Lying on her bed, face down, the skinny fifteen year old girl felt tears leaking into her pillow. Again.
Angrily wiping her eyes without lifting her head, Taylor tried to stop crying. It was stupid and she wasn't normally someone who did that sort of thing. She'd cried when her mom died, sure, but that was perfectly reasonable all things considered. But when she'd broken her arm when she was ten, she'd mostly just shouted in pain then gritted her teeth and borne the discomfort. It had healed up fine after all, and it had been her fault for not paying enough attention to what she was doing. Crying was a waste of time. And she'd learned a very important lesson about situational awareness so a little transitory discomfort was irrelevant.
Her parents had exchanged odd glances when she'd explained her viewpoint once they got back from the hospital, then her mom had shaken her head with an amused expression and her dad had laughed and ruffled her hair. Then they went out to a restaurant, because everyone agreed it was far too much effort to cook after the excitement. Emma and her family had come too, which had been fun.
It had been a good day, despite the minor agony. She missed those days. Not so much the agony, minor or otherwise.
She also missed Emma. Despite everything, she missed her Emma so much. Seeing someone wearing her face walking around and doing, saying, the things she did was enough to make the pain of the broken arm nothing. But you couldn't put a cast on your soul, she thought, wiping more tears.
Some injuries couldn't be healed.
And the final proof that her Emma was dead was that fucking locker.
How anyone could do that to someone else, never mind someone else they'd once been as close as family to, boggled her mind. She could almost expect it from Sophia, who was probably the nastiest person Taylor had ever met, but Emma? The girl who cried when she read a story where the protagonist was hurt? What the hell had happened to her former friend to turn her into… that?
She didn't know, and couldn't imagine.
Growling with black fury and despair in equal quantities, Taylor flipped over on the bed and folded her arms across her chest, to lie glaring at the ceiling. The whole situation was inexplicable. She'd been trying to figure out what she'd done to make Emma turn on her for over eighteen months now, and wrack her mind as she could, she was utterly unable to come up with anything. In the end she'd come to the conclusion it wasn't anything she'd done. It had to be something else. Possibly Sophia. Possibly drugs. Possibly aliens?
Shaking her head she snorted. Probably not aliens. But Sophia was a big part of it, definitely. Other than that she had no idea at all.
But this last attempt on her life, and have no doubt about it, it was an attempt on her life no matter what the school insisted, had made the entire search for answers moot. In a sense the reason behind all this didn't matter, all that mattered was the outcome. And considering that those three little bitches had done their damndest to kill her in a horrible way, she wasn't going to assume they wouldn't have another go at some point. Possibly a more direct and successful one.
Fuck that. She wasn't going to let them succeed. But the question was how to prevent it. Going back to Winslow was only giving them an excuse, and probably an alibi, since the school itself seemed fine with what they were doing to her. Again she had no idea why but there was no denying the evidence of her own experience. Despite her dad not really believing her when she finally explained. Mostly because he found it hard to accept that anyone could be that callous towards another person. He was a much, much better person than they were, and worked around people who would have also stepped in the moment they'd become aware of anything like that happening to anyone.
Despite his depression he cared deeply for her, she knew that to her bones. Yes, she missed the old Dad, but he wasn't gone, he was just… away for now. He'd come back. She was sure of that.
The way his eyes had ignited with justified rage when she'd finally explained things in the hospital had made it clear he was still in there. Her mom's death had affected both of them terribly, and in similar ways. Both had withdrawn into themselves and stopped talking as much as they used to. She was self aware enough to know how similar they were, and to realize that at least half the difficulty they'd had was down to her. She hadn't told him, and he hadn't asked, because why should he? She'd gone out of her way to keep any signs of what she was going through from him and he had his own issues to deal with, so quite reasonably wasn't as observant as he might have been before.
Both of them had a lot of guilt to work through, and both of them were suffering from depression. She'd looked it up online and the descriptions of symptoms and causes were a nasty match.
