Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Walking slowly along the street, Taylor huddled inside her coat. The weather, while it was milder than normal for this time of year, was still cold and damp with a lot of slush on the ground. Her hornet was perched on her neck, under her hair, the tiny claws prickling her skin, but invisible outside her hood. She hadn't wanted to leave it at home until she worked out what would happen if they were separated, which was something she was planning on experimenting with at some point soon.

Her dad had taken the news of her powers with more equanimity than she'd expected, although he was not at all happy about some of the parts of the last couple of years that came out while she explained. She'd opened up about quite a lot of it while she was in hospital but not everything. Having him unexpectedly return home a couple of hours early, which turned out to be because he was worried about her, had rather wrecked her plans to slowly break the news to him about what she could do and hopefully gloss over some of the more upsetting parts of the whole thing. On the whole it was probably good that they'd cleared the air, she thought, although she regretting having to explain the whole story in one sitting like that. Partly because she didn't like to think about it, and partly because she hadn't wanted to add to his own problems with her own.

Which, she realized on one level, had made her own problems that much worse. If she'd opened up earlier, talked to him and asked for his help, perhaps she wouldn't have been forced into that fucking locker in the first place. But regrets were pointless, it had happened and they simply had to live with the outcome. It could have been worse after all. She got some neat powers out of the whole fucking thing, so it wasn't a complete wash, although she was getting annoyed about how those powers seemed intent on pushing themselves to the foreground whenever she looked away.

She'd had to be quite firm several times and insist her abilities stayed quiet. So far, it was working, and she'd been very gradually experimenting with allowing her perception of arthropods to expand outwards bit by bit. Going slowly because she didn't want that pain to come back. It had been more than slightly unpleasant.

So far she'd managed to get her ability to restrict itself to around fifty feet and only sense all the bugs rather than try to seize control of them all. The range was a tiny fraction of what she knew for a fact the true one was, and possibly it was even larger than that in reality, but she was taking her time and working up to that. For now, this was plenty, it gave her all sorts of useful information about what was going on around her, and didn't cause that massive feedback issue which left her groaning in pain and wishing she was unconscious. Hopefully with time that would solve itself though. She felt that it should work more smoothly than she'd experienced, something her power itself was telling her, but somehow she'd kind of broken it. Possibly by being sufficiently bloody-minded about not letting it just run rampant that it was sulking or something.

The thought amused her and she smiled to herself. It really did feel sometimes like something was staring in an irritated and also confused way at her from inside her own head, and she got the distinct impression that her power hadn't been expecting her. And, oddly, that the Changer part of it was a surprise to her power itself as well as her. Which was weird as hell, admittedly. Especially as it was in many ways the coolest part of the whole thing…

In the last four days she'd tried merging with the hornet again, which she now called Vespa because that was obvious, several different types of spider, a couple of ants, a firefly she found hibernating in a tree outside, and a paper wasp. Due to the season there weren't nearly as many insects around as there would be in summer, or even in a couple of months, but there were enough for experimentation. The hornet was one of her favorites, possibly because she was so closely linked with it all the time, which she definitely suspected wasn't meant to happen. At the moment she was avoiding forming quite so close a bond with anything else, partly out of caution, and partly because she kind of felt bad about taking over something so completely. Human Masters were feared and despised because it freaked people out to think of free will being suppressed like that among many reasons. While insects weren't sapient like humans were, they were still alive and, depending on how you thought about it, had their own free will.

And she'd accidentally completely screwed Vespa in that area. So far she couldn't work out how to pull her mind out of the hornet again, but she thought it was probably possible. Not that there was a lot of mind in the creature to override, but there was something in there. Instincts and abilities that she could feel, could use like they were her own and had always been part of her. Again, very weird indeed, but useful.

Even so she still felt a little guilty and while she knew full well most people would, once they stopped screaming, think that guilt over Mastering an invasive hornet species was strange, it didn't change her mind. She just felt slightly bad about it. The majority of people would kill the hornet without a moment's thought, or any other bug they found, but she'd never liked randomly wiping out something alive just because it was in the way.

Perhaps she was unusual, but it just seemed wasteful to her. Mind you, she'd always found bugs and whatnot fascinating since she was little, which had led to some outcomes her parents had sighed a lot over. Like the time she was six and collected about two hundred fireflies without them noticing, then taken them into her room and played with them. Of course the things hadn't stayed in her room, and inevitably the house had been filled with fireflies within hours. Her mom had not been particularly pleased about that, although her dad had spent quite a lot of time laughing his ass off. Mostly about the expression her mom had… She grinned at the memory, deeply missing those days with all three of them together.

There had been an incident with a dozen very large grasshoppers too, which had resulted in quite a lecture from her mom about bringing into the house things that should best be left in the back yard. A lecture that was repeated after the bullfrog incident. And the garter snake one…

'Huh,' she thought with another small smile. 'She might have had a point.'

There had been quite a lot of little creatures brought home, thinking back. Taylor had never had a pet, although she'd wanted a cat when she was younger, but she'd certainly had quite a lot of random animals in her room over the years. Emma hadn't been nearly as keen on them as she was, and Taylor might have chased her waving a very large spider a couple of times. Which, possibly, may have added to her former friend's unkeenness about spiders.

Just possibly.

Taylor's grin this time was a touch dark for a moment.

Anyway. That was in the past. Right now she had different issues. Making sure Vespa didn't come to harm was one of them. She'd become quite fond of the hornet very quickly, although her dad was considerably less enthused. He'd recoiled rather dramatically when she'd shown him the insect and said a number of things that weren't printable. She'd had to demonstrate that it was completely under her control for a while before he stopped looking nervously at it. And had gone a funny color when she told him it was a queen, and would be laying eggs and forming a hive sooner or later.

There had been some arguing about that. Taylor felt it was perfectly reasonable to have an asian giant hornet nest in the attic, since her ability would keep them completely controlled. He had pointed out in long suffering tones that they were still giant killer hornets and were absolutely terrifying and why on earth did she actually want more of them?

In return she'd explained that they might well come in useful.

The argument had gone on for a while, it had to be said. But in the end he'd allowed it, muttering about how he could always burn the house down if things went bad. She was pretty sure he was joking…

So once she figured out how to separate her mind from Vespa's enough to let the hornet go back to having something closer to a normal life, and the weather warmed up enough, the hornet queen would get on with what hornets did and a couple of months later Taylor would have lots of hornets to play with. If she couldn't figure out how to separate them, well… she could still have lots of hornets but she'd be much more involved in the process than she'd ever considered. Which was yet another weird part of her life now, but it was something she might come to experience.

Her mom had told her that one day she'd probably have kids, but Taylor suspected that the older woman would have raised her eyebrows at this particular method of achieving such a goal.

Snorting under her breath at the imagined expression her mom would have worn, Taylor paused to look into a shop window. She was wandering along a street near the Boardwalk shopping district, heading for the library, and intending to buy some new clothes too. Her dad had, after their initial long talk, decided to give her enough money to replace part of her wardrobe, partly due to her exploding her sweatpants and shirt that first time, and partly due to so much of it being wrecked by the three little shits. She'd been somewhat embarrassed, but had admitted she was running short of good clothes. He'd sighed a little, hugged her, and handed her a couple of hundred dollars.

