"Very weird," her dad said as he looked at the photos she'd transferred to her laptop. He tapped his fingers of his left hand on the table as he used the other one to slowly flip through the images, going back occasionally to inspect different ones. "I'm astounded that the river actually not only exists but is this large, too. Never mind the other stuff, which is…" He shook his head in wonder as he trailed off, leaning closer to see a detail on the screen, even as he zoomed in. Taylor watched him, wondering what else was out there to find.

"How could everyone just manage to forget about a waterway that big down there?" she queried, the question one that had been bothering her since she'd first located the river.

He shrugged, not looking away from the screen, but answered, "Hard to say. It could be lots of things. Records get lost, misplaced, misfiled, sometimes deliberately destroyed… It's surprising how little time it takes for all manner of things to be forgotten about if no one is paying attention. There are places built for World War two, like airfields for example, which have pretty much just vanished entirely now only seventy odd years later. Built over, or just abandoned, and now hardly anyone remembers they ever existed after less than a century. After two, three hundred years or more? It stops being history and starts being archaeology at that point. Lots of cities have features that hardly anyone now knows the origin of, or even if they still exist, even things that only date back to the early part of the twentieth century like some of the tunnels under Chicago. Cities evolve, grow, change with time, and they just lose parts of their beginnings sometimes. No one at the time thinks much of it, because it's simply part of the background, and after a few decades when all the eye witnesses have gone, so has the information."

Taylor nodded slowly, understanding the concept. He went on, "Brockton Bay is an old city in US terms, although it's nothing compared to cities in Europe or other places like that. Even so, there have been people here one way or the other since at least the fifteen hundreds, although the city as a city didn't really begin until seventeen sixty eight, like I told you when we were looking at the maps. But there were settlements here long before that, right back to the first Europeans to settle what became Massachusetts. And before that with the original inhabitants too, of course. Boston was founded in… let me think… sixteen thirty, I recall, or very close to that, but there's some evidence that there were people other than the original Native Americans living around these parts even earlier. I've read accounts that claim the late fifteen hundreds as the point the first Europeans turned up in this general area, although I'm not sure how much we can really believe them."

"That's a lot earlier than I ever learned in school," she commented, somewhat taken aback. He smiled a little as he continued to look through the photos.

"I'm not surprised. It's not generally accepted as particularly likely, although there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence. One thing to remember is that historical accounts are often written by specific people for specific reasons, which don't always align with being totally and objectively accurate. The Puritans turning up and settling what became Boston entered the history books for a lot of reasons, most of them reasonably valid one way or the other, but there's some evidence that those same books managed to pretty much forget to mention some earlier expeditions to this area. Who knows why? Religious reasons, that's quite possible, political ones too, which at that point in time tended to be much the same anyway, not that it's all that different now… Personal grudges perhaps? Competing groups, the losers being quietly forgotten, or even actively erased. And who knows what else might have happened. You remember the lost colony of Roanoke, I assume?"

"Yeah. I read about it when it was mentioned in school a couple of years ago." Taylor nodded, recalling a fascinating trawl through various websites. "Even now no one really knows what happened to all those people."

"No. The real explanation is probably something fairly prosaic, like a bad winter, starvation, hostilities with the locals, a Spanish force attacking… There are lots of possibilities, and combinations, that could have led to a hundred or so people disappearing. They might have been wiped out by some enemy, or just evacuated far enough away that no one found them. Maybe disease got most of them and the survivors fled. Who knows? Life was hard back then and people were basically on their own for years, with no easy way to communicate, so losing a small village here and there wasn't all that unusual. Roanoke for some reason got this air of mystery around it, but I can pretty much guarantee there were other cases along those lines that the history books don't mention." He glanced at her, with a strange smile.

"Or possibly the explanation isn't prosaic. Parahuman powers prove beyond doubt that a lot of what we thought was impossible fifty years ago… isn't impossible. Considering what you can do, who's to know if the arrival of Parahumans was really the first time something weird came into the world? Maybe the weird things have been here all along. Folk tales, myth, stories passed down through word of mouth… The indigenous Australian people have been orally passing down stories for possibly forty thousand years. Humanity has a very, very long memory sometimes, but still most of history is completely unknown to us. Especially the history of places not a lot of people lived in until what's pretty recent times. But even with that, there are stories… stories from everywhere anyone has ever lived… of things that are well outside what people would have considered normal once."