But… in the last two days she'd spent more time talking to him than she had for the previous six months, and he'd listened. He'd talked to her and she also listened. A lot of things had been aired that should have been discussed a long time ago, and she felt that there was quite likely light at the end of that particular tunnel. Finally, and all it had taken was a murder attempt by her former best friend!
Snorting with black humor, Taylor put the heels of her palms on her eyes and pressed, feeling dampness under them. Even with the personal breakthrough in parent-child relationships, she thought darkly, that was only one of the problems facing her dealt with however slightly. There were far too many more.
Like the minor fact that she was apparently now the possessor of super powers.
Yeah.
What was up with that?
Feeling the sensation at the back of her mind of something she'd never had until a week or so ago prodding at her awareness, she grumbled under her breath. Stupid powers. She still didn't quite understand what her new ability did although she knew the broad strokes. And every time she tried to… open her mind… or whatever you called it, the sensations were insanely overwhelming. To the point that when she'd regained consciousness that first time in the hospital she'd nearly gone catatonic from the information overload. It had taken several hours of feeling completely disassociated from herself to the point that the doctors had been worried she was having a psychotic break before she'd finally figured out how to make her power shut the fuck up!
And the blessed relief when that mishmash of sensations of every type she could imagine, and lots she'd never even considered, finally fell silent had made her pretty much pass out on the spot.
Rigidly suppressing that part of her mind the rest of the time she'd been in hospital had kept her sane, although it left her with a headache that wouldn't go away and a rather grumpy disposition. Even when Panacea had been brought in to fix the various infections, and though she highly admired the healer for many reasons, she'd still been snarky and irritated. Oddly enough the other girl had almost seemed amused through her own snarkiness and irritation, and when Taylor had sincerely thanked her while still looking like she wanted to strangle someone, Panacea had paused, studied her, then nodded with a small smile. Then she'd left.
The removal of the pain from everything that had been wrong with her had helped a lot, but that damnable headache hadn't gone away, but Taylor kept clamping down on her new power regardless. A hospital was no place to experiment, and she didn't want to fall back into that pit of bizarre input anyway. It had been quite unpleasant.
Now, though…
She lay there, eyes still damp from a combination of pain and regret, while she thought. For now, there was nothing she could do about the school. Unless she borrowed a couple of road flares and the spare can of gas from the garage… Shaking her head even while she smiled grimly as her inner arsonist giggled, she decided that was probably going a little too far.
But at least she still had two weeks away from the pestilential hellhole. The hospital had been quite happy to agree that she needed recovery time despite there being nothing physically wrong with her now. They'd been more than a little worried about her psychological state after what she'd experience. And from what she'd overheard a couple of the doctors discussing with her dad, they were quite likely going to cause Winslow some severe problems. She'd explained what happened to her in earshot of several medical people and none of them had looked pleased.
It gave her a dark sense of satisfaction to think that Principal Blackwell might get screwed over by an angry doctor. But that wasn't something she could affect, neither did it affect her at the moment, so she'd ignore it.
Her dad, over his own objections, was currently at work. She'd insisted she was fine and would be OK staying at home alone, and that he had his own responsibilities. It had taken some convincing but in the end he'd hugged her, given her fifty dollars spending money, looked highly conflicted, and finally left. Still with that air of deep burning anger she recognized from the mirror, but also appearing in some indefinable manner happier than he'd been for a long time.
Taylor hoped that meant her old dad was coming home, and resolved to do everything in her power to make that happen.
But now… Alone in the house, no requirements to do anything other than recover and plot her bloody vengeance read or something, she'd ended up falling into the Pit Of Despair for a while. Which wasn't really shocking, she thought sadly.
Deliberately forcing her expression into a smile, since she'd read that this affected your mental state for weird reasons, she tried to bring herself back into a happier frame of mind. It was hard due to the omnipresent headache, but she persisted. After a moment she got up and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, caught sight of her own face, and recoiled. "Jesus, I look like the Joker having a seizure," she said in horror, before giggling.
It had been a rather creepier grin than she'd aimed for.