The discussion had, she felt, brought them quite a long way back on the path to being normal again, although he'd certainly found parts of it very, very hard to deal with. Which was fair enough all things taken into account. Being half spider the whole time had certainly added to the surreality he clearly felt, but had also driven home just how fucked up her life had become. Oddly, after the first few minutes which involved a lot of rather incredulous staring, he'd pretty much accepted it and eventually ignored it as much as possible. She'd been impressed and pleased. And grateful he seemed to be returning to being the dad she remembered from before everything went horrible.

It was still going to be a long road to normality, she knew, but they'd taken the first steps along it. Her with eight feet, him with two. And both had promised each other to be more open about problems so all the stress wouldn't build up again like it had done. She had a nasty feeling that things could have become even worse than they had done and really didn't want to consider just how bad that could have ended up. It had been rough enough as it was.

The weather had been horrible the next few days so she'd stayed inside experimenting with her ability while he went off to work, tracking down interesting insects nearby, and reading a lot about them online. As well as doing some of the homework the school had sent her, after a brief battle with herself over simply burning it. In the end she'd decided, agreeing with her dad, that there was no point destroying her scholastic future entirely, and she might as well do the work. He was trying to arrange to get her into a different school but for now, sooner or later, she'd have to go back to Winslow. Which she wasn't looking forward to in the slightest. They'd even discussed home schooling, which she was quite interested in, but at the moment he'd put that down as a last resort as it added all sorts of complexities to life they couldn't easily afford. Not that this would stop it, he'd added, if all else failed.

He really wasn't happy about what had happened to her. Not even slightly. And she suspected that there were things he was working on he wasn't telling her, which might well cause a lot of problems for Winslow. That was fine, she didn't want to think about the damn place, and if it kept him happy, it was all good. He was much more open with her, and she with him, now but had no real wish currently to have anything more to do with the school than she was forced to.

He'd made a comment at one point that had made her wonder whether those doctors at Brockton General might also be even more incensed than she'd thought at the time, but hadn't expanded on it.

Taylor still had ten days of recovery time left, and she wasn't going to waste any of it worrying about Winslow or thinking about the damn place any more than necessary. She'd done their stupid homework, which was easy once she had time to think quietly rather than having to fend off idiots, got that out of the way, and was going to enjoy learning about her new powers in the time she had to herself. It was fun, aside from anything else. And she had to practice to get full control of the ability, stage by stage, rather than letting it turn everything up to eleven with a manic giggle. The damn thing was way too overenthusiastic in her view. Although it did, slowly, seem to be learning not to push things too hard. She'd only had to slap it down twice today which was a definite improvement.

So yeah. Life was peculiar in the extreme but at the moment going well, with the minor issue of return to school looming on the horizon. She'd enjoy herself while she could. And deal with the rest when she had no choice.

Moving on to the next shop, she inspected the window display, then nodded to herself and went inside. Soon she was flipping through various items of clothing looking for a replacement sweatshirt and pants, in a color she liked. Finding a couple of suitable sets she put them to one side and went hunting for socks.

Once she'd purchased what she was after, she left the store with a half-full backpack, resuming her slow trek to the library. A couple of other stops netted her some underwear and a pair of nice walking boots which were on sale, heavily discounted due to a small patch of damage on one of them which she decided was only cosmetic. She wore those out of the store, putting her old shoes into a plastic bag the girl on the register gave her when she asked, to prevent the water and dirt on them getting on anything in her backpack.

Satisfied, she left the shops behind her and walked faster. The library was close enough to the shopping district there hadn't been any point taking the bus, as it was only a few minutes walk, and the weather wasn't bad enough to warrant the effort either. Glancing up at the sky she wondered when they'd see the sun again. At least it was no longer doing the half snow half sleet thing the last few days had brought, which was a relief. A good snowfall was nice, she thought to herself, but what they'd had was just unpleasant.

In the library half an hour later she'd accumulated a number of interesting looking books on entomology, and a couple on other subjects she wanted. And now she was sitting at one of the computers idly poking around on the Parahumans Online forums while she waited for several large files to download, having found other free works on insects. The internet connection at home was so slow it would take hours, possibly days, to do the same thing, and while the library one wasn't exactly the fastest broadband on the planet, it was much quicker.

Studying the local cape scene seemed like it might be useful now that she was a Parahuman. Not that she had any particular interest to rush out into the street and beat up a villain at the moment. That sounded like a very dangerous occupation and while on the whole she was fine with saving people from crime, she didn't think that picking a fight with a super-powered Nazi was a brilliant idea. Especially without any practice in such things.

Shooting one in the head from a safe distance sounded like a much better idea, honestly. She wondered why this didn't happen more. Especially considering how many people got randomly shot all the time. It was a little weird, all in all. But life was odd at the best of times in her experience. Although admittedly hers had become a lot stranger recently.

Smiling a little to herself, Taylor read the available information on all the local heroes, and the villains too. There seemed to be an awful lot of the latter…

Some were clearly mostly harmless, like various minor thieves, but the aforementioned super powered Nazis very much were not, neither was the asian rage dragon and his suicide bomber friend. The crazy drug dealers were relatively tame by comparison but still not good. She shook her head as she read some of the news articles, wondering what drove some people to be such utter shits to everyone. And why Nazis were allowed to wander around freely. Hadn't the world fought a war to put those bastard down the first time? It was really annoying, to put it mildly, that they were still around.

She sighed, propping her head on one fist as she scrolled. Her dad had, looking worried, asked her what she intended to do with her powers. He'd obviously thought that she was planning on running around being a hero. Or a villain. Oddly he hadn't seemed to worry so much which it was as he worried about either happening at all. Taylor had honestly thought hard about the question, and finally told him that she didn't have any particular urge to fight evil while wearing a mask, although she had no trouble defending herself or anyone else with her new powers. If necessary, she'd step in, but she didn't plan on looking for trouble. Which was entirely true.

Growing up she'd always wondered whether she could be a hero. Every kid probably did. She'd had the PRT posters on her walls, she knew most of the names of the local Protectorate and the more famous national ones, and of course everyone knew the Triumvirate, and Dragon. She even still had a little figurine of the latter sitting on her desk, as she admired Dragon a lot. But… as she'd got older, she'd realized that so much of what the capes did was kind of silly. Her mom had explained a lot of things she'd wondered about as a small child when she was old enough to understand, and talked about her own experiences with being Parahuman-adjacent for a few years a long time ago. The talks had made it clear that a lot of that lifestyle was nowhere near as simple good versus evil as the news made it out to be, and quite a bit of it was really stupid. Not to mention dangerous.

Neither her mom or her dad were entirely fond of the PRT either, for various reasons. Her mom didn't generally trust the government overall, and said the PRT was just another example of authority doing whatever the hell it wanted without thinking through the consequences. Her dad felt that the PRT talked a good line but failed dismally at following through, something she had learned over the years was a common outlook among people not living in the well off areas of the city. There was no denying the fact that what the PRT said and what the PRT did seemed to be quite at odds a lot of the time.

Hence the still-present super powered Nazis, of course.

Even so, despite his feelings about that organization, they'd seriously discussed her joining the Wards. He hadn't really pushed, and when she'd thought it over and told him that she didn't see the point right now, he'd simply nodded acceptance. Taylor was pleased and relieved that he hadn't insisted. They'd agreed that it was an option for the future, but for now it would be left off the table.

So in the end she was just going to learn how her power worked, what she could do with it, and avoid all that cape insanity as much as possible. It seemed far more sensible than running around in a silly costume hitting things.