Her dad shrugged a little. "Who knows what normal even is, really? I can't help thinking that with Parahuman powers showing that the universe is far stranger than we ever really believed only about thirty years ago, it's entirely possible a lot of those stories might have a tiny kernel of truth to them. Or a not so tiny one, perhaps."

"But how does all that, as fascinating as it is, equal the entire city losing the knowledge of a river miles long and big enough to get canal boats down buried deep under the middle of Brockton Bay?" Taylor asked, finding his ruminations very intriguing and worthy of further thought at some point. "That's a little bigger than a village that got eaten by the forest or whatever. People have been right here for centuries, so how did they just not notice an entire river vanishing?"

"I'm not sure," he responded after a moment of thought. "It's very odd, I agree. And it's not actually completely forgotten about, either. There have been rumors floating around of its existence as long as I've been alive, and Dad mentioned it to me as something he'd heard about all his, and his dad apparently told him about it in the first place. So we're probably looking at close to a century of rumor at a minimum. I've heard other people around the docks speculating on it as well so it's not just our family history, although there sure aren't a lot of people who know anything at all about even the rumors as far as I can tell. And none of them actually believe it. I was more open to the idea from my own experiences and knowledge but I have to admit I didn't expect you to find anything remotely this large." He stared at one of the better photos where Taylor had held very still and taken a long exposure, giving the result that there was a green-lit vista of a pretty substantial waterway vanishing off into the distance around a bend, clearly at least two or three hundred yards away.

"Dad?" she prompted after a few seconds went by in silence. He shook his head slightly, turning to look at her, then smiled.

"I was trying to remember something I heard once, a long time ago. I was younger than you are now, I think… Something about a myth of there being some sort of monster in the hills outside the city. Or under it, more precisely." He chuckled a little at her expression. "Before you got here, Taylor."

"Oh, thanks, Dad," she giggled.

"Myths and legends like that are absolutely everywhere," he carried on thoughtfully, going back to paging through the hundreds of photos. "Every culture I've ever heard of has them, and here in the US there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of local mythical creatures allegedly hiding out there somewhere. Everyone's heard of Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, and a few others are common knowledge. But, for example, there are likely dozens of claimed monsters living in or near lakes and rivers just in the US, never mind Canada, or Mexico, or any other part of the world. And that's not including all the literal sea monsters. Water has always been associated with mystery and myth, going right back as far as we have any records at all."

He glanced at her again. "Port cities have more than their fair share of weird occurrences too. Some are undoubtedly down to unfamiliar people and cultures coming into contact with each other, certainly back before radio and TV was a thing. Some are down to things like the fog, or storms, or drunk sailors playing stupid tricks, or people vanishing because they fell in and drowned or stowed away and were never seen again… But I do wonder sometimes about the ones you can't easily explain like that. Sure, they might still turn out to be something more or less normal if a bit off the wall, but I wouldn't be shocked to discover that every now and then… something happens that is really out of the ordinary."

"I'm starting to feel nervous," she admitted. His voice, calm and low, somehow conveyed a sense of something far older than she expected. And it brought to mind that old stone construction hidden so far below the outskirts of the city…

"Well, this is Lovecraft country," he pointed out with a grin. She stared at him, then laughed as he winked. "And there are still people who claim that crazy bastard didn't make up everything he wrote about. I'm sure the local legends probably helped him along quite a lot. His own very strange mental state did the rest. Probably…"

"Dad.

" Taylor gave him a long-suffering look as he hissed the last word with an evil look, making him snort with laughter.

"But honestly I really don't have an answer for you, Taylor," he continued when he stopped chuckling. "Yet, anyway. I'll have another look through the old records at the Union. We've got about two hundred and forty years of stuff written down there. The Dockworker's Association, under one name or another, has existed in Brockton since before it was Brockton, and we kept everything. And…" He paused and thought, his face going through a couple of odd expressions. "I wonder. I haven't thought of that for years."

