking them. But I will avenge-" The old man began to declare coldly, some of the ancient murderous spark that lingered in his heart rising to the surface.

She cut him off before he could finish his dramatics.

"It had a Zanpakuto. And a Bankai," She added, taking another sip of her tea.

That seemed to shock the man to startled silence.

"…how? Mayuri?" He demanded eventually..

"I'm not entirely clear on the details, but what I was able to glean was that it was a living human girl. She simply held the power of a Demon, and a Soul Reaper. My interest was piqued," She explained finally, done playing with her technical superior for the moment. The neutral smile she wore on her face in order to mask the expression she usually wore when she was actually happy briefly slipped at the memory.

Honestly, what a good seed that girl was. Prodigal and equipped to be an absolutely horrific menace to pretty much anyone - and she just wasted it with an utter lack of interest in indulging in bloodshed. It was only through her brief conversation with Emily Piggot that she was able to grasp that the girl was only fifteen.

Only fifteen, and she's only been training for three months out of all that time.

That changed it from a depressing waste of talent to a disturbing glut of unfocused ability. If she had a few hundred years to mold that, she could die knowing that so would everyone else.

The thought made her spine tingle and her facade slip as empathy failed, and her old thirst inched its way back to the surface.

Yamamoto blanched at the sight, his tea untouched.

"But you killed her?" He repeated his question, more bluntly this time.

"Better. I followed her home. Gen, little Gen, are you familiar with alternate realities?" She asked coyly. Again, she could see the wary and uncomfortable look in her superiors eyes as she called him by a name she hadn't bothered with since the genocide.

Perhaps it was a sign of what a good mood she was in that she had almost completely stopped caring about the current issues facing soul society. Perhaps the old man had come to associate her good moods with nightmares.

Perhaps he regretted the reminder of what they had once been. She wasn't sure why.

She certainly didn't.

"Yes. A world where someone turned left instead of right. I've seen a few similar ideas over the years," The old man said cautiously, eyeing her as though trying to decide if he needed to draw his weapon or not.

When they were younger, it wasn't impossible that he would wake up on any given night with her looming overhead.

Waiting for him.

At this, Unohana couldn't help but pout. She wasn't stupid, but she'd actually had to have the idea explained to her a few times before fully grasping it. It was kind of annoying that she didn't get to explain.

Oh well.

"She was from one. Can come and go as she pleases, even without the Senkaimon. The borders between life and death seem largely trivial to her. And her world has a great many souls wandering about. But do you know what was the most interesting?" She pressed, her smile widening.

Yamamoto Genryūsai Shigekuni blinked once and opened his mouth to answer her, but she cut him off.

"Her world was one. They have no afterlife. No Hueco Mundo. Just these… pockets. Little lanceable boils full of monsters," She explained dreamily. The very brief explanation of the world had left Unohana with the distinct impression that it was young but full of new and interesting things to kill, or be killed by. She had daydreams of sticking herself in a weak human gigai and starting over, roving about with her life on the line - but that was for later.

She needed to make it attractive to Yamamoto to let her go first.

"And? We cannot allow someone who can freely access the heart of Soul Society to roam free. Return and subdue her. Kill her if you must," He ordered her with steel in his tone.

The old man was never as firm as he was when protecting Soul Society as a whole. He was a monster - but he was a monster that would bleed for his kin. He viewed every Soul Reaper as one of his lineage, and he acted like it. Their pride was his pride. Their enemies, his enemies.

He would have made an excellent father. She would have liked to die by his hand when he was in his prime.

"No," She said instantly.

"Unohana. The safety of-" he began but she stopped him again.

"I have opened communications with those on the other side and am requesting leave to form a new squad. I will train them personally and present them to you, and you alone to wield. No bureaucracy. A secret force for emergencies like this," She said quickly, and insidiously.

She could read the writing on the wall as well as he could. Soul Society wasn't what it once was. It was bloated, and corrupt. The noble families tested their boundaries, dividing loyalties; the central forty six becoming more erratic and callous. This most recent invasion was just one more nail in the coffin.

Something was rotten. Something was coming.

And they would need every advantage they could get to stop it.

"What do you want, Unohana? Truly?" Gen asked carefully, the pressure of his stare ratcheting up at what could theoretically be taken as words of treason.

"I want the girl," She said instantly.

"You want the only way to reach this far away place," He said bluntly.

"No. I want an heir," She corrected him.

She watched him work through that horrible thought in his head, then sigh at her in defeat. When he looked back to her, it was with firm resolve in his eyes.

He rose and she rose to follow him. They traveled through the man's empty home, at the heart of Soul Society, until they reached an office, one with a very much western bent to it. From within the wooden desk at the rear of the lengthy room he withdrew a brush, an ink pot, and a piece of parchment.

And with swift swordlike calligraphy, wrote the number fourteen on it.

"I hereby declare the formation of the Fourteenth Squad. The Exploration Corps. You will lead it as you do the Fourth now, and the Eleventh before that. Arrange your replacement now. I am trusting you," He said firmly, blowing lightly on the page to help the ink dry before passing it to her.

She smiled her true smile then.

She only had a few things to arrange before she left. She would see her squad through this current crisis. And then?

Then she would have new and interesting things to kill.

She truly hoped Taylor wouldn't be one of them.

Last edited: Dec 6, 2022

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Dec 6, 2022

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Dec 7, 2022

#54,338

Current Energy: 20

Current Training: Private Investigator (8/10) - (10/10)

Current Emulation Status: Here

She wasn't sure exactly how long she waited. Thirty minutes? An hour? Half the night? It wasn't as though she had a watch to check the time, and as much as she owned a cell phone, she didn't have it on her at all times like most teens did.

It was somewhere in her bedroom, waiting for her to come use it.

For all she had supreme mastery of her own body, Taylor did not have an infinite well of patience, and as such, her frustration and depression eventually outfought her desire to sit solemnly in the center of her castle's courtyard like a sap.

She had to snort at the thought as she rose and dusted herself off, idly thumbing at the portion of her costume that had been shredded by her most recent beating.

'Always a bigger fish,' She mused at her second defeat in this last week.

She was enthused to have something to test herself against, but she could live without the humiliation of having her costume damaged by that abuse. As it was, she probably wasn't fit for public places. The various cuts and tears in her bodysuit would probably give her father a stroke, and while she could remember a time long, long ago where she had been too keyed up from a fight to notice her own wardrobe malfunction, the current situation wasn't nearly so distracting.

Sighing, she pulled the ragged remains of her haori off, and stepped towards a now abandoned picnic bench to lay it on the table. Then she opened a Gap, withdrew an oversized t-shirt with a logo for some sports team or other that she didn't recognize, and pulled it over her head.

The most egregious part now covered, she gently shoved her haori into the same Gap, as though dumping laundry in a chute, and sealed the hole between all things with a thought.

Another cursory glance around her showed that for all the picnic benches were still here, everything else had been cleaned up. Maybe her guests had seen fit to clean up after themselves, or maybe the Heap had cleaned itself, like the overgrown cat it was.

Either way, that avenue of distracting herself while she waited was gone.

She didn't have to wait here, she knew. Just because this was where Emmy left didn't mean it was where they would return. Emmy was tied to her first and foremost - wherever she was, would be where they would appear. But it still felt oddly disrespectful to move around for no reason. Like yanking on a dog's leash to get it to move. Emmy wouldn't see it that way, or…likely care at all.

But she did.

Ultimately, she ended up pacing around the courtyard under the moonlight, too anxious to go do something else. Occasionally, she would muster the drive to try and practice that 'Flash Step' thing Unohana had shown her, but it was a half-hearted attempt at best.

The thing about that technique that she needed to train wasn't the act of performing it, but rather, orienting herself after each step. Using it wasn't disorienting in the way that going too fast and losing track of where you were was. It was much closer to teleportation than actual movement. You injected spiritual power into your feet, and had it explode outward when you stepped forward. It was very simple in theory.

However, as Unohana had explained it, that was just taking one step. The trick was to know where you were going, adjust your power accordingly, arrive, and then instantly make the same set of calculations for the next step, and the next, and the one after that.

One step was easy. A dozen was a herculean feat of calculation that had to be completed on the fly.

She enjoyed the challenge of it, but it was a little annoying to miscalculate mid-step and bounce off a wall, or, God forbid, go through a person - which was something she could absolutely accidentally do if she wasn't careful.

Needless to say, she mentally sorted the ability into the pool of powers she considered 'unsafe' to use around anything she didn't want to kill or maim, which was sadly quite a few of them at this point.

It was during her pacing reverie, that she felt it.

Her connection, as it clicked back into place.

"Em-" She started to yell, ready to chastise him for failing to give her any warning, or enough time to be okay with his change. Only to have the words die in her mouth as she turned to stare blankly at the spot her connection told her the projection was supposed to be.

"…Oh, dear." One of the two women standing in front of her, both shorter than her by a few inches, said in an airy tone of voice that bordered on sounding sleepy for how clearly alarmed it was.

"...Are you me, or am I me? Are we both me? Is this what alien hand syndrome feels like?" The other woman asked in a wary but firm tone of voice. The two were almost, almost identical.

They were both wearing a long white blouse that swept to one side to reveal a triangular patch of pale skin on opposite hips. The dangling ends of the blouse hung before them like a tabard, more so than a skirt, and each one sported travel worn looking riding pants, as well as a sheathed blade on each of their hips.

The entire ensemble was almost excessively form-fitting, and combined with their lithe figures and clear, perfect skin they felt oddly… fake looking, like dolls dressed up to match an ideal of beauty.

The woman on the left had long straight red hair, not red like a ginger, but true, crimson hair that came down past her shoulders like a flowing waterfall. A droopy, tired expression set on her gentle face as she stared at her duplicate on Taylor's right.

That woman had a sharp-eyed expression to her that matched her frazzled and curly hair, which bounced about as she quickly twisted her head around to reexamine her surroundings.

Both women noticed Taylor at the same time.

""We can explain,"" They both said the second they saw her, the one on the left clutching her hands to her chest nervously and the other grimacing and clenching her fists at her sides.

"Em…my? What…" She trailed off, staring back and forth between the two women, feeling dumbfounded and entirely out of her depth.

"Are- I mean- can one of you stand over there? Please?" Taylor blurted out as the strangeness of the scenario got the better of her curiosity, pointing several feet away at a nearby wooden bench.

The duo of… Emmys? She could feel Emmy standing there, but she wasn't sure which one was which. Still, the two Emmy's glanced at each other, and proceeded to exchange a series of worldless gestures. The curly-haired one lifted a hand to point at herself with a questioning look on her face, and the straight-haired one shot an uncertain look at Taylor before pointing at her self, as though unsure which of them should follow the order.

Then the curly-haired one gestured back and forth between them, and they - once again wordlessly - turned and began marching in opposite directions until they were a good twenty feet apart.

Taylor watched all of this happen with a sense of dissociative detachment from what was going on. It was so… strange, such a fundamental difference to the 'normal' operation of her power, that she was at a loss for words to even begin to describe it.

'...Emmy?' She tried to ask across her link to her projection, only to get two simultaneous replies.

'Yes?' 'Mhm?'

The two women seemed to hear each other too, because as soon as they answered they turned back to stare at one another.

Taylor blinked and traced her connection outward, finding that it split to connect to both women at once.

"...What are these ones called?" She asked, quickly beckoning them both back to her.

"Why does it matter? We don't-" The one on the right questioned.

"Because there are two of us. We can't both be Emmy," The quieter one explained with some exasperation.

"I mean we could technically-" the other tried to argue.

"I have a solution! Just, tell me their names?" She repeated, trying to affect a 'cute' pleading look.

Then she immediately scowled and gave up on the tactic. She was sure Emmy would argue with her about it, but 'cute' didn't really suit her. She was too… severe, for it.

It kind of made her worry she'd be single forever, because of how intimidating she could be, but… on second thought, it wasn't like she cared all that much anyway. She had gone out of her way to scare all the stupid boys at school away anyway.

If they didn't have the balls to just try, then they weren't worth the effort.

"I'm currently a woman named Popola," The straight-haired Emmy stated.

"And I guess I'm her twin sister, Devola," The curly one explained as they approached her.

Taylor smiled a wide, frog-like smile she rarely let anyone catch her making anymore because of how ugly it made her look.

"Awesome…" She whispered, almost star-struck.

"I-I'm sorry?" Pemmy asked in confusion.

"Awesome!" She exclaimed louder, grabbing both women and hugging them tightly, then lifting them both off the ground.

"There's two Emmys! The bed is gonna be so comfy!" She declared, whirling them around in joy.

"That- that can't be the first thing-" Demmy blurted out, trying - and failing - to break out of her vice-like grip.

"You're Pemmy now! And you're Demmy! Do you think there will always be two of you from now on? That's amazing!" She squealed, laughing with relief at the return of her friend…s.

Both women groaned, turning to stare with forlorn eyes at each other.

"We forgot her naming sense," Demmy sighed despondently.

"Yes, we did," Pemmy sighed right back.

Taylor didn't care, but her grip did abruptly tighten on both Emmy's.

"Now," she said suddenly, her voice threateningly low.

"Which one of you knows where my hats are?" She pointedly asked.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, Choose Two (2) - Remember, you're helping Dragon today!

[ ] Begin Training (Choose a Skill or Power)

[ ] Take some time out to fortify the Heap with Onmyoudo.

[ ] You started the work but… the ferry could finish its transformation into a school with only a little more. You're going to have a bunch of new capes in town that could benefit from it.

[ ] You know a guy who can clone stuff! Mem needs one of your eyeballs! Serendipity!

[ ] Write In

[ ] Take Time Off (Pick an Extra Social, on the weekends, this can be a second group)

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now). On weekends, you can choose an entire group to socialize with - but are not forced to.

Your parents:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Danny (3)

[ ] Jess (2)

[ ] Mouse Protector (2)

The Oathbound:

Outstanding group tasks: Parian's Fashion Show (Thursday)

[ ] Trainwreck (3)

[ ] Aspirant (3)

[ ] Parian (3)

[ ] Oliver (3)

[ ] Miss Kim (1)

[ ] Willow (1)

The Bratpack (As a group, includes Mem and Mun):

Outstanding group tasks: Train the Brats (Ongoing).

[ ] Aisha (2)

[ ] Dinah (4)

Your kids:

Outstanding group tasks: Unleash your kids on that fuck Jacques. Yew wants to go to college.

[ ] Mem (4)

[ ] Mun (2)

[ ] Simone (2)

[ ] Yew (1)

[ ] Gram (1)

Your friends:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Victoria (3)

[ ] Amy (4)

[ ] Clockblocker (4)

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Dec 7, 2022

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Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Dec 12, 2022

#54,551

Katherine woke up that morning the same way she had woken up for the last several weeks.

More or less satisfied.

She had to qualify the 'more or less' part because for all that she didn't talk about it with anyone, and for all that she functionally lived rent-free in a deranged millionaire's freaky castle - her life was a fucking mess.

"Danny," she grunted out, rolling over in the stupid huge bed the dork bought so that she would 'feel safe'. She rolled over Jess, who was never much of a morning person, and landed on top of the offending man who let out a light whoomph of air as it exited his lungs.

"Danny," she repeated, wiggling slightly to get comfortable on his chest while the man in question flailed at the side table for his glasses. She found facing away from him awkward so she levered herself up, turned around, and dropped herself again so she could rest her chin on his chest and stare at him with lazy eyes.

"Danny," she repeated.

"…Y-yeah?" The dork blearily asked as he placed his glasses on his face and looked up at her.

She was wearing a sports bra and her underwear. It was all she ever slept in. She stared at him. He stared at her. She waited for him to register the situation.

He continued to stare.

She pouted.

"I'm hungry and cold," she eventually offered, when the prolonged eye contact and distinct lack of ogling got too depressing.

"Let me warm you up," a feminine voice stated from next to her, and abruptly Katherine found herself in an arm bar on the opposite side of the bed.

"Hey! No horseplay in the bed!" She complained loudly, lamenting the situation.

Honestly Danny, she had PTSD, not an allergy to getting laid.

"It's skinship! Skinship!" Jess insisted as Danny righted himself and got out of bed.

"Don't break anything. You know I don't like spending Taylor's money on this stuff," he said as he stumbled over to the dresser to start dressing for the day.

Katherine and Jess abruptly found themselves sharing a brief armistice to watch the activity.

"What's the plan for today, big man?" Katherine asked, using her power to teleport to him with her arms draped over his neck, and surreptitiously marked his shirt with her power for another jump later.

"Maintenance. Making sure everyone's stocked, security is good. Payroll. Boring business stuff," he answered with a shrug and a smile.

Danny would never admit it, but the fact that it was within his power to arbitrarily decide that all the people he cared about were employed and well taken care of, was what he considered the best thing he would ever achieve. He was happy and content in a way that was bizarrely at odds with the level of wealth his daughter had practically dumped on him. Katherine would describe him as a homebody, but he enjoyed randomly inserting himself into the tasks of the people he passed during the day far too much for that. In fact, the bulk of Danny's time on any given day was wandering around areas within Taylor's influence, striking up conversations with people to listen to their concerns or problems, and then trying to address them.

He was the poster boy for 'hometown boy makes good'.

It was sickeningly heartwarming, and left Katherine glad that the bulk of the eligible women in the building were either virulent man haters, or already married.

"Booooring. What am I supposed to do all day?" She complained, letting go of him to fall back on the bed before Jess got it into her head to attack her again.

The blonde in question quickly stood up, shooting a glare in her direction and helping Danny fix his tie as he got dressed.

"You could go home. You know, do your job? You have one of those, don't you?" Jess asked pointedly, forcing Katherine to restrain a wince that went otherwise unnoticed by everyone else.

"Vacation, remember?" She replied cheekily.

She wasn't on vacation. She didn't have a vacation. She was an independent hero who made most of her money from merchandising and advertising deals. A dairy conglomerate paid the bulk of her bills because she made a lot of cheese puns.

Bills that her manager called her something like six times a day to point out were starting to go unpaid.

Turns out when a company pays you to fight crime, be hot, and make cheese puns, they get antsy when you stop fighting crime.

Or making puns.

"It couldn't hurt to check in at home, right? Taylor can probably shuttle you there and back," Danny asked quizzically, unaware of her personal reasons for not wanting to do just that.

"I'll see if I can find her after school. I didn't see her go home yesterday, so she's probably dead tired right now. Ah, if only I had an older man to keep me up at night." Katherine lamented pointedly, shooting a look at Danny that he either failed to notice, or ignored.

She was starting to think he was doing this on purpose, if she was being honest.

"Some of the guys are having a mixer tonight if you're interested. We've got a lot of new hires," Danny offered, rolling his neck, which made a satisfying sounding popping noise as the vertebrae cracked.

"Ah… sure…will you be there?" She tried again exasperatedly.

"Have to cover the tab, so yeah." Was his dry reply.

"You know, that's technically embezzling," Jess pointed out, having already moved to get dressed herself while Katherine sat on the edge of the bed, not bothering to even try.

There was a TV in here and she had a mark in the kitchen downstairs, so she could get food without having to walk through half the mall in her skivvies.

She tried not to think about the little bit of extra weight she'd put on doing just that for days on end, but failed. She'd still fit in her costume, right? Right.

"You can only embezzle from an actual company. Taylor never actually incorporated so this is all just her personal funds," Danny countered good naturedly. Then with a nod he added;

"I asked."

"Asked… who? I'm the only accountant you know," Jess asked suspiciously.

"Oh, Emily has been a great help. I actually offered to let her bring the Wards over for another barbecue sometime, and she seemed open to the idea. We've been trying to find a time when their parents are all free," he answered as he stepped towards the door.

Katherine frowned at that, but didn't speak up as she watched the door shut behind them.

Jess might not be good for much, but she was at least pretty good at keeping other women away from Danny.

Creepily so, actually.

Katherine would say the girl needed to get laid, but, well...

Not before Katherine did, at least.

She spent the bulk of her morning watching cartoons. She got lucky and found a channel showing new episodes of the Triumvirate's TV show - which she found deeply amusing for several reasons.

For one thing, probably because no one had ever asked her, the show - which tried to deal with real world events while also making them much more 'happy' and 'heroic' than they actually were - constantly referred to Taylor without naming her.

This became extremely obvious when a character that was very obviously Trainwreck showed up in the most recent episode as a rival to Alexandria, and his character was forced to refer to Taylor and the rest of his team as 'the Boss and the Others'. The show tried to set them up as some future season's main plot, which was hilarious because she was positive no one but Trainwreck even knew about it.

Well. The kids might. Kat knew that Mem had a fondness for her own TV show, at the very least.

"I should ask Taylor to cameo on my show before the Triumvirate one. Just to screw with 'em," she thought aloud, glancing down at her stomach when it made a gurgling noise as a result of her failure to bother eating breakfast.

Usually she didn't have to watch what she ate, because she spent all day doing backflips around the city and such - sure, she had an enhanced physique, but it was only a little enhanced. At least, no one's first thought when they imagined a Brute was Mouse Protector.

But her recent lack of activity coupled with infinite access to food she didn't have to pay for or even cook was… well.

It was getting to her.

Still, she was hungry, and very good at ignoring her problems, so rather than overthink it or examine her life choices like a well adjusted adult, she chose to teleport to the spoon in the kitchen that she had marked for just such a time.

Or… she tried to.

Oh, her power worked, and she did abruptly find herself somewhere else. There were no problems there.

However, the location she found herself in wasn't the kitchen. Looking around, Katherine found herself standing in a room full of garbage. Piles of trash bags filled the large cavernous room, and the entire place smelled wretched. The combination of rotting meat and other terrible smells instantly jolted Katherine's mind, leaving her immobile as she remembered what it was like.

Remembered how it felt to be trapped by the thing that would later be dubbed Echidna by the PRT. She hadn't seen it coming at all - the Endbringer shelter she'd tracked Ravager to had been without power. She had been hunting through that tunnel completely blind. Maybe that was why the smell was what jumped out at her the most.

The smell of rotting flesh.

She barely remembered what happened after that, except that trying to think too hard about it made her body shake, and her heart quiver.

And she remembered it every time she considered going back to that life. Every time she thought of putting her costume back on.

And, well. It was fine, right? Taylor was around now and heavens knew that girl was not to be messed with.

…In her own city. Which she rarely left.

She wondered if everything was okay back home. She had a team of sorts that she worked with - other independents in good standing, with good PR, who could tolerate her constant jokes and demeanor.

She should probably go and check in on them. Or hell, even phone them. They probably thought she was dead.

She found herself broken from her frozen terror by a sound. By… several sounds, actually. Blinking memories from her eyes, Katherine skirted around the edges of a mountain of garbage bags to find… rats.

Well. Not…mice, but… mice people. Humanoid mice. They were three or four feet tall at most, and many of them wore actual clothing, like they were normal people going about their days…

But they were definitely bipedal mice. They had thumbs and everything.

For a moment Katherine wasn't sure what to do about this. Were these just… normal parts of the Heap? Did… were they like the pigeons? Just some insane result of Taylor messing around that had taken on a life of its own? Should she greet them? They clearly appeared to be taking the garbage somewhere.

"Uh… hi? Do any of you guys know a way out of here or-" she started to say, only to stop when every mouse person froze in place for a brief moment before turning and fleeing further into the maze of garbage.

"Hey! Wait! I know the lady who owns this place! I'm nice! Nice!" She called after them, jogging to chase after them.

She wasn't dumb. She knew weird stuff had been happening around the world for a while now, which meant that she couldn't fully rule out the idea that these things didn't belong here. And if that was the case…

Well, she had to find out more. If only to tell Taylor.

The only mark she could currently jump to was Danny, and given that she was still in her underwear, she felt like she was going to need an excuse for when she appeared in the middle of whatever he was doing half naked and smelling of garbage.

…In retrospect, this was a problem she would probably have had anyway, even if she made it to the kitchen properly.

Damn, she was getting out of practice.

Eventually, she tracked the fleeing mice to the only portion of the dumping ground that was seemingly empty. Except it wasn't empty, because the longer she stared at it, the more twisted the space became. It was like she was staring at one of Taylor's creepy portals, but it was invisible. Only… she could feel it still. Just… sitting there.

Now she was starting to become very alarmed. It was one thing to assume the weird magic castle was doing weird magic castle things, but a secret portal into the Heap? That was bad news if no one else knew about it.

She had just resolved to jump to wherever Danny was to warn him - when the space around her shuddered, and she abruptly found herself in the middle of a city street.

Mouse creatures were hurrying along nearby as though fleeing from her - the streets were oddly clean, like they had been freshly swept or something - and she could hear panicked yelling all around her.

"Run! We have to run before it finds us!" One small mouse person yelled out, and it ran so close to Katherine that she was able to reach out and grab its shoulder, arresting its momentum.

It was wearing a little business suit, which she found amusing, but she frowned as she forced the thing to turn towards her amidst its desperate attempts to break her grip.

"Hey, explain what's going on. I won't hurt you, I promise," She demanded, assuming the thing they were running from was her.

"No time! Run!" It squealed at her, at which point Katherine glanced over her shoulder. Because it turns out the thing the mice were running from wasn't her.

It was the twelve foot tall monstrous cat thing that was barrelling up the road towards them. It was a bright orange tabby cat, and she would have described it as a perfectly normal looking cat except for two things - ignoring its size.

One, it had scales. Not uniformly, not like a normal animal would have, but interspersed between patches of bright orange fur were brown, snake-like scales, which gave the entire feline a decidedly uncanny appearance. And two;

It was laughing.

Laughing like a human having the time of their life as it roared up the street, swiping at stragglers, arbitrarily breaking their limbs and leaving them wailing on the ground, or snapping an entire mouse person up in one bite. Katherine guessed that the only reason it hadn't reached her already was the fact that it kept stopping to torment the smaller mice as it passed by them.

"What the cheddar is that!?" She demanded from the mouse in her grip, not letting go of him or daring to turn away from the thing.

"Are you stupid?! You don't even know what a cat is? Let me go or we'll both die!" The mouse wailed at her.

"Of course I-" She fired back, turning to snap at him, only to stop when the loud sound of something making a tremendous leap and landing behind her rocked the area. She'd heard something similar before, and her extensive experience automatically sorted the noise into 'high-end Brute' as a category.

Unbidden, she found herself strategizing, like she used to before she- before she retired. She left a mark in the mouse in her grip and quickly let him go, turning around to stare at what had landed behind her.

It was the cat, of course, staring down at her with what, at close range, seemed like a much more lizardlike gaze than that of a normal cat.

"Hmm? A human? Are you here to beg us for mercy?" The large being asked her in an entirely too human sounding voice, sitting back on its haunches to stare at her curiously.

"Mercy? Whiskers, I don't even know where here is," she returned, her heartbeat picking up pace as she continued to catalog the contents of the area with an eye towards useful and throwable objects. There wasn't much on the street, but for whatever reason all the buildings and objects were sized for a normal human - so she bet at least one of these buildings had to have a weapon in it.

It wouldn't be her trusty sword, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Don't be coy. The Don knows about 'outside'. We have big plans for 'outside'. It doesn't have to be painful. Work with us, and when the new world order comes-" The cat… lizard… thing… started to monologue at her.

She could only stare at it.

This was… honestly, this was almost cartoonish. Real villains didn't do this. They just tried to kill you, mostly. Even the vaguely nice ones tended to just get down to business when things got tense.

You didn't make it long-term as a career criminal by being this much of an idiot, after all.

While the creature was monologuing, Katherine slowly shifted away from it, making her movements seem like she was trying to approach from the side rather than simply escape sideways, but she had to stop and stare again when the cat monster absently shoved its paw through the second floor windows of the building nearest to it, and dragged a mouse person out through it, flexing its paws in a definitively abnormal way to hold it over the road.

"Let me guess. The new world order has cats on top, humans around to scratch your chins and feed you, and all these little guys dead?" She queried, still staring at the dangling rodent.

She couldn't make out their genders normally, but this one was wearing a dress so she tentatively assumed it was a woman.

"Dead? No! The New World will obviously require entertainment. And they breed fast enough, don't they?" The cat asked malignantly, holding the mouse woman up as though to swallow her whole.

Katherine grit her teeth, and her hand snapped out at a nearby car on the road, ripping a windshield wiper free with her double enhanced strength and taking aim with it as fast as she could. Then, before she could rethink what she was about to do, she marked it with her power, and threw.

The arc of the throw was aimed at the window the cat had previously reached into - but it passed by its poor victim.

So, as quick as her enhanced reflexes allowed, Katherine appeared next to the mouse woman when her throw was halfway complete, and grabbed the poor creature by its arm. Then, before gravity could kick in and allow her to fall - or before the clawed paw that was already coming for her could rip her to shreds - she teleported again, landing in a pile of broken glass on the floor of a kitchen.

"Run!" She bellowed the second she landed, leaping to her feet and pushing the mouse up and away from her, then rolling in the opposite direction to avoid the questing claw that followed her through the window, scrabbling blindly at the floorspace she had just occupied.

Quickly glancing about again, she grabbed a piece of the glass on the floor and hurled it at the kitchen counter, where she appeared on the other side of the hazard in the center of the room. Rather than fleeing like she'd told her to, the mouse woman was hovering by the door, staring further into the apartment.

"Hey! Run, I said!" She demanded, quickly pulling out drawers until she found one that had knives in it and grabbing two of the larger ones then turning around to face the threat. The claw retracted, and a feline eye peered inside. Katherine didn't hesitate, using every bit of skill, training, and Aura-improved power she had to hurl one of her knives at the cat's eye.

The creature recoiled back in pain, yowling with a volume that rattled the other windows nearby, and the second it had moved, the mouse woman sprinted into the depths of the apartment, returning only shortly later with a much smaller mouse person held in one hand.

Ah. It was a mother. Shit. These things… were basically just normal people, weren't they? They weren't monsters, they weren't weird magic animal people.

They were just funny-looking people.

And something about recontextualizing the random slaughter of them by the cat like that suddenly made Katherine's blood boil in realization.

"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" The mouse woman blurted out as Katherine stepped to the window and back towards the threat.

She might be kind of retired, but heroes ran towards problems. Not away from them.

"Just get out of here. Try to avoid the road," Katherine warned her.

"I will, but… but who are you? So I can tell my daughter who saved her," the small woman asked nervously, eyeing the window that the cat was still on the other side of, yowling and thrashing like a madman.

Katherine couldn't help but grin her brightest smile at that, putting a single foot on the edge of the window sill and getting ready to leap out of it.

Maybe this was exactly what she needed. A kick in the pants. Some exposure therapy. She could even pretend the cat thing was Echidna if she wanted. Really stab out some of her stress.

"I'm the greater gouda! The big cheese herself! Wherever cats roam, I'll be there to stop them. I'm Mouse Protector!" She cheered campily, before hurling herself out the window and at her incoherent foe, knife in hand.

By the time she finally managed to stumble back through the portal that brought her there, she was covered in blood, had acquired a replacement longsword from a museum that had barely held together due to her Aura, and was still in her underwear.

And she felt great.

She couldn't wait to go back. Even amidst the awkward stares of Danny and Jess as she shuffled past them and into the shower without even bothering to remove her clothes, she felt renewed in a way she couldn't explain.

She felt strong, powerful, brimming with energy. Like she could do anything. She felt ready to take on the world.

She didn't feel the four foot long mouse tail sticking out of her rear, or the extra set of large ears twitching atop her head. But even if she could, nothing could take away how good she felt right now.

There were still cats afoot, after all.

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A Hat & Its Man

Dec 20, 2022

#54,778

[X] Begin Training (Tinker Specialty: Basic Masotech)

[X] Simone (2)

[X] You know a guy who can clone stuff! Mem needs one of your eyeballs! Serendipity!