The computer made a pinging sound, indicating that her files had finished downloading. Minimizing the web browser she started them copying onto the USB stick she'd bought from the library, then went back to PHO. Spotting a thread title that made her stare, she clicked on it. Then read the thread with growing interest and steadily rising glee.

"Oh my god," she chortled as she got to the bottom of the page. "I can't believe it."

Apparently Brockton General had made a complaint to the state medical board about a case where a local school had failed to keep their students under control, the result being one of those students had been admitted in severe medical distress and had nearly died due to massive systemic infection after being exposed to a major biohazard. She had a damn good idea who they were referring to although for medical privacy reasons no names were given. The various sources quoted said that the school had denied all responsibility for the incident, which had led the hospital to dig further, finding that there had been a whole string of injuries which apparently Winslow had gone to some effort to cover up. Reference was made to bribes and threats, along with destruction of evidence.

She was chuckling maliciously as she kept reading, making one of the other people using a computer near her look at her with a somewhat nervous expression then get up and move. Taylor ignored that as she read about how the Winslow administration seemed to have dug itself a very deep hole then jumped in without hesitation. The latest postings in the thread claimed that the city administration had become involved and was asking awkward questions of the board of governors for the school, which was probably going to result in quite a number of people having a very unpleasant time for the foreseeable future.

By the sounds of it, an awful lot of pigeons had come home to roost all at once, and the end result was that Principal Blackwell and her colleagues were going find themselves fighting off forces they had little chance of surviving. Taylor started laughing helplessly as she pictured the look on Blackwell's face, and those of other teachers she heartily disliked and had absolutely zero respect for.

Her dad was going to laugh his ass off when she showed him this. Then probably phone the hospital and ask why they hadn't been informed.

Which was a valid question, admittedly. She assumed it was again most likely down to medical privacy rules, but wondered if the lawsuits that were definitely heading towards Winslow at high speed might produce some compensation for her. It was worth asking her dad to look into.

Finding herself suddenly even more cheerful than she'd been up to now, and idly musing on whether her break from school might be a touch longer than advertised, Taylor finished up on the computer, unplugged her USB stick, and got up humming to herself. It was a good day and it was only half done so far.

As she was walking back to the bus stop, still humming happily, she spotted something in the distance that made her pause for a moment. Two men, both with shaved heads and tattoos on their necks she didn't need to see close up to recognize, who had been lurking in a service alley that led around the rear of a small shopping area, suddenly grabbed a girl about her age and dragged her off the main road. At least three other people saw this happen, and the scream, abruptly cut off, was clearly audible even from where Taylor was, but the witnesses all merely lowered their heads and moved away quickly.

She had a very good idea what was about to happen to that girl, who was of a much darker complexion than the two skinheads were. It was something that happened far too often around the city, although not often in broad daylight in the commercial district like that. Looking around, she couldn't see any sign of any cops, or any heroic Parahumans either. Or, really, anyone with common decency. Every single person who might have stepped in had vanished.

Taylor felt a deep anger rising from somewhere inside her. Her Vespa body vibrated against the back of her neck, reflecting the emotional turmoil. "Fuck it," she growled under her breath. "And I was in such a good mood until now. God, I hate Nazis."

There was no real choice in her mind. Very irritated indeed, Taylor looked around again then headed for a shop she'd been in earlier. She knew it had a changing room which had a window that could be opened in it, and no cameras. Entering it, she grabbed a couple of t-shirts off the rack, not even checking the sizes, without breaking step, and headed for the changing rooms which were upstairs. Nodding to the sales girl who looked up from her magazine as she walked past, she smiled and indicated where she was going. The older girl nodded back with a smile then promptly ignored her, going back to her reading. Hurrying up the stairs, Taylor went into the changing room, locked the door, opened the window as far as it would go, and checked the size of the gap. Good enough.

It took her a few seconds to undress, then put her clothes on the bench in the room. Double checking the door was definitely locked and there were no hidden cameras, she merged with Vespa. Moments later there was an enormous hornet standing on the floor. Quickly scurrying up the wall she peered out the window, looking from side to side to make sure no one was looking. All she could see was several roofs below her, a cold windy day, and no witnesses. 'Perfect,' she thought as she squeezed her body through the window. It wasn't too hard although it was a tight fit. A second after that she was flying towards the alley the skinheads had taken their victim into.

She bitterly disliked being forced into doing something like this and taking the risk someone might find out about her, but she couldn't let an innocent victim get hurt or killed by a fucking Nazi. The news had all too many reports of this sort of thing, and after the assault, the victim usually didn't make it. The bastards tended to have their fun and get rid of witnesses…

On the other hand, flying like this was great, she decided as she droned along, the sound of her wings echoing over the roofs. She hadn't yet had the chance to try it outside, and resolved to do so again when it wasn't quite so critical. Looking down she spotted the two skinheads directly below her, now she'd arrived at the alley. As she'd expected, one of them was tearing the clothes off the poor girl, while the other was rummaging in her bag, tossing things to the ground. Feeling the anger grow, she suppressed the immediate urge to simply sting them to hell, knowing that at her size her stinger was so enormous it would kill them simply from the sharp force trauma never mind the amount of venom she could inject.

Taylor suspected that her venom might be similarly upscaled in potency compared to a normal asian hornet as her size was, which was a touch terrifying. The standard venom was already bad enough.

However, she was more than strong enough like this to fuck someone up. And tough enough, she thought, to take quite an impact to her exoskeleton. Not that she had any inclination to get shot at or anything. But she couldn't see a gun on either of them, nor sense gun oil through her antennae, which she'd found were incredibly sensitive to scents. All she could detect was what she could see, along with a lot of alcohol on their breath. So, after only a second or so of assessing the situation, which was easy due to the massive boost in reflexes and thinking speed she got from her insect change, she simply tipped over into a dive and rammed the idiot assaulting the girl in the side.

He flew a good ten feet with a satisfying scream of shock which turned into a moan of pain as he slammed into the wall of the alley, slid down it, and landed amidst some garbage cans. One of them tipped over and disgorged a whole mass of rotting vegetables onto his head. The skinhead twitched a couple of times and fell unconscious, she guessed with at least a couple of broken ribs to keep him honest when he woke up.

The other one stared at her with wide eyes as she landed facing him, between him and the girl, who was breathing hard and gaping, holding what was left of her shirt closed with her hands. "Drop the bag and run, asshole," Taylor growled, her hornet voice completely unrecognizable as hers yet easily understandable. "Or I'll sting you so hard your great grandparents will scream in agony."

She buzzed her wings threateningly, making the entire alley vibrate with a bass note, and the skinhead paled to the point he looked like he was in danger of passing out, the swastika tattooed on his neck contrasting dramatically. Opening his mouth he let out a scream of horror, flung the bag at her, and legged it like the hounds of hell were on his heels. "Keep running!" she shouted after him. "I've got your scent, I can find you anywhere!" His footsteps increased in speed gratifyingly.

It was kind of true, but she had no intention of going looking for the fucker. But with luck it would give him something to think about for a long time.

Internally grinning, something her current body wasn't suited for doing externally at the moment, she turned to the woman who was still staring at her in a mix of horror and relief. "Are you all right?" she asked, her voice much less harsh.

The woman nodded jerkily. "Um… thank you?"