The whole brief experience did manage to distract her and cheer her up, oddly enough, and she quickly brushed her teeth, used the toilet, washed her hands, and went back to her room. Flopping on her back she resumed staring at the ceiling, thinking.
After some minutes, she heard a deep intermittent humming sound coming from somewhere nearby. Puzzled, she looked around for the source. It seemed to be emanating from her closet, which confused her, so she got up and went over to the door. Putting her ear on it she confirmed that the sound was indeed coming from within. Slightly worried, she cautiously turned the handle then pulled the door open a crack. The faint hum became louder.
"What the hell…?" she mumbled, not seeing anything. Reaching inside she flicked the old switch on the wall, a dim light bulb coming on above the door. In the not very good illumination she inspected the interior of her closet, seeing the expected clothes hanging up, some shoes and a pair of hiking boots on the floor, next to a number of cardboard and plastic boxes full of odds and ends, and a shelf above the clothes with more random detritus on. Nothing in there should be humming.
Movement caught her eye and she looked up, to see a shadow on the ceiling. Right in the corner there was a hole that she knew led into the attic, the old drywall having crumbled a little over the years, due to her house being quite elderly and not, if she was honest, in the best condition. And just in front of that hole was something moving. The light from the forty watt bulb cast strange shadows as whatever it was shifted again, causing her to stare, then blink and go back to the bed to retrieve her glasses. Putting them on she returned to the closet, feeling the headache intensify for a moment, and looked carefully at the ceiling.
"Holy shit!" she yipped as she realized that the moving thing was a fuck-off big insect. It looked like a giant wasp at first examination. Moving very sluggishly, probably because it was still pretty cold outside and she could even feel a faint draft of cold air coming from the hole it seemed to have emerged from, the thing was fucking enormous. Her wide-eyed stare told her it was at least a couple of inches long, with wings big enough that it probably would cover her hand. A yellow head was mounted on a dark brown or black thorax, with a yellow and black striped abdomen.
Gaping at the thing, she twitched when it flapped its wings again, the droning hum coming from them. After a long moment she backed out of the closet and carefully closed the door, then leaned on it. "Holy fuck that's a big wasp," she breathed in shock. After a couple of seconds thought, she realized it had to be a hornet, not a wasp. But it was bigger than any hornet she'd ever seen before, by a considerable margin.
Her head throbbed, making her wince, and she could feel that thing in the back of her mind pushing on her attention, making her swear and clamp down even harder on it. "Go away," she hissed, rubbing her temples.
Going to her desk she pulled the chair out and sat down, then turned the computer on. The intermittent hum from the closet hornet made her look over her shoulder at the door a couple of times. Eventually the ancient machine booted and connected to the internet and she quickly navigated to a site on insects. Typing in hornet she waited for the page to load rather impatiently, rubbing her head with one finger. When it finally finished updating, she scrolled through the results, looking at the images with interest.
Near the bottom of the page she found something that looked just like the huge creature in her closet. Staring at it, she memorized the picture, then got up and opened the closet door again. Examining her visitor closely, she nodded. An exact match.
Which was weird, because according to that website, Vespa mandarinia, otherwise known as the Asian Giant Hornet, wasn't supposed to be native to New England. It was an invasive species in North America and had only been seen in a few places around the US in the last decades, probably imported in goods from overseas.
On the other hand, Brockton Bay was a port city, and it had an awfully large number of asian immigrants. So… it was at least possible that this thing had stowed away in someone's belongings. Why it was in her attic, she had no idea, but the information on the website told her this was a queen hornet, and she guessed it had probably overwintered upstairs having arrived at some point in the fall. They did that, the website said. And now it was slightly warming up, the insect might have woken and sought out warmer areas. In other words, her closet.
And now she was looking right at the biggest flying insect she'd ever encountered, which seemed to be looking right back at her.
The hornet shuffled along the ceiling, intermittently flapping its wings for a few seconds. She recalled from a long-distant biology class that insects did that to create heat, warming themselves in cold conditions. Despite herself, she found the thing fascinating even though she was well aware it was also at least theoretically rather dangerous. The sting was apparently not fun at all, and several of them could easily be lethal.