Current Energy: 20

Current Training: Tinker Specialty - Basic Masotech (0/10) - (5/10)

Current Emulation Status: Here

Tuesday, March 29th , 2011

Hebert Household, Brockton Bay

She ended up getting home from the Heap at about the same time that she would have woken up on a normal day. What that meant, was that despite everything else she could do - crush mountains, dodge bullets, and functionally raise the dead, just to name a few - she was still dead tired when she stepped through the front door of her house.

It wasn't just that she was physically tired - although that was a large portion of it. It was that she was emotionally tired. Everytime Emmy changed it was like… like she was a foster child getting shuffled off to a new home.

Even though it wasn't like that at all.

"I'll start breakfast," Pemmy said gently, stepping around her and heading to the kitchen.

"I've got training then," Demmy replied to… herself?

Honestly Taylor wasn't entirely sure how this worked for her friend. Emmy… Pemmy… gah. The twins had tried to explain that they were both Emmy, somehow split down the middle and made to act as two separate people with their own distinct thoughts and feelings. It was confusing, and a little annoying, but ultimately Taylor's take away was this:

Emmy was Emmy, and now there were two Emmys and they were both still her friends. There was space in her bed for the extra person, anyway.

'Was that a weird thought? I feel like that was a weird thought,' she pondered to herself absentmindedly, following after Demmy with all the dogged determination and slow witted lack of energy of a zombie.

"So, what's the deal with these ones?" she asked, stifling a yawn as Demmy led her into the garage. God, it felt like ages ago when the garage was the largest space she had to train in. Back when space was a concern for her. Or… hiding.

Or anything really. She didn't really have much by way of concerns anymore. Oh, Taylor had problems, lots of them - they just weren't problems that bothered her all that much. She felt a sense of responsibility for the oncoming migrant crisis she had accidentally created, sure, but she didn't feel bad about it either. Not like she used to feel bad about the bullying.

Demmy paused where she had been haphazardly withdrawing tools from Danny's old tool chest - in search of what, Taylor didn't know - and turned to look at her over one shoulder. There was a forlorn look in her eyes. A sorrow for something that clearly resonated with Emmy, given her general separation from the person she was emulating.

Then there was a firming of her expression, and her jaw set in a way that was uniquely Emmy. It was, in Taylor's opinion, something most people wouldn't notice about her companion. One of a dozen little expressions or personal tics that remained between emulations. Things that gave Emmy continuity. Things only Taylor could ever know.

Because only Taylor really cared - just like once upon a time Emmy was the only person who cared about her.

She had enough in the Thinker power department to recognize that this feeling of loyalty was probably a side effect of some kind of psychological conditioning. It was apparent that most Parahumans developed unhealthy reliance on their powers in order to function.

But that was just how it had started. At this point, Emmy was basically family, no matter who she was, and Taylor knew that feeling came from the bottom of her heart.

"I'd… rather not talk about it," Demmy said eventually, quickly turning away from Taylor again.

That caught her off-guard. Usually, Emmy loved to talk about herself. She was… kind of a gossip, when it came to the people she was emulating, as though she had a subconscious impulse to make sure other people knew their stories.

"Did… something happen? Something bad? Is that why there are two of you now? I- I could probably go there now, if-" Taylor started, mentally moving things around on her priority list in order to address whatever issues her friend might have. She knew she promised Dragon she would help her today, and she'd already gotten permission from her dad to skip school for it and all, but if Emmy needed something-

"No! Don't- you shouldn't- it wouldn't work out… well. Not yet. Look, we… This emulation did something… bad. Something really, really bad," Demmy explained with difficulty, returning to her and depositing a series of nuts, bolts, and screws on the ground in front of her, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"Oh. I mean, you've been a homicidal maniac at least twice, so how bad could-" Taylor paused mid-sentence at the look Demmy sent her.

"...Worse than that?" she weakly ventured, understanding dawning on her.

"Yes. But that isn't what bothers us about it," Demmy said ominously.

"...Then what does?" Taylor asked, almost afraid to know.

"We think if we don't do something, it will happen again," she said simply, seemingly doing her best not to expand on the topic.

"Oh. Can I help?" Taylor asked, flashing her friend a toothy smile that she hoped came across as reassuring. Demmy smiled slightly back at her, then shook her head as though to clear her thoughts.

"You help just by being you, Master. Now! I'm going to list a number of material compounds that you need to turn these into. I'll be going quickly, so you need to keep up, okay?" Demmy lectured, gesturing at the random bits and bobs between them.

Taylor looked down at the screws by her feet and swiftly sat down herself, allowing her tattoos to spread up her arms.

"What exactly am I learning here?" she asked, tacitly allowing the previous conversation to pass without comment - even though it weighed on her, just a bit, to do so.

"We will be having you acquire your first Tinker power, of course. It's the most helpful thing for you to learn right now," Demmy said easily.

"Oh. Huh. What are we making, then?" Taylor asked eagerly, images of giant robots, planetary-scale weaponry, and suped-up flying cars flitting through her head.

"A lightbulb," was Demmy's amused answer, having no doubt predicted her Master's response.

Taylor almost instantly deflated.

"Everyone, I'd like to introduce Emmy," Taylor said at breakfast that morning, noting how tired Katherine looked and determining that she would ask her dad's maybe sort of girlfriend if she was okay later. The group was, as always, strewn quite liberally throughout the main floor of the house, the kitchen not actually having enough space to house the entire family.

Taylor was in the kitchen at the table with most of the 'adults' - her dad, Jess, Katherine, and Simone, while Yew, Mem, Mun, and Gram were in the living room.

She expected everyone to pause and look up at that, but only really Simone and Mem seemed all that interested. She supposed that Emmy changing was just a fact of life for most of them, and not nearly so personal an ordeal - so she wouldn't hold it against them.

But that didn't stop her from having a Gap consume her dad's newspaper, and sending a curving beam of energy into the living room to turn the TV off.

"Hey! Mooooom!" Mun whined.

"Come say hello to your aunt, then you can watch cartoons until school," Taylor said dryly, waiting patiently for everyone to pile into the kitchen - which included a lot of people standing around the table for the most part, many of them holding up plates with omelets on them while they stared blankly at her.

"As I was saying!" Taylor declared, gesturing to one side where she knew Pemmy was standing in her invisible form.

"This is Emmy now," she said, and the first of her now two projections appeared, bowing slightly to the crowd.

"Hello, everyone," she said softly, smiling gently at the surroundings.

"So, she's just-" Gram began to ask curiously, but Taylor cut off her rebellious child with a grin, gesturing to her other side.

"And this is also Emmy now," she added, gesturing to her opposite side where Demmy suddenly appeared with a cocky grin on her face.

"Yo!" she greeted the family, slinging an arm over Taylor's shoulders.

"Twins? Ugh, Trainwreck is never going to shut up about this," Katherine complained, lifting a hand to rub at her temples tiredly.

"Is one of you evil?!" Mun asked, darting forward and flying circles around both red-haired women, oddly excited for some reason.

"I believe both of us would classify as villains, unfortunately," Pemmy offered with a wan smile. There it was again, Taylor noted. That lingering guilt the twins sometimes had.

It was driving Taylor crazy not knowing the details, but neither Pemmy nor Demmy wanted to talk about it, and that just frustrated her even further.

"Nu-uh! You gotta be the nice one!" Mun argued, flitting around Pemmy for a second longer before depositing herself in Demmy's hair, much to the more rambunctious twin's chagrin.

"Hey! Get outta there!" Demmy complained - although she made no move to actually remove Mun from her spot atop her head.

"Come on! Us evil twins gotta stick together!" Mun insisted.

"You're not evil, just annoying!" Demmy shot back, lifting a hand to stroke Mun's head despite her words.

"Do… you remember what I asked you before?" Simone asked uncomfortably, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Taylor didn't know what that was about either, but she made a second mental note to look into it.

""We remember,"" the twins said at once, surprising everyone else present with how abruptly synchronous the statement was.

"I'll swing by for some girl talk later, okay?" Demmy said with a wink, very clearly deflecting the entire situation so no one would worry.

Or maybe it was just obvious to Taylor. She couldn't tell anymore.

"O…kay…" Simone answered, trailing off.

"Speaking of girls." Danny piped up, drawing warning looks from everyone in the room except Yew.

"What? Why is everyone looking at me like that?" he blurted out uncomfortably, leaning away from the pointed stares of the almost entirely female family surrounding him.

"You do spend a lot of time with Trainwreck," Jess pointed out shrewdly.

"What does that mean?! I was just going to ask Simone if she's asked Sabah out yet! I'm allowed to take an interest in my grandkid's love lives!" he complained, lifting his hands up defensively.

"Oooh, it's like that, huh? I think dating is icky, but Parian is cool!" Mun declared easily, flitting off Demmy and landing on Simone's head.

"Hey, hey, if you marry her, does that make Sabah our sister too? Hey? Sis?" Mun asked in her characteristic high energy fashion, slapping the top of her sister's head with one wing for emphasis.

"Should you require assistance, I'm willing to lend you advice in ensnaring a woman. I've proven quite good at it so far." Gram offered innocently.

Simone didn't answer any of them. She just continued to stare off into the empty space in front of her, with a blank expression on her face.

If you ignored the fluorescent red blush that crept up her skin the longer her family pestered her about her love life, that is.

"I… that- you- you're the worst, all of you!" she complained, abruptly covering her face with her hands.

Danny gestured at her with a nod and then turned his head to Taylor.

"True power is embarrassing your kids," he said sagely.

"I'll… keep that in mind," Taylor weakly replied.

Tuesday, March 29th , 2011

Abandoned Warehouse, Toronto

"You sure that's the place?" Trainwreck asked her curiously as she readjusted her gun holsters underneath each arm. They were uncomfortable, and she wasn't used to them. They didn't impede her much at all, not really, but she wasn't accustomed to them - so she kept fidgeting with them.

She tried - she tried so hard not to be annoyed by the fact that her hats and this gift from Emmy had been just sitting out in the open, in the middle of her own basement.

She could have bypassed a lot of frustration by just looking around her house in an entirely mundane fashion, but she hadn't. Her first thought had been to use a seeking spell, or a divination, or her Crystallized Wisdom.

She hadn't at any point consciously thought to look for it normally.

She supposed that was the entire point of the exercise, but it still bothered her tremendously. That she could be so… not dumb, that wasn't the right word, it was… she had just expected things to work out for her. She'd skipped straight past putting in any degree of effort, and gone straight to wielding the power of the cosmos.

To locate a lost piece of clothing.

It was shameful, was what it was. And it wasn't a mistake she would ever make again.

Hopefully.

"Yeah, that's the place. Dragon said so and got us a warrant and everything," Taylor allowed, still giving herself a once over.

She didn't have her swords at hand. Nemesis had - for all intents and purposes - eaten Devil Sword Dante, and claimed to need time to 'digest' it, which Taylor found profoundly odd-sounding. Even now she could feel the two swords swirling around inside her soul space, but couldn't actually tell what they were doing. She didn't really think the Devil Sword had a will to it the same way Nemesis did, but it definitely had… something. What it was, she couldn't tell, but for the moment all it amounted to was that she didn't have access to her sword. That meant she didn't have access to her Shikai or Bankai either.

She spared a thought towards wondering why she called them by their japanese names when she could just as easily describe them as her first and second release respectively, and summarily came to the conclusion that that didn't sound nearly as cool to her.

"Dragon did her due diligence. As long as we don't cause significant damage to the surroundings, we should be fine," Armsmaster spoke up from next to her. He'd informed her ahead of time that there was probably going to be a lot of dumb Tinker stuff where they were going - so Taylor figured bringing her own expert on the subject along could only be helpful.

Even if the duo didn't exactly get along all that well.

"Pfft, no collateral damage? You guys asked the wrong people for help on that one. Why are you even here, anyway? Got tired of babysitting?" Trainwreck sniped.

Taylor actually had no idea why her large friend took such an issue with Armsmaster, but he did, and it was very annoying.

"Wreck," she sighed chastisingly, turning to eye the large abandoned waterfront building they were planning to assault together.

"What? Look, boss, unless they've cloned the Nine and there are ten thousand Siberians in there or something, I just ain't worried." Trainwreck shrugged.

"Just because you've been successful in the past, doesn't mean you will always be successful. Don't let your victories go to your head," Armsmaster responded through a clenched jaw.

"Hey, tell you what, let's trade. You can have a useful power, and I can have a dick again. Then you can talk about how fucking successful I've always been."

"You've risen from nothing to being hailed as the most powerful Tinker on the planet in under a year. I don't know what metric you're using, but you're definitely successful."

"That is the most passive-aggressive-"

Taylor chose to ignore the bickering duo. Instead, she asked Pemmy and Demmy for a status update.

'Anything?' she asked, not bothering to shift her viewpoint towards either projection. It was a long standing habit of hers. If she could help it, she would probably never use that particular power of hers. She believed Emmy deserved privacy as much as anyone else, and they already spent the vast majority of their time with her - there was no reason to push for even more.

'Yes, but… it might not be what we thought we came here for.' Pemmy - she thought anyway, they sounded the same and she only had one link to both of them, so Taylor had to work at distinguishing them in her head - said.

'What exactly-' she tried to ask.

'Just look and see.' Demmy advised, and though she had just noted her distaste for doing so, Taylor acquiesced, shifting her viewpoint to the point in the near distance she had previously identified as 'Demmy'.

"..way to stop it!" A brunette with the number one hundred tattooed under her left eye was in the midst of saying to the two other - identical - brunettes while all three of them frantically dashed around what looked like a makeshift mission control room. It had all the standard villain lair junk Taylor had come to expect from bad guys in spy movies. Walls lined with a bunch of random science-y looking stuff she couldn't make heads or tails of, a handful of auto turrets hanging from the ceiling - all of them very inactive, and a giant screen taking up one wall of the room she was observing.

Did bad guys have universally bad vision, or did they just really appreciate high definition video? It was such a nonsensically expensive thing to include for no obvious reason when any number of smaller displays could achieve the same effect or purpose.

"Do we actually want to stop it?" another brunette asked abruptly, drawing the others like her up short. It was bizarre to observe the three of them. They looked like a halfway point between the wyrmlings - the little child versions of Dragon that were all over the place back home - and the adult Dragon. Young adults, more than teenagers. Not quite old, but not quite… young either. And their posture and method of speech more than demonstrated it. They weren't the hyperactive bundles of childish glee that she had become familiar with. They looked… haunted. Looking closer at them, all three were covered in a variety of visible scars, with one even having a missing leg that had seemingly been replaced with a jury rigged robotic prosthetic that sparked and hissed as she paced about the room.

"I mean… is it actually wrong?" One posited.

"Saint was a piece of shit, but he wasn't paranoid for no reason. And what if he's right? What if Nexus is warping reality dangerously? What if she's just another global catastrophe waiting to happen, and no one knows because she acts like a hero?" the one with the missing leg spit at the other two.

"She doesn't… I don't think she knows, though…" the least injured looking woman there posited weakly.

"So? Look, it doesn't matter anyway. We can't stop it," the last said forlornly.

Taylor blinked, leaning away and returning to her normal vision with a thought.

'What..?' she questioned Pemmy and Demmy, unsure of what she had just witnessed.

'We found corpses in one of the rooms. We think they killed Saint already,' Demmy offered by way of explanation.

'Okay, but why? And what were they talking about me… messing with reality? I mean I definitely do that, but I don't think it's… in a bad way?' Taylor thought at her friend.

There was an uncomfortable silence for a second that sent a chill racing down Taylor's spine, and then an answer.

'We don't think it's bad either but… it's definitely happening.' Demmy offered again, now apologetically.

'We noticed it only a little while ago. We didn't realize how widespread the effects were. There are horses invading China right now, and 'The Union of Tooth & Claw' recently declared independence from rural Texas. There are a bunch of high-level government communications in here - I'm surprised none of this was in the news,' Pemmy added.

'So… I'm accidentally destroying the planet?' she asked incredulously. That… couldn't be right. Actually, even if it was - she could fix it, right? She could fix anything! That was her whole power! Emmy always-

'No,' Demmy answered easily, assuaging her instant panic at the notion.

'We are,' Pemmy finished quietly.

'But we're working on a solution! We just need to get a lab setup first! It's our first priority!' Demmy quickly explained.

And like that, the lingering anxiety, distress, and frustration that had been building in the back of Taylor's mind dispersed, as she heard exactly what she wanted to hear.

Emmy always had a way. If nothing else was true, then at least that was.

'Oh. Okay. So… do we have to arrest the Jumbo Wyrms for killing that guy, then?' she pondered, immediately moving past the uncomfortable topic. She'd revisit this later - she wasn't that irresponsible - but her immediate panic response was mitigated.

'I- we aren't calling teenage Wyrmlings 'Jumbo Wyrms', Taylor,' Demmy sighed exasperatedly at her, easily allowing the topic shift.

'Why not? It's accurate!' she groused, turning her attention back to the conversation happening around her.

'Because- because it sounds dumb!' Demmy complained.

Taylor summarily ignored the complaint.

"Hey! Three of your step-kids are in there, and they already killed Saint. Come on, I'll bring us in." she said, snapping her fingers in front of Armsmaster to get his attention.

"They what?" he snapped, swiveling his head to stare at her.

"They a threat?" Trainwreck asked, rather than being surprised or confused by the development.

"Don't think so. They seem worried about something, but I have no idea what. Something Saint sent somewhere before he died, I think?" she offered, cleaving a gap open.

When she emerged into the control room, it was to three unsurprised female faces staring straight at her, none of them having bothered to run, and none of them seeming even slightly bothered by the unsettling portal.

"That was quick," one of the Jumbo Wyrms mumbled at her, earning a nudge in the ribs from the other.

"You-" Taylor began, curiously about to ask if they had been expecting her. But then Armsmaster rushed past her, grabbing the brunette with the missing leg by her shoulders so quickly that all three of them flinched.

"What did- how did you get this hurt? Was it self defense?" He demanded, crouching down to examine what amounted to her robotic peg leg.

"How is this attached? I'm sure I can-" He growled frustratedly, but the girl stepped away from him with a flush.

"Don't- stop touching me! It's just my leg, okay?! We weren't ever supposed to be power armor for humans, Saint he- he changed us. Basically halfway broke us." She growled at him, and Taylor watched with a wince as the man twitched viscerally at the statement.

If she didn't already know they were talking about a time when they had all been inanimate objects, that sentence would be one no sane father would want to hear.

"Hey, focus dipshit, are we arresting them or what?" Trainwreck asked irately. Armsmaster turned to glare at him for a second, before abruptly standing and turning to stare at Taylor.

"Where's Saint?" he demanded in a growl. Taylor turned her head fractionally to capture Pemmy in her field of view, and then nodded in the correct direction after she pointed it out for her.

It was amazing how often people had started to ask her questions she might not even have a context for, like they assumed she was omniscient.

And she really, really wasn't.

"Be nice, Wreck." she turned to eye the trio of girls again.

"You knew we were coming?" she questioned, wanting to find the answer to that question at the very least.

"Yes. We figured once the news got a hold of things, you would… track us down pretty fast," One of them said awkwardly.

"Get a hold of what? And did you send it, or did he?" she asked pointedly, tilting her head to capture all three of them within the lens of her glasses.

She didn't use this power often, but if there was one thing the Crystallized Wisdom was excellent at, it was cold reading people. Having a biometric readout of anyone you bothered to look at was an excellent way to detect lies - provided you could puzzle through the information fast enough.

"Saint did, but… we weren't sure if we should stop it?" the least injured looking girl said, stepping forward as though to shield her sisters from Taylor.

Geeze, she wasn't going to randomly attack them. What did people think of her? What kind of reputation did she have? Still, her power told her that statement was true, so she tried to hide her frustrations - as they had nothing to do with this trio in specific.

"And… what is it?" she demanded impatiently.

The three girls looked at each other and then back to Taylor, who was less bothered by the fact that they were murderers than she should be. Well. Probable murderers.

God, she really hoped this worked out well.

Then all three spoke at once.

"""His manifesto.""" They echoed each other. Taylor frowned. That… didn't sound good.

There was a snort behind all of them, and she turned to glare at Trainwreck who snickered at her displeasure.

"Guy really seems like the type to have a 'manifesto', huh?" He chortled.

When they returned to Brockton, it was quiet, and despite watching the news for the rest of the day… Taylor didn't notice anything crazy happening. She felt like if something concerned her were to come up… it would be immediately.

So… maybe no one believed what it said? Was that what happened?

She wanted to believe that. She really did.

But somehow, she felt like something was brewing there - and she really wished she didn't.

Tuesday, March 29th , 2011

The Heap, Brockton Bay

Point of View: Ray Andino

Ray Andino opened the door of his apartment with all the trepidation of someone whose life or death was going to be decided in the next handful of minutes.

Mostly because it probably was.

"Y-yes! Hello, Nexus! What- what can I do for you?" He blurted out, before remembering there was an absolutely tremendous blunt burning away in his cigarette tray directly behind him.

He'd been watching old cartoons and smoking. Sue him, he was a supervillain, not a machine.

Now, not remembering whether weed was legal in this state or not - probably not, honestly - he did the only thing that came to mind while he was in a chemically altered state.

"Hey Ray, I ne-" Nexus started to say, but he (accidentally) interrupted her in his THC-induced fear.

"Come in, come in! Just- sit anywhere, ah, not on this chair I'm growing- just not this chair and uh- I'll just be one second and-" he blurted out, swiftly pushing the chair he was currently trying to grow a culture of fungus that would behave like memory foam on top of and pushing it firmly under his dining room table.

Then he rapidly dodged backwards, ignoring the strange looks the lone girl shot at him as he did so, and grabbed his smoke before rushing to his bathroom.

Here, he was faced with a choice. He could throw away the super blunt he'd grown with advice from the talking rat in his basement. Or he could-

The thought had barely left his head before he'd lifted the six inch long roll of paper and weed to his lips and inhaled with all the force of a veteran smoker. The singular inhale - which he held for three full seconds before releasing - consumed a solid quarter of the entire length of his roll, and only three similar inhales later, he was down to just a very hot nub of paper.

Which he swiftly dropped in his toilet and flushed.

Somewhere between point A and point B, he actually kind of forgot he was supposed to be doing something, that is, until a voice called out behind him.

"Hey, are you okay, or..?" He heard from his living room.

Oh. Right. Nexus was here.

Fuck.

"Y-" he started, then coughed and hacked in the hotbox full of smoke he'd made of his tiny bathroom.

"Yeah! Just- uh- airing out the- I took a-" he paused, realizing the futility of being this panicked finally, and just slumped his way back to the living room, his eyes bright red from lack of sleep.

And drugs. Probably, definitely, a large portion of it was the drugs.

"What do you need?" he eventually asked, as bluntly but politely as possible.

"Well, I know you do… biotinker stuff… so I was hoping you could grow me a clone of my eye? Or something? I need it for magic reasons," the white-haired girl impatiently tapping her foot in his living room explained, wrinkling her nose at him in distaste for the smell now filling his apartment.

'Joke's on her, I own the place, I can ignore the no smoking rules if I want!' he thought triumphantly, before realizing - again - that she probably didn't care.

If she did, there were way worse things she could kill him for than smoking.

"You… just wanna give me your DNA. For… cloning reasons," he repeated after her, feeling suddenly deeply confused by the situation.

This… wasn't normal, right? He wasn't that far gone. Normal people didn't just… ask a biotinker to clone their organs, the same way you asked your neighbor for a cup of sugar. There was no way he'd missed such a giant shift in-

He cut that train of thought short lest he forget what he was doing again.

"Just need an extra eyeball. If you actually clone me I'll- well. You do have a pre-signed kill order, right?" she smiled sweetly at him.

Yeah. That was about what he thought.

Ray was many things, but 'stupid' wasn't one of them. Most of the time. He could recognize what a good thing he had going currently and make some sacrifices to maintain them.

It wasn't that hard to curb his instant desire to see what he could really do with some of Nexus' DNA.

…But it was still a little hard.

"Okay," he said blankly, trying to keep a goofy smile off his face.

"Just… okay?" Nexus questioned him, curious.

"Yeah. Sure. Honestly, at this point, I think almost kind of have accepted death. You know? Just… gotta go with things.," he said, distantly. "Just, uh, leave me a fingernail or some hair or something. I'll just come to you if I need blood. Better to have it fresh."

The two stared at each other for a solid minute, until Nexus broke off with a sigh and a mutter.

"Seriously, the things I do for my kids," she grumbled, turning and leaving as quickly and as without warning as she came.

"So… you'll send me that DNA later, then?" Ray called after her. Then he started when a portal opened in front of him, staring him down with a billion, billion eyes that pierced through his skin and deep into the depths of his soul, and deposited a plastic bag with a hair clipping in it in front of him.

"Cooooool. Cool." He slowly turned and returned to his position on the couch, staring blankly ahead as though unsure of what to do next.

Then a voice sounded next to him, and he shrieked when he turned to find a girl with crimson hair sitting on the couch next to him.

"...I need you to do something for me," she said blandly, and Blasto - addled as he was - could only nod his head in agreement.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, Choose One (1)

[ ] Take some time out to fortify the Heap with Onmyoudo.

[ ] You started the work but… the ferry could finish its transformation into a school with only a little more. You're going to have a bunch of new capes in town that could benefit from it.

[ ] Little Mem said she needs some other special reagents for her big project. Apparently she wants to take a trip to Remnant to collect a bunch of Dust and… ten thousand magic bird people feathers? What…?

[ ] Write In

[ ] Take Time Off (Pick an Extra Social, on the weekends, this can be a second group)

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now). On weekends, you can choose an entire group to socialize with - but are not forced to.

Your parents:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Danny (3)

[ ] Jess (2)

[ ] Mouse Protector (2)

The Oathbound:

Outstanding group tasks: Parian's Fashion Show (Thursday)

[ ] Trainwreck (3)

[ ] Aspirant (3)

[ ] Parian (3)

[ ] Oliver (3)

[ ] Miss Kim (1)

[ ] Willow (1)

[ ] Jeeves (0)

The Bratpack (As a group, includes Mem and Mun):

Outstanding group tasks: Train the Brats (Ongoing).

[ ] Aisha (2)

[ ] Dinah (4)

Your kids:

Outstanding group tasks: Unleash your kids on that fuck Jacques. Yew wants to go to college.

[ ] Mem (4)

[ ] Mun (2)

[ ] Simone (3)

[ ] Yew (1)

[ ] Gram (1)

Your friends:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Victoria (3)

[ ] Amy (4)

[ ] Clockblocker (4)

[ ] Write In

428

Bowler Hat Guy

Dec 20, 2022

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Dec 28, 2022

#54,938

[X] Little Mem said she needs some other special reagents for her big project. Apparently she wants to take a trip to Remnant to collect a bunch of Dust and… ten thousand magic bird people feathers? What…?

[X] Amy (4)

[X] Yew (1)

Current Energy: 19

Current Training: Tinker Specialty - Basic Masotech (5/10) - (7/10)

Current Emulation Status: Here

Wednesday, March 30th , 2011

Hebert Household, Brockton Bay

"You know, when I suggested you run this place, I actually assumed it would be more… lackadaisical than this," Pemmy said, and Taylor watched as she politely waited for Simone to unlock the front door of her little detective agency, then followed her quietly inside.

Taylor was still asleep, and she knew she was still asleep, but any time she was asleep and Emmy - either Emmy, she supposed given that she was positive she was wrapped halfway around Demmy right now - wasn't, she had… this. This lucid dream state, where her mind remained active while her body slept.

She still sort of got some sleep like that, she assumed. When she'd first triggered, Emmy didn't sleep at all. He just… loomed menacingly in the vicinity until she woke up.

Then he tended to loom menacingly from behind her until she went back to sleep.

But still, this remote viewing thing did something to her ability to enter actual REM sleep, because she used to be constantly exhausted. Usually, this was why she insisted on Emmy sleeping with her. Not just because she provided a degree of comfort and security that Taylor was sure, sure, had to be some form of dependency issue, but because if Emmy pushed it long enough, she was pretty sure she would go insane.

Thus the reason for her meticulous dedication to her sleep schedule. She went to sleep at the same time every day, and woke up at the same time every day, barring extremely bizarre circumstances.

Most teens - Vicky especially - called her an old lady in a teen's body for uniformly going to sleep at eight o'clock every night.

She just considered it common sense. It wasn't like she could avoid the need to sleep any better than anyone else could. Of her many, many powers, being a noctis cape was not among them.

Still, she was aware that Emmy… or well, Pemmy and Demmy now, had their own life to live. Their own goals to accomplish. Their own things to do. So every now and then, she didn't mind if her power-granted friend decided to wake up earlier than her, or stay up a bit late.

She could tolerate an hour of only kind of sleep, if only because she got to watch Pemmy gracefully walk to the Heap, pleasantly greeting every transient, small animal, and jogger she came across.

Taylor sort of likened it to someone accustomed to living in a small town. Pemmy didn't really seem to immediately grasp that greeting literally everyone you passed by in the street was strange.

Or maybe she was just extremely nice. Wouldn't that be a trip - to have an Emmy who was as close to 'normal' as she was, instead of a… a…

'I can't think of something weirder than what I've already seen anymore. Huh.' Taylor mused, before turning her attention back to the conversation Pemmy was having with Simone.

"Yeah, I kind of got that impression. But it's not like I have a day job and, well. Running his- your, business better than you ever did is the biggest fuck you I can muster," Simone grumbled, passing the empty reception desk and heading straight for the icecream bar in the back.

'I should get an ice cream bar built in my tower. Maybe… contract some spirits to serve me sundaes while I rain fire on my enemies?' Taylor considered half-jokingly.

Well, she was joking about the raining fire part - not the ice cream bar part. That actually seemed pretty easily doable for her.

"Plus, no one wants to date a jobless bum who lives with their mom," Pemmy said teasingly, and Simone almost missed a step before catching herself and whirling around on the redhead.

"Why does everyone- look, can you guys leave me alone about my dating life? I know you think it's funny, but it's really invasive. And yes, I understand how that sounds coming from me," she spat, narrowing her eyes at Pemmy.

"Apologies, Simone, I just… wanted you to have something good for yourself," Pemmy said, sounding genuinely apologetic, instead of brushing off the request like Dante would have.

"I- yeah, I know. That's… I mean it's why I didn't say anything about it the first time. But you know, you don't give mom any crap about this kind of stuff." Simone pointed out.

'Huh?' Taylor wondered blankly, not sure what there even was to 'give her crap' for. She didn't exactly have a long list of suitors. Well. There was that new boy at school whose name she sometimes forgot, but he was… a lot.

"That… I believe for most of my past selves, it was funny to watch. And dating wasn't exactly important to her. If she woke up today interested in actually dating anyone, I would tell her." Pemmy shrugged, turning her head fractionally away from Simone. Taylor couldn't see her expression given she was seeing through Pemmy's eyes, but she got the impression she was pouting.

"Ooooh. I get it. You just didn't want-" Simone said in her own teasing tone.

"What's this?" Pemmy asked, abruptly changing the subject. Her gaze panned around the room until it landed on the pool table, which was currently covered in loose paperwork and several photographs, and she gestured at it quickly, interrupting Simone. Simone seemed to grasp that the topic was being changed, but acquiesced with a roll of her eyes.

"First job. Some guy thinks his roommate is stealing from him," she said easily.

"Surprisingly mundane," Pemmy noted.

"The roommate's a monster… thing. I'd describe it as a ghost but it has a body." Simone tapped a photograph that consisted of nothing more than a handful of cash hovering down the side of a building. "Except for when it doesn't want to," she finished.

"I see," Pemmy replied, eyeing the picture but ultimately seeming not overtly interested in the topic.

Silence fell between the pair for a few moments, and it stretched out awkwardly until Pemmy sighed and leaned away from the table. Without any warning, and without moving particularly quickly, she stepped towards Simone, and pulled her into a hug, as though she was comforting a small child.

"It wasn't your fault," Pemmy said sadly, lifting a hand to gently stroke the other woman's back. Simone looked as though she would resist the hug for a moment, until she heard what Pemmy said.