"No problem," Taylor replied. "You should call the cops though. I have to go, I'm already late." The woman looked massively confused as well now, but Taylor just flicked her antennae cheerfully at her, waved with a foreleg, then took off and headed back to the open window at high speed. All in all it had been under a minute since she'd left the shop but she didn't want to take any more risks than she had to. Still annoyed at the skinheads, she quickly retraced her path, made sure no one was looking, and squeezed through again into the changing room which was thankfully still undisturbed. Seconds later she was getting dressed again.

And smiling to herself in a rather grim manner. That had been sort of fun, and with any luck at least two racist rapey muggers would think twice before they tried anything like that again.

Her inner hornet was quite pleased too, she mused, sending the Vespa body back under her hair.

Checking the shirts and finding that one was actually her size and quite nice, she tried it on quickly, then left the changing room and went down to the store. Putting the other one back, she paid for the second, then left, finding that there was already a police car parked at the entrance to the alley, two cops getting out and heading into the narrow space. Satisfied that things were under control Taylor turned in the other direction and resumed her interrupted walk towards the bus stop, reflecting on how much fun flying was.

On the ride home, she started making mental notes about other experiments she could do with her power. She'd suddenly had the thought that it would be interesting to see if she could merge with more than one bug at the same time…

That seemed to make the thing at the back of her mind sit up and stare at her. She stared back, a small smirk in her mental gaze.

'Yeah. I'm going to see what I can do, and you're going to cooperate. So sit down and shut up while we figure all this out, got me?'

Oh yes. Life was looking up, she thought, feeling surprisingly good about things. And wondering what her dad would say when she showed him the stuff on PHO...

Chapter Text

Putting the phone down her dad stood looking at it for a few seconds, then lifted the notebook he'd been writing in and inspected that for some time. Eventually he turned to look at Taylor who was sitting in the living room armchair watching him, Vespa perched on her hair.

"Well," he said, shifting position a little on the sofa opposite her to make himself comfortable. "That changes things."

She raised an eyebrow, wordlessly asking him to expand on his statement, which made him smile briefly. She was aware that she'd picked the mannerism up from her mom, and knew he recognized it, which was at least part of the reason she did it. It reminded both of them of something they mutually missed, but in a good way.

Leaning back, he flipped back a few pages, examined the top one, then met her eyes. "So. Apparently the hospital administration seriously got a bee in their bonnet about your case." He paused as she broke down giggling, sighing faintly, and waited with a good humored expression until she ran down. "Pun not intended," he added dryly, making her grin for a moment. "Anyway. What I was told was that there have been a statistically unlikely number of injuries arising from activities at Winslow, which have been escalating in severity for the last couple of years. The hospital has noticed this, and as mandatory reporters, dutifully did their job and reported them to the relevant authorities. Unfortunately it seems that those authorities subsequently did not do their duty and investigate, or if they did, half-assed it like you wouldn't believe."

He flipped the page while she listened intently. "At least one prior case was reported to the police, but for some bizarre reason nothing came of it. And when the hospital lawyers dug into it in the last week, which from implication suggests they engaged a private investigator who knew his stuff, they managed to determine that the cop who took the report strangely enough appears to have far more money in his bank account than he strictly speaking can come up with a good reason for…"

"Winslow bribed him, you mean," she said in a flat voice.

He shrugged, his eyes flinty behind his glasses. "That is the logical assumption, yes," he agreed. "Or at least someone bribed him. They're still working on proving it was directly at the hands of Winslow's administration, but their lawyers are apparently fairly sure they're in it up their eyebrows one way or another." He looked back at his notes while she suppressed the urge to visit Blackwell and find out just how dangerous her large hornet form's venom actually was. Slowly.

"So that cop is toast, basically. They've got more than enough evidence to get him fired, and are suing him to boot, but that's only part of the problem. The Mayor's office is extremely unhappy about all this, because Brockton General is one of the major draws to the city due to Panacea, and their expertise in dealing with mass casualties. A sad reflection on Brockton Bay, I guess, but practice sure helps. They get all too much practice. And their own administration has a lot of influence on the city, so when they get pissed, the Mayor sits up and pays attention." He shrugged slightly as she nodded. "I've met the man. He's a politician, but he's still a decent guy, and he takes his role more seriously than most people in his profession do."

"Yeah, you've mentioned that before," she nodded.

"Now, we come to your case. Which was the most serious of them to date, although there was apparently at least one previous student who nearly ended up dead from trauma early last year."

Taylor thought, then slowly nodded. "Oh. Right, I remember that. I didn't hear exactly what happened, but… I think it was a hispanic guy? Got jumped by some of the fucking wannabe-Nazi assholes from what I heard. He didn't come back to school and no one wanted to talk about it, not that anyone really talked to me anyway. But I overheard some girls gossiping about it in the bathroom. I… think he got stabbed or something. Which sounds perfectly plausible, knowing Winslow."

Her dad stared at her for some time. "Jesus," he finally muttered, lowering his eyes back to the notes. "Why the hell I agreed to let you go there is…" Shaking his head, he visibly headed off what was likely to end up as a rant and took a few deep breaths before continuing, "The lawyer said that the hospital warned the school that it was on extremely thin ice at that point and also escalated it, again, to the School Board. They were assured that everything would be put in place to eliminate bullying, stupid pranks, and any other danger. Even got it in writing. Reports were made, yet again, and they thought that this time it might actually stick." He looked up at her. "Until you were brought in."

Taylor looked back at him. "They weren't happy."

"They were about as far from happy as it's possible to get," he agreed darkly. "They completely lost patience with the entire thing, and decided that enough was way more than enough. It had to stop, no matter what. So they started going back over all the records of every single case in any way associated with Winslow or anyone even slightly connected to it, found no end of issues during their audit, fired at least four people who were also apparently taking bribes from anyone who turned up with a big old sack'o'cash, are suing them into the ground on top of having them arrested, by the sound of it got at least one PI to investigate everything in sight, and are apparently intent on absolutely fucking anyone who was involved from the ground up. And they've looped in the Mayor's office, the FBI, and the state governor. Who apparently isn't impressed either. It's turned into a total shitshow."

"Finally bureaucracy working for the little guy," she quipped with a wry grin, which made him chuckle.

"More likely mostly for itself, but the fallout is indeed helping the little guy," he responded, looking amused. "They're worried about being sued themselves, for a whole pile of reasons. So it's preemptive action in one sense, well deserved revenge for causing them a lot of trouble in another, and just general anger at complete incompetence and causing so many medical problems for the rest of it. In total there's about forty five million dollars worth of lawsuits already filed and god alone knows what the end total will be. Even if they lose half of them, which the lawyer didn't think was likely, they're going to practically bankrupt Winslow's school board and at least one legal firm. Plus several individuals who you'd probably recognize on sight."

Taylor grinned nastily. "Good," she replied, feeling quite pleased in general.

He looked like he agreed wholeheartedly. "Anyway, that's the basic story. Now, the part that affects us. Or you at least. Two parts." He thought for a moment. "Three. Three parts."

She started giggling again and he grinned. "Part one. Your schooling is obviously going to be affected by all this, as is that of everyone else at Winslow, because that place is probably going to get shut down for some weeks while the city runs their own investigation. My guess is that they'll probably fire the entire lot of them and then try to restart with a whole new staff, but that's going to take a while to set up. Assuming they can even find anyone who wants to work at a place with the reputation Winslow is likely to have very soon."