"What?"

Leaning back from the computer, he interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles, then relaxed his hands again, before scratching his nose vigorously for a moment. "You know our family has been in the city for a very long time, right?"

"Yeah. Immigrated from Europe way back in the early seventeen hundreds, right?"

"Yes. Your mom's family too, from fairly close to where my own ancestors came from. We didn't know it until after we got married but our great-great-great and then some grandparents were almost neighbors. I got curious once just before you were born and tried a little amateur genealogy, and managed to trace my own line back something like seventeen generations before it got so complicated I lost track. I should have another go at it, it's a lot easier these days." He seemed pensive for a few seconds, while she waited, then shook his head and resumed talking.

"Your mom's ancestors, if you go back far enough, originated on the island of Paxos in Greece. From what I could find out they had a long history there. It's hard to be certain but from what her own mother said, their family had lived on Paxos for at least a couple of thousand years or more." Taylor looked at him with her eyebrows up, and he shrugged. "I know, it's a hell of a long time and hard to prove, but the old woman is pretty convinced from stories her grandparents told her, and apparently there are graves in the area going back certainly several hundred years at a minimum bearing names of your mom's known ancestors. Local legend has it that they're some of the, possibly the, original inhabitants of that place, which if it's true is amazing. And her side of the family… let's say it had something of a reputation."

"You told me once that so did your family," she pointed out with a grin. He smiled ruefully.

"Oh, definitely, but my family was more in the business of fucking up invaders and occasionally going looking for revenge. Her family, if the old stories are true, were kind of known more for being, well… magic users, I guess you'd put it in modern terms."

Taylor stared at him. "Mom's ancestors were witches?" she exclaimed incredulously.

"I honestly have no idea about the real truth of it, Taylor," he replied. "I'd have said magic was impossible, but…" He looked at the antennae she currently had sticking through her hair. "Impossible is a vague concept when you really think about it." As she wiggled the appendages at him with a grin, he went on rather reflectively, "And from what I heard from your grandmother on your mom's side, I suspect because she was trying to scare me off, is that they were allegedly a lot more than mere witches. Sorceresses, I think she said. Powerful ones. Although she couldn't prove it, and only muttered something about how back in the old days her family was feared and respected and I should be careful not to hurt her daughter. Annette thought it was hilarious and was cracking jokes for weeks about turning me into a newt."

"You'd probably get better," Taylor commented with a giggle, making him laugh.

"I guess so. Anyway, as far as I can tell, my own ancestors kind of got kicked out of Greece a few hundred years ago over something I can't figure out, and ended up in France for a while. That's where the Hebert name comes from, I think. From what I could dig up they might have deliberately changed it to avoid anyone finding them."

"Wow. I wonder what they did?" she asked, fascinated.

"Not a clue." He shrugged. "Probably something that upset someone powerful, I suspect. That wasn't all that hard to do back in the days of kings and nobility. Easily annoyed, some of those people, and very vengeful. Running away and hiding was probably entirely sensible and not as uncommon as you might think. Granddad had some stories that were pretty out there about my ancestors fighting monsters or something, but I was too young to really remember what he was going on about before he died. So who knows? But eventually they left France and went to the UK, this would be… sometime around the sixteen hundreds? They seem to have lived there for a couple of generations or so, then finally decided that the New World was a better bet and headed west. Possibly trying to get even further away from Greece, or just wanting a challenge. Who knows? I think there are still some relatives in the UK even now although I have no idea where or how to find them, and there's probably even distant cousins back in Greece, I'd imagine. But both your mom's direct family and mine ended up in this area nearly three hundred years back and have been here ever since."

He was looking thoughtfully out the window as he spoke, Taylor following his eyes to see the bay in the distance, white-capped waves scudding across the surface in the breeze, with the intermittent sunshine reflecting from them. It was a view she'd seen all her life, and knew like the back of her hand. "I'm wondering if I can track down some of the old family records," he carried on after a moment or two. "Granddad had a lot of papers going back at least a century, possibly more, from what I can remember. Dad stored them away after Granddad died, so thirty one years ago now. I haven't thought about them since before you were born, to be honest. But I know where they are, or were at least. He left them with an old friend of his who had a lot of space in his farm to the north of here, just over the border in New Hampshire. I've got the contact details somewhere…" Her dad shook his head as he turned to look at her. "I should chase that up and see if those papers are still around. I don't even know if old Jake is still alive, for that matter. God, I haven't thought about that for years…"

After a second, he chuckled. "And that is how things get lost, Taylor. People just forget about records, information, whatever, and move on with their lives. And by the time anyone is in a position to think about what might be out there, it's too late."