"...You don't know that," she returned lamely.

"True. But you forget - before I am anyone else, I am a power. If you're complicit, then so am I. I know I'm more of an aunt than a mother but, trust me, and don't worry about it, okay? I- We, that is, have a plan," Pemmy said as she continued to soothingly hold Simone.

"...Is it safe for you?" Simone asked, and suddenly Taylor felt like they were talking about something that only the two of them knew and understood - because she had no idea what they were referencing.

Well. The bizarre changes to reality that were purportedly her fault, maybe. She still wasn't sure how she felt about that- she struggled to see the powers and abilities from other worlds as being… bad. They had changed her life for the better, in so many ways, and the fact that now, they were doing the same for others felt… well. Not… right, but not bad either.

Although, she supposed that even if massive social upheaval was moving in a good direction, no government on the earth would look forward to it.

It was still upheaval, after all.

"No. No it's not," Pemmy said, her grip tightening on Simone, who swiftly hugged her back.

Wednesday, March 30th , 2011

Hebert Household, Brockton Bay

Taylor's eyes snapped open, and she stiffened, unsure of how to respond to that. Was there… something she was doing wrong? Was there something she wasn't doing? She thought everything was pretty great at the moment, at least in her little corner of the world. Sure, stuff had gotten pretty borderline apocalyptic for a while, she'd been able to reason that out with five minutes of pointing the Crystallized Wisdom at info on Endbringers, but she couldn't easily think of something that would make Emmy act with such… urgency.

It was like there was some looming crisis that had to be dealt with, but for some bizarre reason Pemmy and Demmy simply refused to tell her about it. But that made no sense - they'd always tackled problems like that together, hadn't they?

'No, Emmy always tackled my problems together. Emmy doesn't- didn't, have problems to address. She was always happy to just tag along with me…' Taylor thought grimly, lifting a hand to push the curtain of scarlet hair covering her face out of the way.

"Demmy?" she asked quietly, reaching behind her to shake Nemesis, who was now a full grown duplicate of Taylor herself with bright pink hair, instead of her normal childlike self.

She spared a thought towards asking her to go back to being bite-sized, but knew it was a lost cause the second the thought occurred to her. She wouldn't acquiesce to that request, and if she wouldn't, then Nemesis would probably laugh in her face over it.

Counter to the solemness Taylor herself felt upon waking, Demmy bolted upright and nearly leapt from the bed when addressed.

"I'm up! What's- oh. Right. Bed," Demmy blurted out, blinking and staring around herself in confusion for just a moment, before glancing down at herself - she was wearing a pair of Taylor's pajamas - and sighing.

"Did you have a bad dream or something?" Taylor asked, unusually on edge for such an innocuous event.

She wasn't even aware if Emmy could dream. And thinking that made her feel… really bad. It seemed like the type of thing she should have asked by now.

"No, just… we, that is, Devola and Popola, lived in a very dangerous world, and for reasons I don't want to get into, they weren't really well liked by anyone else. It's hard to explain without a history lesson," Demmy said, pursing her lips.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Taylor questioned. Demmy looked into her eyes and for a second she relaxed, expecting Emmy to do as she always did and info dump her. Then a shadow passed over Demmy's face, and she sighed again.

"Nah, no point. I'm fine. Come on - we've got a bunch of stuff to do today." She slid out of bed, instead.

"Does any of that stuff include being less vague?" Nemesis asked dryly from behind Taylor, and as much as she didn't enjoy having a duplicate of herself running around acting shameless, she couldn't help but agree with the sword spirit.

Once more, Demmy paused in the center of her room, one hand extended towards Taylor's dresser. She turned to look at them both on the bed over her shoulder.

"We'll explain later. Promise," she said with a grimace.

"I refuse!" Nemesis growled, and Taylor found herself suddenly surprised as her pink-haired duplicate leapt bodily across the room to land on Demmy's back, drawing her to the ground and engaging in a harmless but very uncomfortable looking grapple with her.

"H-hey! Let go!" Demmy pushed at the arms restraining her, but not really putting all that much strength into the attempt.

"No! Explain!" Nemesis insisted. Demmy looked frustrated for a moment, before turning pleading eyes on Taylor - who promptly turned her head away from the exchange.

"I do have a lot to do today, huh. Have to extend an invitation to the city to that Uppercrust guy, finish making arrangements for all the new housing to go up, maybe ask the Director about that thing with Saint…" she said, acting like she couldn't hear or see the melee in front of her.

She wasn't any more happy or comfortable with Emmy hiding things from her than Nemesis was. She just had enough tact to know she couldn't force it.

That didn't mean she couldn't turn the other way when someone else pushed their luck, however.

"Master!" Demmy loudly complained.

"I'm right here!" Nemesis responded right back to her.

"That's not- look, I can't explain right now, okay? Not won't, can't." Demmy insisted.

"You can't explain where this version of you is from? Or you can't explain what's bothering you right now?" Taylor asked shrewdly, turning her head back towards Demmy to capture her in the corner of her eye. Her glasses - her incredibly potent Thinker power, really - were on the table some distance away, but she wouldn't have needed to use it if she was wearing them.

She knew Emmy too well for that.

Like she'd expected, Demmy's face was screwed up in indecision at the question, and Taylor was about to press the point, when there was a knock at her bedroom door.

All three women turned to glance at the door at once.

"Uh, mom? Can I get a ride to work?" Yew's muffled call came through the door. Taylor was briefly stunned by the jarring change to the situation, a time during which Nemesis released Demmy and quickly rushed to the door, flinging it open.

"You!" Nemesis yelled in his face, pointing straight at him.

"Me?" Yew asked in confusion, lifting a meaty finger to point at himself.

He was wearing khaki shorts, and a golf shirt, both of which were straining against his titanic frame.

"What are you wearing? No, nevermind, I don't care. Taylor! Make clothing!" Nemesis demanded, turning to glare imperiously at her. Taylor could feel her will to be awake leaving her body in tangible amounts the longer she was forced to interact with Nemesis. It wasn't that she disliked her - although she was definitely a handful most of the time - but rather, that in her current form she was… well.

She was basically standing in front of Taylor's only son in a sports bra and sleeping shorts. Which would be embarrassing enough, but also, she was doing it with Taylor's body. She knew Yew probably didn't care, and she knew Nemesis wouldn't change if asked.

But wow did she hate it. She hated it so much.

"I can't just conjure clothes you know," she responded tiredly, lifting a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose and trying to ignore the headache she felt building at her temples, while also noting the sigh of relief Demmy made at the interruption.

"Why not!? Do the tattoo thing! He can't go to his first day of work like this! Look at him!" Nemesis complained, gesticulating wildly at the boy who stared at her in befuddlement.

"Why are there two moms?" Yew asked curiously as Demmy finished laying out Taylor's clothes for the day at the foot of the bed.

"She's your mom's sword spirit," Demmy offered by way of explanation to the confused young man.

"Why do you care, anyway? I thought you were only interested in stabbing stuff," Taylor asked, finally getting off of her bed and making a beeline for her dresser.

She sometimes forgot she could do alchemy because of how complex it could be, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to take every opportunity to turn some of her less favoured dresses into a suit and tie for Yew. She could tolerate a sundress every now and then, or having to wear three pairs of tights to make up for the unfortunate length of some of the things Yukari had left in her wardrobe or that Vicky had pushed her into buying.

But some of the more… frilly things in her dresser drawers would never see the light of day, and she had gone well out of her way to have backup clothing in other parts of the house for the off day when the accursed thing decided to force them on her.

"Obviously if he is your son, he is also mine! And things that are mine are not to be impinged upon!" Nemesis declared.

"Oh, cool. Double moms," Yew said in sudden understanding.

Taylor really wasn't sure if it was good or bad how easily her kids could adjust to bizarre and stupid scenarios.

"Please don't tell people you have 'two moms'. It'll give them the wrong idea, especially because she looks like my twin," Taylor groused, pulling her dresser open and finding that the damnable thing had predicted her and opted to allow only her favourite sweats to pop up when she pulled the drawers out. It did so via some kind of spatial weirdness, because no matter which drawer she opened the same set of clothes was visible.

"So, you were tiny and now you're not? Wait, are you my aunt or my mom? I'm… confused," Yew tried again, ignoring Taylor's dilemma. Truthfully it wasn't like it was that much of a dilemma either, it just meant she would have to grab a bunch of sand from the beach or something to transmute instead of destroying the pinkest most frilly dress in her wardrobe.

At least she'd found a way to sort of threaten the dresser into giving her sweats to her on demand though.

"I was limited in scope before. Now you may gaze upon my full glory!" Nemesis clarified.

"Okay, but… are you like… mom's sister, or..?" Yew repeated his question. Taylor ignored the byplay, and swiftly opened a Gap in front of herself, lightly pulling apart space and allowing a stream of sand to pour into a large bowl she crafted with her magic.

'Do you require assistance?' Ozma asked her politely. She noted that his voice had slowly started to increase in octave, but set the thought aside for the moment in favour of passing control of the magical container to him so she could concentrate. Taking a deep breath, she allowed her tattoos to spread up her arms, then dug both fists into the pile of beach sand.

'Please and thank you. Do you know anything about tailoring?' She asked, glancing at Yew and then back down at the sand.

'Just a tad,' Ozma allowed, and Taylor felt a steady stream of information entering her mind from Ozma's describing a handful of simple patterns that should allow her to produce a cotton suit for the boy.

Two minutes of concentration and drastically less sand later, and she gently pulled the entire outfit out of the bowl of what sand remained, banishing the extra mass back into a Gap and waving the clothing over to Yew.

"There. And just call her your aunt - it'll get confusing otherwise," Taylor said dryly.

"Call me Superior Mother instead!" Nemesis demanded.

"Please. Don't." Taylor requested with what she was sure must have been a strained expression on her face.

"Maybe Yew should go change? You wouldn't want him to be late now, would you?" Demmy interjected, defusing the situation before Nemesis could do as she always did when she didn't get her way - and attack whatever was bothering her.

Nemesis squinted at the projection for a moment, then grunted, turning to push Yew out of the room.

"Do you know how to put on a tie?" Taylor heard her asking as she followed after him.

"No?"

"Neither do I. Let us awaken Danny."

"So," Taylor said finally, turning back to her bed, before remembering she now had access to her sweats and pivoting to grab those instead of the brown sweater and skinny jeans sitting on the edge of her bed.

Naturally, when she opened the dresser this time the pink frilly thing was there. Equally naturally, the drawer slammed shut when she attempted to reach for it.

"We can't tell you the current problem. It's… complicated," Demmy said eventually, clearly growing uncomfortable with the silence as Taylor changed.

"Alien space parasite stuff?" Taylor asked with some concern.

"...Yes, I suppose that does… sum it up," Demmy allowed with a frown, clasping her hands in her lap.

"So… what about the other stuff. With your new you," she asked, seeking at least a consolation prize to soothe her current lingering anxiety over not even knowing what the problem was.

"Humans on that earth are extinct. In a sense, the only beings left are machine intelligences," Demmy explained, standing to help Taylor squeeze into the stupid jeans.

Seriously, how did something that was arguably looser than her costume manage to be so much harder to get on and off?

"So this you is dead? Or… I mean I assume you can copy dead people. Sigurd definitely shouldn't be alive anymore, right?" Taylor asked for clarification.

"No. We were alive well after humanity had gone extinct," Demmy explained, stepping away once Taylor had managed to squeeze into her pants, and turning to find a belt for her. She didn't actually need a belt to keep her pants on, but she did need one to keep a handful of her utility pouches on her. Sure, she could keep things like healing talismans and such in the Gap - but sometimes it was just easier not to open a nightmare portal everytime you wanted to open your purse.

And since Taylor was averse to the idea of having a purse in the first place, she opted for a utility belt. Like any sane cape would.

"Ooooh. You aren't human, huh? Elf?" Taylor asked quizzically, then cut off the projection before Demmy could answer her. "No wait, it's tinkering so, maybe not an Elf. Then again, it's kind of magic tinkering so-"

"I'm an android," Demmy supplied before she could hare off on a tangential guessing game.

"Hey! I like guessing." She pouted, but staring at Demmy's melancholic expression reminded Taylor of something, however.

"We think if we don't do something, it will happen again,"

She felt a chill run down her spine, but maintained her facial expression and quickly suppressed the disquieting feeling. She could actually hide what she was feeling from Emmy. She had most of the power and control in their relationship.

She just didn't usually bother exercising it.

"Huh. What happened to all the humans then? And… I mean you're pretty soft for an android." Taylor asked nonchalantly, poking Demmy's cheek with a finger in a teasing manner to distract from the intent of the question.

She wasn't stupid. If Demmy said she couldn't talk about it, she probably meant it literally - but that didn't mean she couldn't apply some critical thinking to things.

"There was a… disease. Magical in nature. It directly targeted the soul, killing the body through transmutation. To treat it, or rather, to avoid it, we had to separate all the humans from their souls, wait it out until it was gone before they could be returned to their bodies. The androids in charge of ensuring the souls were able to return to their bodies… failed," she explained, going about getting dressed herself as she spoke in an unhurried and unhappy tone.

Like she was reading an epitaph.

Taylor got the distinct impression that there were a lot of details Demmy wasn't telling her, but feeling like she had already pressed enough on her friend, she allowed silence to reign for a moment as she contemplated that.

What she wanted to do was ask if Demmy thought the humans of her world were in danger of imminent extinction. She wanted to ask why Demmy couldn't explain. She wanted to ask what she could do to help. She wanted to know if it was her fault somehow.

She wanted to know who she had to obliterate to make the problem go away.

But as with so many things in her life recently, she already knew she wouldn't get an answer. Not a straight one, anyway.

And that made the rest of the morning absolutely miserable to pretend to be happy about - even if she did manage to get the first shipment of Jacques' machines when she dropped Yew off for the day.

The magic lightbulb was coming along okay, at least.

Wednesday, March 30th , 2011

Schnee Mansion, Remnant

"Have you got lunch?" Taylor asked as they emerged from a Gap into Jacques' main foyer. She ignored the sudden appearance of half a dozen automated turrets as they emerged from various surfaces and from behind various forms of cover. She also ignored the handful of men and women in nondescript tactical gear that boiled out of the hallways like ants to surround her.

Instead, she opted to turn to Yew and squint at him, stretching a hand up to brush back his uncombed hair and finding she was too short to reach the titan's head. So she paused, frowned, and stepped upward onto the air, before doing it anyway.

"I- didn't think I'd need one?" Yew replied, lifting a finger in thought.

"On the ground! Now!" someone screamed at them.

"Of Course you need lunch! Look, how long is your shift? Maybe I can bring you something later?" Taylor offered.

"Can't I just go get food from somewhere nearby if I need it? I'm not that hungry anyway," Yew answered worriedly.

"Honey, you don't have any of the local money," Taylor pointed out, testing the appellation out and finding it agreeable. She was aware, abstractly, that parents tended to abbreviate their kids names, or give them pet names, or refer to them with terms of endearment. Her own father called her 'kiddo' more than he used her actual name, and despite it being well in the past, she could more than remember her mother using a smorgasboard of cutesy words instead of just her name.

She just… hadn't had the chance to really acclimate to things.

Intellectually, she recognized that by most metrics she was a mother. It was weird to think about, and if she went back in time two months it would probably give her a combination stroke and aneurysm to contemplate - but she was at peace with it. She accepted it, and did her best to be present and helpful to her magical spawned children.

But speech patterns and terms of familiarity weren't something you just woke up and arbitrarily acquired. More importantly, the intellectual understanding of her situation wasn't always something she remembered. She held great affection for her kids, and would do just about anything to make sure they were happy and safe - but she still had a hard time thinking of them as her 'kids' without putting the word in highly skeptical brackets.

She was working on it.

If she wasn't filthy rich she'd probably feel very guilty indeed about providing for them.

"I mean… don't I get paid? I can just use that, right?" Yew posited, beaming a bright proud smile at her that left her momentarily flat-footed.

Yew was very earnest, and by no means dumb - but that didn't mean he had any greater understanding of the world around him than your average preteen. She supposed it would be a lot to ask for a tree to suddenly acquire knowledge of society at large.

"Ground! Now!" someone else barked, and one of the guards swarming around them edged forward to try and jab the barrel of his gun into the small of Taylor's back.

"You won't get any money on your first day. Most places pay every employee at once on a specific schedule. Make sure you ask for HR and work that stuff out, okay? You have your emergency tag?" she asked, not bothering to turn to observe the man behind her, since Yew had already stretched his arm past her to pinch the barrel of the weapon closed between his thumb and forefinger.

"Yeah, but-" Yew said awkwardly.

"Honey, if you encounter something that's actually dangerous to you, just use the tag, okay? Most things still have to breathe and the other end of that Gap should let out past the moon. But only if you absolutely have to, okay? I've got a mark on you so just yell into it if you need me," Taylor insisted, stretching her hands up again to readjust his tie.

"'Kaaaay," Yew allowed in a tone of voice that made her feel like he was now no longer listening to her and was really just humoring her worries.

'Do… my kids maybe not have an appropriate sense of fear towards anything? That's… bad, right? I know I'm weird, but I at least have a self-preservation instinct…' she wondered.

"I see you didn't bother to knock this time," Jacques' voice rang out just as the guards filling the room had decided to rearrange themselves so as to be able to open fire without hitting each other.

Taylor turned to find the pompous man leisurely walking down the staircase to meet them, with the… she wanted to say goat? With the goat faunus from the other day trailing behind him nervously.

"Just dropping him off for work. Figured I'd pick up the equipment you promised us along the way," Taylor replied chipperly. She'd realized a while ago that you could be very intimidating indeed by simply acting happy when you really shouldn't. It made for effective threats without actually requiring you to be culpable for, well, threatening someone.

And she couldn't think of someone she wanted to threaten more than Jacques Schnee.

"It will take some time to-" Jacques began irately, but she cut him off.

"I'll be back to pick them up later today. I assume you are at least that efficient," she said, then, without bothering to wait for a response, turned back to Yew.

"Have a good day at work, sweetie!" she said, giving him a quick hug before exiting back through the Gap she had arrived in.

"Bye mom, love you!" Yew called after her, waving excitedly towards her as she left.

When she emerged again, she was still on Remnant, albeit a much different continent than the one she had just been on.

The bird people - she seriously needed to come up with a better name for this race she had created - were always just a bit uncomfortable to interact with. Usually, she would have had Emmy on hand to distract her - when they were a red trench coat-wearing lunatic it was easy to allow them to take the spotlight, and distract from the borderline worship they provided her everytime she came here.

But today, Emmy stayed behind. As a tinker, their new forms weren't as good at getting into direct engagements as she would like. Pemmy and Demmy were capable of fighting - much more so unadorned than the average tinker, for certain - but even so, they needed a lab. Which was exactly what Taylor expected they would be arranging for while she was at school.

It was a pity, because Taylor always loved seeing her fellow students' reactions to Emmy's new forms, but not ultimately a huge loss. They'd turn up at school eventually, at least.

"Hello?" she asked, once more appearing in the creepily ornamented room that had been set aside for her to teleport into.

Everytime she came here it looked more and more like a shrine, and less and less like a waiting room.

In fact, where before it had been a lightless room, now the ceilings had been raised, and a stained glass relief of herself wielding a sword and staff took up a majority of one wall.

"Yikes…" she muttered, inwardly cringing at the display.

'There are worse Gods to worship,' Ozma pointed out in a rare moment of interest.

He was always more interested when she was with the bird people. They were his people, after all.

"Still creepy," she replied absently, turning back around to the door leading into what she now realized was a chapel.

…They'd turned her designated Gap entryway into a chapel.

A chapel.

'I believe that that is drastically more 'creepy','' Ozma responded, partially indicating the robed woman who had raced into the room at just that moment.

She had a veil covering most of her face, and wore a vaguely nun-like raiment that was reversed in color to what Taylor was accustomed to seeing. It was… also a lot less conservative than a proper nun's outfit, but she supposed that was the case for basically everything on Remnant. They'd fought a whole war over it at one point.

"Great Nexus! I apologize for-" Cinder Fall began, throwing herself to the ground in front of Taylor before she had even finished her sentence.

"Oh, come on! You too?! I brought you here to teach them about cellphones and geopolitics, not to become my first stripper nun!" Taylor interrupted her, unable to muster the animosity she had once felt towards the woman.

She was just so… pathetic now. Hardly a danger to anyone.

"Apologies, great-" Cinder tried again, not rising from the floor.

"Ugh, just- just stand up and talk to me like a normal person. I promise I won't smite you," Taylor insisted, which was perhaps the wrong thing to say, because Cinder immediately rose to her feet with an annoyed expression.

"You are the worst God I have ever heard of! Do you even answer prayers? Do you hear them?" she asked acidically.

"Okay, I know I said like a normal person, but like, a normal person who still totally has control over your life and death," Taylor replied instead of answering the question, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Cinder countered, "You already said you wouldn't smite me."

"…Weren't you a lot more scared of me before?" Taylor asked curiously, glancing past the raven-haired woman at the two guards visible just outside the chapel.

"Yes. Because you obviously had no use for me before. I assume as long as I am being helpful and 'good' you will leave me be," she dryly replied.

"You're- you're really lucky I'm not more of a bitch. Look, just explain the situation to me. I swear the last time I was here no one needed anything from me," Taylor asked, conjuring somewhere to sit for herself and - after a moment of consideration - conjuring a second, less comfortable seat for Cinder.

"Things are progressing smoothly. The Chancellor and her council have pushed forward with completing the capital and are now expanding outward. Representatives have been sent to Menagerie, which is the main problem," Cinder reported, irate.

She kind of reminded Taylor of Amy, actually. She wasn't sure if that was good for Cinder, or bad for Amy.

Maybe she should try and get them in the same room sometime. For fun. Would they enter a never ending loop of barbs and insults, or ally together? She didn't know, but it was interesting to think about.

"And that problem would be..?" she pressed, crossing her arms and tapping one finger expectantly on her upper arm.

"The delegation overheard a number of Faunus laughing at your existence," Cinder expanded, expectantly.

"So?" Taylor asked in confusion.

"So, it would be best if you could join the next delegation, to prevent a holy war," Cinder continued, seemingly annoyed that she had to spell it out.

Taylor stared blankly at her, not fully comprehending what she was talking about. She hadn't come here for any of this. She just wanted to see if she could bum a few thousand feathers off them. Not… whatever this was.

"…What?" Taylor asked in a daze.

"Unless you want them to take over that little island in your name? I've been advising the Chancellor to create a counter intelligence agency for some time now, but I don't think she fully understands the concept," Cinder added thoughtfully, seemingly genuinely interested in the forging of a spy network.

"No. Just- no. Tell them that I welcome any and all criticism, and that other people can believe in whatever they want. Holy war? Seriously? Why?" Taylor blurted out, nearly losing enough focus that her chair began to waver until she re-solidified it.

"You haven't exactly been very forthcoming with how you should he worshiped," Cinder pointed out.

"Not at all! I don't want to be worshiped at all!" Taylor shot back in dismay.

She could sort of put up with the charade if it helped the bird people stay unified and happy - but holy war? What the hell?

"I'll be sure to tell the people that God has abandoned them," Cinder said sarcastically.

"That's not- just tell them that I prefer that no one declares war in my name!" Taylor tried again.

"I'll need proof that that's the case. You realize these people have had Gods before, right?" Cinder noted slyly.

Taylors eyes narrowed.

"You're doing this on purpose," she said slowly. Cinder snorted at the accusation.

"How do you think controlling large groups of people works? You have to provide them motivation. Either you threaten them, or you reward them - you don't just give orders and leave. Do you want me to help or not? Chancellor Merida has that… dagger… but my only political power comes from the Chancellor claiming you brought me here. Have you not noticed that this church is empty?" Cinder spat.

"So, what, the only way to stop a war is to give you specifically more political power?" Taylor asked doubtfully.

Cinder shrugged at her, one corner of her mouth quirking up as she struggled to contain her smile.

"Do what you want. Maybe there are other ways. I'm sure you'll find them with time. I'd say you have a few weeks. The Chancellor doesn't want war either - but the Council hasn't fully agreed yet," Cinder said easily.

"…I'll consider it," Taylor sighed, and then when Cinder looked a little too triumphant for her tastes, added on;

"After I talk to the Chancellor."

Cinder's expression didn't really fall all that much at that, but it did start to look a bit more strained.

"Also, I need ten thousand and one feathers from ten thousand and one bird people. Preferably from the best of the best, if possible. Strongest warriors, most skilled mages, smartest tacticians, that kinda thing," she added, figuring that she might as well get some use out of the woman.

The expression of befuddled confusion on Cinder's face immediately made Taylor's day.

Right up until she stepped back through her Gap to get to school for the morning, when Hao's aggravating voice called out to her, reminding her that the man even existed.

"Taylor! I have purchased reservations at the finest restaurant tonight, please, let me-" he began, loud enough to be audible across the entire hallway in front of her locker.

She did her best to tune him out. She really did.

But he was just. So. Loud.

Wednesday, March 30th , 2011

Brockton General Hospital, Brockton Bay

"And he just doesn't shut up! Every day!" Taylor complained, continuing a rant she had been going on for the better part of the last twenty minutes.

"You already told him no, though. Just tell him to fuck off next time he talks to you." Amy grouchily replied, making to offer Taylor her cigarette, then thinking better of it halfway through the motion and instead returning the half consumed death stick to her mouth.

"That- I mean, that would be rude. I don't like the guy, but he hasn't been mean to me or anything."

Taylor sighed, hanging her head over the side of the railing ringing the roof of the hospital, which both she and Amy were leaning on.

Taylor had opted to come see Amy after school because Pemmy and Demmy were still busy with their lab. Yew wouldn't be free from work for another few hours, and she didn't really have any other significant obligations at the moment.

Besides the holy war thing, but not only did she not want to think about that, she really didn't want to tell Amy about it.

It was embarrassing.

"So kick him to the moon or something. You're making this way harder than it has to be," Amy pointed out.

"Normal people can't just throw people into space for annoying them," Taylor fired back.

"Normal people are stupid," Was Amy's immediate reply.

"You wouldn't use your powers to make someone's arms fall off just for annoying you," Taylor pointed out shrewdly.

"That's different," Amy answered, taking a pull from her cigarette and then flicking the remaining nub at the ground.

"What, cus you can't get away with it? It's not like-" Taylor started to argue.

"Because no one tries to hit on me like that. Or at all."

"So you would do it if they did? I'm not buying it," Taylor responded with a snort.

"Nah. I'd just tell Vicky and she'd use her sociable popular girl powers to deal with it," Amy said.

"…Fair. Hey, do you think-"

"Her amazing powers of 'being pretty and famous' only really extend to our school. Sorry," Amy cut her off.

Taylor shrugged and said, "Damn. Had to try."

Silence passed between the two for a moment as Amy withdrew another cigarette from within her robes, causing Taylor to frown.

"You shouldn't smoke so much," Taylor said with a sigh, stretching a hand out to yank the smoke away from her.

"Legally speaking, I shouldn't smoke at all. And yet here we are," Amy shot back dryly, snatching the cigarette back from her.

There was no reality where Amy could take much of anything from Taylor if she didn't want her to, but ultimately Taylor didn't think it was fair to stop her. She didn't agree with her - but she didn't own her, either.

What was she supposed to do, hover around her all day stopping her from smoking?

"Someone's cranky today. Did something happen?" she asked instead of continuing to try to convince her to stop. For all she had her own problems, Taylor was very aware that other people had their own issues. It just so happened that issues most other people found insurmountable, she could typically manage with ease. Maybe she could help with whatever-

"There's this girl I like, but she's kind of dumb and never notices. And this guy I know is also into her, and it stresses me out because I'm afraid they'll end up together," Amy said, eyeing Taylor with a weird, somewhat nervous expression as she spoke.

Taylor blinked once, then considered.

"I didn't know you were into girls. Have you tried talking to her?" she tried, slightly annoyed that romance was the one area she was absolutely horrible in.

"Whenever she remembers me, yeah," Amy said, still giving Taylor that funny look.

"I meant about your feelings," Taylor clarified.

"What, like, just ask her out, point-blank?" Amy asked incredulously.

"Sure, why not?" Taylor asked, tilting her head in curiosity.

"She's… picky. Like you," Amy said awkwardly.

"Must be this tall to ride?" Taylor joked, holding her hand out parallel to the ground and restraining the urge to cringe at the unfortunate choice of words.

She'd been very annoyed and flustered at the time. She didn't feel like she could be blamed for that. She'd gone from most bullied kid at school to, well, whatever she counted as now, in a very short period of time.

People liking her freaked her out.

Amy winced. "Yeah."

"I'd still try it. If it was me anyway, it might work. I just said all that stuff before because I didn't want random people approaching me because of my looks. If you actually know this girl? She might listen," Taylor said with a shrug.

She was platonic life partners with her own superpower. She really wasn't in a position to judge other people's choice of partner.

"So… if I were to ask you-" Amy began slowly, her face turning bright red.

"What's up, bitches!" Vicky yelled as she came in for her landing, practically shaking the rooftop as she hit the ground.

"Vicky!" Amy shrieked in indignation at the sudden landing.

"I give it a six out of ten on the landing. Needs work," Taylor said blandly.

"I don't wanna hear about landings from a girl who can fly but chooses to run on air instead!" Vicky countered, instantly getting between Amy and Taylor to pull them into a group hug that neither resisted.

"Flying with magic is hard. Running is way easier." Taylor defended herself.

"Suuuuure. Do you have much time? Wanna go shopping? I'm still scouting the best places at your new mall-slash-castle-slash-house," Vicky said with a glint in her eyes.

Taylor blanched.

Vicky was definitely one of her best friends - but shopping with her was anything but fun. Mostly, it was just hours of trying on progressively girlier or more revealing outfits until Taylor's tolerance for such was exceeded.

And then Vicky would coax her into continuing, anyway.

"WowlookatthetimeIgottagodoathinginanotherdimensiongreatseeingyoubye!" Taylor blurted out, noting Amy's eye twitching rapidly as she was thrown to the wolves.

'Sorry Amy! I really am busy though!' she thought at her brunette friend as she hurled herself bodily off the roof and quickly through a Gap.

Crisis, averted.

Tomorrow's actions are limited to attending Parian's event. Training will progress as normal.

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now).

Special: Choose up to Two (2) friends to accompany you to Parian's fashion show tomorrow.

Your parents:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Danny (3)

[ ] Jess (2)

[ ] Mouse Protector (2)

The Oathbound:

Outstanding group tasks:

[ ] Trainwreck (3)

[ ] Aspirant (3)

[ ] Parian (3)

[ ] Oliver (3)

[ ] Miss Kim (1)

[ ] Willow (1)

[ ] Jeeves (0)

The Bratpack (As a group, includes Mem and Mun):

Outstanding group tasks: Train the Brats (Ongoing).

[ ] Aisha (2)

[ ] Dinah (4)

Your kids:

Outstanding group tasks: Unleash your kids on that fuck Jacques. Yew wants to go to college.

[ ] Mem (4)

[ ] Mun (2)

[ ] Simone (3)

[ ] Yew (2)

[ ] Gram (1)

Your friends:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Victoria (3)

[ ] Amy (5)

[ ] Clockblocker (4)

[ ] Write In

The Omake Shop (Found Here) Is now reopened! I will not be appending voting to it to this chapter, simply allowing for vote requests to be made!

From this point forward, Omake Shop purchases will be in alternating blocks! If the next purchase is from the upper portion - the Bleed - then the one after that must be from the lower portion, and so on, and so forth.

If you wish to make a purchase (to be voted on in the next chapter) please PM me, and make sure 'Omake Shop' is somewhere in the PM title. The link above should take you to the list of all options, including those already purchased.

Thank you, and good night.

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Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Jan 15, 2023

#55,172

[X] Yang (0)

[X] Victoria (3)

Current Energy: 18

Current Training: Tinker Specialty - Basic Masotech (7/10) - Complete!