"It's already got a shitty reputation," she accurately pointed out. "For very good reasons."

"Yeah, but that's going to get a lot worse when this hits the papers," he replied. "It'll be one hell of a scandal. So, going back to Winslow isn't going to happen any time soon. Which leaves about nine hundred students kind of in limbo."

"Home schooling exists," Taylor noted. He nodded.

"Indeed, and for a lot of them that might happen. I'm going to have to check, but I suspect they'll also try to place the students with other high schools around the city. It's early enough in the semester they can probably do that reasonably easily although the schools aren't going to be happy about it. In the long term it'll probably be whatever Winslow becomes that takes most of them on, but it's possible that they might filter out the higher-achieving students and permanently place them at better schools." He shrugged a little. "I expect it'll take some time to sort all this out. Weeks at least."

"At least I don't need to go back, so that's a win already," Taylor smiled.

"You still need schooling so I'm not going to just let you sit at home all day turning into horrifying insectoid monsters," he replied, with a small frown which made her smile widen.

"Of course not! I can home school during the day and be a horrifying insectoid monster evenings and weekends!"

Her dad sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Quite. Let's move on." Vespa waved at him with one foreleg and he groaned under his breath, looking back at his notes again.

"How is this my life now?" he muttered, causing her to snort with laughter once more. "Right. Where was I? Oh, yes, schooling. For now, we'll look into the home schooling process, but if it turns out we can get you into a real school I'd much prefer to do that. I think you need other kids your age who aren't out to get you around you."

"Do such bizarre creatures exist?" she queried with a thoughtful look. "I expect they're very rare if they do. We should capture one for science should we locate it."

He gave her a dry look. "You done?"

"For now."

"Good. Sarcasm aside, young people do need peers. And if you immediately say there are lots of those at the docks I shall glare at you." He pointed sternly at her, making her close her mouth and look innocent. It didn't fool him based on his expression.

"That would be wharfully punny of me, so I'll resist," she commented, making him wince hard and groan.

"So we'll wait and see what happens on that front," he went on after a moment of recovery and a minor warning look which made her smile angelically.

"Part two," he carried on after flipping the page and examining it. "I asked about the lawsuits, and expressed the point that we were also very unhappy with Winslow. Quite vigorously."

"I heard, yeah," Taylor chuckled. "It was impressive."

"Thank you," he replied in a dignified manner. "I do what I can. Apparently, though, the hospital was expecting this from involved parents when they became aware of what was going on. They'd have reached out at some point, but since the news hit PHO yesterday they've had several of them call and make the same inquiries I did. I'm told that while we're perfectly free to launch our own lawsuits, and if we want them to the hospital will make the parts of their investigation that aren't covered by privacy laws available for that purpose, the lawyer I was speaking to suggested there was a possibly better method."

"Which is?" She watched him with interest.

"Joining in on their lawsuit. He pointed out that the damages we'd get might be higher if we sued separately, for a whole pile of legal reasons that get very complicated, but there was also the possibility that we'd lose. He didn't think that was likely considering the overwhelming evidence against Winslow, but he raised it as a possibility. And, of course, it would be an expensive process anyway. Hiring a lawyer, getting all the facts, going to court… it adds up fast and while I could get a lot of help from the Union that wouldn't eliminate the problem."

Taylor nodded slowly, understanding the issues involved fairly well. "But if we let the hospital do all the work…" she mused out loud.

"They cover all those costs. Exactly. They also have a lot of really good legal people who would be far out of our reach, a hell of a motive to squeeze the other side until they collapse like a crushed beer can, and a seriously enormous budget to throw at the problem. Along with enough political pull with the city and the state to make sure no one can manage to sweep it under the carpet." Her dad shrugged. "The downside is that when they finish chewing up Winslow and the school board, we likely won't get as much compensation as a separate case might produce. Maybe. Who knows, really, the amounts involved are so high that even a small percentage of it is more money than either of us would ever see in our lives otherwise."

"How much is that?" she queried curiously. He grinned.

"He wouldn't go into specifics, but the implication was in the ballpark of at least a million or so."

She nearly fell out of her chair, making him laugh. "Holy shit."

"Yeah, that was kind of my reaction too," he commented while she tried to get to grips with the sum. "Remember, that's not a guarantee, and we don't know how long it will take before the case even gets to court, since they're still gathering evidence and so on. And he thought they might in the end just settle out of court rather than drag things out to the bitter end. Which is probably the best outcome in a sense as it would be quicker and simpler, but who knows? Those people are corrupt beyond belief and provably stupid since they clearly didn't think any of this through. It was inevitably going to come out sooner or later." He shrugged once more as she nodded agreement, still slightly reeling at the news.

"I told him we'd discuss it and think about what we should do. You're the one who nearly got killed by those assholes, it's your decision, Taylor."

"Go with the hospital," she immediately replied.

"You're sure?"

"Yeah. I know we can't afford a high powered lawyer and I don't want to cause you any more problems than I already have," she said, staring at the carpet. After a moment he got up and moved to sit next to her, the chair being barely large enough for this. It brought back a memory of the pair of them, or Taylor and her mom, sitting in that same chair while one parent or other read to her when she was little and she felt momentary nostalgia.

"Look, Taylor, I know we've had problems between us for far longer than we should have done," he said quietly, putting his arm around her shoulders. "I didn't talk about things I should have, I drowned myself in grief and threw myself into work to try to cope, and in the process I forgot the most important thing in my life, that being you. And you had your own issues you didn't tell me about, for what sounds like similar reasons. We're far too much alike in some ways."

She looked up at him, Vespa rotating on her hair to get a better view too. He was smiling softly and sadly. "Annette was the glue that held this family together in a way. With her passing, we… didn't stick as closely any more. To both our detriment. But never for a moment believe I have ever considered you any part of the problems we, I, have had. Life is often hard, and it's far too easy to end up just trying to deal with the day to day difficulties and lose sight that there's a lot more to it than those. We both did that. And it didn't do either of us any favors. But…" He sighed a little. "I think we're slowly coming back from the edge. I sure hope we are. I'm bitterly regretful that it took what happened to make me take a long look at myself and see how much I fucked up. You should not have had to go through any of what you did. And I love you deeply, you are my daughter, who I would do anything for. So, if you want, I'm quite prepared to take on Winslow alone no matter how hard it would be."

Reaching up she wiped a tear from her eye, then smiled at him. "Thanks, dad," she replied after quite a long silence, her voice almost inaudible. "I'm so sorry I kept all those secrets too. I should have talked to you a long time ago. Or gone to the cops, or Emma's parents, or… fuck, I don't know, done anything but sit there and take it like I did." She rubbed her face with both hands as he listened. "Maybe this could have come out differently if I hadn't just withdrawn into myself so much."

"Perhaps," he nodded. "It might have been better. On the other hand it might have been worse. We simply don't know, and can't know. All we can do is deal with what happened. And if I have to mortgage the house to sue those bastards I'll do it with a smile. To be honest I'd burn the fucking place down with the same smile, but I'd get a reputation if I did that, so I should probably restrain myself."

Taylor giggled for a few seconds. "I've had almost the exact same thought several times. I guess we are a little too similar."

"Road flares and the spare gas can?" he queried with a look in his eyes that made her grin as she nodded.

"Yep."

"That's my girl." Hugging her, he looked highly amused. "Best reserve that for something really serious though. Hard to walk back from."

"Fair enough. So what do you think we should do?" She watched his face.