Wondering what she should do, as she didn't want to simply kill it, she closed the door again and sat on the edge of her bed pondering the matter. The humming became more continuous as the thing warmed up, and seemed to move down the closet as it did. She guessed it was now on the back of the door.
Her head throbbed again, very hard. "Ow!" she cried, putting her hands on her temples and pressing. "Fucking stop that," she added in a growl. "Stupid power. What do you want?"
Something at the back of her awareness seemed to glare at her. She glared right back. "It's my head, stop fucking with it," she snarled. While she was locked in a battle with her own power, she was dimly aware that the humming had become continuous, and had gone right down to the floor. Ignoring it as she forced whatever it was that was trying to come out back into its box and nailed the lid down, she came back to herself just in time to hear the hornet become much more audible. Looking up she flinched as she noticed it was squeezing under her closet door, pushing through the old carpet with a lot more strength than seemed plausible for something so objectively small.
On the other hand, while in absolute terms it was much smaller than a human, she thought as she warily watched it, for an insect it was fucking enormous.
And it was still looking right at her.
She looked back, wondering what she should do. As she was thinking that perhaps diving out the bedroom door and slamming it might be a sensible idea, since being stung by this thing didn't sound fun, it lifted off with a deep drone which was much louder than she'd expected. Flying rapidly towards her, it made her fling herself back on the bed in reflexive shock. "Gah!" she exclaimed without meaning it. The hornet zipped overhead, bounced off her window which was directly behind her, and ended up landing right in the middle of her chest.
She froze, and watched as the thing seemed to recover, flicked its antennae, and slowly rotated with a complex motion of all six legs, until she was staring into a pair of enormous compound eyes.
Distracted by the sudden proximity of an insect that looked large enough to eat a small dog, she didn't react fast enough when the mental box she'd shoved her power into metaphorically rattled, then burst open.
Taylor, taken completely by surprise, screamed in agony as her entire mind was filled with uncountable sources of sensory input. Grabbing at her head with both hands she squeezed, desperately trying to force the incredibly disorientating mental noise to end and go back where it came from, but whatever her power was doing, it didn't want to stop. Furious, with it and herself, she pushed harder and harder, her eyes half-open and her vision blurring. She could feel her heart thundering in her chest.
And she could feel something else moving on her chest. Barely aware, she could dimly see the hornet walking over her sweater towards her face. Fixing her gaze upon it as something to anchor her while the assault on her mind continued, she kept trying to force her power to shut the fuck up and let her think. Eventually, in desperation, she did something she couldn't for the life of her put into words, some mental twitch, which…
It was impossible to explain quite how she did it. Fixated on the hornet, which was peering at her from less than a foot away, she forced the noise in her head out, accidentally aiming it at what she was looking at. The hornet froze at the same moment as something in her mind blossomed. Entirely new sensations, almost beyond explanation, filled her. At the same time the mental impressions of millions of whatever they were faded into the background quite a lot. Without consciously meaning to Taylor doubled down on the weird internal pressure she was exerting and abruptly all the multitudinous yammerings almost vanished even as one specific one grew to fill her entire being.
The thing at the back of her head somehow managed to give off a sensation of surprise.
Taylor relaxed very slowly as the headache that had been present for days finally… just went away.
She closed her eyes in blessed relief.
Then she frowned.
Then she flicked her antennae.
What?
Her eyes shot open and she stared at the hornet sitting on her. It stared back. She could tell it was staring back because she could see her own face!
"What the fuck?" she whispered, even as she watched her own lips move, through a visual system that was totally alien even as it was perfectly normal. She heard her voice as vibrations through all six legs. Flicking her wings, she watched with her human eyes as the hornet did exactly what she wanted it to. It was as natural as moving her fingers even though she knew damn well it was anything but natural.