"Hopefully it's not too late here," she replied quietly. "I'd like to learn more about our family."

"I'll dig out the details and see if I can get in contact, assuming he's still around," her dad nodded. "He'd be at least in his eighties now, I think, but it's possible. And…" He sighed faintly. "We might also have to contact your mom's mom."

Taylor winced slightly. She hadn't seen her remaining grandmother for some years, since before her mom died, but she well recalled how the older woman wasn't a great fan of her dad for reasons she'd never been able to work out.

"I guess it might be nice to see her?" she hazarded, making him grimace.

"Nice… Not quite the word I'd have picked, but we'll see."

He spent a few minutes finishing looking at her photos, then in the end shook his head again. "Absolutely amazing, Taylor. You've discovered stuff I suspect no one else has any knowledge of at all. Certainly no one alive. I'm seriously impressed. You'll have to show me in person at some point."

"I'd like that," she told him with a smile.

Flipping back a few images, he stopped on one, then pointed. "The thing I'm most curious about is that."

Both father and daughter inspected the ancient dark stone jetty built over a long-forgotten underground lake for a while, then exchanged a glance, before he closed the laptop and handed it back to her.

Getting up, he smiled at her, then went off to arrange lunch for them both while Taylor resumed looking out the window at the water in the distance and thinking about history and all it contained, and hid.

"That should do it," Amy said, lifting her hand from where it had been resting on Emily Piggot's wrist as she repaired enough damage that she was privately surprised the woman was functional at all. The director must have been in near-constant pain, some of it quite severe at times, and the sheer number of healed wounds she had was impressive in a rather horrible manner. The girl suspected that the only thing keeping her going was a combination of sheer willpower and spite…

She'd spent twenty minutes being very careful to fix everything she found as comprehensively as she could, then double-checking she hadn't missed anything. It could have been done faster, but considering how much money she was getting out of this, and how she had a slight wish to impress her patient with her abilities and her competence in using them, she'd gone unusually slowly. Even so she'd done in minutes what conventional medicine would have spend years on and failed anyway.

"Kidneys regenerated, old wounds properly healed, an incipient heart problem fixed, DNA damage that would inevitably lead to cancer if the heart or kidneys didn't get you first also repaired, several broken bones that hadn't quite healed properly remodeled correctly, your arteries cleared of plaques… The full tune-up basically. You're as healthy as you'll ever be," she said, as Director Piggot raised her arm and made a fist, then ran her thumb over the fingertips. "Yes, fixed the nerve damage from the wound to your shoulder as well," she added, watching the gesture. "I can remove the scars if you want too, but having healed a lot of military types, sometimes they want to keep them…"

Her voice faded as she waited. Piggot thought for a moment, then shook her head. "Thank you for the offer, Miss Dallon, but I believe the memories of certain events are important to have a reminder for. You repaired the underlying damage?"

"Yes."

"In that case purely cosmetic issues are of little importance," the older woman replied.

"As you wish. You'll find you both have a hell of an appetite for a few days, and also lose weight much faster than normally would be possible," Amy went on, as her patient listened intently. "I reset your metabolism to fuel the repairs and get you back to peak health. It'll still take a while, several weeks at least, and you'll want to exercise, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you how to do that. Give it… a month, I'd say, and you'll be in as good condition as you ever were. With the tune-up, you can probably exceed that if you put the effort in, but even if you don't, you're not in danger of falling over dead for a good long time. Assuming you avoid bullets or anything particularly lethal of that nature." She grinned a little as Piggot gazed at her, then snorted.

"I spend quite a lot of my time planning on avoiding lethal outcomes," the woman replied somewhat acidly. "In my job that's always an option, but it's one I'd prefer to avoid."