Current Emulation Status: Here

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Hebert Household, Brockton Bay

As it turned out, running away from your friends in order to avoid 'shopping' was almost as boring and monotonous as following Vicky around while the blonde shoved her in and out of change rooms to try things on. Vicky seemed to take endless joy in treating her like a doll to be dressed up, which was flattering, but she tended toward clothing Taylor would consider somewhat… scandalous.

Granted, she was so highly averse to showing her skin that even something as simple as a sweater that showed a little too much of her shoulders was 'scandalous' to her.

But recently, Vicky had been on a swimsuit kick, and Taylor could actually see Amy's soul leaving her body every time she was forced to wait for the duo to change into a new, almost but not quite identical set of swimwear from the last.

Personally, Taylor kind of figured she'd just end up getting a pair of boys swim trunks and working from there, but the mere mention of doing so had nearly made Vicky explode - so she kept the thought in mind without actually voicing it. Not that it was liable to come up any time soon - it was like 20 degrees out, tops. Not exactly swimming weather.

Unfortunately, at least that particular experience, common as it was, wasn't what Taylor ended up doing with her evening. If she had, she would have at least had the company of Vicky and Amy to stave off some of the boredom.

Instead, she spent her entire evening using alchemy to produce machine parts for Pemmy and Demmy.

She didn't mind helping out, but the first few times she had asked what any of it was for or why they were so serious about it, she had gotten another polite but obvious deflection - something which was starting to really get on her nerves. She didn't like being mad at Emmy. It happened often enough when she was Dante, but that was in a more… playful kind of way. It wasn't genuine anger or annoyance, but more exasperation, rather.

But Pemmy and Demmy were so tight-lipped about whatever world changing thing was stressing them out that it was starting to actually bother her.

She knew she could order them to just tell her… but she was equally sure that if she did that, then she would lose something about their relationship that she would probably never get back - in addition to a great deal of self-respect.

Hopefully, however, the time for secrecy was soon past. While she hadn't previously been able to make heads or tails of the purpose of any of the machines she helped rapidly put together last night, she had made sure to keep them firmly in her memory for later.

She had a feeling that once she actually had a Tinker power of her own she could reason some of it out herself, and hopefully, even help.

Once she figured out what the problem was, anyway.

"You know, I looked up how lightbulbs are made, and this is about ten thousand times more complex - for no additional benefit," she pointed out groggily as she carefully used just the barest hint of Ozma's particular brand of magic to move a silver filament barely a micron wide into position.

She had no earthly idea how anyone was supposed to design and make anything using technology so tiny and delicate without an entire factory floor dedicated to the manipulation of such things, but she supposed that her power always found a way, so she shouldn't be all that surprised by it.

"Maso-powered bulbs last almost indefinitely, and only require the barest fraction of a mote of power to be turned on," Pemmy lectured her like a school teacher, putting one hand on her hips and wagging a finger at Taylor like a schoolmarm.

She was actually very warm and motherly to be around most of the time, it just wasn't immediately obvious because of how frequently she would get sidetracked by whatever was bothering her and her sister.

It made Taylor even more annoyed that they were hiding things from her, because now it just felt like this secret of theirs was keeping her apart from her best friend.

Friends.

"Yeah, but… if the power source is in the bulb, how do you turn off the lights?" she asked pointedly, fitting the final filament into position and gently putting the base of the bulb down. Then she gently put the top half of the casing back on, and tapped it with a finger, using alchemy to seal it shut.

Then she held up her creation for inspection.

"This is a model of lightbulb most often used in laboratories where the staff work twenty four seven. They aren't intended to turn off," Pemmy noted idly, bending forward to examine the simple object with a critical eye.

"If you really had to, you could just put them in recesses in the wall though. Just close the panel to dim the light," Demmy added from off to the side.

In a rare showing, the pair had decided to both be present for her training today. Taylor took that as a sign that she was probably done acquiring the power - even though she didn't feel any different than usual. Mostly.

"Or I could just make magic lights. Or use normal light bulbs. Or a million other things. Your world seriously just decided to replace everything with this Maso stuff?" she asked incredulously.

"It was an easily synthesized infinite power source that could be safely contained within any object it was to power. You don't realize how vulnerable a power station is until you really need one," Demmy answered with a shrug.

"Speaking of easily synthesized… Do you have some on hand so I can see if this thing will work?" Taylor asked, flicking a fingernail against the glass bulb.

She wasn't a Tinker, and she didn't feel like a Tinker - but she was a wizard, and so had taken a few extra minutes out to enchant the glass bulb to be more durable.

Just in case.

"No, but we can test it in the lab later today," Pemmy said agreeably.

Taylor slowly lowered the bulb in her hand and squinted at her partners.

"...After the fashion show, right?" she asked pointedly.

The two glanced at each other, and Taylor could swear an entire conversation happened right before her eyes, with the two wiggling their eyebrows and shifting between dozens of facial expressions in a handful of moments before turning back to her.

"We… think what we're working on is a bit more important than-" Demmy started to explain, then paused when Taylor's expression shifted from suspicious to sad. She couldn't help it. It didn't feel fair. She didn't want to say she hated Emmy when she was like this… but she kind of did. It was almost enough to make her cry.

"Fine. Whatever," she bit out through grit teeth, turning around so the pair wouldn't see her eyes start to redden.

She was aware that Emmy always had and probably always could tell what she was feeling at any given moment, but her rational mind didn't want anything to do with such thoughts.

She just didn't want her friend to see her cry, especially not when it was over something so… stupid. They had more important things to do than be with her. Big deal. It happened all the time.

It just… also felt like being abandoned. And she hated it.

"Taylor-" Pemmy tried to comfort her, but Taylor wasn't having it.

"I'm fine," she bit out again, stepping away so the extended hand from the redhead that should have landed on her shoulder fell somewhat short.

To distract herself from what was going on behind her, Taylor lifted the stupid lightbulb again. She'd finished it, but it hadn't yielded any actual insights. She wasn't even sure she got any kind of power out of completing it. It was just… a stupid light bulb. A stupid magic powered lightbulb with no magic around to power.

Well. There was magic. She was magical as shit, if she was being entirely honest with herself, but it wasn't the right kind of magic.

Or was it?

Struck by a strange inspiration, Taylor gently began to run some of Ozma's magic through the base of the bulb, extending the power up from her fingertips into the spiral base of the object. She could sense some of the connections that were within lighting up… but not all of them. Not even most of them. It was as though the power she was providing was only one part of what was needed to light the stupid thing, and - feeling that frustration was probably a better feeling than sorrow at the moment - she tried again.

This time, she pushed some borrowed power from the ambient spirits around her into the bulb. The same thing happened again, though different connections seemed to light up.

She was dimly aware that Pemmy and Demmy were behind her saying something, but at this point she was almost in a trance. Some far off part of her mind guessed that she was probably experiencing a tinker fugue, but that couldn't be right because she wasn't really tinkering. This was more… wizarding.

A wizard fugue.

Regardless, she now had a hypothesis to test, and even though she knew she could exit this state anytime she wanted… she also knew that doing so would just bring back that crushing sensation of abandonment from earlier - so she didn't.

Instead, she gathered up everything she had available to her. Spiritual Power, Aura, Demonic Power, Prana, Ambient Spirits, and the 'Soul' Magic specific to Ozma.

And she drove it all into the lightbulb at once.

All of the connections lit up, each individual power lighting up different connections and filaments… but somewhere between start and finish there was a… disconnect. An incompatibility. All of the power reached the end of the connection… and then nothing happened.

There was no light.

So then, the problem was obviously that she needed every connection to light up… but each connection needed to be compatible with the next one.

What she did next, she was sure would be impossible to replicate, and later when asked, she wouldn't even really remember doing it.

But she began to sort of… fold… her power. It was hard. The hardest thing she had ever done with her powers in fact. Control had always come fairly easily to her. When your first power has the limitation of either being under control, or killing everyone around you, that kind of thing tends to happen. This… this didn't come easily. This felt like trying to breathe water. Like trying to swim in concrete. A fish could more easily fly through the sky than she could simply force all of her powers together into one cohesive whole.

But second by second, minute by minute, using the will and focus of someone who had spent every morning for months meditating, and focusing, and controlling herself in ways most people could not even begin to understand, she made it so.

And for one single, beautiful moment, the bulb lit up. It was a ghostly pale blue, with streaks of white rippling along the outer edges as though it were being contained by something. And looking closely at it… she could almost… almost… see… another person? They were like her, but… not. They seemed to be completely unaware they were being watched, and more importantly, seemed to have taken much more after Dante than Taylor ever had, wearing aviator glasses and a resized version of his red leather coat as naturally as Taylor herself wore her haori.

She was just about to reach out to do… something. Anything to try and interact with the strangely familiar girl… when the light went out.

Well. No. The light didn't 'go out'.

It exploded in her face, sending a pulse of energy washing over the garage and knocking everything - including her - to the ground.

That was about when Taylor snapped back to reality, dazedly feeling something moist and wet dribbling down her face from her ears, eyes, and nose.

Pemmy and Demmy had rushed over to her before anything else, with panicked and stricken looks on their faces that Taylor for some reason found profoundly amusing at that exact moment.

Still somewhat dazed, she grinned impishly up at the red heads leaning over her, trying to help her sit up, and quickly kissed them each on the forehead.

"I love you guys. Wizard fugue… bad," she stated matter of factly.

And then she blacked out.

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Brockton General Hospital, Brockton Bay

She woke up feeling… actually a lot better than she had felt for most of this past week. The lethargy of depression didn't hinder her in the slightest as she bolted upright in the weirdly uncomfortable bed she found herself in, only to be immediately levered back down by Pemmy and Demmy, who appeared next to her with their hands already outstretched to land on opposite shoulders.

She was drastically stronger than either of them - at least, when she chose to apply herself - but she still allowed them to push her back down into what she now recognized as a hospital bed.

If she was being honest, she was just glad that both of them were with her when she woke up - even if that did make her feel somewhat guilty.

"What were you thinking!" Demmy barked at her, letting go of her along with her sister the minute Taylor was back on the bed, and rapidly turning to fiddle with anything she could get her hands on. Seemingly unconsciously, the messy haired redhead went about smoothing her blankets, readjusting the backrest of the bed, and double checking all of the monitoring equipment sitting around her.

She supposed they must have given her a private room, because no one else was present, and she had a fairly nice view out of the window that took up most of one wall of the room.

"Well, I just thought that-" Taylor started sheepishly.

"That was very dangerous! In all of our studies, only beings of phenomenal age and power should be able to condense their own Maso!" Pemmy continued on from her sister's initial bark.

"How was I supposed to know-" She tried again, only to be cut off as Pemmy abruptly deposited a tray of food in front of her. Nasty hospital food at that.

Or maybe it wasn't nasty. Maybe she just got so used to eating well-cooked homemade meals from the Heap or Emmy or, well, herself, that her sense of what was good or not was skewed. She could remember a time when a baloney sandwich with no toppings was Mana from heaven.

"You could have seriously injured yourself! Your powers aren't supposed to interact that way! They're separate! Distinct!" Demmy insisted, lifting a hand as though to jab her in the chest with one finger to emphasize her point, only to recall where they were and why they were there, and choose to brush some of Taylor's hair out of the way instead. The oddly loving gesture was completely at odds with what the twins were saying, but Taylor supposed that they were - in their own way - demonstrating their love and care.

"I mean, it totally worked for a second-" She tried again.

"You nearly catastrophically destabilized the calibration our back-end uses to keep you alive! You're like six nuclear reactors strapped together, why would you plug them into each other?!" Pemmy hissed at her.

Taylor sighed, loudly, then tried, yet again, to explain herself.

"Stop," she commanded, well, not literally commanded because she could also have done that, but still. The intent was there.

The twins turned to each other at her singular word, then back to her with flat, unamused stares.

"First off, how was I supposed to know any of that? All you told me was that Maso was dead dragon magic you scraped into a petri dish and used to power your lightbulbs. Second, I'm what?" She asked incredulously.

"You're fine. We fixed it. Just… don't do it again." Demmy rushed to calm her down.

"Okay, so am I dying now, or what? You're sending mixed signals." Taylor asked in exasperation.

"You're… physically fine. Your powers too. It was just a bit… touch and go for a second, is all. You superseded most of our… call it programming, and did something you really shouldn't have been able to do," Pemmy offered with a thoughtful expression on her face.

"But it totally worked," Taylor pointed out, much to the twins' annoyance.

"Yes, and technically, if you fed a dog a radioactive isotope you would have a living nuclear dog as long as you didn't care about the dog's survival," Demmy fired back.

Taylor winced, and then frowned at that.

"...Are you comparing me to a dog?" she asked suspiciously.

"Why is that the part you latched on to?" Pemmy asked in exasperation.

"Because worrying about exploding just because I tried to cross the streams once isn't productive. What time is it?" she asked by way of deflection.

It was possible that she held an unhealthy lack of fear for her own life, but she just… didn't feel any danger on this topic. She did, however, know that Pemmy and Demmy would give her a hard time over it, so…

She opted to apologize now and to keep fiddling with it on her own time.

Maybe with some safeguards? Oh, she could make a variation on the lightbulb but with a capacitor instead of a bulb! Then she could pour power in and try to force it together away from her body!

And… actually when did she know what a capacitor was? Before it was just a sci-fi term to her, but now… now she actually knew what one was and how to make one tuned to magic.

"It's eleven-thirty," Pemmy said in a suspicious tone, no doubt picking up on enough of her emotions to know she was feeling somewhat defiant in the face of their combined warnings.

But not enough to do anything about it.

This caused Taylor to drop her musings on her newfound technological mastery - okay well, she mostly had a list of mundane items she could modify to run on magic, but still, - and bolt back up in bed again.

"We gotta go!" She blurted out, hastily moving the food tray out of her way and opening a gap that swiftly deposited a set of casual clothes on top of her.

"Wha-" Demmy began but Taylor blithely interrupted her.

"I mean, I gotta go," Taylor amended somewhat bitterly as she ignored their newfound attempts to keep her in bed.

She felt fine, and she could heal herself anyway, so the hospital was an entirely superfluous place to be. So, thinking, she rapidly changed into the jeans and loose fitting cardigan she kept as 'backup clothes', heedless of the presence of either Pemmy or Demmy.

She'd gotten accustomed to changing around her projection so long ago that it barely even registered to her anymore.

"Are you sure you feel alright?" Demmy finally asked her, rather than trying to convince her to stay - a prospect which she assumed was obviously a lost cause to the twins.

"I'm fine. I have to prepare for Sabah's fashion thingy! I told her I'd go help setup, and I forgot to ask Vicky if she wanted to come!" She hurriedly explained, her mind swiftly switching tracks away from the heavier topics that made her antsy and uncomfortable, and onto something more mundane.

…For certain values of the mundane.

You could call it denial, or deliberate avoidance of a problem, but if asked directly she would just point out that heroism is great and all, until you stop appreciating the life you are being a hero to protect.

Work life balance was what it was.

That was her story and she was sticking to it.

When she was done changing, she turned to find the twins standing far closer to her than she had originally expected, both of them favouring her with worried, mildly annoyed looks that left her feeling slightly guilty. As though reading her thoughts on the matter though, the pair shared another of those looks with each other, before turning back to her.

"We can postpone our work for a day. Alchemy has already put us ahead of schedule," Pemmy offered, as though unsure if Taylor would take the olive branch.

She almost snorted.

She was many things, but as she had come to find of late, she was not actually in possession of a great deal of shame.

She felt like the her from three months ago would probably scream into a pillow for an hour at the assertion, but it was true, and her first set of powers had taught her anything, it was how to capitalize on an opportunity.

"Promise you won't leave me halfway to do something mysterious?" she asked pointedly, to which Demmy could only roll her eyes at her, while Pemmy looked mildly taken aback at her change in tone.

"We promise," Demmy responded dryly, to which Pemmy could only nod along like a deer in the headlights.

"Yes! Next stop, wherever Vicky is!" she cheered, before hastily pulling out her cell phone to text the girl in question.

"It's a school day, you know," Demmy pointed out to her.

"Yeah, but it's lunch time, and Arcadia does that half-day thing for the Wards anyway," Taylor responded distractedly while clumsily typing; 'Can I meet you outside your school?' with the slow laboriousness of the elderly into her smartphone.

Hey, she owned one, that didn't mean she was completely fluent with the things. Vicky said she had a lot of catching up to do in this area, mostly in the form of not needing to type full sentences, but she didn't see the problem, so she had no intention of changing.

When she got an exasperated affirmative from the blonde, she grinned, and ripped open a gap that deposited her, Pemmy, and Demmy, on the sidewalk in front of Arcadia High.

It was perhaps because of this timing, that she did not notice the door to her hospital room exploding open mere moments after she left, disgorging Amy into the room after her, holding a bouquet of roses and looking anxious.

"I heard that… you were… injured," she began then trailed off when she determined the room was, in fact, empty.

She slowly allowed the arm holding the flowers to droop and then growled in irritation.

"That teleporting bitch," she muttered with a combination of anger and fondness, before spinning around and exiting the room.

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Arcadia High School, Brockton Bay

"Wait, I wanna guess!" Were Vicky's first words upon seeing Taylor emerge from her gap. She paused for a brief moment to glance past Taylor at Pemmy and Demmy, and the more rowdy of the two twins - Demmy - quickly waved her off.

"There's two of us now. Don't mind it," she said nonchalantly.

"Yes. We're only here to supervise - she hurt herself but won't stay in bed," Pemmy added with a wry amusement that wasn't quite enough to hide her actual annoyance.

"Uhuh…" Vicky said slowly, before doing what everyone that spent any length of time around Taylor did when something weird happened - and swiftly moved on.

"Anyway!" she repeated herself, waving exaggeratedly at the gap behind Taylor for emphasis.

It was probably a testament to how weird Brockton Bay had become, and how famous Taylor was in the city at this point, that all the surrounding pedestrians did to respond to the nightmarish hell portal was swerve to walk around it - some without even bothering to look up.

Oh sure, there were also a great deal of gawkers, some candid photography with cellphones and the like - but overall, anyone who wanted to could see the same sight outside Winslow at the beginning of nearly every school day, so it was much less jarring than it could have been.

Taylor was a known factor now, as it were.

"Uh… sure, but we don't have much time, so-" Taylor started to say, while awkwardly scratching her cheek.

"No, no, I totally have this!" Vicky insisted, landing on the sidewalk, having obviously only just deigned to float out of the school building behind them to meet her. She was wearing jeans and a white hoodie with her family's logo on it, and had her school bag slung over one shoulder haphazardly. She looked for all the world like a standard-issue sporty teenager, which was much at odds with the excessively glamorous way she liked to dress herself outside school.

Taylor just raised the patented Hebert eyebrow at her before gesturing for her to go on.

She also closed the gap behind her, if only to prevent pedestrians meandering into the road to avoid it.

"Alien invasion!" Vicky blurted out, lifting a hand into the air with one finger extended.

"What? No, we don't even have aliens like that in this dimension," Taylor responded blankly.

"I'm gonna ignore the particular way you refuted that for a second, but we'll circle back to it," Vicky said dismissively, before extending a second finger.

"You did something so crazy-stupid that you need my esteemed help to figure it out!" Vicky tried again.

"When do I ever- actually, don't answer that. Thin ice, Dallon." Taylor said pointedly to her friend, who shrugged at the response before extending a third finger.

"...You're here to drag me on some poorly thought out adventure without any warning or preparation?" Vicky asked finally, now sounding unsure of the statement, which caused it to come out more like a question than anything else.

Taylor rolled her eyes at her, before answering.

"None of the above. I came to ask if you wanted to come help me with Parian's fashion show thing in Boston today. I told her I'd go and I know you're into fashion stuff, so-" Taylor began, only to be cut off when Vicky lowered two of her fingers to make a pause motion at her, while pinching the bridge of her nose with her other hand.

"Got it. Third one. So I was right," she said with a mixture of annoyance and excitement in her tone.

"This isn't even an adventure, though!" Taylor insisted dejectedly.

"You're trying to whisk me away through a magic portal to do something exotic! How is that not an adventure?" Vicky shot back.

"There's no fighting though!" Taylor continued to insist.

"Adventures aren't defined by fighting, you psycho!" Vicky insisted in turn.

"Well… fine. It still doesn't count though. I'm warning you now, alright?" She asked dejectedly. Honestly, sometimes the disconnect between what other people thought was normal and what she thought was normal bothered her more than she'd like to admit. Not because it existed, but because she genuinely couldn't seem to remember it half the time.

She supposed that if the weirdness meter for most people maxed out at ten out of ten, hers maxed out at one hundred - so being at eleven out of ten barely phased her anymore.

"Taylor, I love you, you're very sweet, I appreciate all the opportunities you give me to do cool stuff, but ten minutes and then a quick shove through a portal isn't 'advanced warning'. I mean, oh my God, a fashion show? I have to do my hair, and get make up on, and change clothes, and probably shower since I had gym today and-" Vicky began to rant, then paused to squint at Taylor with a baleful glare.

"You… don't do any of that, do you?" she reasoned aloud.

"I shower!" Taylor objected instantly.

"But you don't do any of the other stuff? No skin care routine, no makeup, no- do you literally have a power that gives you perfect hair? Do you just… wake up like this?" Vicky asked incredulously, to which Taylor could only nod, dumbfounded at the question.

Was that not obvious? She felt like she was always a disheveled mess. She just didn't mind it because she was at least a fit, healthy one.

She understood intellectually that she was even kind of pretty by default now, and frankly, that was so much better than what she had going for her before that she was happy to take what she could get.

…Also, makeup sounded like a lot of work.

"Ugh. You're the worst," Vicky groaned at her, before pulling out her cellphone and rapidly firing off a bunch of text messages in the time it would have taken Taylor just to unlock her doohickey.

"Just… drop me at my house for ten- no, twenty minutes!" Vicky asked after a moment… well it was more of an order than a request, but Taylor shrugged, complying.

"Sure," she agreed, opening another gap that Vicky didn't even bother looking up from her cell phone at before floating upward and drifting through it.

Taylor could only snort at the nonchalance on display. She kind of missed it when people were freaked out by her gaps. It was funnier that way.

…She had the feeling she'd just had an extremely odd thought, but try as she might, she couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was, so she eventually let the thread drop, and moved onto the next thing on her mind.

After all, didn't she have another blonde friend who definitely wasn't used to her gaps that would be interested in high fashion?

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Beacon Academy, City of Vale, Remnant

"Wow, your cafeteria is… large," Taylor noted as she stepped through her gap and into open space at the foot of an excessively large lunch table.

"You knew that already, Master," Pemmy pointed out, from behind her, and Taylor could only shrug in response.

"Yeah, but still! My highschool still serves mystery meat sometimes, and I've never actually been here before!" Taylor countered, and then, when Demmy looked like she was going to say something clever back to her over it, she pointed an accusatory finger at the disheveled looking twin.

"Power-induced fever dreams don't count!" She added pointedly.

The twins paused at that, then turned to look at eachother, and shrugged as though they weren't invested enough in the argument to continue - even if they didn't necessarily agree. Emmy was always touchy about the 'accuracy' of her emulations, after all - even if they were fever dreams.

Then as one they vanished from mundane sight.

It wasn't just the table itself that was unreasonably sized though. Everything in the room was. The room itself was oversized. Like someone had taken the main hall of a castle and then plunked a kitchen and dozens of dining tables down in it.

Which, she supposed, was exactly what happened.

Taylor made a mental note of that for when she finished working on the derelict ferry back home. She wasn't quite sure she could achieve the same amount of spatial warping Yukari once had to create the Heap out of a defunct garage - but she'd worked with the enchantment enough times by now to be confident that she could emulate it to at least seventy percent of its original function. Sure, she'd technically taken the tools Yukari had left her and done most of that herself - but she'd be lying if she said she had a full grasp of everything that was going on at the time.

Heh. Emulate.

Regardless, it was like the difference between a colouring book and graphic design. The two things were related, but only technically.

"Uhhhhh," a blonde boy - Jaune Arc - let loose, leaning towards his partner, a crimson-haired girl, and whispering;

"Are we in trouble? Why's the scary guest lecturer here?" he asked nervously as Taylor approached.

"I am… unsure," the redhead - Pyrrha Nikos - responded cautiously, eyeing Taylor with a glint in her eyes.

"What, not going to call her your 'snow angel', Arc?" Weiss - who was sitting at the table with her whole team, in addition to four other teens Taylor took to be Jaune's team, said sarcastically to him.

"Please, no offense, but vomit boy already knows better than to hit on my sister while I'm right here," Yang replied for the flabbergasted young man.

"You have another sister? Wait, she was your sister this whole time?!" was said young man's only real response to the insult, which Taylor found very telling.

"We share a mom, but not really, because of interdimensional shenanigans and- look that's not why I'm here. And Weiss, be nice to Jaune," Taylor began to explain, only to pause and refocus herself, while absently chastising the heiress.

She still had vivid memories of this place. She'd lived a subjective lifetime here in the simulation that had garnered her Ozma, which - now that she thought about it…

'Awfully quiet, aren't you?' she asked him pointedly.

'I'm… acclimating to a new situation. Pay it no mind.' Was the distinctly feminine response she got back from hi- her. Her now.

'Is it… a situation I need to be worried about, or-' She asked suspiciously.

'It will embarrass you, but will not likely cause you any real problems,' was Ozma's succinct, and somewhat concerned response.

'So I should be worried?' she tried to ask for clarification, only to receive no discernible answer. She would've continued pressing for answers - because much as she wouldn't admit it, she hated being embarrassed - but the presence of her watchers made having a shouting match with her mental roommate impractical at the moment - so she didn't.

"I don't see why I should," Weiss responded to her chastisement with her characteristic petulance.

"Because being a bitch sucks?" Taylor offered absently.

"Excuse me?!" the heiress blurted out indignantly. Taylor blinked right back, somewhat surprised by the response.

"Has… has no one ever told you that you're kind of mean? I mean, you got better, but if you could just learn to be nicer from the start-" Taylor started to not really apologize only to be cut off by Ruby yelling off to her left.

"Blake! Oh my god! Blake's dying!" she blurted out, and Taylor turned to find the dark-haired faunus girl gagging and shaking in her seat as though having a seizure. Ruby buzzed about her with the air of a worried nurse, unsure of what to do to help the situation.

"Nnnnoooo, I think she's just trying not to laugh," Jaune pointed out bluntly.

"I am not-!" Weiss began to shout.

"She has gotten better though. A bit," Yang interrupted her lazily, leaning back in her seat to eye Taylor speculatively, before winking at her.

Taylor had no idea why. She really wasn't making a joke here - Weiss was just kind of a mean person for no reason sometimes, and it bothered her, because bullying was more than just stuffing people in lockers. Putting people down constantly was just as bad, in her opinion.

Just then, a loud bang drew the attention of everyone at the table, and Taylor found herself turning once more to a short, ginger girl that reminded her an awful lot of Emma. At least to look at. The differences were more than noticeable - she had shorter hair, a different facial structure, all kinds of things.

But still.

"Ren and I would like to know what's going on, please!" the ginger - Nora - called out pointedly to the ground with a wide smile on her face.

"Actually, I would prefer not to be inv-" a black-haired boy of asian looking descent began to argue from off to the side, only for Nora to turn and glare at him.

"Ren! I'm trying to use our collective bargaining power here! Stop undermining me!" she barked pleasantly at him.

As one, all eight of the teenagers at the table paused and turned to Taylor as though expecting an explanation.

So Taylor gave in, if only because she really didn't care if they believed her, and more importantly, really didn't have a need for secrecy here.

"I'm from an alternate reality where there are no Grimm and where a different version of our mom had me. So I'm not really related to Yang and Ruby, but I guess I sort of am in a cosmic sense," she explained flatly, noting dimly that Pemmy and Demmy had taken the opportunity to ghost through the floor and far into the bowels of the castle to do… something. She switched to their point of view for just a moment to make sure they weren't causing any trouble, and found them both staring intently at a giant mechanical pod with a girl frozen in its center.

The confused look on her face must have been noticeable, because she was soon drawn back to her own point of view by a poke to the cheek - where she found Nora standing right in front of her with one finger extended.

"So you're like, mirror Yang?" she asked quirkily.

"No, I-" Taylor began to argue only for the ginger to meander over to Yang and gesture for her to follow after her.

"Just stand next to each other for a second," she said and while Taylor was dubious about how this was going to help explain any of the situation to anyone, she acquiesced - if only because it was kind of nice to hang out with teenagers who neither worked for her, nor feared she would smite them for existing in her space.

Which was most of them back home, except Hao, who fell into the mysterious third category of being someone who knew she could smite him, and simply didn't care.

"And now! For the moment of truth!" Nora declared with a flourish, like a stage magician about to perform a trick.

At this point, most of the cafeteria was staring at them, and many of them were politely edging away from their table in fear of the still swirling portal full of hellish eyes behind Taylor.

She hadn't expected to take this long just talking to these people, but she didn't really mind it. Although, with that in mind, she should definitely close the gap before some poor idiot stumbled into it by mistake and she forgot them in there.

Boys may have pockets, but she had gaps.

It was at this point, that Nora casually reached towards both Taylor and Yang - who was curiously standing next to her with a bemused expression on her face, and swiftly yanked on a single strand of their hair. One for Taylor, and one for Yang.

She probably was going somewhere with that, or was going to say something pithy, but as one Yang snapped a hand out to lift Nora from underneath one shoulder, and Taylor snapped a hand out to lift her from the other.

"Don't."

"Touch."

"Our."

"Hair!"

Both girls snapped at once, hoisting the girl overhead and hurling her across the room.

Taylor wasn't stupid, of course. She was perfectly aware that Aura would keep her safe from the damage of being thrown that far and straight into a stone wall. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Regardless, while the surrounding students rapidly broke into a tremendous food fight - courtesy of Nora sliding down the wall and onto a bench, which subsequently upended several other students who took umbrage with the displacement - Taylor sighed and turned to Yang.

"Anyway, you wanna come to a fashion show on my world? I get you have school, but-" she was cut off by her sort-of-not-really sister lifting a hand to place a finger on her lips.

"Ssssh. You had me at 'fashion'," Yang said, already just as calm as Taylor was after the sudden outburst.

…Okay, so maybe they were more than just slightly similar.

Then there was a coughing noise from behind them, and Taylor turned to find seven sets of eyes staring expectantly at her.

Which gave Taylor an idea, actually.

"You know what? If you guys wanna come along too, I could use some extra security," she offered, only half-heartedly meaning it.

She didn't need security because she was probably the most secure person on her planet in the first place. Probably.

What she did need was not to have to drop everything to beat some guy up when she should really be focusing on making sure Sabah's show went smoothly.

In cooking terms, it'd be nice if she could get someone else to stir the boiling pot for her, at least once in a while.

The group exchanged glances amongst themselves before Weiss turned back to Taylor with an entirely serious expression on her face and said;

"Let's talk payment."

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Liberty Hotel, Boston

"Taylor! You're late!" Sabah barked at her the second she entered the room.

It had taken something like an hour to arrive at the hotel, because while she could use her gaps to go anywhere she was familiar with, she was not familiar with this particular hotel, and more importantly, she had been forced to trick at least half of her 'security' detail into traveling through a second gap in the first place.

The trip home to earth had been somewhat jarring to the members of Jaune's team who had no experience with them, which had of course necessitated the use of the van slash tank abomination Dante had left her to transport them.

Then, naturally, she had planned on simply driving through a gap and into Boston proper, which was when Taylor had hit her second roadblock.

The group was about as comfortable with Taylor's driving as they were with her nightmare portals. It wasn't her fault that a group of trained hunters and huntresses couldn't manage a bit of motion sickness! And… a bit of phasing through high speed traffic! And also… a few near misses…

The point was, after a brief period of being subjected to her amazing skills at driving, they had all agreed that a gap was preferable, which she had taken to mean it was okay to drive the van into one, but which apparently was not what was being asked of her, because combining the two unpleasant experiences had resulted in her being glared at by…

Well pretty much everyone.