Slowly lifting her right hand she gingerly reached out with her index finger, watching as it neared her head that wasn't the head she was born with, which she still had. The questing digit very gently touched the hornet on top of its head, and she felt the pressure.
"Oh my god," she finally said faintly.
Apparently her power did whatever this was.
After a long and totally befuddled few seconds, Taylor closed her human eyes. Her hornet ones could easily make this out, although the vision wasn't as sharp as she was used to. It was sharper than she'd have expected though, and covered a ridiculously wide field of view. And… she moved her hornet body from side to side, inspecting her room from this incredibly weird viewpoint. The colors looked strange, making her realize that the insect visual system could see in wavelengths that were outside what human eyes could handle. She recalled reading something about that once, but actually experiencing it was beyond bizarre.
As was how completely natural this felt. She was controlling the hornet body as if she'd been born in it, while knowing this should have been impossible. Lifting a foreleg she waved it in front of her eyes, then lowered it. Experimentally flapping her wings, she heard the deep drone through her ears at the same time she felt tiny muscles working.
"Fucking wild," she murmured through human lips. Throwing caution to the wind, she flapped harder, and took off. Flight was as trivially simple as walking was normally, she instantly discovered. Giggling internally she banked and zoomed around the room, finding the experience both utterly beyond anything she could have expected, and enormously entertaining.
Zipping out her open door she flew her hornet body around the house for the next ten minutes, just experimenting with this new ability, and simultaneously having more fun than she'd had in years. There was no easy way to get outside but hovering in front of the living room window she could see it was cold and wet outside and probably no place for a hornet to be anyway. Laughing at the thought through the part of her on the bed in her room, she buzzed around the place some more, then finally returned to land on her outstretched hand.
Opening her human eyes she examined her other body with interest. She waved at herself with one leg. "OK, this is cool," she finally said to herself. Literally. Her power was incredibly weird but this particular part of it was definitely worth the disorientation.
She felt the box at the back of her mind still twitching, and knew there was more to these abilities, but at least she'd managed to suppress the overwhelming input part of it for now. Even so, she could still feel all those innumerable pinpricks all around her, just waiting to pounce the moment she lost focus.
Propping herself up against her pillows she moved her hornet-self up her arm to perch next to her ear. "Well, this is different," she muttered as she looked around the room from two completely separate viewpoints at the same time. She had absolutely no trouble integrating both sets of senses together, which she was sure shouldn't be this easy, but it was like she'd always been able to do it. Leaning back she thought hard. Eventually she came to a rather shocking conclusion; all those other little whatever-they-were things in her mind… They were other insects.
It was the only thing that made any sense at all, while making no sense whatsoever. Her power was connecting her with every insect in range, whatever that really was. Somehow she'd locked it down to only this hornet, but she could tell there was a lot more to this ability than one insect. A lot more.
And something else hiding away in there too, something she couldn't quite figure out yet. She could literally feel it lurking way back in the new part of her mind.
Putting that to one side for the moment, she looked around the room, then felt around with her ability, very cautiously and not letting it out more than a tiny fraction in case it tried to overwhelm her again. She somehow got the impression that it was disappointed, but growled under her breath and rigidly forced it back. It was her power, it did what she told it to, or there would be trouble.
If she was stuck with a superpower, that superpower was going to cooperate or else.
Grimly amused at her own thoughts, Taylor focused on one of the tiny little things floating in her awareness. She knew exactly where it was relative to herself somehow, and became aware as she realized that that she knew the relative positions of every last one of the points she could sense. Which was also weird, but for the moment she ignored it. This particular one was downstairs in the living room. Lifting off with the hornet body she flew out her door, down the stairs, and over to where the thing she was sensing was. Landing on the carpet she scuttled under the sofa. And in exactly the spot she was expecting, she saw a large spider.
"Huh," she mumbled upstairs. "Not just insects. Cool."
The spider backed away, then dashed off as fast as possible. Somewhat amused Taylor brought her hornet out from under the sofa and flew back upstairs. Landing on her own head, she grinned. "So cool."