"Let the hospital deal with it. You're right. It's much less costly, painful, and time consuming. As I said if you really don't want that, we don't do it, so don't reject it just because you don't want to cause a problem. Because while it would be hard, it would also be worth it. However I do think it would be more sensible to leave this to the experts."

Taylor nodded slowly. "Yeah. I'm honestly fine with that. I don't care how they get screwed, all I care is that they get screwed. And I don't want to live in a cardboard box because I bankrupted us."

"I'm sure we could find a really nice cardboard box," he assured her with a grin. "I know people at several shipping companies."

Laughing, she felt better about their relationship than she had done for a long time. Since she'd woken up in hospital it had been steadily improving and seemed to be heading back to where it used to be, for which she was profoundly grateful. Both of them were definitely healing from their own traumas, and helping each other to heal.

"All right. I'll call the hospital legal people and let them know we're on board," he added, managing to get out of the chair and go back to the sofa, where he sat again while retrieving his notes. Writing a few words, he flipped the page again.

"So on to part three. You're going to be left here on your own a lot of the time. That worries me, not because I don't trust you, since I very much do, but because I don't think being isolated all the time is really a good idea."

"I'm not isolated, I've got lots of little friends!" she remarked with a broad smile, Vespa rearing up on her four hind legs and waving the front ones at him cheerfully. "Like the spiders, and the cockroaches, and the termites, and the centipedes, and…"

Pinching the bridge of his nose, her dad waited for her to stop, then sighed heavily while she giggled. "That is not quite what I mean and I know you know that. Human friends. People who can talk with you."

She scuttled the Vesta body down onto her hand and raised it to her eyes, regarding it thoughtfully. "I wonder if I can make insects talk?" she mused, causing him to sigh even more heavily.

"Again, not quite what I meant. And please don't. That thing is bad enough without it talking."

"Hey, Vespa is cool," she protested, the insect rotating on her palm to fix him with a glare. Or as much of one as something without human features could produce.

"I'm not… entirely… certain your definition of cool and my definition of cool are the same," he said doubtfully after thinking it over, which made her shrug, smiling. "I am entirely certain that a lot of what you can do will give most people the screaming heebie jeebies. God knows a hornet that size is kind of worrying. The thing you get when you use your power is terrifying."

"That Nazi sure thought so, yeah," she commented with a reminiscing smirk. "You should have seen him run! He could have qualified for the Olympics."

"Oddly enough I believe you," he muttered. "If it wasn't a Nazi I'd feel sorry for the bastard. But under the circumstances, well…" He shook his head as she grinned. "Good job."

"Thanks, Dad."

"And don't think you've successfully distracted me from the point I was raising."

"Darn. So close."

Looking slightly amused, he put the notebook down and leaned back. "I'm fine with you being here on your own, Taylor, you're a responsible girl and smart too. But I still worry about your social life."

"What social life?" she asked wryly. He pointed at her.

"Exactly. You shouldn't just lurk inside like one of your spiders, you need to meet people. I'm not saying you should become a social butter…" He stopped himself and put a hand on his face as she began giggling again. "Oh, Jesus."

"I could! I could become a social butterfly!" she gasped as she rolled around laughing. "With an internet stream and everything! Ooh, now I want to see what would happen if I did that!"

"Annette, I need you," he grumbled under his breath. "This is getting silly."

"Mom would have loved it," Taylor commented.

With a small regretful smile he nodded. "Probably. Your mother was…" He fell silent and shook his head sadly. She felt the same emotion, but could see that both of them were dealing with their mutual loss in a much more healthy manner than even a couple of weeks before, which seemed like something her mom would have approved of. When she finally calmed down after the hilarious thoughts his comment had sparked died away a little, although she put a pin in the concept of a social butterfly since it seemed far too good to ignore, he resumed, "I'm not going to force you to go out and make friends, or anything like that. I'm merely suggesting that it might be something you should consider. You've been pushed into being alone far too much, even when you were in school, and that's not what you were like when you were younger. If you want to sit in the house studying your bugs and home schooling, fine, I'll live with that, but…"

He paused for a moment, thinking, while she considered his words. "Perhaps you might also want to think about doing something else," he finally added.

"What?" she queried.

"I'm not sure, honestly, but I would like you to at least think about it," he replied. "If you want you can come to work with me sometimes. There are plenty of spare rooms you can sit and read in, and I know you know quite a lot of people at the Union who would be pleased to see you again. It might be a little less lonely than being here all day. Get you back into the mindset of having people who aren't out to get you around the place." Her dad watched her face as she considered the idea. Eventually she nodded.

"Yeah, I could do that sometimes, sure," she agreed. "And I bet there are all sorts of cool insects lurking around the docks."

"Oh, god," he sighed. "I didn't think of that."

She grinned widely. "I did."

"I repeat. Oh, god."

"Hey, I wonder if there are any more asian hornets around the docks? Seems like that would be the place they might turn up," she pondered out loud, stroking Vespa with one finger. Her dad blanched. "I bet there might well be other neat imported insects too…"

"Oh god is no longer strong enough," he mumbled as he got up and went into the kitchen seeking coffee, based on the rattling sound that occurred moments later. Giggling she followed, Vespa flying back onto her head. "Please try to restrain your urges to collect every lethal arthropod known to man," he begged as he looked sideways at her while filling the kettle at the sink. Her answering smile didn't seem to reassure him.

"Do you mind if I get a few terrariums?" she asked innocently. He froze, then turned to put the kettle on the stove while muttering something under his breath too faintly for her to make out other than a general impression of bemused horror. "I promise I'll keep most of the bugs in them."

Having turned the stove on, he lowered his head with his hands resting on the edges, apparently communing with the appliance, until he finally took a deep breath and turned around. "I suppose, considering your power, it's probably not unreasonable. So all right. But, for me? Please don't overrun the house with swarms of huge venomous insects? Or even huge swarms of normally sized venomous insects. The neighbors will talk." He smiled as she hugged him.

"Thanks, dad. I won't cause too much trouble."

"That's what they always say," he sighed. "I did to my own dad. Then when the cops turned up, he got very sarcastic, and made me pay for a new shed out of my own money."

Gazing at him with her eyebrows up, she slowly asked, "Um… what happened?"

"Youthful indiscretions, and that's all we'll say about it," he replied with dignity. "The statute of limitations may have run out but I have no wish to give anyone who may be present any ideas she doesn't need."

Laughing, Taylor started making them some lunch, pulling various things out of the fridge for sandwiches of epic sandwichness. After watching her for a while, he cleared his throat, making her turn her head to him inquiringly. "One other thing," he began. She raised the eyebrow again. "I…" Swallowing, he started again after having had trouble getting the words out. "I think we should probably get cellphones. Because if you're here on your own, or out, I want to be able to contact you in an emergency."

She stared at him in mild disbelief, not ever having expected him to go back on his long dislike of the devices after what happened to her mom. "I may have overreacted," he added quietly. "I was not in a good place back then. And I'm honest enough with myself to admit I might have made a mistake."

Putting her knife down and wiping her hands on a cloth, Taylor moved to him and gave him a long hug. "Neither one of us was in their right mind back then, Dad," she said very softly. "I understand why you felt like that. I kind of felt the same. But you're right. It's time to move on."

Stroking her hair, careful to miss Vespa, he smiled. "I guess it is. We'll go into town and find something tomorrow after work." Looking at his watch, he continued, "I'll have to get back as soon as we've eaten, though. I have way too much stuff to finish off today."