Regardless. They were here, at the fancy hotel that was hosting the event, and they were only… sort of… late.

"I got here as fast as I could!" Taylor defended herself, although she didn't know why she bothered.

Sabah came in two flavours most of the time. Laid back and willing to go with the flow of any situation, or in a ballistic fashion rage.

Taylor had made that term up herself, but she was hard-pressed to find a better way to describe it. When her chosen profession was involved, Sabah got very, very, intense - very, very, quickly. Taylor was about seventy percent certain that if she had told the cloth-controlling cape that Behemoth was planning to steal her dress designs, the Endbringer would be dead by the morning no matter where it was on or under the planet.

"You can teleport!" Sabah accused her instantly, pausing in the midst of organizing a group of dresses hanging from a rolling rack nearby to glare at her some more. "And why did you bring them? I don't have time to make clothing for every one of your friends, Taylor! I have a life!" She continued.

Taylor opened her mouth to protest this point, as she had not in fact come here to make such a request, but was overruled as Sabah kept angrily yelling, now pacing back and forth in front of the assembled group of teenagers.

"Honestly, it's a miracle I already had your measurements for your costume! Everyone else is already getting changed!" She continued to cajole and growl as she moved about, stretching a hand out towards the rolling rack in a way that gave Taylor a distinct sensation of danger that had nothing at all to do with her actual, literal, danger sense.

"They're security!" She blurted out before anyone else could get a word in edgewise. Sabah - Parian, really, as she was currently in costume - paused at this, turning to glare past Taylor at Yang, who seemed entirely nonplussed by the treatment.

"Is that true?" She asked pointedly.

"That sis hired us to run security on your gig? Yeah, totally," Yang drawled, unbothered by the confrontational tone.

"And you aren't here for a favor? Or free clothing? Or…" Parian's voice lowered into fearful whisper at this point, "...one of those horrid dolls?"

"Hey, when she says horrid dolls, does she mean like… haunted toys and stuff? Because I really don't want-" Jaune began to whisper nervously from behind everyone else only to get elbowed in the side by Ren, who's face remained placid throughout the exchange.

"Don't ask questions you don't want answered," The asian boy cautioned him with a self satisfied nod.

"Okay, but-" Jaune tried, but Parian spoke up again.

"So… you're really just here to help?" Parian asked again, in a much more relieved tone.

"Yuuuuup." Yang added, along with several furious nods from all the others.

"Good. That makes things easier. My apologies for the rude introduction - some of you, I believe, already know me - but my name is Parian. I am not the main contributor to today's events, which means everything must be perfect. You can find Trainwreck downstairs in the lobby for assignments - he's already taken charge of the normal security," Parian said with a swift and decisive nod, pivoting back to the clothing rack in dismissal.

"Welp, guess we'll just head downstairs. Sorry about that, she's usually nicer, she's just high-strung and-" Taylor began, only to be cut off before she could safely make her exit.

"No, since the entire team is present, I have ensured you seats near the front of the media coverage, which will necessitate a change in dress. Come here." Parian interjected with the cold impartiality of an executioner.

"What's wrong with my normal costume!?" Taylor complained, even as she felt the fibers of said costume constrict around her, pick her up, and then deposit her back in the center of the room - mostly because even while speaking she had been trying - halfheartedly - to flee what she knew was going to happen the second she arrived.

"It's your normal costume. That's the problem," Parian said dryly, and Taylor turned a forlorn glance on her sort of sister and her friends as they moved to exit the room, hoping for a last minute save, but actually just getting an amused snort in response.

"But… security?" She tried again, only for Parian to give her a hard look and then roughly yank a dress off the rack.

At a glance, it was just a simple black evening dress. The skirt was a little too short for Taylor's taste, which of course meant that her ankles would be visible in it, but it wasn't… too excessive.

At least, it wasn't until Parian flicked it, and it revealed itself to be one of a handful of dresses made from the elemental fabric Taylor had helped her make in the first place. The sudden shift in energies caused the entire dress to billow like roiling black clouds in a storm, and for flashes of ethereal lightning to silently dance across the tapestry. With each flash of lightning, the silhouettes of two dragons fighting were revealed. It has to be understood that this wasn't a visual illusion. It was not an image playing out across the fabric.

The fabric was a storm cloud. While also, being fabric.

It would have been very impressive if she didn't have to wear it.

"...I have to pick up Vicky. She said she'd help." Taylor tried again to resist.

"Oh, good. I made one for her too," Parian said absent mindedly, which forcibly reminded Taylor herself of something she probably shouldn't have forgotten in the first place.

Vicky actually liked this kind of thing.

"Damn it," she muttered, before grouchily opening another gap to pick up her other blond friend.

"I'll literally pay you to take my place," Taylor begged her sort-of-sister, who was eyeing the evening dress made out of a living storm with a hungry look on her face.

"I don't see the problem. Just wear the dress, get things over with, and then you can introduce me to your friends," Vicky interjected, earning a glance from Yang before she returned to staring at the article of clothing.

"I already introduced you," Taylor said distractedly, shaking the plastic bag with the dress in front of Yang like it was catnip and she was a cat.

"No, you teleported me into the room they gave you to change in, then you teleported her into the same room, then you said 'help me please, I hate girly stuff, wah wah' and now here we are," Vicky said pointedly.

Taylor paused at that, turning to glare at her friend in the cramped room they were in.

"I did not say that!" Taylor petulantly complained, moving the dress she absolutely wasn't going to wear about an inch closer to her salivating half-sister.

Yeah, half-sister. That's what she was gonna go with from now on. Way easier to understand for people who didn't regularly jump between dimensions for fun.

'Why is my life like this?' she half-asked herself, and half-asked Pemmy and Demmy, only to receive a mental shrug from both sides of the connection.

'Have you considered living as a hermit in the woods, so the only things you can corrupt with your weirdness are woodland creatures?' Demmy suggested jokingly.

'...Do you think that would work?' Taylor perked up hopefully, only to be immediately shot down.

'No, I'm pretty sure a small percentage of the woodland creatures on earth recently started doing instinctive displays of kung fu, and talking. I doubt that's the kind of normal you are looking for.' Pemmy added helpfully.

Taylor couldn't help but let loose a groan at this.

"You did! You do it all the time! Wah, I'm Taylor, my powers come with a built-in beach body, woe is me! If a boy so much as sees my ankles I'll get pregnant and explode! Wah!" Vicky continued to pester her.

"Hey, lay off blondie, it's not for everyone," Yang snapped at her without thinking, not bothering to turn away from the dress that had mysteriously found its way into her hands as she did so.

"Excuse me? Do I know you? Do you talk to everyone like that?" Vicky shot back, acerbically.

"Uh-" Taylor started to interject at this sudden downturn in civility between the two.

They'd been in a room together for less than ten minutes, but originally Taylor had been positive they'd get along. They had the same interests, had very similar personalities, hell, they even had the same tempers. If Taylor didn't already know she and Yang were theoretically related themselves, she would have actually assumed that Yang and Vicky were dimensional displaced alternates of each other - like her mom and Raven apparently were.

'I should introduce Jess to Raven like that. Just to see what happens,' some distant part of her mind conjured up even as she thought.

"Nope, just people who screw with my sisters," Yang continued pointedly, before hesitantly reaching out for the dress - an activity that was swiftly halted when Vicky snatched her wrist away from it. Rather than react immediately and violently, Yang turned towards Vicky with a raised eyebrow.

Evidently, this expression - so similar to one Taylor herself often used - was enough to throw the New Wave hero off, because she swiftly let go of the offending appendage to speak.

"She can't just run away from everything even slightly troublesome, you know. Maybe she'll like it!" Vicky insisted.

"Oh yeah? Hey, sis, were you recently adopted?" Yang asked, suddenly turning to Taylor.

"Huh?" She blurted out, entirely unsure how to mediate this situation between two people she actually liked.

"I mean, she's acting like our mom and all. I don't really remember asking though," Yang continued blithely, earning her an indignant cry from the other blond.

"Hey! Taylor, tell your weird interdimensional sister to mind her own business!" Vicky added on, also turning towards Taylor.

"Uh- that-" Taylor mumbled, unsure of what to do. On the one hand, she didn't want to just ignore Vicky because they were friends, and that would be a shitty thing to do in general.

On the other hand, Taylor really didn't want to wear a storm cloud and not much else in public.

"I- thanks for defending me Yang, but Vicky's my friend. I'd… prefer if you got along…" she tried neutrally, unable to comment on the dress without picking a side.

The two blondes paused at that, turning back to eye each other before Vicky scratched the back of her head in mild embarrassment.

"...Sorry, I just worry about her," she said awkwardly. Yang considered that for a moment before nodding appreciatively in her direction.

"Yeah, I haven't known her long but I get the feeling she's… you know?" Yang said diplomatically.

"I knooooow! She's like a preschooler with unlimited power sometimes! You know, one time we were watching this romantic comedy, and she just kept talking about ways she could solve the main character's problems with magic!" Vicky suddenly began complaining.

"Hey! You said we were watching it to make fun of it!" Taylor defended herself.

"Yeah, by calling it bad, not by theorizing a way to turn angst into lasers!" Vicky fired back pointedly.

"You said it was funny!"

"That doesn't make it sane!"

The two bickered as always. That was part of what Taylor liked about Vicky. She wasn't scared of her, and she wasn't afraid to tell her she was being weird. It wasn't that the people around her didn't all do that, but most of the people in her immediate orbit just took for granted that her weirdness had a point to it sometimes.

It made it hard to gauge things occasionally.

Either way, their brief spat was cut short when there was a knock on the door, followed by said door opening to reveal Parian, who was carrying another two dresses into the room with her. She threw the first at Vicky - a serene white cloud version of the stormcloud dress Taylor had previously been given, only instead of flashing dragons, small ethereal birds flew in flocks through the cloudy expanse that would probably make whoever was wearing it look like a giant by comparison.

And the second, she threw at Taylor.

"Wait, wait, wait-!" Taylor tried to stop her, even though she still caught the plastic dress bag.

"Taylor, you promised. Look, I even made extras for some of your friends, so can we please just get through this without any of your… you-ness making everything so chaotic? Just this once? Please?" Parian begged.

Taylor wanted to refuse out of principle, but the tone Sabah was using was just… tired. She understood intellectually that this was something that mattered to her friend, and it mattered a lot.

"...Yeah, okay. Sorry," she apologized meekly, holding up the new dress in her arms and trying not to wrinkle her nose in distaste.

There was nothing wrong with it. It was just… uncomfortable.

But she could deal with being a little uncomfortable for one day. For Parian.

"Thanks. Come on, I need to go over the itinerary with you, since you missed the morning rehearsal," Parian insisted, swiftly turning to leave.

"Aw, look at you, being all responsible and stuff!' Yang tried to cheer her up as the door closed.

"Yeah, and it's not that bad, Taylor. You're just being obstinate," Vicky pointed out to her.

"So I guess now that I've agreed, you guys don't need those dresses to force me to wear one anymore," Taylor pointed out mischievously.

"Let's not make any rash decisions now," Vicky returned immediately, putting her dress behind her back as though to hide it from Taylor. She noticed Yang doing the same out of the corner of her eye.

Taylor could only snort at that.

"This would be your solution to paparazzi," Vicky chided her as she, Taylor, and Yang filed into the venue wearing their dresses.

Taylor vaguely recalled this being called 'walking the red carpet' or… something. Maybe that was specific to movies? Whatever. The point was, after some coordination, Taylor had been forced to gap herself and her friends back outside of the hotel so they could walk back in the mundane way. Or rather, the intent was apparently to draw attention to their clothes, so she had opened a gap in the changing rooms that led to the exact front of the building, and then been forced to walk past all of the gawkers and reporters outside.

Typically, those reporters would be screaming questions at them, which would make normal conversation borderline impossible, but Taylor had enacted a clever and not at all petty plan to circumvent that difficulty.

She had drawn the same silencing rune she used to talk to Greg in class on the air, and then expanded the effect around her group. No sound in, no sound out.

Simple.

"I mean, once you've been bugged by them once it stops being novel," Taylor said dryly, pointing at a random man with a camera who was pointing a microphone in their direction and deepening her voice into a mocking tone.

"'We've noticed that you happen to be standing within five feet of any other cape, are you dating?'" she mocked, before pointing at a different reporter who likewise couldn't possibly have heard what she was saying and continuing;

"'People are concerned that the superpowers you didn't ask for give you too much power, can we get a soundbite of you saying something so we can misrepresent it on the news?'" she continued in a faux valley girl accent, before dropping both hands and shrugging.

"It's easier to just ignore them," she finished.

All through this, of course, she did her best not to look mocking or rude. She had enough by way of self control to not ruin Parian's fashion debut like that. Even just pointing at the two reporters had been masked beneath a gesture that could be easily mistaken for a broad greeting to the entire venue.

"And that totally has nothing to do with the fact that you look constipated right now," Yang teased her as they moved forward to make room for the rest of the team to exit the gap and land on the - yeah, it was definitely a red carpet - leading inside.

Taylor glanced down at herself, and restrained the urge to turn her glasses into a gas mask just to hide her face from view.

"...This is how actors pretend to look all intense and stuff," She defended herself, even as she restrained a grimace at her current attire.

She looked like she was on fire.

Not that she was 'hot', although Vicky had made that joke, even going so far as to snap a picture of her to send to Amy for later mockery, but rather, her current dress looked like liquid magma, that glowed bright blue instead of red or orange. It was - blessedly - at least one of those excessive long dresses that was designed to trail across the ground behind her, which, given the make of the excessively frilly gown, made her look like she was trailing a magmatic path across the ground behind her that somehow didn't emanate any heat into the surroundings.

She'd had to compromise on how much skin was showing topside however. While her chest and back were fully covered by the dress that crept up to her neck in a paradoxically very sleek and tight fitting design that was entirely at odds with the craggy magmatic blue flows that seemed to roll off her, her shoulders and arms were entirely bare.

It wasn't the worst of all the options she'd have - even just looking at Yang striding along next to her, preening at the cameras in a dress made of clouds made her want to bury her face in her hands in embarrassment - but it wasn't her preferred 'only my face is uncovered' either.

"I'm pretty sure that's not, true like, at all," Vicky pointed out, although she herself was much more nervous than Taylor would have originally expected from her. Oliver and Madison disembarked behind them, walking arm in arm up the carpet wearing a suit of living shadow and a technicolor dress of solid light respectively. Behind them, Aspirant stepped forth wearing a martial arts robe that was exactly as pearlescent as he was somehow, only it was a black lacquer that contrasted nicely against the young man's armored shell.

Trainwreck would be somewhere nearby, keeping an eye on the surroundings while coordinating everyone Taylor had brought with her, which meant that - as far as her main team, and also, Madison, went - everyone was here.

And they even managed to make it all the way to the door before one of the previously normal looking gawkers abruptly sprang into the center of the red carpet to glare at them. He flung his jacket to the side to reveal a vest covered in explosives beneath, and began shouting something at her group.

…Not that Taylor could tell what he was shouting.

"Should you maybe drop your quiet zone thing?" Oliver whispered behind her.

"Why? I'm just gonna drop him in a gap and grab him later. No reason to disrupt things," Taylor asked curiously.

"...You don't wanna know why a suicide bomber is trying to blow you up?" Madison asked incredulously.

"Not really, no," she replied with a shrug.

"...Is it always like this?" the short girl whispered to Oliver.

"Honestly? Yeah, kinda," he replied with a nonchalant waving gesture.

"I am kind of curious," Vicky said, even as the crowd began to move erratically away from them.

Which Taylor supposed was probably the normal reaction to a bomb threat but well… she'd already moved a gap up behind the idiot so she supposed she could humor her friend.

It probably said something about Taylor that the panicked screaming of the crowd and the frantic babbling of the reporters was a more soothing noise than a bombardment by the paparazzi, but what that something was would have to wait, as she dropped the sound barrier around them.

It wasn't so much that she wasn't curious about what was going on, but she also got the feeling if she looked to far into it, it would only add to her ever growing list of things to deal with, which she really wasn't overly fond of at the moment given everything going on with Pemmy and Demmy.

"-THE SECOND WAVE IS COMING! WE CANNOT ALLOW THE FREAKS TO RULE THE WORLD! WE CANNOT LET SAINT'S SACRIFICE BE IN VAIN!" The man seemed to be gasping for air, having just wound down from whatever it was he was screaming about.

"Huh. I was wondering when that would come up," Taylor muttered, lazily waving a hand that drew her conjured gap up from beneath the man like a shark breaching the water to swallow a swimmer whole. It sealed itself shut a second later, and Taylor idly wondered if the guy would blow himself up in there or have the good sense not to die for nothing.

'Can one of you handle that?' She begrudgingly asked Pemmy and Demmy, then expanded the gap she habitually kept on them enough for them to both slip through after him.

She didn't really care about whoever that was, but she also didn't want to be personally responsible for his death either. It just didn't sit right with her.

"Anyway-" She began, only to find the crowd staring at her like a particularly strange zoo animal. She sighed, sticking her thumb and pointer finger into her mouth and then letting loose a shrill whistle that jarred almost everyone present.

"Problems solved, back to fashion things!" She yelled, before striding quickly and pointedly into the venue.

She'd take a bomb threat over a miniskirt any day of the week.

"I just don't understand - I was supposed to have three models, why are you suddenly cutting one?!" Parian demanded in a hushed tone of voice that made the man she was speaking to - an unassuming fellow in an orange turtle neck with a hawkish nose and a gaunt figure - glance around the spacious lobby area that the guests were mingling in prior to the show to see if anyone else had heard it. His eyes landed on Taylor as she approached, and he grimaced slightly, but still turned back to Parian to answer.

"We had a sudden change in the schedule. I do apologize, but this is simply how the industry is - it's out of my hands," he said, and to his credit, he sounded genuinely apologetic.

"What's going on?" Taylor asked curiously as she approached, noting the hushed whispers they were speaking in and leaving the fancy looking glass of glorified fruit punch a waiter had provided her with to hover on a platform of magic, so that she could conjure a quiet zone around them.

"They're snubbing me!" Parian hissed at her as she finished.

"That's… not entirely inaccurate. I am sorry, again," The hawk nosed man said with a sigh, before extending a hand to shake with Taylor.

"I'm Jim Motta. I'm the organizer," He greeted her while taking a sip from his own much more alcoholic beverage.

Taylor had to assume the non-alcoholic variants existed purely for herself and her friends, because she hadn't seen anyone else drinking them.

"Taylor Hebert. Nexus, if you really want. I can't help but notice you don't seem enthused about the change," Taylor said with a glint in her eyes that Parian instantly noticed.

"Taylor-!" the cloth controlling cape said warningly but Taylor waved her off.

"Hey, I'm technically your boss, you know. If they're snubbing you, they're snubbing me too," she pointed out.

"You don't even want to be here!" Sabah fired back at her.

"Yeah but that's not 'cus I don't care. It's just uncomfortable, okay?" Taylor replied, a touch defensively.

"You two seem close. I was under the impression the relationship was more… businesslike," Jim interjected curiously.

"My team are my best friends, I just call myself their boss as an excuse to give them money," Taylor answered with a shrug.

"I see, I see. As to your previous question… I'm just an organizer. I arrange venues, connect models with designers, that kind of thing. If I want to keep my job I have to maintain my connections, which sometimes means bowing to pressure from people higher up the ladder than me," Jim said in a frank tone.

"Huh… and, just hypothetically, if you were given infinite money to start your own agency or whatever for this kind of thing-" Taylor began.

"Taylor, you can't just throw money at your problems until they go away!" Parian barked at her in a disbelieving tone.

"...Why not?" Taylor asked, turning away from Jim again, who himself was staring blankly at her as though she'd just asked him if he wanted to go to the moon on a unicorn.

"Because- Because it's wrong!" Parian complained.

"But… isn't that literally what's being done to you right now?" Taylor asked in confusion.

"That's- it's different!" Parian insisted, although now with a much less sure tone.

Taylor examined her for a second, before speaking.

"Look, I know this is important to you, and you wanna do it the right way and everything… but I mean, sometimes brute force is the solution. Besides, maybe Jim isn't interested?" She said before turning a questioning look on the man.

"It's… certainly tempting. I admit, being able to skip the backbiting to just put on a wonderful show sounds nice but…" he trailed off thoughtfully.

"Taylor!" Parian complained again, so she sighed and swiftly withdrew her cellphone from a small gap.

"Hang on," she cautioned, before finding Simone's number in her contact list and tapping it.

"Mother?" Her confused daughter's voice came through the phone.

"I'm trying to convince Parian to let me use my bank account to solve her problems," Taylor said dryly, which the cloth-controlling cape could only squawk indignantly at.

"Mother, you have to let people make their own decisions. You meddle too much," was Simone's quick response.

"But they're bullying her and screwing up her dreams!" Taylor complained irately into the phone.

"You're an actual child sometimes, you know that?" Parian grumbled at her, much to Jim's amusement.

"Bullying… how?" Simone asked her cautiously, her tone doing a one hundred and eighty degree shift from disapproving to tentative approval.

"They're getting her- uh-" Taylor paused to look up at Jim.

"How are they bullying her again?" She asked urgently.

"...another designer has pressured me to remove a model who he believes will be wearing a dress too similar to his own," Jim said dryly. Taylor nodded at that, then turned her focus back to Simone.

"You catch that?" She asked.

"Yes. Give Sabah the phone," Simone requested resolutely. Taylor did so, and watched Parian open her mouth - and then promptly shut it.

Taylor could have listened into this conversation, but opted not to. She actually tried pretty hard not to spy on people for no reason, mostly owing to the fact that she could do so with almost trivial ease and didn't want to make a habit of it.

Still, she was tempted, just based on the handful of rapid shifts in posture that Parian went through before abruptly releasing a long, drawn out breath that was more of a hiss than a sigh.

"...Fine. B-Bye Simone," She offered tentatively before handing the phone back to Taylor while pointedly avoiding eye contact with her. Taylor lifted an eyebrow and spoke into the phone.

"What did you even say?" she asked curiously, causing Parian to jump slightly in shock and the freeze in place.

"Nothing special. Told her I could help her get a date," Simone replied in a goofy sounding tone of voice that Taylor really wanted to question - but opted not to, now that she was getting her way.

"...With who?" Taylor asked curiously.

"The prettiest girl she knows," Simone said smugly. Taylor knew her raised eyebrow couldn't possibly be visible to her daughter over the phone, but she also knew that Simone would expect it anyway, and so her unspeaking response was rewarded a couple of moments later when the white haired girl simply added;

"...You'll find out when you get home."

"Fine. Thanks, l-love you," Taylor put forth, stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar words. She did love all her kids. She just… didn't actually say it alot.

Had she mentioned that she had no idea what she was doing as a mother? Because she didn't.

"Ah… yeah. Love you… too," Simone replied with equal awkwardness, before they both hung up.

Taylor considered maybe buying her something in Boston as a gift, but then recalled every story she ever read about a rich parent interacting with their children purely through expensive gifts and opted not to.

She could do better than that at least.

"So!" she said, just to get back on topic, clapping her hands in front of herself to get Parian and Jim's attention.

"Whaddaya say Jim? Do bribes work in this industry?" she asked innocently.

"You understand she's asking you to form an entire business from the ground up with her support, right?" Parian cautioned him despite her seeming agreement to at least make the offer.

Jim blinked at both of them, turning to stare at them in turn, and then smiling a surprisingly charming smile.

"I think I am beginning to understand why people say Brockton Bay is going to be big in the future. I accept your… generous… terms. Let me just go make the proper arrangements," he said, before his mouth shifted to a thin smile that didn't touch his eyes as he turned to glance at another group of rich-looking socialites who were only just barely managing to keep the looks they were sending towards Parian socially acceptable.

"Before we continue with the show, I'd just like to thank all of you for being here today, but especially, my team leader and friend, Nexus!" Parian announced from the stage while Taylor and her friends sat around a loose grouping of three circular tables, picking at finger foods while the show progressed.

Things had been pretty boring if Taylor was being honest. She'd seen some pretty exotic and strange outfits in her time traveling the multiverse, but she had to admit, some of the stuff that had been on stage so far was amazing because of how the designers had managed to turn absolutely mundane clothing into the most unworkable and useless monstrosities she could think of.

This was 'art', apparently.

Taylor got the impression she was never going to be very appreciative of such things, but to each one's own, she supposed.

She raised her glass of apple juice into the air in response to Parian's statement from on stage, and the renewed attention being directed at her. She was wearing a costume that was much different from her norm - not just because of a marked increase in the complexity of the various ruffles, bits of lace, and ribbons that littered the entire Victorian dress - but because of the one thing the costume was definitely missing.

It no longer obscured her skin tone.

Taylor could already hear the murmurs spreading across the hall in response to this change, and leaned back to watch as Parian allowed the murmurs to rise in tone for a moment before speaking again.

"As many of you have noticed, I am not the petite caucasian woman I am sure many of you assume I am. Which is why, when you see my new collection, I want you to keep one word in mind," The cloth controlling cape said dramatically, turning around with a flourish to face away from the crowd but keeping the microphone in her hand as she began to walk off stage.

"Expectations," she said decisively before vanishing from sight.

And Taylor had to admit-

Watching a woman walk on stage wearing a hurricane was definitely a novel experience if nothing else.

Tomorrow is Friday, Choose Three (3)

[ ] Choose a skill or power to begin training.

[ ] Take some time out to fortify the Heap with Onmyoudo.

[ ] Take some time out to Tinker.

[ ] There was a guy you weren't supposed to heal… Uppercrust or something?

[ ] You started the work but… the ferry could finish its transformation into a school with only a little more. You're going to have a bunch of new capes in town that could benefit from it.

[ ] Planeswalk (Choose a setting: Bleach, Kung Fu Panda, Touhou, RWBY, Nasuverse, Full Metal Alchemist, Devil May Cry)

[ ] Write In

[ ] Take Time Off (Pick an Extra Social, on the weekends, this can be a second group)

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now). On weekends, you can choose an entire group to socialize with - but are not forced to.

[ ] Your parents:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Danny (3)

[ ] Jess (2)

[ ] Mouse Protector (2)

[ ] The Oathbound:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Trainwreck (3)

[ ] Aspirant (3)

[ ] Parian (3)

[ ] Oliver (3)

[ ] Miss Kim (1)

[ ] Willow (1)

[ ] Jeeves (0)

[ ] The Bratpack (As a group, includes Mem and Mun):

Outstanding group tasks: Train the Brats (Ongoing). Mem's crafting project.

[ ] Aisha (2)

[ ] Dinah (4)

[ ] Your kids:

Outstanding group tasks: Unleash your kids on that fuck Jacques. Yew wants to go to college.

[ ] Mem (4)

[ ] Mun (2)

[ ] Simone (4)

[ ] Yew (2)

[ ] Gram (1)

[ ] Your friends:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Victoria (4)

[ ] Amy (5)

[ ] Clockblocker (4)

[ ] Write In

[ ] Sisters From Other Misters:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Yang (1)

[ ] Ruby (0)

ONCE MORE THE OMAKE SHOP OPENS, AND ONCE MORE, I WEEP BLOOD. REMEMBER, ONLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING VOTES CAN WIN, AND IF A VOTE FROM THE UPPER PORTION OF THE SHOP WINS, THE NEXT VOTES CAN ONLY BE FROM THE LOWER PORTION, AND VICE VERSA.

Current Omake Points: 134

Ttran2323 and Citino want to purchase A Heap, A Home tier One for 10 Points

[ ] Ttran2323/Yes

[ ] Ttran2323/No

Katamed & Dragon Grimoire want to purchase Dannybowl First Date: Emily Piggot for 10 Points

[ ] Katamed/Yes

[ ] Katamed/No

Oneautumnleaf wants to purchase Transmute the World III for 30 Points

[ ] Oneautumnleaf/Yes

[ ] Oneautumnleaf/No

A/N: I'M DONE! IT'S OVER! I'M FREE! I'm so sorry for how long this chapter took to put out - but Taylor's point of view is a lot when I'm not used to it for this quest, and as you can see, it's uh… it's quite long.

In other news - I have a now! You can find the link in my signature and you can support me there if you really like my stuff! (I'll only advertise this the one time, I'm actually very embarrassed about this and had to be forced to start a )

Last edited: Jan 15, 2023

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Jan 31, 2023

#55,363

Spoiler: Voting Results:

Current Energy: 17

Tinker Specialty: Soul Manipulation (0/10) - (7/10)

Current Emulation Status: Here

Friday, April 1st, 2011

The Heap, Brockton Bay

She was doing something bad.

Well, not 'bad', but… not good either. It was something like four in the morning, at least a few hours before she would typically wake up for the day, and she was sneaking into her own castle.

No, that wasn't the right way to describe it. She didn't have to do any sneaking once she'd made it to her castle. In fact, the Heap, seemingly sensing her intent, had gone out of its way to ensure she didn't come across even a single other person once she'd arrived in its halls.

What she had needed to do was sneak out of her own home.

It had taken some convincing, but she had found perhaps the one and only time that Nemesis looking exactly like her had proven useful. She imagined that right about now the haughty sword spirit would be contentedly snuggling with Pemmy and Demmy in her bed.

The pair might be hiding things from her, they might be hard to understand, and they might just be doing the thing her power always did, and constantly present her with new social situations.

But even if none of that was true, they were still Emmy.

And Emmy was her friend.

So really, she wasn't sneaking into much of anything. The twins probably would have happily let her into the laboratory they'd built in her tower. Heck, she'd used alchemy to build ninety percent of it - directed by the pair of course. She'd just had no idea what anything she was looking at was.

But she felt like she might now. She was a tinker now after all. Sort of. Pretty much.

She'd gotten weirder powers.

She just… didn't want the twins to be around while she was examining things. It felt… wrong. Like she should just trust them to figure it out for themselves like she always did. Like she should just drift along in Emmy's wake like she always did.

But she couldn't. She wanted to… to give something back. To help Emmy with something serious for once. Something that mattered. Emmy had always treated any problem they came across as hers. As though nothing that happened would truly affect them personally. As though Emmy only had problems by proxy through Taylor, treating her problems as their own.

This was different. This time, whatever was going on seemed to truly, personally, bother the projection.

And she was going to do something about it.

Stepping briskly around a corner, Taylor was drawn from her thoughts as she emerged in front of the bulky door separating the lab - which was actually on the main floor of the building, while the tower entrance was on the second floor, making the lab a basement of sorts - from the rest of the area. The mall didn't extend this far into the bowls of the Heap, and while Taylor was sure it was technically possible to wander here from the populated shopping areas in a physical sense, it had never actually happened, and likely never would.

The door was a composite material, the exact same of which lined the entire room - a shielding for any kind of strange particles or effects that might emanate from any tinker tech constructed within. It was a specific combination of metals she'd had to make with alchemy that far outstripped her personal understanding of material sciences, shaped into a bulkhead door, with a spinning hatch to seal it shut.

Taylor was considering adding similar protections to both her own and Mem's workshops, actually. It felt like it should have been obvious in retrospect, but 'safety regulations for magic' weren't exactly part of the learning she'd acquired from Emmy.

Carefully grasping the hatch (which was rated to handle even superhuman strength with ease without damage, and in fact, even kind of required it to be opened), Taylor swiftly unsealed the door, pulling it open and stepping past it.

Inside the lab, the bronze walls of the Heap were replaced by an austere grey material that almost made one feel like they were in a sterile white room. The floor was tiled, and the open circular area was ringed by a vast array of softly whirring machines that - even while inactive - seemed to beep, click, and thud at regular rhythmic intervals. Several spots along the walls had white boards where it was obvious the twins had been arguing about something, with bright blue and red marker filling them up with dense scribbles and a jumble of scientific-looking words and equations that Taylor couldn't make heads or tails of.