Quite a lot of experimentation later told her that she was sensing every arthropod within probably close to half a mile. And there was something underground that wasn't an arthropod, although whatever it was seemed very sluggish. In the end she guessed it was probably various worms, which seemed kind of random. What did arthropods and worms have in common?
That was going to take some thought, but for now she just put it to one side.
An attempt to control more than the hornet had instantly let her power try to make her control everything all at once, and she'd sworn at it and promptly clamped down again. It was too much right now. Hopefully she could learn to expand her abilities with some practice, but the way it seemed to want to be all or nothing was annoying. At least the hornet body was nice and easy as well as fun, and gave her a simple way to experiment without feeling her mind was going to pop like a balloon.
Eventually she got up and went to make lunch. Shortly she had cooked a frozen pizza and was eating it while watching her hornet body nibble on a slice of apple. Eating with both mouths was certainly an experience, she mused with a small smile. That fucking locker assault had been the worst thing she'd ever gone through, but this ability, despite issues, was something good that had come out of it. Kind of. It was at least interesting and fun.
She wondered what else she could do with it. Aside from sting the fuck out of Sophia and Emma.
Giggling at the thought for a moment, she rather regretfully pushed it into the same hole as her inner arsonist. Revenge was sometimes nice to think about but dwelling on it for too long would only ruin her currently reasonably buoyant mood, and she refused to let those little fuckers live rent free in her head causing trouble. Standing up, she took her plate to the sink and washed it, then dried it and put it away. Retrieving the rest of the apple she ate it while also finishing off the small slice. Flying her hornet self to sit on her human self's head, she went back upstairs and amused herself reading up on hornets on the web for a while.
Having learned quite a lot of interesting things, including that the asian hornet was quite the nightmare in many ways, she finally turned the computer off. Glancing at the alarm clock she saw it was still only about one in the afternoon. She pondered the idea of catching the bus into town to visit a bookshop she liked. It was open until late so there was no rush.
Swiveling the chair around she put her feet on the bed and thought about her power. There was still an annoying tendency for it to knock on her mind and try to take control of every single available creature in range, but she kept it suppressed with an effort of will. She could almost feel it muttering to itself, but she wasn't going to let some stupid power control her. There had been way too much of something external influencing her life for close on two years and she was damn sure not going to let that go on if she had any say in the matter.
But, even as she kept that part firmly nailed down, she could feel that other thing lurking way back there somewhere. Whatever it was, it was also part of her power, but it wasn't nearly as pushy as the main part. Which of course intrigued her quite a lot.
Having just read up on powers, she knew now that what she could do would count as a Master ability, and most likely a Thinker one too. Quite a powerful one if the resources she'd read were right, although on the face of it she wasn't quite sure why. So what was left? Powers apparently normally didn't have too many different manifestations in any one person. Yet there was definitely something there which wasn't either the Master part or the Thinker part.
Letting her hornet body walk around on her hand, as she was still finding the dual-viewpoint thing massively entertaining, she considered what she could feel. After quite a lot of thought she very carefully tried to pull that bit towards herself while keeping the rest of it thoroughly locked down, which was really hard. Every time she fiddled with one part, the whole thing tried to escape, but she persisted.
It took her a good half hour, but very suddenly she succeeded. That hidden bit of whatever it was doing all this abruptly sprang into life, whooshing forward even as she recoiled in shock. It almost felt eager. Yelping in surprise, she jumped to her feet even as she felt incredibly strange, got very dizzy indeed, and fell over. The sensations intensified, her body feeling like it was being constrained by something, then faded even as she heard some weird sounds, but the incredibly strange feeling remained.
After the dizziness disappeared, Taylor groaned. It sounded weird. Pushing herself to her feet, she blinked.
Except that she didn't actually blink.
And while she could feel she was standing she was also looking at her bed from about knee level.
Which didn't make any sense at all.