"Fair enough." Amy shrugged. "Basically just eat properly, exercise occasionally, and don't walk in front of a bus. Usual sort of thing any doctor would tell you. Other than that, you're done." She grinned slightly again. "Unlike normal medicine there aren't any post-care problems to consider other than a few good meals."

"You have my thanks, Miss Dallon," Director Piggot said as she stood up, then experimentally stretched, looking somewhat surprised at how easy it was. While still a somewhat corpulent individual, Amy knew that in mere weeks she'd have shed at least fifty pounds and, she suspected, have got herself up to at least the level of any of her troopers. The woman was nothing if not determined. "I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to not be in pain."

"Hopefully you can remain like that for a long while, Director."

The two regarded each other for a few seconds, then Piggot nodded. "I will certainly try not to ruin your excellent work."

"That would be ideal," Amy chuckled. "If that's all, I'll leave you to it."

"I'll notify the insurance company that everything is done, and you should find your payment in your bank account within two days, they tell me," Piggot commented as she put her coat on, then headed to the door of the treatment room Amy had borrowed from the hospital for this job. As she put her hand on the handle, Director Piggot looked back at her and came, Amy was certain, quite close to actually smiling briefly. "Thank you again. You are a credit to your family and your team. I wish more young Parahumans, indeed, young people in general, were as responsible and practical as I believe you are."

Somewhat taken aback, but pleased nonetheless, Amy met her eyes, then after a moment nodded her thanks. "I'll see you around, Director."

"Most likely, Miss Dallon." With an answering nod, she left, and Amy sat down and slowly relaxed.

Half a million dollars. For less than half an hour's work.

And, apparently, the respect of the PRT director.

Eventually, she shook her head slightly, got up, and went to find her sister and something to eat. While thinking hard about all the implications this particular set of circumstances had thrown up.

Looking up at the wall of metal in front of her through the water, swirling currents sweeping seaweed fragments, small creatures, and random detritus past her, Taylor pondered the sunken ship. Or partly sunken at any rate, since a lot of it was still above the surface even at high tide. Right now the tide was coming in fast and she was having to dig all her legs into the silt to remain stationary from the pressure of the cold water.

Her currently mostly-crab drideresque form was easily able to handle the temperature and pressure of being on the bottom of the bay under about eighty feet of water, and she'd spent quite a lot of time exploring the subsurface vista both during the day and at night over the last few weeks. The latest design of eye she'd come up with was easily able to work even the dark of the night and depths without needing any bioluminescence at all, she'd been pleased to find when she'd tried it first. She was still tweaking the parameters to improve every aspect she could identify but even now it was a huge improvement over anything she'd so far found in nature.

Looking both ways, she could see the sunken container ship vanishing into the distance and turbulent water. The conditions in the bay were seldom completely clear at this time of year, although in summer and indeed in the depths of winter the water often became startlingly transparent. But even then, here at the mouth of the bay with the constriction of the ship narrowing the navigable channels as much as it did, the north end only having about a thirty-five foot gap between the bow and the rocks, with about three times that at the southern end where the stern lay, the currents became so intense that the water was almost always full of silt to one extent or another. Right now it wasn't too bad but even to her eyes the visibility was only about a hundred feet or so. No one other than a suicidal idiot tried braving the whirlpools and eddies that resulted from the tides at the southern end, only coming in or going out at slack water, and no one was daft enough to even think of the northern route.

Underwater, of course, it wasn't quite as bad as it was on the surface, and she was much, much tougher than a trawler hull was anyway, so Taylor had no real worry about going around either end of the ship, but the current right now was fast enough that the northern end was way more work than was worth it. Although surfing the current underwater for a few hundred feet was good fun, she'd discovered. So she turned to the right and headed south, tapping the hull occasionally and listening to the echoes. It was mostly full of water, of course, which was only natural considering both how it had ended up in its current position, and from all the damage to it. She paused at one point where the metal was torn and bent, seeing what looked like damage from an explosion. She recalled that about a decade ago a group of optimistic and not very bright people had tried dropping dynamite under the thing in the hopes of shifting it out of the way, which had apparently resulted in a godawful bang in the middle of the night which woke half the city, a lot of waves which swamped their boat, and quite a bit of anger from the harbor patrol who had to fish them out then fine the crap out of them.