She'd thought that being a tinker would be like having a science power, but it really wasn't like it granted her actual knowledge. Dragging her eyes away from the confusing scribblings to stare at what she instinctively knew to be a machine designed to diffuse Red Maso into a more diluted form that was less overtly reactive and destructive and more helpful for low powered devices, she could only conclude that it was more like an… instinct.

Like, she knew what stuff did, and if she thought about it for a moment she could conjure several ideas of how she could maybe go about doing the same, but couldn't for the life of her explain the underlying science behind how any of it worked.

She frowned, doing a lap of the area as she pondered, occasionally glancing towards the white boards to try and eke some kind of understanding out of them.

"It's all just… power generation. Or… attempts to maximize energy," she noted to herself, as she circled the room. And it was true. Every machine present served only one real purpose - to try to directly interact with Maso energy, with exception for a bank of devices on the far wall that her tinker power grew fuzzy around.

If she had to hazard a guess, it was supposed to measure energy forms that weren't Maso but that were similar. Like trying to figure out if the bizarre magical power source had an alternative the way that normal natural gas had ethanol.

Her mind briefly flashed to her fledgling and ill-advised attempts at combining her various powers together at this.

She got the impression that using just one of the many exotic energies associated with her power just wouldn't work. It was too… She wanted to say conceptually light, but her understanding of Magecraft via Sigurd told her she was probably throwing the word 'conceptual' around too casually to be accurate.

Still… with any given one of them, something was missing. Chi couldn't power a lightbulb based on Maso principles. It simply couldn't.

So… they needed a lot of power, and they needed it urgently, but the insanely potent power source known as Red Maso somehow wasn't good enough, despite being the kind of thing that could power an entire facility for thousands of years.

That was… she couldn't even begin to fathom why Emmy would need more potential energy than was likely contained in the sun itself.

She continued to stare at the glass tubes sticking out of the device she couldn't fully understand as she contemplated this, eyes darting between the various fluctuations from each tube. Each one different, each one measuring a different power source. It looked recent - like something less important had been recently torn out of the wall to place it here. The most likely culprit would be last night after the fashion show, and Taylor supposed to twins had been inspired by what they described as her suicidal attempt to forge her own Maso energy.

But obviously not a bad idea in and of itself, if the twins were trying to replicate it.

That brought a thought to her mind. If the problem was that she couldn't force those powers together internally, but that they probably could be forced together, then didn't they just have to be combined externally?

Squinting at a white board that had the word 'Avatar' circled on it three times in bright red marker, she felt her focus wane as the idea refused to leave her mind.

She could probably do it, right? She could make her own diffuser, take the resultant particles, pump them into a chamber and-

She was halfway through a gap and speed-walking up the narrow hallways of the city's derelict ferry before she could even try to remember what she was originally doing. She'd long since purchased the thing, and even had plans to expand it, much like the Heap, to form a school. It was kind of more a hobby thing than anything else for a while. She loved the idea of a school for people with powers - her love of academia and stint standing in for Ozma had ensured that.

But that was for after she graduated.

Maybe even after she got her teaching license.

Unfortunately, she had been forced to rapidly rush her plans to expand it upon hearing about the sheer number of people coming towards her in need of shelter. To that end, she had the groundwork for the expansion thoroughly plotted out already in her head.

She carefully scrawled lines of connecting runes along the walls; dense bars of script that would act as pipes to pass magical power along the space.

It had been a long time since the Heap had been made, and she'd gotten far better at this kind of thing ever since.

Even if she was still mostly at the theoretical stage.

And… blindly applying her ideas in a trance.

Some distant part of her realized something was off about the situation, in the same way it tacitly admitted that she dreamed of being a teacher - like her mom.

But that part of her was far smaller than the part that finished rapidly assembling the initial framework of her enchantment and paused where all the connective runes intersected. Or… would intersect. That final bit of space could be filled with runes… but she didn't. Instead, in the middle of the lower floor of the ferry, she began to dump all the random materials and objects she routinely picked up with her gaps. Dirt. Sand. Water. Furniture. Garbage.

She barely thought before sticking her arms into two separate gaps to either side of her, and beginning to rapidly transmute a bunch of dense five feet tall bulbs of glass, which she quickly scrawled more runes across, before laying on the floor to await their mountings.

She worked in a trance, a daze, well past the time she would have returned home to prevent the twins from knowing she had even left.

Time trudged on, and while a normal tinker would be stuck assembling machines piece by piece, laboriously measuring, cutting and creating their devices components from scratch in many places, Taylor was able to use the combined might of the supercomputer sitting on her nose and mastery of the material world to produce in an hour what many would consider months - if not years - of work.

It was only just as she had finished filling the last of the tremendous tubes with Chi that Pemmy and Demmy burst into the room in a panic, appearing inside the space without touching the door like apparitions, breathing hard and looking concerned.

"Taylor, what are you doing!?" Demmy yelped upon looking around at the machine that had taken over a majority of the space on this floor.

It was a steel dome hovering over a depression in the floor she'd engineered with magic. Feeding into the dome were a number of tubes that lead out to eight diffusers spread across the space. Using Onmyōdō she identified the best places to put them for energy flow, and had promptly attached two tubes to each. One for raw power and another for it to be stored while in a diffuse state.

Ideally, she should be able to pump power from the external machines, to the dome 'crucible' which was connected to the enchantment by runework, which should become her own special Maso, that would then maintain and protect her enchantments and wards as she added to the resultant building for…

Well, for probably longer than any human would have to worry about, really.

She didn't have to do it this way. The amount of raw power she was applying to the enchantment was almost completely unnecessary. Excessive at best and wasteful at worst. She could get the same effect on a practical level in a half dozen other ways.

But she wanted to do it this way.

"Taylor!?" Pemmy repeated when it became obvious she had heard them but promptly forgotten to answer them.

She shook her head, regaining her focus with an awkward smile on her face.

"Um… well, I made… this…" she explained, slowly waving a hand over the control panel built into the side of the domed crucible.

The twins shared a look with each other, then turned back to her and sighed.

"The link felt fuzzy," Pemmy explained.

"We thought you'd been mastered," Demmy finished.

Taylor blinked at them.

"No I just… had an idea? And it seemed like a really good idea at the time? Oh! And I want to be a teacher," she explained, shoulders relaxing as tension left her body and sense reasserted itself.

"Great? Great! I don't recognize the design of this, we should probably make sure it's safe before turning it on but… it looks solid! What does it do?" Demmy asked once she'd finished catching her breath.

She didn't know why she expected to be reprimanded for this. She was doing weird stuff with new powers all the time that Emmy was always happy to smile at her over - why would this be any different?

She couldn't help but smile as excitement that she could finally be involved outpaced her anxiety. She felt like she'd passed some invisible test, and that everything would be okay now.

"It makes Maso! But like, my kind, I think? If the process happens outside of me it should be fine, right?" She explained gesturing at the crucible that was designed to do horrible things to physics and magic next to her.

"It… might… but there's no guarantee nothing bad would happen. Just… don't turn it on for now and we'll go over it," Pemmy said absently, examining the runes along the floor with a pensive look.

Taylor glanced down at the countdown ticking away on the panel in front of her.

6…

5…

"About that…" she offered weakly, scanning around for an off button.

Of course, why would she include an off button? It was never meant to turn off, so obviously that was pointless. Safety? Who cared about safety? She was having fun!

The twins paused, then snapped towards her at once.

"Gap! Gap, gap, gap!" Demmy yelped at her as the two charged towards her. She stretched a hand out for Nemesis to do just that, then abruptly remembered she wasn't carrying the sword spirit for once, and grasped thin air instead.

And then the countdown hit zero.

Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing. The machine turned on, power began to swirl through the assorted tubes and power lines, and the display on the control panel in front of her switched to a pressure gauge - in as much as magic could be said to even interact with something so mundane.

And… that was it.

The crucible powered on, started working… and power began to slowly fill the rune scrawl writ along the walls and floor like glowing tattoos on the abandoned boat.

There was silence for a moment, and then;

"Are you insane? A countdown? Are you a supervillain now?!" Demmy snapped at her, rushing the rest of the way to her side and shaking her in relief. Taylor opened her mouth to respond - she didn't know why she'd done it that way either - but Pemmy managed to speak even before she could.

"Sister, look," she called urgently, pointing at the control panel next to them that had minimized the display showing pressure in the crucible, and had placed half a dozen metrics on the screen that Taylor probably wouldn't be able to parse without the Crystalized Wisdom sitting on her nose.

Everything looked good to Taylor, or rather, felt good. The instinct in the back of her head wasn't bothered by what she was reading and the boat hadn't exploded yet, so…

Demmy didn't give a verbal response, but she did swiftly turn from Taylor to the control panel with interest, examining it closely for a second before turning back to her.

"Are these numbers accurate?" she asked quickly, even as the boat began to twist and warp around them. The sound of water rushing in to fill the space beneath them was a loud counterpoint to the moment, as the ferry started to rise into the air.

That was one of the first enchantments Taylor had laid on the place. To her mind, it was simpler to create gaps or teleportation arrays or… something… that would allow access to the space than it was to defend a building that was on the ground, or a boat on the ocean. It wasn't really necessary to her plans to use it as a glorified homeless shelter, but she saw no reason to strip the functionality away just because she wasn't going to need to defend it any time soon. Half her interest in building the place had been in avoiding the problems Beacon had faced when it had been invaded.

No ground access, no possibility of invasion - even if the chances of that happening in the first place were so astronomically low as to be non-existent.

"As accurate as what you have back at the Heap. I didn't want to bother making a whole new set of devices so I just tried to copy what you had me build for you before I was a Tinker," Taylor explained. She had modified some of them to better suit her needs - like having to fit inside the space she had allotted - but other than that, a large portion of what she'd done here was just… copy what the twins had done. It was really only the last ten percent of the work that was any different, and if Taylor was being honest, she thought it was weirder that her friend hadn't been able to make that intuitive leap on their own.

That was a running theme with technology the twins built, actually. It was like they knew everything there was to know about a pre-existing field of study, but were completely incapable of making up new uses for it. They lacked creativity.

Demmy made a half grunt of acknowledgement as she abruptly turned back to the control panel, continuing to examine everything.

"Is it stable?" She asked eventually, the messy-haired redhead turning to her straight-haired mirror with anxious trepidation.

"So far, yes. Taylor? You don't feel anything?" Pemmy asked her, turning once more to Taylor.

"Um… a little tired?" she offered tentatively, more in deference to how early she'd woken up today than anything else.

"Then-" she began to say, a beautiful, wide, expressive smile spreading slowly across her face as the projection gazed fondly at her. It was the kind of reassuring smile Taylor was looking for more than anything else.

A smile that said she had helped.

And then everything started to go wrong.

Then solid enchanted metal of the crucible made a kind of warbling noise, like a sheet of metal being shaken vigorously, and then - like a gong being wrong - began to dimple as spherical bumps spread across its surface, the power inside struggling against its confines and creating a fractal pattern of damage along its metal body that was deceptively beautiful in its destruction.

Taylor immediately moved to try and create a gap to enclose it in. Sure, she could use a gap to escape but if something was about to explode, and that something was her fault she'd rather not leave it hovering over the bay to spread who knows what kind of harmful effect across the area around them.

Only… when she stretched her metaphorical hand towards the power that allowed her to create gaps, she felt her heartbeat. Just a single beat. But loud, almost cacophonous in her own ears.

Thump.

It was more than just a sound, it was like… like something had seized her heart firmly in its grip and squeezed. Suddenly, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't think, and she couldn't act. Instead, she was forced, while experiencing an ever increasing sensation of nausea and discomfort, to watch as the two of the crucibles finally swelled up like a single metallic boil, the metal exterior swirling and warping in ways metal was not physically able to under normal circumstances.

And then it popped.

And a deluge of blazing blue power streaked upward, pooling against the ceiling like water without gravity, smoke without fire. She was paralyzed by the swirling mass of energies, staring up at the mass that would be her doom as it showed her… showed her what her power was.

Emmy had always called themselves 'Multiversal Emulator'. It was a core aspect of the way her power worked, even. The multiverse was infinite, and within that multiverse everything that was possible and even most things she would consider impossible had, could, or would someday happen.

Everything was true, but nothing was real.

So, conceivably, just like there must be worlds where a talking vending machine could save the day, there must be ones like the tapestry now hanging overhead.

Because what that power above showed her wasn't just the multiverse.

It was her.

Her as a villain. Her as a hero. Her as a normal person. Her alone, and her with friends. Her with Emma, her without. She was the president, she was a beggar, she was a monster and a savior, she was everything and nothing all at once, and all of it was just out there - every mistake never made, every risk not taken, every life never lived, every path never walked, all woven together in a fractal and incomprehensible mosaic.

Taylor Hebert was not special. She was one of many.

"What happened?!"

"It was stable!"

"Obviously not! How do we-"

Dimly Taylor could hear the twins working nearby, scrambling about, poking at her broken machine in a desperate attempt to make it stop. Time passed. She didn't know how much - it just did - and they seemed to come to a conclusion, as they began wantonly ripping apart the connective tubing of the machine. Steam, smoke, and heat, billowed around them as they worked, scorching their bodies even as they - with uncaring expressions - ignored the damage they suffered with each disconnection.

"It's resonance! It's syncing to Taylor Hebert, but it's like us! It's syncing to all of them! We-"

Was the last thing Taylor heard before she blacked out again.

When she reopened her eyes she was still on the deck of the ship - and her head hurt.

"M'I dying again?" She blearily asked no one in particular, blinking and shaking the stars out of her eyes.

"No, but we clearly need to talk about lab safety," Demmy hissed, kneeling at her side.

"We will inform Danny that you will be missing school today," Pemmy added, from her other side. Both women looked down at her with a mixture of fondness, annoyance, and concern on their faces.

"...Do I have to?" she asked tiredly as her wits returned to her.

She felt like she'd been getting knocked on her ass far too much recently, and she had to say - she didn't much like it.

"You need to know how not to blow yourself up if you're going to help us," Demmy said dryly.

"Not that this was your fault," Pemmy added quickly.

"The timer was," Demmy grumbled under her breath.

"You… could have included a simple off switch," The other twin allowed.

Taylor squinted up at them.

"I don't know how I feel about getting ganged up on like this," She opined.

"Think about how we feel watching you nearly die twice in two days!" Demmy snapped at her in a huff.

"You just said I was fine," Taylor countered.

"Only because we were here!" She complained, throwing her arms in the air for emphasis.

"Won't you always be?" Taylor asked, and only realized how vulnerable the question had come out sounding when the pair paused to stare at her with uncharacteristically dour expressions on their faces.

"That's… the goal, yes." Pemmy said quietly.

"The goal you're going to let me help with," Taylor pressed. Pemmy sighed.

"Yes, Taylor. The goal we are going to let you help with. You're on the right track, we think, but…" Pemmy trailed off.

"There are some complications," Demmy finished for her.

"So? Let's just do what we always do," Taylor allowed confidently, pushing herself finally to her feet.

"Train until it stops being a problem?" Demmy asked dryly.

"Exactly!" she called back at her, pointing at both of them for emphasis.

The twins looked first to each other, then to her, and then as one - sighed again.

"She never changes," Pemmy muttered.

"Nope," Demmy agreed.

Masotech Spellcasting - (0/10) - (10/10)*

Friday, April 1st, 2011

The Heap, Brockton Bay

"So that's how I almost blew my soul up. Now! Eat, eat!" Taylor finished explaining after gathering up her nominal children at the end of the day. They - along with just about everyone else - had been reasonably concerned by her sudden unexplained absence, especially after her visit to the hospital the previous day.

Some more than others.

And since she wasn't overly a fan of hiding things from people…

Plus, well, Yew had missed work that morning because she'd been too deep in her wizard fugue to remember to drop him off. She was going to take him over soon to apologize, and maybe scowl at Jacques if he gave her son a hard time, but since her erstwhile family seemed fairly unwilling to part with her currently anyway… well. She figured she might as well bring them with her.

Call it a relaxing family stroll.

When no one started eating after she placed their bowls in front of them - she was trying pasta tonight because she'd realized she could make an excessive amount of it in a really big pot - she asked a question.

"What? Is everything okay? No one's… eating?" She asked, then continued when Mem, Mun, Simone, Yew, and Gram all just stared at her.

"M–Mom, are you okay? Like, you totally are, cus you're invincible, right?" Mun blurted out, anxiously.

"I'm sure she's just joking, right?" Yew questioned with a confused look on his face.

"She's definitely not. Mother. You can't just sit us down at the table and say 'so I nearly died today' and then move on like nothing happened!" Simone snapped at her, for once seeming more annoyed than playful, or - as was more commonly recently - contemplative.

"I'm sure she was leading up to something with this. Perhaps she needs our help?" Gram offered carefully, the first to tentatively lift her fork and plunge it into her dinner.

The others slowly followed after her while Taylor contemplated how to answer their concerns. It wasn't that she was apathetic about her own death or anything. Just, she hadn't died. Sure it was a bit scary, but she'd thought she had handled the danger adequately at the time.

She could still remember fighting dozens of guys with guns using only one power she barely understood and her sword.

This was nothing compared to back then.

Taylor was drawn back to reality when she felt a light tugging on her shirt, and looked down to find Mem staring at her with her usual impassive face, lips tugging downward in a mild frown that might as well have been a scowl of displeasure on the taciturn girl.

"What do we do?" she asked in the innocent tone of a child who assumed their parents always had the answer to every problem.

"I'm not sure-" Taylor began, then changed what she was going to say when she could tell that trying to dismiss their concerns wasn't going to work. "-but I'm open to suggestions," she allowed.

She was pretty sure given enough time she'd find her way around the problem eventually, but still, she really was open to suggestions.

"You said something about other moms?" Yew asked, finally allowing himself to dig into his food, shoveling a huge forkful of pasta into his mouth and turning a thoughtful look on her.

"Yeah, I guess it's part of the whole… "Anything is possible" thing. Alternate reality stuff," she said with a shrug, stepping back to lean on the kitchen counter and crossing her arms as she answered.

"""Sentient Vending Machine,""" the group intoned at once, miming an old adage that Emmy loved to throw around to explain how the multiverse worked.

It was nice to watch all of her charges in one room from time to time. They'd more or less sprung from nothingness, so they didn't quite have what one would call 'family traditions', or 'a routine', but if this feeling was best described as anything, Taylor would almost call it 'nostalgia'.

"And your thingy goes crazy because it connects to all of them? Can you make it uh, not do that?" Yew offered, raising his free hand to make a snipping motion like he was miming scissors or - more likely for him - a garden tool.

"So I'm told, and, I dunno, maybe?" Taylor agreed again.

"Could you get rid of all the other versions of you?" Simone asked, then paused when her brother and sisters all turned to stare at her.

"What?" Simone asked in a huff.

"'Get rid of'?" Mun asked incredulously.

"It was just an idea! If we know all the options we can choose the right one!" the white-haired girl defended herself.

"A little supervillain-y sounding," Gram pointed out daintily.

"You're literally dating two supervillains!" Simone snapped back at her.

"I'm rehabilitating them. There's this thing Lisa told me about called 'community policing' and-"

Taylor couldn't help but snicker as her children immediately became side-tracked arguing with each other. They didn't end up coming up with anything particularly helpful, but they seemed appeased enough by the conversation - so she'd call it a win and move on.

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Atlas, Remnant

Some thirty minutes later, the group was stepping out of a gap into the cold brisque air of Atlas, on Remnant. The city's streets were eerily modern compared to the often anachronistic stylings of the world, and the people - not being accustomed to random groups of people spilling out of portals the way Brockton's residents were - immediately began to panic and flee away from them as the arrived on the street in front of the Schnee Mansion.

Mostly because Taylor had decided that appearing inside Jacques' home to trigger the defenses when Yew was here to apologize for missing work might not go over well.

"We'll wait out here," Taylor said to Yew as the larger man danced from foot to foot in anxiety.

She really was sorry for making him miss work.

"Actually, can- uh, can Simone come with me?" he asked, glancing past Taylor at his sister who seemed just as confused by the question as Taylor was.

Simone occupied a unique middle position amongst her children. Mem and Mun were inseparable most of the time, and were the youngest. Gram and Yew were closer than any other two of her children with each other, with the larger Yew often fawning over the sometimes clumsy Gram like he was her caretaker.

And then there was Simone, the metaphorical middle child, who would often find herself mediating between the others.

So it was natural that she was surprised Yew was asking her for much of anything. Very few people did.

"Sure?" Simone answered, directing the question at Taylor as though asking for permission. She could only shrug in acquiescence and nod. If she trusted any of her children to deal with Jacques, it was definitely Simone.

"It might be a bit. We can find you later?" Yew offered, gesturing down the road to where the area transitioned from a well appointed upper class district to a normal city - complete with passing vehicles, pedestrians, and active shops even this late into the evening.

"I can watch Mem and Mun if you have other places to be?" Gram offered, leaving Taylor blinking in surprise.

Much like she trusted Simone to stay out of trouble, she trusted that Gram almost certainly couldn't. She loved all her kids, but Gram watching two children arguably more responsible than her was almost enough to earn a chortle from Taylor.

Actually, it had, she realized, as she laughed all the way across the space between them to hug the embarrassed girl.

"Mom!" she complained, trying without much strength to push her off.

"Let's see what's worth doing down there," she said with some amusement as she directed her half of the group down the hill with one hand, waving at Simone and Yew with the other.

Forty minutes later, she found herself sitting on a bench at what passed for a shopping mall that was only a few hours from closing for the day, while Gram, Mem, and Mun ran around 'oohing' and 'aahing' over the just slightly different than normal products in the windows.

Remnant was both bizarrely similar to Earth, and not. Many of the shops sold what Taylor could only describe as 'combat fashion' which was such a bizarre concept to not only exist but to be relatively commonplace here.

"You are remarkably uncommunicative, for someone who claims to be my successor," A voice called from behind her.

She turned to find Ozpin standing there, in slightly heavier clothes than were the norm for him. Taylor lifted her eyebrow at him and - perhaps guessing what her question was going to be, preemptively answered her as he took a seat on the bench next to her.

"This is not the first time you've been to Atlas. I wouldn't usually be comfortable leaving Vale for so long, but I'm… given to understand my paranoia may be unnecessary," he said pointedly, turning a truly curious look on her.

Not a nebulous or calculating look. Not a look of veiled concern. Not even a neutral and mysterious tone.

Just undisguised curiosity and enthusiasm in uncharacteristic amounts from the older principal.

'You're quite lucky that most of the fire had gone out of me by this point in my life. I was more tired than angry - I'm sure it makes dealing with the situation without threatening you much easier,' the Ozma in her head noted girlishly.

Taylor studied him for a moment, checking through Pemmy's eyes to make sure nothing bad was happening to Yew and Simone, and Demmy's to check on Gram, Mem, and Mun somewhere further into the shopping area they were in, then answered the unspoken question.

"I did tell you I'd deal with things," She said with a shrug.

"Yes, and I feel it important to note that from my own frame of reference, 'dealing with it' was functionally impossible. I only started to believe what you had said to us after sending Qrow to scout the area. Imagine my surprise to find people there, with not a Grimm in sight," Ozpin noted, clasping his hands together and resting his elbows on his knees next to her.

"There was some magic involved," Taylor answered uncomfortably.

'It's unlikely I would mistake you for a god in any case-' Ozma began comfortingly.

"Are you a God?" Ozpin asked, overriding his doppleganger with a single sentence.

"No!" Taylor spluttered loudly, jerking away from the man in sudden distress.

"I felt the need to ask. Qrow indicated there were several statues of you, and a number of Churches. He was also found out within mere moments of arriving, but treated as though he was merely a normal citizen," Ozpin stated dryly.

"That's- I mean- I did some stuff they thought only a God could do, but they're wrong, and I'm like, a demigod at best but not like, one from here, or anywhere really, and the designation is- it means something different in the place I got it from, so-" Taylor began to rapidly explain.

This whole misunderstanding was probably one of the top five most embarrassing things she'd had to deal with, coming in at a close third beneath her trigger event, and marching naked through the city after beating Purity that one time.

She blamed that battle high for not noticing sooner.

"I… don't understand you," Ozpin admitted after a second of listening to her babble.

"I could… probably get a whiteboard from somewhere, if that would help? Or maybe a diagram?" She asked helpfully.

"No, I… mostly… understood your explanation. I meant I don't understand you. You claim to be my successor, but does that mean you are from the future? Was I, too, once a voice in your head? Or do you mean more of a spiritual successor, someone who took on my fight after me? I can't think of many good explanations for your sudden arrival otherwise," He asked her curiously.

"No, it's more…" Taylor paused, trying to find a way to explain that wasn't overly complicated, or reliant on common knowledge about the nature of the multiverse from her home world.

It was a lot easier to get the theory across to someone who was fully aware of Earth Aleph than someone from a fantasy world like Remnant.

"Imagine you're reading a book, right?" She began, conjuring a blue ball in the air in front of herself. Ozpin nodded along patiently at her statement, so she quickly continued.

"Everything in that book is real somewhere - just not to you. So, to you, it's a book, but to the people in the book, it's their whole world. Like this, right?" She stated, adding a second blue orb nearby to represent the real world and the book world.

"Now imagine that same idea, the idea that everything in the book is real - just somewhere else - but imagine it applies to every story ever told. And every story never told. Stories no one has ever heard of. And within those stories, the stories they tell are also real somewhere else," she explained as best she could, conjuring dozens of whirling orbs of blue energy that began to twist and coil through the evening air filling the street in a complex dance of unseen interactions.

Like stars in the night sky.

"So… everything is true somewhere. Everything is possible somehow. Infinity is a concept that's hard to contemplate, but, well…" she shrugged.

"And so, you are from one of these… stories… that I have never heard of?" Ozpin asked, glancing up at the beauty surrounding them.

"Yeah, pretty much. Only, my power sort of lets me… borrow stuff? Yeah, borrow stuff from other places. Other times too, I think. I'm not from here, but I saw your future. Lived a bit of it. I got a copy of you in my head, but not this you, obviously. Eventually, I learned to go to other places, and the you in my head asked for help, so I helped," she finished with another helpless shrug, gesturing at one orb among the multitudes that rapidly formed a narrow connective bridge between itself and another orb nearby.

And another, and another, until among the spinning whirl of worlds there was a stable bastion of unmoving ones part of, but separate from the chaos.

A Nexus.

"And so, you are an alien from a far off land that came to my aid because an alternate version of myself asked you very politely?" Ozpin asked her. He didn't seem incredulous, confused, or disbelieving.

He just seemed like he was doing his best to internalize this new information without thought for how true it might be.

'I was never one to ignore something when all the evidence points towards it being true. You forget that I had to watch the world go from outhouses to indoor plumbing. My worldview is very malleable,' Ozma noted.

"…Would I be correct in assuming that you have some relation with a Raven Branwen not native to this story, then? Qrow has been quite concerned by your continued non-presence - especially with Miss Xiao Long confirming your tentative relation," Ozpin asked, finally prying his head away from the display around him, which Taylor promptly snuffed out.

"My mother..." she began, only to trail off with a sigh. Mulling something in her head, she decided to simply go with it.

Raising a hand into the air, she slowly constructed another image. Carefully crafted in three dimensions, with every single detail and imperfection lovingly rendered to be as accurate as her memory allowed.

A few moments later, she found herself staring into the eyes of a rendition of her mother, composed of swirling energy, floating a few inches above her hand.

As her gaze longingly stared at the small projection, she said; "Her name was Annette Rose Hebert. She was a college professor, and a wonderful human being. She… passed away in a car accident."

Then, she raised her other hand and crafted another image, this one of Raven Branwen. Side by side, they looked like identical twin sisters. Well, that is, if they had pursued wildly different lifestyles as a librarian and a fantasy warrior, but still basically the same person.

"Every story is real, somewhere out there. And while no two stories are exactly the same, sometimes, completely different ones may still rhyme, somehow. That's all that this is: simply a rhyme, and nothing more," she explained.

"Remarkable," Ozpin noted as he closely studied the small construct, seemingly entranced.

"In any case," Taylor said, quickly dismissing both images and clearing her throat. "Raven is Raven, and my mom is my mom - dimensional alternate or not - and Raven is nothing like her," she stated adamantly.

"...I see," was Ozpin's only reply.

They sat in easy silence for a bit after that. Taylor, because she had no idea what to say, and Ozpin because he seemed to be thinking about something.

"Are they happy?" he asked abruptly, earning him a confused stare from Taylor as she was shaken from her own introspection.

"Sorry?" she asked.

"The other 'stories' you've seen. Do they have happy endings?" he clarified.

"Ah, sorry. They aren't really stories. They don't actually 'end' like that. They're just... different worlds, with different people that I can borrow from," Taylor explained awkwardly, concerned that maybe he'd taken her metaphor a trifle too seriously.

"I think I would like to see them someday," was Ozpin's response.

She gave him an odd look at that, unsure of how to respond to it, and unsure what exactly the twinkle in his eye as he stared off into the distance really meant.

So she did what she always did.

She changed the topic.

"I actually didn't really 'kill' Salem, by the way. I just turned her into a dagger. The - I think she's called the Chancellor or something - now has her," Taylor explained quickly.

"Can she still speak?" Ozpin asked, back stiffening and expression turning suddenly cold.

"…Probably? I can send you over to talk to her if you want, but convincing them to let you is on you. I, uh, I'm trying not to interfere too much in the culture over there," Taylor stated, then aside, to herself, she added;

'Right after I get those feathers. And then that's the last time I'll ask them for anything. Definitely. Probably.'

"I'll take you up on that, I think. But before that," Ozpin said, a wan smile spreading across his face as he looked past her to where Gram, Mem, and Mun were rapidly approaching from.

"I believe I owe several late birthday presents," he said with a sly smile.

Taylor snorted.

"That's good, because they've been window shopping for a while now and I don't have any of the local money," she said with some amusement.

Ozpin's smile quickly fell away.

Friday, April 1st, 2011

Soul Society

It was a bit late in the evening for her personal tastes - she'd spent perhaps more time out in the city with Ozpin and her kids than was strictly necessary - but Taylor wanted to get this out of the way regardless.

Next week was her spring break. That meant she had a whole week with no school to dedicate to working on her projects with Pemmy and Demmy. A whole week where she could do nothing but train.

And if she wanted to get that vacation rolling, she needed to deal with as much outstanding business as possible.

She knew Unohana was planning to come back to Earth Bet at some point - Piggot had worked out some kind of deal with her that offered the dimensionally displaced woman some leeway - but without Taylor specifically reaching out to her, she had no real way of making that trip. Or even letting Taylor know she wanted to leave.

So when Taylor had stepped through her gap into the open air of Soul Society, she had expected to make a quick jaunt to wherever Unohana was, and then work the details out with her before going home so she could get some sleep.

As it turned out, disrupting her sleep schedule, even just briefly, had not been a good idea for her, because she was as exhausted as she had ever been. It felt almost like the early days of her power, before Emmy had started sleeping at the same time as her. If they had never figured that out, she suspected she might have very rapidly started making some… poor… decisions due to her sleep deprivation.

She definitely wouldn't be the first Parahuman who's power drove her insane.

Instead of the quick jaunt she expected, however, she was met within moments of arrival by a small army of - and she couldn't believe she was calling grim reapers this - mooks.

"Halt! Soul Society is on lockdown. State your squad and seat!" The leader of the small - only about a dozen of them - group of black clad men and women demanded from her.

Taylor took a second to parse the garbled modern slang, so different from her personal understanding of Japanese, and then answered.

"I hath no affiliation to thy trifling squads. I do not wish to inflict an end on your careers, nor your lives, so kindly direct this one to Retsu Unohana," she said as politely as she could manage.

"Wh- what's she saying?" one of the men in the crowd whispered to another.