Confused, she turned around, feeling six legs moving under her. What the hell? Reaching up she felt her face and twitched when she saw the appendage she was using come into view. It was quite familiar in some ways from the last couple of hours or so, but at the same time not. Waving it from side to side she numbly tried to get to grips with the fact that her hand had been replaced by the clawed grippy bit on the end of a hornet's leg.
Only about a hundred times the size, she saw when she compared it to her bed.
"What the fuck?" she muttered, her voice still sounding strange to her own ears.
Looking around, which needed her to mostly move her body since her neck didn't appear to have nearly as much range of motion as she was accustomed to, she saw she was standing on a pile of fabric shreds, which after a moment she recognized with irritation as what remained of the sweatshirt and pants she'd been wearing. Examining her body from inside, as it were, she came to the conclusion that somehow she was now a hornet the size of a large dog.
Taylor felt she should be much, much more worried about that than she was, but for some reason it didn't horrify her nearly as much as she felt it should.
It was freaky as hell, sure, but not horrifying.
After some more self-examination, she looked around, wondering where her tiny hornet body had gotten too. She couldn't see it anywhere, nor, when she checked, feel it. Thinking hard, she finally walked out of the room into the bathroom, finding moving around like this just as trivial as the smaller one had been, and reared up on her hind legs while putting her forelegs on the rim of the sink. In the mirror was reflected a vastly enlarged version of the same Vespa mandarinia that she'd found in the closet. Looking more closely she saw there were slight variations, hard to describe but somehow adding up to a very slightly more human face. Opening her mandibles she tried saying something and saw her mouthparts move, while a perfectly understandable yet still very odd voice said, "Well, this is pretty damned weird."
Which, of course, it was.
"Huh," she added, waving an antenna while watching her reflection. The senses the insectoid appendages granted her were familiar from the smaller hornet but still very odd. "Didn't expect that. So did I merge with it, or what?"
She could still dimly feel all the other things in range, but that specific hornet was definitely missing.
"Add Changer to the power list," she murmured, more than a little shocked. It was a hell of a strange thing to discover you could do. Spreading her wings she examined them, finding they stuck out at least four feet on each side. "I wonder if I can fly like this?"
The bathroom was much too small to fully spread them, or flap them, so she dropped back to all sixes and scuttled out and downstairs into the living room. It was barely large enough to experiment in although she'd need to move the sofa out of the way. Which turned out to be remarkably easy, in turn making her realize that her giant wasp body was much stronger than she'd expected. It kind of made sense, insects were well known to be disproportionately strong, but even so it was a bit of a surprise.
Also making sure the curtains were pulled just in case the neighbors happened to look in and wonder about the enormous insect rearranging the furniture, she finally moved to the middle of the room and turned in a circle to make sure she was clear of everything breakable. Satisfied, she carefully opened her wings and started flapping.
Rather to her shock, she took off in a gust of wind which made the curtains flutter and found herself hovering in the middle of the room while emitting a deep bass drone. Everything was vibrating from the sound. Extremely pleased with herself, she landed again, not wanting to risk damaging anything. 'I didn't expect that to work so well,' she thought with satisfaction. Going back upstairs, she moved into her room and stared at the ruins of her clothes. 'That's annoying. Oh well. I can get new ones.'
As she looked at them, she had a though. One she should probably have had much earlier.
'I wonder how to change back?'
Luckily it turned out to be fairly simple although it took quite a lot of experimentation. In the process she also found it was apparently possible to alter the ratio of hornet to human she expressed. This came as a shock when she hit on the mental controls to poke to switch back to a human body and found herself on two feet, but still with a hornet's head, antennae, an exoskeleton, four arms, and a huge abdomen with an enormous stinger on it. "Fuck me, I'm a were-hornet or something," she mumbled, examining herself in the mirror and prodding her mandibles with one clawed finger. "That's so fucking weird."
She still had wings, and having gone back downstairs, found she could also still fly although she was certain it shouldn't have been possible at her mass. But as everyone said, powers were bizarre at best. Shaking her head she flicked her antennae, then went back to her room. A few more minutes of effort and she'd managed to change entirely back to her normal human form, although the variant where she had wings and the abdomen on the otherwise standard shape was also interesting. The moment she was finally completely human again she found the small hornet body reappeared on her shoulder. Moving it to her hand she gazed at it.