Needless to say the multi-thousand-ton ship hadn't budged an inch, although the damage to the hull was fairly impressive to see close up. She reached out with a claw and grabbed a bit of the two inch thick steel, bending it quite easily in her grip, then looked up at how much of it there really was. No, she wasn't going to be snipping it into smaller pieces any time soon. She was strong, yeah, and getting stronger, but this was way past anything she could directly do. Not without spending months, possibly years, on it.

Dropping the snapped off piece of hull into the silt, she scuttled along, listening to the ship creak and groan in the currents, along with the distant intermittent bass roar of surf on the shores around her, and lots of weird sounds emanating from the vast amount of life living down here. The sea was a surprisingly noisy place, she thought once again.

The sheer amount of life within her range and her ability was staggering even at this time of year. Above the water, the bugs were still revving up, but down here it never stopped even in winter. Reaching the stern, she poked her head around the curve of the hull into the direct current, feeling the force of the water moving at several miles an hour on her carapace, before slowly moving out of cover into the full stream. Digging her legs into the thick solid mud that was compacted on the bottom of the bay she pressed on, watching as all manner of debris, both natural and otherwise, moved past at a remarkable rate. It didn't take her long to get to the other end of the narrow channel and reach the seaward side of the ship, which she started moving back along.

Taylor had thoroughly explored this entire area via her multitude of minions, of course, but she'd also wanted to have a look personally, if only for fun. She could sense how the bottom dropped away rapidly within feet of the rocky reef the ship was grounded on, falling to a depth of more than two hundred and fifty feet before leveling off again. It stayed there as far as she could currently sense, and from looking at hydrographic charts of the area, she'd found that depth was fairly constant for a number of miles out to sea. The continental shelf edge was quite a bit further away, but once you finally got out past it, the bottom was thousands of feet down.

At some point she wanted to go and have a look down there but that could wait. She had plenty to explore closer to home.

Examining the ship again, she mused on methods to remove the thing. Her dad was sure that if it wasn't there the effect it would have on the economy of the bay would be remarkable, but it was an awful lot of wreck to get rid of. Without turning into something big enough to tow it out of the way, which she wasn't sure was really possible, it was something of a puzzler.

Perhaps make something that liked eating steel, make a few hundred thousand of them, and let them get on with the job? It would make the PRT turn white at the mere thought but they didn't have to know, right? Taylor smirked internally at the thought.

It would become rather obvious that something odd was going on if the city woke up to find the ship missing one morning. Although that would be hilarious, it might cause problems she wasn't quite ready to deal with, so perhaps not. Even if she could think of a way to arrange it.

Tapping the hull again, about half-way down the seaward side, she paused as another idea struck her. Was it actually necessary to remove the entire thing? What if it spontaneously… kind of fell to pieces? Staring at the metal wall a few feet from her, she thought hard. If the ship happened to decay a little more, the current might well do the job quite effectively. Especially if the tide was going out at the time…

'I wonder if that would work?' she pondered, digging at the steel with one leg and watching the shiny streak she left under the rust and old paint as the pointed end gouged the metal deeply. 'Make a few cuts here and there, wait for the tide to finish coming in, break it all the way through, then the outgoing tide pushes it over the edge of the reef here and it ends up way down there out of the way… That might actually work.'

'But how do I actually cut it up?'

she thought a moment later as she turned to look towards the open ocean in an evaluating manner. 'That's an awful lot of steel to cut through even if I only pop some seams or something. And all the internal structure too… I'm not sure I could do that very quickly without making it so obvious someone comes to investigate.'

After some more thought, she looked down. Then prodded the silt, digging through it until she hit rock, which was only a few inches down. 'On the other hand… The rock is softer, and this thing is right on the edge along quite a lot of the length. It's kind of a miracle that the ship wasn't pushed over the side years ago.' It was a good point, she mused as she resumed her trek to the bow. Whether by design or luck, the idiots who'd scuttled the ship around the time she was born had come very close to dropping it into water deep enough that it would have entirely vanished for good. They'd missed getting it over the side of the reef by feet, and parts of it still stuck out over the edge quite a long way. It was, if you looked carefully, quite precariously balanced.