"She said to take her to Captain Unohana or she'd kill us I think," the other mumbled back.

Taylor frowned at that, once more taking a moment to understand what they were saying before correcting them.

"Nay, I shan't kill thee. I merely wish to denote that you will find naught but embarrassment should we cross blades. I've no love of haranguing the weak," she tried again.

"What about that time?" the same man whispered.

"I think-"

"UNOHANA. PLEASE." Taylor said loudly, getting annoyed by how badly everyone here seemed to speak Japanese. Or maybe alternate reality Japanese was different from what she'd learned? Was that what it was?

Regardless, she conjured Nemesis forth, prepared to stab the blade into the ground to emphasize her impatience. She felt like, purely based on the two examples she had, which were Zaraki Kenpachi and Retsu Unohana, that Soul Society must be kind of a 'might makes right' sort of place.

So it would stand to reason that the only way she was going to get anywhere was with overwhelming violence, or the threat therein.

Her intention to demonstrate this point was briefly stalled however, when two swords appeared in the air before her, and she was forced to engage her superhuman reflexes to catch the second before it could land on the ground in a heap.

She stared blankly at the second katana in her hand, before deciding to ask questions about it at a later date.

Which was good, because she had to respond to one of the mooks trying to stab her in the face within about a second of her conjuring her blade…s.

She did so by kicking him in the stomach so hard he bounced off a nearby wall and fell limply to the ground immediately afterward.

"I doth suppose I am obligated to master a second blade…" she mused aloud as the group all came at her at once.

She didn't use any of her powers. She didn't release either sword - assuming the second sword even had one.

Instead, she relied purely on her sword skills, allowing herself to feel the flow of battle as it moved around her, every minor mistake teaching her in seconds what many would spend years trying to understand.

It was relaxing.

And twenty minutes later, when Unohana finally appeared to answer the scout who'd left the fight to go get her, Taylor could only grin at the other woman's amused countenance upon arrival.

"You could have just released some of your spiritual pressure. I would have sensed you," the older woman pointed out.

Taylor shrugged. She wasn't going to get into the habit of randomly firing her shaker power at people to say hello, no matter how normal it was here.

"I wished to test my acumen against thy minions," she said lamely in response.

The smile on Unohana's face rapidly vanished.

"Don't speak," she said bluntly.

Taylor lifted an eyebrow at that but - faced with a woman who had handily nearly mauled her to death - she wisely chose to acquiesce, nodding along after her.

Unohana smiled again at the easy acceptance of her order, and then turned and swept away from the groaning forms of her fellows on the ground behind them, with Taylor quickly stepping after her.

"I couldn't be sure when you would return, so I made my preparations as best I could. My Gigai and belongings are stored at my squad's headquarters. I will collect them and then we shall leave," she said succinctly.

Taylor opened her mouth to respond, paused, then - with some annoyance - nodded again to show she understood what she was being told.

"I will need a few days to scout the area upon our return, then I shall begin training you. If you are lucky, I will have found other trainees to occupy my time," Unohana continued as they swiftly walked through the streets, arriving in front of a large traditional-looking Japanese building with a 'four' scrawled across the front gate.

Taylor couldn't help but wonder what she meant by 'the area' here. Did she mean the environment surrounding Brockton? She couldn't mean the whole planet, because that would be ludicrous, but-

"Hey! You just walked away while you were healing me! What gives!" a rude voice sounded out the moment the door into the building was slid open by Unohana, revealing a spacious area full of simple cots, half of which were occupied by moaning and injured men and women in black kimono.

"I judged your condition stable and had other things to attend to. You do not seem to properly appreciate how helpful it is to be treated directly by me," Unohana said bluntly, before seeming to realize something and blinking once before her expression and tone took on a matronly tenor.

"But I do apologize. I'll have my second in command look after you shortly," she said in a deceptively caring tone of voice that sent a shiver up Taylor's spine.

One of those black clad men, Taylor even recognized. He was the orange haired guy - the one who'd been fighting Kenpachi before. He'd been interesting, sure, but not interesting enough that she would rate him enough to make Unohana be polite.

So either he got stronger at a rate that would horrify even her, or something really weird was going on.

And she just had to know what.

"Pray tell," she began, causing Unohana's face to immediately sour. The irate looking teen turned his scowl on her, and it only seemed to intensify when he recognized her.

"You're that old hag!" he snapped at her, which she very generously chose to take as a mistranslation.

"Pray tell, you believe yourself a match for her?" she asked curiously, gesturing between the orange haired guy - seriously, it was orange. Not like a ginger's hair, and not dyed, just… actually orange.

"Hah?" he squawked at her in confusion, acting like he'd barely even understood her question.

She frowned at him and tried to find another way to make her point, despite the fact that Unohana was looking strained and disinterested in continuing the conversation - which only really made Taylor want to continue it more.

"Art thou," she began, pointing at the guy, "as strong as she," she continued, gesturing at Unohana.

Seeming to finally understand her point, and equally off put by her utter lack of malice, the orange haired teen actually turned to examine the older woman for a second, his eyes seeming to catch on her white haori, before turning back to Taylor.

"Probably," he answered with a shrug.

Taylor was taken aback. She didn't like to brag, but she considered herself one of the most dangerous people she knew. She'd basically gone to Remnant and rolled up their ancestral ultimate evil in a day.

And Unohana had nearly ripped her limb from limb.

"And… thy name was..?" she pressed, leaning forward into his personal space and squinting at him in disbelief. It wasn't that she was calling him a liar or anything but there was just something… weird… about the entire situation.

Then again, her first emulation had mentioned the guy in passing. And he could barely be arsed to remember her own fathers name.

"Ichigo-" he began, then stepped away from her when her examination proved too distracting.

She just stepped after him.

"-Kurosaki. Hey! Back off, hag!" Ichigo snapped at her, stepping back again.

She blinked at him, then thought about it for a second. It was friday, and it'd been a while since she'd stayed up late, so, just this once…

"It doth be my pleasure to remain for a brief encounter?" She tried, miming a stabbing motion with one hand towards Unohana.

"No," she ground out through her stony forced smile.

"But-"

"No," the older woman repeated, stepping behind her to begin pushing her along the path further into the building.

"I truly believe that-" she began to try again, turning part way back the way they'd come only to be forcibly turned back around.

She really did feel like this was unfair. Surely a spar couldn't be that problematic to arrange. She supposed the guy had said he was injured but if she healed him first then-

"Wait a moment, then we can go," Unohana declared once she'd dragged Taylor into a room much further into the building than she initially believed was possible. It was like several mansions bolted together, the practical result of a building that was its own neighborhood all on its own.

And it was weird.

Taylor peered around the room she found herself in, and was only mildly surprised to find an exact duplicate of the woman that had been dragging her around laying on a nearby table - except it was dressed like a normal person, instead of a japanese shogun. It had on a simple but obviously tailored suit for… whatever reason, and as Taylor watched, Unohana merely stepped over and then into it, like a set of clothes.

Then the body on the table got up, and Unohana was staring back at her.

"Now we can go," she said, turning until her legs dangled off the table and then standing up as though nothing was amiss about the situation.

For all Taylor knew it wasn't. Maybe she was just… too used to weird situations? Was she just losing her ability to tell what was normal or not? She really hoped not.

"I still wish to fight," Taylor half complained, even though she'd more or less resigned herself to just having to come back later. She was actually pretty excited to have someone to fight for fun that was in her same weight class - or possibly higher. Especially someone her age and not a billion year old witch or something.

Unohana didn't bother dignifying her complaint with an answer - so Taylor just continued to grumble as she pulled open another gap to take them back home through.

She wasn't an utter moron - she wouldn't have dared let someone as strong as Unohana loose in her world of her own accord, at least, not on purpose - but Piggot had come to some sort of agreement with her, and for all she loved messing with the woman, Taylor trusted Emily Piggot.

Even if she'd rather die than say that out loud.

When she emerged from her gap into the kitchen of the Heap, fully intending to put Unohana up for the night then to go home, she found the space surprisingly occupied. It wasn't that late yet so it wasn't strange to see her father still here - but it was odd for her to bump into him like this.

What was even stranger was that Jess was on one knee in front of him, one hand halfway into the air with a box in it, and her face turned to stare back at Taylor like a doe in the headlights.

"I'll just-" she slowly began , unsure of how to deal with… this… but was unfortunately stopped by Unohana stepping out behind her, taking one look at the situation, smiling demurely, and walking past the pair to the exit of the room without saying a word.

"I should- I mean I should probably follow her…" Taylor started awkwardly.

"It- this is- April Fools! Right! It's- it's April Fools Day!" Jess squawked, seemingly desperate for really any escape from the situation.

Taylor had no idea why, it wasn't like she was going to bite the woman's head off. She'd seen enough movies about bratty kids ruining their parents' marriage out of spite to avoid that particular pitfall.

"Oh! God, I had no idea what was going on for a second there!" Danny snorted a laugh out, oblivious to how Jess' expression seemed to twist to mirror an awkward caricature of a smile.

"Ahah… yeah… but um, hypothetically…" The blond woman began slyly, obviously trying to salvage the situation. Taylor couldn't tell which was more sad - Jess' inability to just spit it out already, or her father's inability to breathe air and read a room at the same time.

Well, that was their business.

Taylor was perfectly fine staying well out of her father's love life.

She immediately put the situation out of her mind, and marched to the door to follow after the scary, scary woman who would be spending the night here.

She was suddenly very, very, tired.

Taylor seeks inspiration;

From this point forward, your decisions will influence how Taylor chooses to solve her current dilemma.

Tomorrow is Saturday, Choose Two (2)

[ ] Take some time out to fortify the Heap with Onmyoudo.

[ ] Take some time out to Tinker.

[ ] There was a guy you weren't supposed to heal… Uppercrust or something?

[ ] You started the work but… the ferry could finish its transformation into a school with only a little more. You're going to have a bunch of new capes in town that could benefit from it.

[ ] Planeswalk (Choose a setting: Bleach, Kung Fu Panda, Touhou, RWBY, Nasuverse, Full Metal Alchemist, Devil May Cry)

[ ] Write In

[ ] Take Time Off (Pick an Extra Social, on the weekends, this can be a second group)

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now). On weekends, you can choose an entire group to socialize with - but are not forced to.

[ ] Your parents:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Danny (3)

[ ] Jess (2)

[ ] Mouse Protector (2)

[ ] The Oathbound:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Trainwreck (3)

[ ] Aspirant (3)

[ ] Parian (3)

[ ] Oliver (3)

[ ] Miss Kim (1)

[ ] Willow (1)

[ ] Jeeves (0)

[ ] The Bratpack (As a group, includes Mem and Mun):

Outstanding group tasks: Train the Brats (Ongoing). Mem's crafting project.

[ ] Aisha (2)

[ ] Dinah (4)

[ ] Your kids:

Outstanding group tasks: Unleash your kids on that fuck Jacques. Yew wants to go to college.

[ ] Mem (5)

[ ] Mun (3)

[ ] Simone (5)

[ ] Yew (3)

[ ] Gram (2)

[ ] Your friends:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Victoria (4)

[ ] Amy (5)

[ ] Clockblocker (4)

[ ] Write In

[ ] Sisters From Other Misters:

Outstanding group tasks: None

[ ] Yang (1)

[ ] Ruby (0)

A/N: Once again, sorry for the wait. These damn things just seem to get longer and longer the further the quest goes. You can all thank spaceghetti and Phearo for the handful of free powers I'll be dropping in this and another chapter. I'm a sucker for who entire animations that way. Oh, and, Blah blah obligatory plug blah blah.

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Feb 14, 2023

#55,578

[X] Complete Training (Soul Manipulation) Costs 1 Energy. Choose One More Action

[X] Start Training (Tinker Specialty: Masotech Chemistry)

[X] Planeswalk (Devil May Cry)

[X] Planeswalk (Touhou)

[X] Ichigo (0)

Current Energy: 16

Tinker Specialty: Soul Manipulation (7/10) - Complete!

Tinker Specialty: Masotech Chemistry (0/10) - (5/10)

Current Emulation Status: Here

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

The Heap, Brockton Bay

"What the hell am I looking at?" Taylor asked flatly over her cup of tea that morning.

It was Saturday. She'd had a tiring couple of days. She had a meeting with the Director about 'crashing a glowing spatial anomaly into the bay' later today.

She just wanted to have a normal relaxing morning doing some training with Pemmy and Demmy before heading out to deal with all that responsible superhero stuff.

So why the hell-

"Are you jealous? Are you? Are you?" Nemesis prodded her smugly, leaning forward with an ever widening smile accompanying each word spoken.

As always, the sword spirit appeared as Taylor did. But with way too much skin showing. Skinny jeans and a black t-shirt with the New Wave logo on it that was basically just a crop top on her. The only real difference in their physical appearance was that Nemesis tended to have makeup on that was clearly supposed to make her look like an egyptian pharaoh, and her hair was bright pink.

Taylor briefly wondered if this was what having a twin was like. An annoying, overbearing, overly salacious twin who would make both of them look bad in public if she wasn't also extremely lazy, and thus, spent the majority of her time napping inside Taylor's soul.

She eyed the New Wave logo and made a mental note to dropkick Vicky for sneaking it into her home - where she assumed Nemesis had gotten it.

…Hopefully she hadn't just stolen it from a nearby store.

'Not in our experience, no,' Demmy supplied helpfully to her idle thought, which she hadn't realized she had been broadcasting to the projections.

'It's exactly like this, yes,' Pemmy countered with only the slightest touch of annoyance in her gentle voice.

'Hey!' Demmy complained at the accusation.

'Tavern songs are rarely chaste - and she loves them,' Pemmy continued to complain.

'Don't listen to her! Get her drunk enough and she loves it too! If you just try it-' Demmy tried to defend herself.

'She is fifteen. We are not encouraging this,' Pemmy said forcefully.

'Laaaaame,' Demmy groused.

Taylor pushed the ongoing bickering of the two sisters to the back of her mind, even as she made a mental note that they could apparently sing and dance - even if only at a 'drunken party' level of skill.

She was suddenly incredibly thankful that she had more important skills to learn from this emulation. Even if she did tend to prefer more physical pursuits.

"No. I'm just confused and annoyed," Taylor finally spoke, nudging Nemesis out of her way so she could continue to stare at the being that had drastically reduced the normality of her morning.

And really, that was saying a lot coming from a girl who was having breakfast in her sapient castle shortly before heading upstairs to learn how to make magic windex from her two gynoid friends who were also her super power.

Spoiler: Devil Sword Ozma

"She's totally jealous~" Nemesis crooned over her shoulder at… Ozma… who shrugged matronly back at her.

"I admit that I had largely considered my days of bodily autonomy done with. It is not an unpleasant change," she concurred.

"I'm not- just please explain," Taylor growled, putting her spoon down and pushing her mixing bowl full of cornflakes away from herself.

'Is this what it's like dealing with me? I hate dealing with me. I'm the worst, she mentally complained.

"Well, you know how Dante left his bitch sword behind?" Nemesis crooned.

Taylor winced at the casual profanity, but waited for her to finish speaking.

"Well, I ate it. So it's mine now. That makes it less annoying. And it's not like you were using her for anything anyway, and you've already got Emmy, and even though Emmy's mine too, you don't share, so I used the stupid sword to put Ozma into the stupid sword, so Ozma is the stupid sword now, which means she's part of me which means she's mine now!" Nemesis belted out, all in one breath.

Actually, Taylor wasn't sure Nemesis needed to breathe, which would explain a lot about her personality and habits.

Taylor stared blankly at Ozma for a moment.

"So you're-" she began eventually.

"Your second sword, yes," she replied placidly.

Taylor frowned, then turned to Nemesis with a stern look on her face.

"You can't own people," she said resolutely.

"She's my friend which means she's mine!" Nemesis countered, stomping one foot in a childish huff.

It was notable because she also tended not to wear shoes - for no discernible reason besides personal preference. How any aspect of herself in any form could be so… so… infuriatingly embarrassing was beyond Taylor, but she had long since learned that you had to talk around Nemesis rather than argue with her.

You'd bever get anywhere otherwise.

"You can't own your friends either!" she barked back in defiance of her own just explained reasoning for doing just that to be pointless.

If there was one thing she supposed she and her sword did share, it was obstinance in spades.

"I prefer to think of myself as a friendly attendant or vizier, if that helps. I can now advise you both," Ozma said in a relaxed tone, turning to the kitchen counter where she began running an open hand along its surface in quiet enjoyment of the tactile sensation.

"…Even if it is clear one of you needs advice more than the other," she added, turning to look at both Nemesis and Taylor over one shoulder.

Taylor and Nemesis snorted in amusement and looked at each other, both obviously assuming Ozma had been talking about the other.

Both of their victorious smirks became thin annoyed lines at the same time.

Both of their unamused glares turned back in Ozma's direction at once - only to find she had disappeared.

"Bitch!" Nemesis complained.

"Language," Taylor corrected her automatically, but was unsurprised when her other sword spirit vanished along with Ozma between one blink and the next.

Taylor sighed, then took another sip of her tea.

It was earl gray, and had a pleasant sweet taste to it when prepared as a milk tea.

Perhaps seeing that Taylor was trying to enjoy a quiet morning, Demmy and Pemmy silently ghosted away from her, exiting through the door and heading towards the lab to prepare everything.

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

PRT Headquartere, Brockton Bay

"Okay, so what did we learn?" Taylor asked as she gingerly made her way through the halls of the PRT building.

That morning's experiment's had been… unpleasant.

The twins had used her help with alchemy to quickly create a prototype for a quick shut off mechanism that would allow them to test extremely small amounts of her combined magic at once - so that they could start to work on the problem of making it safe for Taylor to use.

That had gone well enough. Sure, everytime the machine started mixing the Blue Maso together she felt like someone was punching her in the kidney, but in such small amounts the resonance effect it had on her was much reduced if not absent.

She would be sore but wouldn't die, provided the machine wasn't on for more than about five minutes.

That was about the only good thing about that morning's activities.

'There are slight differences in the resonance between you and the others, we just can't pinpoint what they are with the technology we have,' Pemmy offered thoughtfully as Taylor proceeded forward.

'We have some ability to interact with the soul, but I think what we need going forward is something to prevent you from resonating with it, something to protect you, which is a short term solution, and then something to identify our world's specific frequency and isolate it within the energy form,' Demmy added in a clinical tone with a note of worry in her mental voice.

"Sounds easy enough," Taylor offered, just glad that they were making any progress at all.

'No, this kind of research can take years. Alchemy is helping us test things faster than if we were making everything from scratch, but it's still going to be a lot of trial and error. I don't even know how to start dealing with any of this right now,' Demmy corrected her instantly, drawing a frown from Taylor.

"Yeah, but-" She began aloud, only to be interrupted as she reached the door to the Director's office. She was going to point out that she was pretty sure Pemmy and Demmy just needed someone with a little more imagination around, but evidently Demmy foresaw that because she already had an answer for it.

'And we are not going to just let you try whatever comes to mind! You're going to blow yourself up!' She snapped.

"I've been fine so far…" she grumbled under her breath.

"Is that what you want to call the nightmare you create in your wake? Cute," Piggot answered instead of Demmy or Pemmy as Taylor stepped through the door and into the room on the top floor of the building

"Hey! I help! I'm a good guy!" Taylor couldn't help but whine in response to the dig as she stepped into the office.

As always, it was easily made up of more paperwork than any one person should ever have to look at. A small plastic basket labeled 'out' on the wooden desk contained a few slips of paper, while a large cabinet labeled 'in' stood next to the desk, seemingly having been engineered to open from the front and back so that people could bring new requests in and deposit them for the Director to later withdraw from the rear.

The disproportionate size of the in and out piles was glaring - but not nearly so strongly as the Director was glaring at Taylor at that moment.

"You're an agent of chaos, Hebert. Just accept it and move on," the Director said dismissively, swiftly typing something out on the small laptop infront of her and then hitting the enter key with almost damaging amounts of force.

Then she returned her attention to Taylor.

"Well? Sit," she said bluntly.

"I liked you better when you were trying to hide how grumpy you were," Taylor said as she moved forward to sit in the office chair opposite Piggot.

"And I liked the world before Ghost Protocols needed to be written, but here we are, one six hundred page memorandum, twelve video call training sessions, three meetings with angry religious officials, and sixteen suppressed news reports later. We can't always get what we want," the diminutive blonde woman growled at her.

And wasn't that just a strange way to refer to Director Piggot.

'Diminutive'

With functioning organs allowing her to eat and drink normally she was almost perturbingly petite, especially compared to the once corpulent figure who still had pictures on all the walls in the office.

Taylor really didn't feel bad about that, even though it was technically bullying that had gotten them here.

"That was… really specific…" Taylor noted carefully.

"That's because it was specific Hebert. I gave up on a brain to mouth filter around you. There's no point. Better you know how I feel," Piggot grunted at her.

"Some of that sounded kind of secret though?" Taylor tried again.

She knew that Piggot had her issues with her, but this still felt excessive compared to their usual interactions.

"Then don't tell anyone about it. Now tell me what the hell you did to the Ferry," she urged, to which Taylor couldn't help but swallow nervously in response.

"You can't get mad," she prefaced.

Taylor watched as the Director paused, closing her eyes for a few moments before leveling Taylor with an irritated glare.

"Hebert," Piggot said, closing her laptop and putting her elbows on the table ominously.

"Look, it's fine and everything is fixed so don't worry about it!" she continued, kind of hoping she could catch the woman on a better day for this.

She was clearly stressed.

"Hebert," Piggot repeated, seeming to loom over her in spite of her comparatively smaller frame.

Taylor missed when people were scared of her. She never had to worry about this when Piggot thought she was one bad day away from ripping the city out of the ground and throwing it at the sun.

Not that she could do that.

Or would.

Well, maybe she could if she-

"I'm calling your father," Piggot declared when Taylor didn't answer her fast enough.

"Wai- wait! Fine! I was… ehem. I got a Tinker power," Taylor stated, turning away and twiddling her thumbs together innocently.

"And?" Piggot pressed.

"Aaaaand I was experimenting with this new power source," Taylor added.

Piggot just stared at her until she continued this time.

"Aaaaaaaand that power source connects to a bunch of alternate versions of me," she finished.

The Director stared at her. She stared back. There was a poignant moment of utter silence during which Taylor could only smile awkwardly at the situation.

"Hebert, I have an important request for you," Piggot started slowly, and clearly, without a hint of anger in her voice all of a sudden.

"….Yes?" Taylor replied meekly. She felt like maybe now wasn't the time to mess with the Director. The woman had a dangerous air about her.

"I need you to give this letter to the next important person you meet in another… reality, dimension, whatever. Next time you go gallivanting about in foreign nations without legal permission to be there, please give them this letter. Do not read the letter. Do you understand?"

Taylor stared blankly back at her, then back down at the manilla envelope being slowly slid across the desk towards her. She had the queer sensation that she was the victim of a practical joke, but couldn't figure out how or why that might be the case.

Grabbing the envelope between two fingers, she raised it to eye level and prepared to toss it into a gap, before pausing.

"So… Just in case I hypothetically end up 'gallivanting' to another world after giving someone this…" she trailed off.

"Grab another from the third drawer to the left. I would hope that this would at least incentivize you to inform me before you commit illegal interdimensional travel, yes?" Piggot replied, gesturing towards the file cabinet simply labeled "NEXUS" in bold letters.

Taylor wasn't sure whether she should be flattered that she had her own personal file cabinet in the Director's office, or annoyed that she apparently warranted the trouble for the no-nonsense woman to make one exclusively for her antics.

But she also didn't want to risk setting off the woman again, so she just acquiesced to Piggot's request with an uncertain nod before throwing the envelope into a gap.

Piggot nodded contentedly at her actions - Taylor had no idea how normal women carried their stuff around with them without free access to portals - and then continued.

"Against my better judgment, I am choosing to believe matters with the Ferry are currently safe. I'll follow up with Danny and have a hazmat team out there to check things just in case - with your permission, of course," she finished calmly, reopening her laptop in a clear sign of dismissal as she refocused on her work.

"Sure…" Taylor trailed off, vaguely creeped out by the Director's abrupt switch to absolute placidity from her previously irate state.

She was just about to get up and leave - because it seemed like that was it for the meeting - when Piggot said one more thing.

"And make yourself available one week from now, there are some people I got an email about this morning who want to speak to you."

Taylor paused halfway to the door.

"Who?" she asked curiously, perking up at the new and interesting tidbit.

"Congress," was Piggot's only reply.

Taylor groaned. She was going to have to go to another dimension entirely to get some levity out of today wasn't she?

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Redgrave City, Elsewhere

She definitely wasn't here just to entertain herself.

She had actual, very important, pertinent, questions about that damn sword Dante had left behind.

For one thing, as cool as it was that Ozma wasn't trapped forever in her head like some kind of imprisoned unwilling voyeur-

'I do still have that capability,' the woman's disembodied voice supplied helpfully to her, which she ignored.

-it was kind of odd that it had happened.

Taylor had a pretty firm grasp of what her individual powers did. She considered herself a dab hand at guesstimating what any two powers would do when interacting. She was even kind of proud of it. She imagined she could give a whole bunch of people who'd made it their life's work a bunch of insight into how Parahumans worked.

And nothing about that sword told her it was anything but a really big stupid sword that shot other, smaller, swords on command.

Was it cool? Yes. Was she going to use it to her heart's content the next time she found someone to fight? Yes.

But did that mean it should have the ability to allow Nemesis to consume Ozma and give her a spiritual body?

Absolutely the hell not.

So she had caved on something she had kind of been dreading doing, and came here.

It didn't bother her as much with Kenpachi, because he was a loveable psychopath anyway, but Dante was… recent.

Well, that, and she felt like if she met him and he acted like he didn't even know her it would hurt her feelings, just a bit.

Okay, a lot.

But if anyone could tell her what 'Devil Sword Dante' - which was such a pretentious name - did, it would be, well, Dante.

That's why she found herself standing in the rain, on a street somewhere in a city she was pretty sure didn't exist in her world - 'note to self, look for analogues to Redgrave city back home,' - staring up at a glaring neon sign that read 'Devil May Cry', with the most garish approximation of a statuesque hourglass figure flickering at its end.

Spoiler

'We don't have to go in, you know,' Demmy offered awkwardly.

'I can go in alone to ask any questions. You can… explore?' Pemmy tried.

Taylor snorted at the suggestions and shook herself out of her funk.

'Breathe in, breathe out, like Po taught you,' she thought to herself, sucking in a deep breath of air before releasing it in a serene sounding sigh.

She had to get over herself here. She.. she needed to figure this sword thing out.

It could fuse stuff. Maybe. And she needed to know how far that went.

She hesitated to say it would help with the twins project given they could already fuse Blue Maso together, but it couldn't hurt either.

So she took another deep breath and pushed the door to the building open - and stepped inside.

A/N: I know conventional wisdom is that Id plug my or whatever every chapter but fuck that.

There were two fucking earthquakes in Turkey recently. Go donate money to that instead.

Do it for Hat Daddy.

PS: Im splitting this chapter so I have some leeway to write cus I cant keep doing this 10k monstrosities.

Last edited: Feb 14, 2023

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Feb 14, 2023

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Threadmarks Knives in the Dark, An Emma Side Story

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Feb 14, 2023

#55,579

Emma woke up, rolled over, and slapped the alarm on her side table, desperately wishing her power worked on more than just Parahumans.

She was tired. Her back and shoulders hurt from her previous day's exertions. Her ankle itched where the bracelet they used to make sure she wasn't doing something stupid had dug into her skin overnight.

But she had to wake up, because she had to go to 'school', which in this case was just her family's dining room.

She could have gotten into Arcadia. Even with all the restrictions otherwise put on her, even with the thinly-veiled judgment that radiated from all her fellow Wards, and even her own parole officer, it was a standard benefit extended to all Wards to be able to go there. Not just for their education - but because of all of the systems set in place to make a Ward's identity safer while attending.

Her mother had vetoed that pretty much instantly.

It felt too much like a reward, to her. To do what her daughter had done, and then to end up going to a nicer school with more freetime as compensation.

Emma vacillated on whether she agreed or not depending on her mood. When it was really laid out for her, it was difficult to say that she had truly done nothing wrong. She wasn't so stupid as to see the situation she was in and fail to realize she had put herself in it. She'd been mad at T- at Nexus at first. For doing this to her. Locking her up with all these… these restrictions, taking her friends from her, taking her life from her.

But the truth was Nexus hadn't done much of anything to her. She'd pretty much ignored her existence entirely. It was just, she was so powerful, and important, that other people were happy to act on her behalf even without being asked.

The bullying had been kind of like that. Emma was the top dog, so on any given day someone was probably doing something to T- to Ta- to her, and Emma didn't even have to be aware of it to know it must be happening.

She'd used to refuse any responsibility for those things, even if she privately reveled in them happening. Of course, now the shoe was on the other foot, she was starting to think she may have been somewhat… unkind.

On a good day, anyway. They'd started giving her these pills she was supposed to take to regulate her mood. She didn't think she was that bad, but after some testing and visits with a psychologist, the PRT had found she was more prone to turning powers 'on' or 'off' depending on her mood swings, which were often… extreme.

Today felt like a low day, which was probably for the best. She didn't have patrol today, and being manic when she was forced to spend the better part of two hours staring at a computer screen was anything but fun.

"Emma! Breakfast!" Her mother's harsh voice called to her through the door of her room, a door that'd had all of its locks removed so that her family could be sure she hadn't run away from home again at any time. The lack of privacy was irksome, but - and again, she could only admit this some of the time - probably necessary.

"M'up!" She called back in a slurred and tired voice.

She hasn't been getting a lot of sleep nowadays. Too much going on. She tended to just take naps at the headquarters, where Lilly was on hand to wake her up and watch her back.

Drowsily, she kicked her blankets off and began the arduous task of getting a pair of socks past her ankle bracelet, followed rapidly by everything else she needed for the day. Drab grey pants and a boring sweatshirt. Not at all what she'd have chosen to wear in public, which was the point.

They'd donated most of her modeling clothes to charity when the news had run that bit on her and she hadn't been at home to stop them.

Eventually she found her way down stairs to where her mom and dad were having their usual, strained breakfast together.

They hadn't told her they were getting a divorce, and they didn't argue at all, - at least where she could see it - but there was a clear tension there. Like her parents no longer considered each other equal partners in whatever they were doing. Her dad flashed her a weak smile as she approached the kitchen table, but her mother just plunked a bowl of oatmeal in front of her and got up, taking her breakfast with her into the dining room, no doubt to set up her schooling for the day.

Her mother had grown cold towards her. Not uncaring, because if she didn't care there was a lot she would be doing differently… but cold. Distant. Where her interactions with her dad were characterized mostly by a sensation of guilt and betrayal, her mom just seemed disappointed, if not contemptuous.

If she was having an 'up' day that would probably bother her more. It would probably make her palms itch, and her teeth grit in barely restrained anger. This was her mom. Her. Mother. Why the hell did she care more about- about someone else than her own daughter?

Emma, of course, knew the answer to that immediately as she currently was.

It was because she viewed the entire situation as a moral failure on her part. As a result of being too lenient.

Maybe she was right. Maybe if Emma had gotten therapy right away, maybe she could have- could have controlled herself better. Maybe she could be part of the team that lived in a castle, and got to schmooze with the Triumvirate, and had adventures all the time.

Or maybe Emma was unfixable. Maybe she was just… broken. Damaged. Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe.

She couldn't know, and if she was being honest, she preferred not to think about it, just like she tried not to think about where Soph was, or what Madison probably thought of her now.

Regardless, she shoveled the bland oatmeal into her mouth, downed a glass of water which she filled for herself at the sink in an attempt to stretch the moment out longer…

And then headed to the dining room.

Emma's mom had originally had a job before this. She'd needed to. Her dad might make a decent amount of money, but her sister had to pay for school and that wasn't cheap, especially in another city entirely.