"Sure." Releasing him she busied herself finishing the sandwiches and put them on the table while he made himself some coffee and her some tea. Soon they were eating. While he was chewing, he watched Vespa fly down and start eating a small portion of ham Taylor had kept back for her hornet body. He examined the insect, frowning very slightly after a moment or two.

"Is that thing growing?" he asked slowly. She looked at him, then at Vespa. "I could swear it's a little bigger than it was when you found her."

"Insects don't really grow like mammals do once they're mature," she replied, also studying Vespa. "They shed their exoskeletons, but adult hornets don't do that." She hadn't paid attention to what he was claiming, she had to admit, but… "She does look a little larger," she finally said, carefully inspecting the insect. Leaning back she pulled one of the kitchen drawers open behind her, rummaged around, and pulled out the old wooden ruler they kept in there for historical reasons. Putting it on the table she walked Vespa over it and aligned the rear of her abdomen with the start of the thing, then looked at where her head was. "Two and a half inches exactly." Spreading the wings, she measured across from tip to tip. "Three and three quarter inches wingspan."

"Christ, that's a big hornet," he said, looking both impressed and a touch worried.

"She's at the upper limit the books say is typical for this species," Taylor agreed, feeling quite pleased about that. "I'll keep an eye on her measurements though. I can't think why she'd be growing, but who knows? It's probably just your memory, you are ancient after all." She grinned impishly as he glared at her.

"Thirty eight is hardly ancient, you young foolish child," he replied with a haughty look of his own. Both of them laughed after a moment.

"I'm sorry we didn't talk properly for so long, Taylor," he said once he'd taken a few bits of his last sandwich, sounding deeply regretful. "I missed this more than I can say, and forgot how much I missed it. You're a wonderful daughter and I wish I'd told you that more. I'll do my best not to fall back into that self-destructive mindset, but I can't guarantee everything will be smooth sailing. But if I do, I need you to pull me back out, OK?"

Smiling fondly at him and feeling better about life in general than she'd done for years, Taylor nodded. "Of course. And if I get all moody and teenagery, you try to make me stop, too."

"Assuming I can. Moody teenagers are a force of nature," he quipped, then finished his coffee as she giggled. "But I'll do my best." Checking the time again, he stood. "Right, then, I need to get back. I'll call the hospital when I have a moment and sort out anything we need to do for the legal case. I expect we won't get much information until either they settle or it goes to court, where you might end up as a witness. I personally doubt it will go that far, but who knows?" He shrugged. "Those people are idiots."

"Yeah," she sighed. "Tell me about it."

Walking around the table he patted her shoulder, smiled at her, and added, "Thanks for the sandwiches. I'll see you around six or so."

"OK." Getting up she gave him a quick hug then once he'd left the kitchen started cleaning up. The front door shut moments later and through the various insects she was monitoring she could sense him getting into his truck, which started and drove off down the street. Satisfied that things seemed to be going pretty well at the moment, she put the crockery and cutlery away, wiped everything down, and turned back to the table. Bending over Vespa she studied her hornet body again. "Bigger? Huh. I wonder…"

Flying the insect body onto her hair, she went upstairs to do some more research into interesting insects that could be found locally while wondering if you could mail order some of the ones she'd found out about from the literature…

That seemed to have some promising applications if it could be arranged, she thought with glee.

Chapter Text

"That should do it," Taylor remarked to Vespa as she stepped back to admire the results of half an hour's work. Some time after lunch she'd recalled that there was, for some reason, an old fish tank buried in the clutter in the basement. She'd had memories of seeing it years ago when she was looking for something else, and had taken a while to locate it, but when she finally found the thing she was pleased to see it was undamaged if very dirty. There was even a top for it with a light, although the filter thing that was lying inside it looked very broken. Having hauled it up to the kitchen she'd spent a while dumping out all the random detritus inside it then carefully cleaning it thoroughly inside and out, ending up with gleaming glass that looked almost new.

Having got that part sorted out she'd lined it with a few sheets of newspaper for the moment, put in a couple of small bits of apple and a shallow dish of water, then flown Vespa into it and put the lid on. Once that was done she'd carried it up to her room and put it on her desk. "Right, let's find out what actually happens," she told the hornet, seeing her own face through the glass from the other point of view. She'd decided that now was a good time to check what the result of her separating from her hornet physically was, although she still couldn't work out how to do it mentally. The tank was to make sure that if the link they shared did collapse the hornet wouldn't end up flying madly all around the house and possibly hurt herself, or worse end up outside and freeze to death.

The weather wasn't enormously cold but it was only barely above freezing right now, which was much too cold for a normal hornet. Taylor had experimented with her merged form in the back porch, which was completely unheated and pretty much just a place for dirty shoes and random garden tools, but crucially only had one small window so no one could see her. She'd discovered that the vastly larger super-hornet body, while it could certainly feel the cold, didn't seem to be particularly badly affected by it, at least in the short term. No more than her human body was, and perhaps a little less.

It was useful information and probably due to powers weirdness, as was the way she could even fly in that body. Or just breathe. In theory an insect the size of a doberman should simply suffocate under its own mass, but she had no trouble at all. The body, while it looked like a hugely enlarged hornet, clearly had much more fundamental changes going on under the exoskeleton.

While that was interesting and she wanted to learn more about it, the immediate result was that she was certainly capable of flying around outside even in this weather without any real worries. But the Vespa-sized hornet body wasn't, and she didn't want it getting damages, hence the precaution.

Satisfied with her work, she waved to herself, then went downstairs to put her boots and coat on. Thus adorned she went outside and closed the door, before walking down to the street. Nothing so far was amiss so she turned towards the east and started walking, carefully monitoring her link with her hornet-self.

After a hundred yards she smiled. So far so good, nothing seemed at all different.

At two hundred yards she beamed. All good. Excellent.

Same at three hundred yards. And four hundred. And five hundred.

"Huh, the range is better than I expected," she murmured to herself, her hands in her pockets to keep them warm as she trod onwards, counting her paces in her head.

Six hundred. Seven hundred. Eight.

She started frowning. That… seemed like a lot.

Nine hundred. One thousand.

Stopping she turned and looked back down the street to her house, way down at the far end close to where the intersecting street crossed it. "Interesting," she mumbled under her breath. Turning back to face the way she'd been walking, she carried on, crossing the next road after a quick look both ways. The range kept going up and up, and at just under a mile she stopped again and leaned on a low wall next to the street, thinking. Everything she'd read about Parahuman Master abilities suggested that a range of a couple of hundred yards was considered pretty significant and a quarter of a mile was enormous. She was nearly a mile from Vespa and had no difficulty whatsoever with her connection. And all the bugs she'd been monitoring around the house within a few dozen feet were still in her awareness. Which… didn't make any sense.

Bracing herself, she very gingerly tried extending her power, which immediately tried to slam the full weight of itself into the open. Gritting her teeth she forced it back hard. 'No! Stop that. We've spoken about this before. Play nice or I'll be very upset,' she told it firmly, getting a sort of petulant irritation from somewhere. 'This is a test. This is only a test. Please remain calm.'