"I did not expect today," she told it seriously, although she was grinning like an idiot. "Dad is going to freak out."
Which was true enough. She was going to have to be very careful how she told him. Confronting him with a hornet large enough for a kid to ride was probably not the best approach…
She grinned maliciously as she had a sudden delicious image of letting Emma find something like that in her bed.
Probably best to leave that with the arsonist and the hornet stings, although it warmed her inside for a moment.
Pondering the events of the last half hour or so, while idly flying her hornet body around her head, she had a thought. "I wonder…?" she mused softly, examining the millions of tiny sources all around her. "I do indeed wonder." After a little thinking, she sent the hornet out back to the living room. It didn't take her long to catch the spider she'd spotted earlier, since she found that the hornet brain knew exactly what to do and as a result so did she. Carrying it back to her bedroom, she dropped it on the desk in front of her human body, then carefully and gently grabbed it in her hand.
"Sorry, little dude, this is for science," she told the struggling spider.
Putting it into a glass, she stood and took off her clothes, having pulled the curtains. Then she carefully reclaimed the spider, which wriggled in her hand attempting to escape. Taking a breath, she prodded that internal control.
Again, strange sensations swept through her, leaving her reeling, although not as much as the first time. Lifting a leg, she grinned internally.
A spider as large as the hornet had been was somehow even more impressive, she thought as she examined her reflection in the bathroom mirror a minute later. The vision was stranger than even the hornet's was, but it was still oddly perfectly usable despite that, and she could pretty much see the entire room at the same time. Focusing on any part of it brought that bit into focus, which was neat. Waving a leg at her reflection, she dropped to the floor and scuttled back into her bedroom. It looked like her Changer power let her basically merge with any arthropod, she thought, pondering the implications. It was one of the strangest powers she'd ever heard of but it was still really cool. Even though she suspected a lot of people would find it very, very scary.
Luckily she'd always been fine with creepy crawlies, and didn't have any issues handling them, assuming they didn't mind being handled. Actually being a creepy crawly was weird, sure, but it was still one of the most incredible things she'd ever heard of.
Experimenting with that aspect of her power, she fiddled with it until she succeeded in pulling off what she'd suddenly thought of. Looking down at herself, she raised a leg, then looked over her shoulder at her spider abdomen. "Wow. I can do a drider," she giggled, recalling some of the weird pictures Greg Veder had shown on his phone when he was babbling about a game he'd been playing. Moving around the room, she found it easy to coordinate eight legs and two arms. And all the time she still had her hornet body. Apparently the various parts of her powers worked nicely together.
Pulling on a shirt, she examined herself with a grin. "Yeah. This would shit up an arachnophobe something terrible," she commented to the hornet. "Emma doesn't like spiders…"
'No. Bad Taylor,' she told herself firmly. 'You can't let them know about this.'
Although she really wanted to see Sophia's face. Because while Emma didn't like spiders Sophia absolutely hated them…
Sighing a little regretfully Taylor went downstairs, finding the drider form surprisingly easy to drive although the stairs were a little narrow for all the legs. She rummaged around in the fridge for a few seconds, find that she was hungry again. Pulling out all the fixings she made a couple of sandwiches, then went to go upstairs again to eat them.
She was just taking a bite out of a sandwich when the front door opened and her dad stepped inside.
She stopped.
He stopped.
They looked at each other.
His gaze dropped as his eyes widened.
She looked down, then back to him as she grinned somewhat guiltily,.
"Um… I can explain?"
He closed the door and leaned on it with a heavy sigh. "This had better be spectacularly good, Taylor."
She wordlessly offered him one of the sandwiches, then preceded him into the living room. He followed and sat down, waiting. Swallowing, she began talking, nervously rubbing her two frontmost legs together in a odd reflex she didn't consciously think about.
It was a very, very long talk.