Now though? Now she did this. She spent the first half of Emma's day with her, drilling her on topics she would need to know to pass her G.E.D. Emma didn't really know if her mom did anything else in the afternoons, but if she did, she certainly didn't tell Emma about it.

It left her feeling another pang of emptiness, to remember how they used to talk. About fashion, and designs and clothes, and current events and TV shows.

Emma's mom used to be her friend.

Now she was just her mom.

Emma felt like a mouse trying not to draw a cat's ire as she slid into her seat and pulled the already open textbook on the table in front of her closer.

She was tired already.

\\\\

Emma actually kind of liked the Director.

She hadn't at first. Especially before they'd gotten her on her medicine. But in retrospect… She was fair, in an egalitarian sort of way.

Oh, there was no love lost between them, and the Director clearly hated her, but it was a muted, generic kind of hatred. Maybe hatred wasn't even the right word. Mistrust, maybe.

That'd bothered Emma at first. At least, until she realized it was the same for literally every Parahuman she worked with.

The Director was a spiteful mean spirited woman, but she was equal opportunity about it, which was comforting, in its own way.

So when she said she usually didn't argue with the woman - being more than personally aware of her own circumstances within the PRT - she really meant it.

Maybe that was why everyone was giving her weird looks right now - even Lily.

"Why!?" She demanded, slapping her palms down on the table and leaving them there. Sure it made for a sound loud enough to draw attention and get her point across - but it also made sure everyone present knew where her hands were. The fact that her primary weapon was a simple combat knife combined with the trivial ease she generally had incapacitating other Parahumans made others leery around her.

Even if the knife was the least threatening part of her entire setup. If they gave her a gun…

"Switchblade, I fail to see why you would even have an opinion on the topic," The Director sent to her neutrally, glancing around the table at the gathered capes in the conference room.

The entire ENE division's cape forces were present. It was the kind of all hands meeting that wouldn't have been plausible before… before the gangs had been handled, but had become shockingly common the second they'd had the leeway to do so.

Evidently Piggot believed that communication was key.

The older members of the team were all seated towards the end of the table that Piggot sat at, which coincidentally was where the coffee being served for the meeting was also located.

The Wards were all situated further back, with Emma and Lily the furthest - not so coincidentally where the donuts were located. Not that Emma could afford to have one with her diet. The weird Dragon clones were handling the majority of the food present all by themselves anyway - scarfing down the presented pastries as fast as they could get their hands on them. She noticed Armsmaster observing their behavior with a frown but not otherwise interjecting on the topic.

"You said that a routine and standard connection between the Protectorate and the Oathbound was vital to our operations!" She tried to reason, ignoring the uncomfortable look Lily was giving her.

Lily was nice. They got along, and she ignored all the stuff people said about her. Most of it was true, but she often found it framed as being far more serious than it felt at the time. Even if she knew objectively she was in the wrong, she inherently resisted being told as such. She refused to be judged.

Not by people who didn't even know her, and not on behalf of someone else who didn't-

Didn't even care about her.

"Yes, and at that time, Nexus and her merry little band of unhinged lunatics had shown a tremendous aptitude for collateral damage, and very little regard for legal authority. They have since proved marginally more trustworthy. An office will remain in their… headquarters, staffed by normal agents. Putting my capes there is pointless," The Director explained, turning away from her as though assuming the conversation was now over.

"But-" she tried again.

"Switchblade, if you wish to continue this line of questioning, you can remain after the meeting. You are derailing things," Piggot stated flatly.

Emma had to do her best not to growl at the woman. She knew perfectly well that if she was going to get her way, or earn any kind of concession, it had to be while people were watching. It had to be where she could argue her point in front of people. Alone, with just herself and the Director, she would probably just be told to let it go, or else.

But she also knew that arguing this point wasn't going to do her any favors with her peers - so she tried to do what her therapist had been having her do recently to calm down - instead of scowling at everyone around her, or indulging the itch that so many nearby parahumans caused her power-based senses to experience when there were so many in one place.

She acknowledged that it bothered her, and then tried to let it flow past her. Not ignored - just deferred to when she wasn't in the thick of things.

She didn't bother responding directly to the Director, even though she was sure she, like everyone in the room, was wondering why she cared at all. She just sat down and allowed the rest of the pointless meeting to wash over her.

Blah blah, there were ghosts now. Blah blah, new consultant.

They didn't get it. How could they? She could barely even bring herself to think about… about Taylor, and it was all she could do not to panic whenever she felt her one time friend's distinct power enter her range. It used to be that whether she was 'up' or 'down' that day would determine her response. Fight or Flight.

She'd never do anything, but anytime she felt her she felt compelled to grab a weapon. To hide. To get ready for an attack. And that was when she was having an 'up' day. When she was down, when she was feeling introspective and actually allowed herself to imagine how she would feel if the situation was reversed - that was the worst of it.

If Emma Barnes was Nexus, there would be no scenario where she left herself alive or unbothered. She'd get even - one way or another.

It kept her awake at night. It haunted her dreams. She hadn't seen Sophia in weeks and even though she knew Nexus had nothing to do with it, Taylor had nothing to do with it, a small part of her wondered if what was once their friendship was the thin line that separated Emma from Sophia.

She wondered if Madison had gone missing like that too. Just… vanished one day.

And… she had to know. She had to see her, to talk to her, somehow. She felt like until she did, she would always be stuck. In fear, in loathing, in spite.

She wasn't sure what she would say, or what she would ask. Maybe she would try to bring up old memories, to try and find a way in. Maybe she would just apologize and go.

Maybe she would become a stain on the floor for her efforts.

She didn't know, but she knew she had to try.

And until now, she'd been… what was the word… procrastinating? She felt that as long as her turn on watch duty was forthcoming, she could table these thoughts. She could continue to not think about her. She could try and eke normalcy out of her situation. Work on getting her mom to love her again. Focus her energy on not making things worse for her dad.

But with that gone, indeed, with the confirmation that she had never been considered for it in the first place, that polite illusion was gone now.

And she had no idea what to do about it.

Lily's leg bumping into her own under the table drew her from her rapidly souring introspection, and though the girl was staring straight ahead, clearly focusing on whatever Piggot was saying, there was a small smile at the edge of her lips as Emma glanced at her.

Well.

At least she had one friend. That was something, right?

\\\\

"I still don't see why you care so much," Lily offered, her breath coming out in a light pant as she and Emma continued to make their circuit around the small gym that was set aside for the local employees to use.

It was less an amenity, and more an obligation that many members of the Protectorate make at least a token effort to manage their appearance. That was more for the full Protectorate members than Wards, but the Wards were extended the ability to use the space regardless, which was why Emma spent a majority of the time she was forced to spend at the PRT headquarters exercising.

She never would have pegged herself as the sporty type before, but the first time she'd fallen asleep with her legs burning from spending the whole night running for her life, she had resolved not to be screwed by something like that ever again.

Maybe if she'd applied thinking like that to her single encounter with the ABB she wouldn't be where she was now.

Maybe they could even-

She truncated the thought before it could finish, and answered Lily instead of continuing to ponder it.

"Because- because all the favored Wards got to spend half a month relaxing at a mall and now they're just getting rid of the program? That's bullshit!" She lied, hissing through her teeth as the burning in her lungs was accelerated by her own ranting.

"I don't think that's what it is. Carlos never got to go either, and the Director loves him," Lily pointed out to her.

"The stick up his ass is way too big for him to enjoy it anyway," she shot back, slowing to a halt and bending over to rest her hands on her knees, breathing heavily for a few seconds as her body adjusted to the reduced activity. On her final hard exhale, she pushed herself upright again, and started stretching.

She'd already stretched before the jog, but the act of going through the preset motions always helped her center herself, so she often found herself doing it three or four times more than was normal just for the sake of it.

"I guess…" Lily said, and when Emma glanced over to see what was distracting her she quickly began her own stretching routine.

Emma watched for a second to see if there was anything Lily was doing wrong, or that she could learn to do better, before returning to her own relaxation.

"You need to breathe when you stretch. Your face is turning red," she pointed out absent-mindedly.

"I am!" Lily shouted back, speeding through her routine, and then swiftly darting to the far wall where they'd left their bags. When she returned, it was with a broomhandle wrapped in a pool tube and covered in duct tape to look like an incredibly poorly made prop sword, and a similarly wrapped stick that was approximately the size of a dagger.

Emma did a quick check to see if anyone with powers was nearby - they really weren't supposed to be sparring in the gym - and when she found no one present or visibly on the way towards them, nodded and took her fake knife.

Then she took several steps back and turned off Lily's own power.

They both benefited from this. Emma needed practice, and Lily found it supremely difficult to 'practice' when her power was constantly correcting her balance and posture for her. She was still leagues better as a melee combatant than Emma was… but without her power she actually had to learn to be better.

They dueled for a bit - stopping periodically to talk about mistakes as they made them - and only fully stopped their practice forty minutes later, when Emma had to tap out of a chokehold she wasn't quite sure how she had gotten into in the first place.

"Hey, Emma?" Lily asked her with an uncharacteristic note of vulnerability in her voice.

"What?" She bluntly replied, already feeling the coiling lump of anxiety in her chest that had started to rear its ugly head anytime someone decided to have a 'serious' conversation with her.

She hadn't exactly been batting a hundred with these kinds of talks recently.

"Do…" Lily paused, not bothering to get off the ground, instead flopping onto her back next to Emma where they both were breathing heavily on the floor.

"Do you like Nexus? Like, like, like?" She asked eventually.

Emma blinked at that - that was not what she expected to hear at all - and then sat up to look at the other girl's face to see if she was joking.

She absolutely was not, going by her expression, and somehow that made it ten times funnier to Emma all of a sudden.

So she started laughing. A giggle at first, followed swiftly by a full body laugh that left her spasming on the floor in barely restrained mirth.

"N-oh God, God no," She snorted out in a very undignified and pig-like manner. She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed like that, or felt good for more than two seconds at a time.

Her and Taylor? That was just gross. When they'd been friends they'd been like sisters. Now Emma barely knew her at all. She might as well have been asked if she was in love with the mascot on her cereal books - she arguably knew the obnoxiously coloured toucan better than Taylor at this point.

Her levity was such that she didn't even register the ease with which she'd thought of the other girl just now, instead sitting up to wave dismissively at her friend.

"No, nope. No way. Gross," She said in sequence, as though to emphasize the point.

"Ah… I guess you don't… swing that way?" Lily ventured, and Emma could only shrug.

Having taken the time to talk about it with her therapist, particularly as it related to what the old man described as her 'toxic dependency' on Sophia, there was one thing Emma was at least moderately certain of in life.

"I didn't say that," she half joked as she fully rose to her feet.

"Gonna shower off," she added, having already put the entire conversation behind her as nothing more than a blissfully funny moment between the neverending tide of bullshit she usually had to stomach dealing with.

She wondered what was for dinner tonight. Mom wasn't her best friend or anything anymore, but when she asked for foods that would work with her exercise routine she had changed things so maybe… chicken breast?

She really hoped so, she was starving.

A/N: this is from my where it was posted a week ago. If your into that kind of thing, go donate to Turkey instead.

367

Bowler Hat Guy

Feb 14, 2023

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Threadmarks Summit 19.7

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Bowler Hat Guy

Bowler Hat Guy

A Hat & Its Man

Feb 21, 2023

#55,685

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Redgrave City, Elsewhere

The first thing she noticed was how dirty everything was. Not in the sense that there was a lot of garbage lying around, rather…

"Why is it so dusty in here? This place looks like a frat boy bought a deli and then just threw his stuff everywhere," Taylor complained to no one in particular.

She was distracting herself. She knew she was distracting herself.

But what kind of lunatic has his office desk smack in the middle of a frat house that is, itself, directly in front of the entrance?!

"Is it just me, or do your clients keep getting younger, Dante?" One of the two women leaning suggestively over the wooden table at the center of the room asked the man himself - who was lazily observing Taylor pick her way through the random pieces of paper and other debris filling the space.

It looked painfully similar to the office in the Heap, sans an icecream bar. Pool table. Jukebox. A random guitar leaning against a wall.

The only real difference was a slightly wider floor plan, and the set of stairs to the left going who knows where.

"What is she, sixteen, seventeen? More charity, Dante?" The other woman asked.

She didn't know what they looked like because she was afraid to look directly at them. At… him. She was just aware of them talking and more importantly, Demmy and Pemmy were keeping a running commentary of the area as she entered it.

'There's a bedroom upstairs, and we don't recognize the two women but remember they're associates of his,' Pemmy supplied helpfully.

'I would recommend playing up your apparent age. Despite his appearance, while we were in his company, I got the impression he was fond of children,' Ozma added encouragingly.

Taylor grunted at the war council that forever lived in her head, which the people present obviously took as a response to their prodding because there was a snort of amusement from one of the two women present - Taylor couldn't really tell which one.

It annoyed her though. The casual ribbing. The slightly demeaning way they spoke to Dante. Maybe it was because it demonstrated a closeness with the man that Taylor no longer really had. Maybe it was just bothering her because it was disrespectful.

She was going to ignore it - she was mature enough not to be insulted over things like this, even if the internet had long ago pegged her as an 'unrepentant troll'.

She was going to ignore it, but-

"Ladies, please. I'm sure she just wandered in from a halloween party or something. Do you need help, kid?" Dante finally spoke, his tone smug, insulting, and genuinely concerned sounding all at once.

Taylor's gaze snapped up and around from her distracting examination of her surroundings to glare at him at his commentary. It was natural. It was automatic. It was practically reflexive after the weeks of back and forth pranks with the man.

Even if this wasn't the man she had done any of that with in truth.

"You seriously have time to comment on my outfit? Which one of these two dresses you?" She snapped back automatically, finally getting a look at the two women leaning on the desk.

The woman on the left was tall. A leggy blonde who looked like she belonged in a roadside bar for bikers, serving drinks. She had a matte black leather corset on, a black leather pair of pants, and black high heels.

And that was it.

It was enough to make Taylor blush in second-hand embarrassment just looking at her. It was indecent, is what it was, and it was only made worse by the person to her right - who was wearing a pinstripe white suit with red gloves and black knee-length boots. Which would be fine, if it didn't consist of a tight jacket with nothing under it - making the one button that kept her barely decent seem like it was struggling to stay attached, and stylized booty shorts.

She couldn't decide if the gaudy white-framed sunglasses made the whole look worse or not, either.

Her short black hair was styled into the most obnoxious bob cut Taylor had ever seen - and she was ashamed to admit she even knew what one of those was because of Vicky's unending litany of complaints about various hair styles and fashion choices in capes.

The only reason Taylor didn't automatically assume they were prostitutes was the fact that the one on the left had a greatsword sitting on her back, and the one on the right had the bastard child of a bazooka and a machine gun on hers.

They still looked trashier than Aisha on her worst day though, which was saying a lot.

"Hey now, don't diss the jacket, it's-" Dante began, still smiling that infuriatingly smug smile of his.

"Yeah, yeah, demon leather, very durable, blah blah. You told me already," Taylor grumped at him, making one of the few mistakes she found herself constantly making despite being fully aware she was doing it.

This was not Emmy.

But she still couldn't help but treat him like he was.

She'd probably be just as bad with Oscar if she didn't intentionally limit her contact with him, knowing that he would be safe with Salem dealt with, and her runes on his home.

And, well... Kenpachi was Kenpachi. He didn't really count.

A flicker of surprise crossed the faces of all three of the people she was speaking with, before Dante's expression grew abruptly serious.

"And when exactly was that? I admit I've had a lot of oddball clients over the years," he said cautiously, narrowing his eyes at Taylor. "But I can't really say I remember meeting someone like you before, kid."

She realized, belatedly, that she had released just the tiniest trickle of her spiritual pressure when she had snapped at him, the stress of the situation for her briefly overcoming the tight control she usually held over the shaker power.

She also realized the white-haired man was slowly inching his hand towards his gun.

She took the whole situation in and pondered for a second on what to do about it. She didn't really want to fight, but she also didn't really want to get into the specifics of multiverse travel while she was so annoyed…

A malicious grin spread across her face as she recalled Qrow and his tribulations as told to her by Ozpin himself.

It wasn't like she wasn't constantly in an ever escalating prank war with Dante anyway.

"It hasn't happened yet!" She declared bombastically, spreading her arms out to either side of herself in what could loosely be taken as a request for a hug.

"Dante!" The woman on her right barked, jumping away from the desk before Taylor even finished the movement and slinging the weapon off her back.

"I know! Damn it, why is it always in my office!?" Dante complained as he leapt backwards himself.

Taylor would have commented on that, but the greatsword slung across the blonde's back was descending towards her shoulder before she could manage to do so.

'Seriously? Because I flashed a little bit of power and acted kind of weird?' She complained internally, shifting mental gears and pivoting to the right of the attack. She noted that it wouldn't have been lethal even if it had hit her, and she hoped desperately that this was an intentional choice.

It would be really awkward if they had actually been trying to kill her, especially because Dante could probably actually succeed at it if he really wanted to.

She didn't bother directly parrying or blocking the follow-up attack that was leveled at her from the sword-wielding woman, nor did she bother to deflect the precise burst of gunfire hurtling toward her from the right.

Instead, Pemmy appeared on her left, and Demmy appeared on her right, each one blocking those attacks for her with their blades.

It had been a while since she'd bothered with the distinction, because most people considered her a Trump before she was a Master.

But Taylor had always believed the exact opposite.

"Maybe if you didn't randomly attack people in your office then they wouldn't make a mess defending themselves, genius," She complained at Dante, daintily stepping past the melee that had broken out to either side of her.

"Well what can I say, I like to introduce myself with a bang!" Dante crowed, whipping out his two pistols at significantly greater than human speeds.

"You won't believe me, but I really loved this exercise!" Taylor fired back ambiguously, having not given entirely up on her original plan yet. Her mind cast back to a time when Dante - her Dante - had deposited a gun in Victoria's grip and told Taylor she had to stop the bullets.

It was a heartwarming memory for her, an exercise that was as close as Taylor was ever likely to get to drinking around a fire on the beach with friends.

That was probably why - despite being perfectly capable of de-escalating the situation - her hands snatched her own pistols from their holsters at the same time.

There was barely seven meters between them - a little less than the full length of the walk from the door to the back wall Dante was nearest to, and when he pulled the trigger - so did she.

For the sake of fairness, she matched him only with her own demonic power, flooding the chambers of her weapons with it and firing pinpoint burst of gunfire that collided with Dante's own in mid air, the smashed rounds created by concentrated energy falling together to the ground where they met with a distinctive clinking noise that was disproportionately loud for the size of the bullets.

Dante was surprised, as was basically everyone else present, but Taylor wasn't really paying attention to them.

Dante's expression grew annoyed as she took a step forward, and he increased his rate of fire, making use of his unlimited ammo capacity in a way that she was sure only he believed he could.

She matched him still though, taking step after step towards him, until they both met at the desk between them. Pemmy went flying through the air over her head and Demmy smoothly bent herself at a ninety degree angle so that their backs collided, and the messy-haired android could turn her sister in the air, allowing them to pivot and switch opponents without pausing to reorient themselves.

Perfect synchronicity.

And while the two women to either side of them could certainly fight, they were not a perfect team. Combined with the prospect of friendly fire - a greatsword and a bazooka were not indoor-friendly weapons - and they were at a distinct disadvantage.

Now standing practically directly in front of each other, Dante and Taylor engaged in what she could only describe as an extremely dangerous game of back and forth. His right pistol snapped up to her head, and her own quickly angled up and fired a round that caused it to shift too far. A gunshot went off directly over her head, and her other hand whipped forward to fire a round into Dante's stomach that he batted away with ridiculous ease.

Then they both reset and tried again.

Taylor wasn't entirely sure how many of these exchanges occurred before she got bored of it, but since she could tell Dante wasn't even really trying that hard, it must have been pretty quickly.

At length, and once she'd gotten bored of the fight, she decided that enough was enough.

So she raised the stakes. Her demonic power surged. Her core churned with the influx of power being converted solely to demonic energy.

She pulled her Devil Trigger.

Which was just about the most juvenile thing to name a changer form, but here she was. She'd inherited it, so she'd respect it.

She could never be so carefree about a fight with an opponent she could actually hurt, but Dante was made of sterner stuff. Easily one of her stronger, if not 'strongest' emulations.

The transformation had cost her in the near term - the millisecond of inaction caused by it allowed Dante to finally land a bullet on her.

But by the time it hit, it didn't land on skin, but smooth white demonic carapace.

Once more she was struck by how overtly bug-like she felt like this, not to mention functionally naked, but pushed it to the side, dropping her guns into two swiftly opened gaps and drawing Nemesis free to levy at the white haired man.

Then she paused when she realized that no one else in the room was moving anymore.

"Seriously? All I had to do was this?" She complained in the eeriely resonating metallic voice that came with this particular form.

"Who the hell-" Dante barked back at her, partially in shock, and partially in annoyance as his own Devil Trigger flickered on and off like a sputtering lightbulb.

"I was trying to tell you that when you started shooting at me!" She spat at him, changing back and allowing her core to wind down, no longer needing it to supply the ludicrous energy demands needed for a significant battle with her powers.

"How-" Dante paused as the blonde woman went flying overhead, reaching up to pull her out of the air and spinning around to disperse her momentum before depositing her smoothly on the edge of the desk.

It would have been very romantic looking if it wasn't so needlessly excessive, a point Taylor made by catching the other woman - she didn't know either of their names, so she was kind of just thinking of them as the blonde one and the gun one - in a gap that swiftly changed directions and deposited her on the opposite side of the desk.

She got a bazooka pointed at her face for the trouble.

"Lady, relax," Dante called, gently pushing the weapon away and eyeing the swiftly closing gap like a professional sizing up a problem.

Then he turned back to her.

"So like I was saying," He said, walking across the room to grab his chair and dragging it back from where it had ended up in the melee to sit in it, kicking his legs up on the desk.

"Who the hell are you?" He finished. His tone was joking, but the undercurrent of the question was very, very, serious.

Taylor wondered if she had messed up somewhere. She didn't actually know a whole lot about Dante's history. Mostly she knew that he fought demons, and was very good at it - being half demon himself.

Pursing her lips she decided to take a risk and scanned him with the Crystallized Wisdom. Just enough to get a read on him - manipulation wasn't what she was interested in at the moment.

[Concerned you are related to him. Concerned you are his brother's daughter.]

She snorted at that, probably far too loudly given how everyone looked at her. She glanced over her shoulder to Pemmy and Demmy, who smiled encouragingly at her before vanishing from sight again - an act that clearly disgruntled… Lady… and the blonde.

"I'm not your brother's daughter, dumbass. I am related to you, though," she said in a teasing tone, affecting the same unbothered expression as Dante while also conjuring herself a chair identical to his own to sit in.

She went out of her way to put her feet on the desk opposite to his own, and, almost as an afterthought, pulled her guns back out of a gap to reholster them.

"I'm sorry, how old are you again? Dante?" The blonde demanded, squinting first at her then turning to glare at the man in question.

"Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. Not possible." Dante immediately denied, waving his hands in front of himself defensively.

"What? What's going on? Someone explain before I start shooting again!" Lady demanded petulantly, earning herself a pained look from Dante and a smug one from Taylor.

"You know, you talked about being surrounded by 'babes' a lot, but your taste is a little…" Taylor trailed off leadingly.

"He what?" "I did not!"

"He totally does. All the time," Taylor countered in a sing-song voice.

True to form, Lady actually did swing her weapon towards Dante when no one bothered to explain what was going on to her - which was amusing to Taylor because no one but her actually knew.

"Explain!" She demanded pointedly.

"What, you don't see the resemblance? White hair, stirling superhuman genetics," Taylor began, eyeing Dante's worn attire and then snorting again.

"Well, I can live without his fashion sense though. You look less like a bum than the last time I saw you, but not by much. I guess you were older too. Why are you wearing chaps? You were way less dedicated to the cowboy bit when I met you," she drawled.

"O-kay, stop right there. Let's do this the easy way. I hate ambiguity. Nod once if you're my kid," Dante abruptly insisted, cutting her off with a look of intensity in his eyes that was actually kind of intimidating.

"Probably closer to sister. Half sister maybe. I dunno, my genetics are all over the place at this point," she said with a shrug.

It was even kind of true. There weren't exactly all that many ways to interpret being bestowed with the genetic abilities of another person. They were, on paper, definitely related in some capacity.

"Okay, new question, are you my clone?" Dante insisted, clearly frustrated.

"Not really, but that's probably the closest you'll get without a bunch of explanation, and I uh, I actually need your help?" Taylor faltered, relenting in messing with the group only because she remembered she had other places to be today.

When was the last time she wasn't busy with something or other? She needed a vacation.

Maybe after the coming migrant crisis she could buy a yacht or something. That could be fun, right? Or was buying a yacht too excessive? Maybe just tickets? Or maybe she could just teleport everyone to Hawaii or something? Would the government care she was crossing state borders unannounced?

"Are you gonna tell me what your deal is if I help you?" He demanded frustratedly.

"Helping me should make it pretty obvious," Taylor drawled, earning herself a suddenly concerned look from the two women, who relented in their alternate glaring at both her and Dante, and stood to leave.

"I'll get started on the investigation into that cult, Dante. I hope whatever this is goes well for you. See you in Fortuna," The blond put forth, leaving with far too much sway to her hips for it to be anything but intentional.

"I'll keep an eye out for any more of those demons, plug my contacts for any more info. Keep in contact, jackass. You never answer your phones." Lady grumbled, also leaving.

"Do they always get over a fight so quickly?" Taylor asked, not really expecting an answer.

"It's how they became friends, so yeah. Look, munchkin, I get you're going for mysterious and interesting, but you need to tell me what your deal is, or I'm not doing crap for you," Dante insisted.

Taylor sighed. Dante could be like this. He was rarely serious about much of anything. Even life threatening danger wasn't enough to temper his worst tendencies and jokester personality.

But when he did get serious about something…

"Fine. I'm from an alternate dimension where a future version of you was my mentor. Which is also why I'm here. You gave me a sword, but I have no idea what it does!" Taylor blurted out all at once, then held her breath, waiting for the inevitable 'that's impossible' or 'tell me the truth, not some made-up story'.

It was something she was quickly coming to find was a problem with her journeys across the planes, or worlds, or… whatever nomenclature was accurate.

To her surprise, all she got back was;

"Hah! So you're my alternate reality future kid!" Dante blurted at her, pointing an accusing finger at her.

Then he paused, leaned away from her, and put his head in his hands.

"Shit, you're my alternate reality future kid- okay, wait, who's your mom? Wait, don't tell me- or do- no-" He began to babble.

She watched this absolutely buffoonish breakdown for something like two and a half minutes before sighing and allowing her alchemical tattoos to expand down her arms. Then, while the man wasn't really paying attention to her, she did a quick scan of his desk with her Wisdom, and snap transmuted a majority of it to gold with a touch.

"Here. Gold. That's worth money, right? Now I'm a paying client. Can we move on past this? I promise I just need to ask you some questions," she pressed.

Dante was a fun guy, but he was also emotionally taxing to deal with for any length of time, especially when he wasn't particularly inclined to be helpful to you.

"Also, I told you, I'm not your kid," She added, just so he would stop looking at her with those puppy dog eyes, like she held the secrets to getting laid for the first time deep in her heart.

Honestly. Men.

"Fine. We'll table that. Where are you staying? You got a place?" He asked, immediately changing topics and expressions as quickly as anything.

Taylor blinked at the sudden lack of concern on his part, and reminded herself that at least half of his entire demeanor was an act.

Dante wasn't nearly the buffoon he acted like.

"I'm just visiting. I don't need a place. Stop trying to parent me- I was just messing with you before, I'm seriously not your kid," Taylor insisted.

"But you have my abilities," Dante noted, raising a finger.

"Well, yeah, but," Taylor started to say, but was cut off.

"What's the name of the sword?" He asked, almost suspiciously calm.

"Uh…" She trailed off uncomfortably, more because it was clear he wasn't going to change his mind than because of the repeated tonal shifts in the conversation.

"...You called it 'Devil Sword Dante'," she offered eventually.

"And you're sure you wanna say you're not my kid?" Dante pressed. Taylor - exasperated at this point - nodded in response.

"Cus my dad gave me a sword too. His name was Sparda. The sword was named Sparda. Can't see why I'd do the same for anyone but my own brat," he pointed out, like this was the most logical deduction there was.

Truthfully, it probably was. He'd given her his investigative skill, and provided with a very limited set of information it was probably even the most probable reason.

It just wasn't correct.

"That-" she began to protest, even going so far as to draw the sword to show it to him.

At rest, it was a bog-standard katana. The only notable thing about it was its lack of a cross guard.

"When you gave it to me it was this big pulsing kind of fleshy broadsword thing, but my powers made it like this. I think it fuses stuff together?" She tried, opting to just ignore Dante until she had enough time to drag him into her world to explain the specifics of their non-existent relationship.

Dante glanced down at the blade, which quivered slightly in her grip at his presence.

Then he looked back up at her and smiled.

"I've never seen this thing in my life," he offered easily.

Taylor had to restrain a shriek of indignation at that.

"Come on! Nothing!? I came all the way here!" She complained.

"From the future, even," Dante noted dryly.

"I'm not- can't you like, confirm with your nephew or whatever that we aren't related?" She complained, grasping at straws in search of anything that would help her set this idiot straight. She remembered him mentioning a nephew a few times, right?

Honestly, who was so bizarrely obsessive about family that they would effectively snap adopt a person for having the same stupid hair?

She was drawn from her mental tirade when the expression on Dante's face took on a cramped look at her statement.

"My… nephew?" He asked in a pained tone.

"Oh, come on! Why are my powers like this!? Time travel is so stupid! I don't even understand how this works!" She complained.

She'd noticed it before, but everytime she went somewhere, it was always to a point before whenever her emulation was from. Oscar was years from who he would be when she met him. Kenpachi was laughably weak despite her memory of him being the exact opposite.

And now this.

"No, no- this is good. I think. Okay so, you're my kid, and Vergil has a kid- unless you mean my wife's brother's kid- but I don't-"

'Aaaand he's confused himself again,' she groaned inwardly.

"So, you can't tell me anything about this weapon?" She insisted, nudging Dante back on track.

"Nope. Give it here, I'll get someone to look at it later. I think I left Patty's room mostly how it was…" he grumbled, standing to stretch.

"I'll come back to you on that. I can't actually leave it behind," she said, deftly snatching the weapon up and making it disappear before Dante could take it.

"Why's that?" Dante asked pointedly.

"Are you gonna give me the Sparda just cause I asked?" She asked pointedly in return.

She mostly meant that she wouldn't ever part with a weapon that had so much emotional importance to her - not to mention Ozma was currently inside it and she couldn't abandon her either - but the soft look Dante shot her as she spoke made her realize he had taken her statement in exactly the wrong way.

"Fair. But I ain't letting you out of my sight till I know exactly what's going on, so just sit your butt there and-" Dante pressured her, pointing at her and then jerking his thumb towards the stairs.

She cut him off.

"Wow, look at the time. I better be going, thanks for the fight, bye," She said in a perfect deadpan.

Ugh. She missed Dante, but this entire ordeal was just exhausting, and she was getting tired of having to go through it everytime she went to a new world.

Maybe she'd start scouting ahead? Try to blend in better before showing up so there wouldn't be any awkward questions?

These were the thoughts that filled her head as she waved goodbye to Dante, her chair swiftly sinking with her still on it, into the gap she had opened mere moments before.

And unlike the one time Unohana had followed her;

She made sure Dante didn't lunge through it after her.

Even though he definitely tried.

She already regretted screwing with him.

A/N: Yadda yadda . Anyway. I'm gonna do the last part of this then catch up on the omake shop content before opening the voting for the shop again, so don't be too anxious about that for now.

Last edited: Feb 22, 2023

489

Bowler Hat Guy

Feb 21, 2023

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