The only reason it was still where it was seemed to be that when it had gone down, in a number of places random reef outcroppings had punched through the hull and locked it in place. From the sounds it made as the water pushed on it, it wasn't totally solidly fixed down either. She could, when she put a hand on it, feel the metal vibrating under the force of the currents and occasionally wiggling a tiny amount, while the invertebrates inside and under it reported that it was indeed moving around very slightly. She suspected that given time enough the metal would decay to the point that the ship would go over the edge all by itself, but perhaps she could figure out how to speed that up?

Getting to the bow, she pushed herself out into the raging current and folded her legs under her, grinning as the racing waters zipped her back into the bay at a fairly impressive speed. Once the current subsided enough she sank to the bottom and stood up again. 'That's a lot of fun,' she thought with glee. Deciding not to have another go even so, she returned to her cogitating. Taylor spent some time thoroughly investigating all the places the ship was holed, and what exactly was pinning it in place. In the end, she was fairly sure it was about a dozen locations that were the main problem, everything else not being enough to really have much of an effect. So, in principle, if she arranged for those pieces of reef to go away, the outgoing tide stood a decent chance of shoving the ship off the reef in a way that to all appearances would be the result of natural forces.

The question was how to go about doing it?

Her hyper-venom would easily do the job, but underwater it would be difficult to get it to actually affect the rock as it would just get diluted immediately. And probably kill everything other than her in the immediate vicinity, which wasn't ideal. Explosive venom, like the one she'd accidentally come up with some time ago, had the same problem of probably not working particularly well underwater.

Direct chemical attack was probably therefore not the answer. Mechanical methods of some sort, on the other hand, might be…

The question was, of course, how.

She could probably make her way inside and do it manually, with quite a lot of work. But that had a number of issues, not least being a lot of effort and possibly something that again someone might notice. It was very unlikely but not impossible. She needed something more subtle, something that after the fact would look like it had been the result of natural causes. Assuming anyone even bothered to check, of course. Taylor was quite enjoying being very quiet and behind the scenes and didn't much fancy the PRT or anyone else getting worked up about her activities, because they would just get in the way and cause trouble. Far better to keep her actions low key and subtle so no one was sure anything was actually happening at all.

It was also very funny in her opinion. She had so far, by her best estimates, foiled several hundred crimes around the city, at least a dozen of them from here while she was poking around, and while there were starting to be a few people around the place who were getting a little weirded out by how many muggers seemed to have bad luck while doing mugging, no one as far as she knew had put it all together yet. Except Tattletale, or Lisa, who for her own reasons seemed content to say nothing and just get on with helping her friends.

Taylor was perfectly fine with that. And curious to see how long she could keep it up for before someone did notice. Possibly a very long time indeed since to the average person it was something of a stretch to assume all these random crimes all over the city were getting interrupted by the same cause.

She was quite content to be a hidden force for good. It was just as satisfying as punching a Nazi, and caused much less property damage and panic.

Although at some point she was going to have to use her jumping drider form for something. If only for personal amusement value.

'What I really need is a worm that eats rock,' she thought. 'Like a ship boring worm, but more hardcore…'

Well, if anyone could arrange something like that, she could. She had quite a lot of creatures available that were amenable to modification, and a fair number of them could probably make a decent attempt at grinding up the rock the reef was made of. It wouldn't take all that many either if she could come up with something sufficiently effective, and it was no more than a couple of dozen cubic yards of rock that needed to be dealt with. She suspected that if it was weakened enough, in fact, she could let a good storm do most of the work. At this time of year the city often got fairly impressive storms, and indeed the long range forecast suggested there was one on the horizon, about two weeks away.

'Back to the warehouse, it's time for Science!,' she thought with a laugh, before changing her form into something more suited for swimming, based on another species of crab, and heading rapidly back towards the other end of the bay.

There was work to be done, and many new ideas to document.

Not to mention more abominations of nature to invent. She really enjoyed that part.

So, by all impressions, did they, so it worked out well for everyone on the whole.