She giggled to herself at the sort of incredulous sensation that came to her. Very slowly and focusing hard, she pushed her ability outwards back in the direction of the house, trying to keep it as narrowly-aimed as possible. Insect after insect came into her purview, in a line stretching back along the street. She found that she could sense them nearly three quarters of the distance without any trouble, although her ability was definitely chafing under the restrictions she was putting on it. However eventually she hit a point where she couldn't seem to get it to go any further, even though she somehow got the impression that it might be possible to push it past that if she could just figure out how.

"OK," she muttered, "Let's call that the range for now. More than I expected. So… why can I…?"

Realizing something, she withdrew her senses back to herself and the nearby environs, then repeated the exercise, but starting at the Vespa end.

And sure enough, it did exactly the same thing in the other direction…

"Oh my god," she breathed in shock. "Is that supposed to happen?"

Her power, somehow, seemed nearly as surprised as she was. Which implied the answer was 'No'.

Leaving the narrow tunnel of bug senses stretching three quarters of a mile from her house towards her, she tried to do the same thing in the other direction at the same time, which gave her an odd sensation of dizziness for a second or two then snapped into place. And within moments she was sensing the same bugs from opposite directions across a big chunk of the shared distance. "Holy crap."

Her voice was both incredulous and pleased. The results were not what she'd expected at all.

Keeping the narrowly focused tendril of her power going despite the power itself hopping up and down wanting to expand it in all directions, she resumed walking in as straight a line as she could manage. The overlapping area slowly diminished until finally she felt both sets of senses separate. But the link to Vesta didn't change one iota. It was as seamless as when the hornet body was sitting on her neck.

Wondering rather desperately if it even had a range she looked around, then headed to the nearest bus stop. This required further experimentation.

Jumping on the bus when it arrived a few minutes later, this route being one that would end up on the far side of the business district with stops every couple of blocks, she paid the driver and moved to the back, taking a seat next to the heater. The bus was mostly empty due to the hour, being too late for the morning commuters and too early for their return, but there were still a dozen or so people on board. Mostly at the front with a couple nearer to her. No one paid her any attention at all.

The bus pulled away and rumbled off down the street while Taylor kept a keen internal eye on what was happening. She'd pulled her awareness of arthropods back to a sixty or so foot radius around both her human body and the hornet one to minimize distractions and was simply watching to see what happened to the link to Vespa. As the minutes ticked by, the answer to that seemed to stay absolutely nothing. By the time she reached the other end of the Boardwalk where she got off to find a snack to eat as she was hungry again now, she'd come to the conclusion that distance as far as that particular link went might well be functionally irrelevant.

'It might not work over tens or hundreds of miles, but I'm nearly six miles from home now and I can't see any difference at all,' she thought as she paid for her burger and fries, then went to sit down near the window. 'Which implies I can probably reach anywhere in the entire city at least. Which is nuts. I wonder why that part of this works over such a big distance but the other part is only about three quarters of a mile. Although that's still pretty impressive…'

She slowly ate some fries, mulling over her results. By the looks of it, her connection with Vespa was so strong that her power was acting like both the hornet body and her human one were interchangeable as far as her arthropod ability went. That led her inevitably to the thought of whether she could pull of the same trick with other insects. If that was possible, she could in theory spread them around the place like cell towers and cover the entire damned city with her ability!

Taylor felt somewhat faint. It was an insane idea, but it might actually be possible. Assuming she could form a similarly deep bond with something other than Vespa, since she still had no idea how she'd managed that in the first place, and by the feeling of it neither did whatever it was that was still watching her from somewhere inside her head and feeling weirdly disturbed as well as slightly proud.

Somehow, she was certain she'd broken something quite important about her power. Hopefully she wouldn't get in trouble for doing that.

The thought made her smile to herself as she picked up her coke and took a sip.

'I did not expect this,' she mused, taking a bite out of the burger. 'But it's amazingly cool. I can see some really interesting possibilities here… I should make a note.'

Unfortunately she didn't have a pen or paper, so she just mentally put it down as great success and finished eating. Once she left the burger place, she looked around. Not having Vespa riding on the back of her neck for some reason made her a little twitchy, possibly because she'd become so accustomed to the sensation of tiny claws over the last few days. She hadn't intended to come this far when she'd left the house or she'd have brought her backpack, and a pair of gloves thinking about it. Rubbing her hands together she decided to go home again, so headed back to the correct bus stop. Checking the timetable she saw it would be about fifteen minutes before the bus arrived.

Deciding it was too cold to stand around outside, she pondered going back to the burger place to stay warm, but after looking around realized she was near a side street she recalled had a bookshop she'd been to a few times on it. So she headed that way, intending to pop in and look around to kill time in the warmth.

As she walked towards the bookshop, she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes fixed on a shop on the other side of the street, one she'd never noticed before.

Brockton Exotic Pets the sign over the window read.

The slow grin she developed made an older man who was crossing the road towards her suddenly change his mind and go back the other way, looking over his shoulder with a slightly worried face. She ignored that as she checked both directions, then hurried across the street to peer into the window of the shop. Her power told her that there were some absolutely fascinating things in there, and was prodding her and whispering she should go in right now.

So she did.

Happily.

Pulling her hood down as she entered, she looked around with a smile. There were glass tanks all over the place, down both sides of the place and in two aisles in the middle, while at the back of the long thin shop there were cages as well as larger glassed-in enclosures. The entire place was quite warm, heat radiating from quite a lot of the terrariums. In the ones to her left she could see several snakes of various types, some lizards, one of which was watching her in a friendly manner, and a few rodents. Walking down the row, she examined the contents of the terrariums with interest. The snakes didn't react much when she peered in, a forked tongue flicking being about the only motion, but the lizards were moving about. She paused to peer at the blueish one that looked very alert and interested, smiling when it bobbed its head a couple of times and seemed to grin at her with reptilian good humor. Nodding back, she moved on.

The reptile section was followed by some really impressive aquariums, which were surprisingly warm to the touch, and full of incredibly colorful sea life. Coral, anemones, and brightly shaded fish of all sorts thronged the tanks, which were apparently tropical environments. There were even some jellyfish of various types. To her surprise, several of the creatures she was watching were amenable to her power, which she hadn't expected. The aquatic worms made a little sense, as she'd already noticed that was a thing with terrestrial ones, but how did jellyfish come into it? Or those anemones? They were neither worms nor arthropods.

It was a little confusing yet again, and she put it on the list of things to look into. She was less surprised to find that the crabs in a couple of tanks were as far as her power went just another sort of bug, which actually made sense this time. Inspecting them she gently probed their tiny little minds, not taking control but just connecting to their own senses for a moment. Yeah, it worked just as well as any other 'bug' did. Neat, but not immediately useful, although she could see some intriguing possibilities down the line. On the other hand, if she needed crabs, there were lots around in the bay, and they didn't need an expensive heated tank like these guys did.

Eventually she went past the aquatic pets and arrived at the part she'd felt from the street. Arthropods.

Quite a lot of them, in fact. A fair number of different species of spider, several scorpion varieties, stick insects in multiple sizes from so small they were barely visible to large enough to almost make a good nightclub… Tanks full of crickets and grasshoppers she assumed were food for some of the reptiles in all likelihood. Several different types of mantis were in other terrariums, then there were some enormous beetles, one of which was so big it would have filled her hand.

Her eyes were wide with glee.

This was perfect.

How had she not heard of this place before?

Even before her powers came along she'd have found it absolutely fascinating, but the addition of her ability ramped that up to infinity and beyond. Looking at the various tanks she couldn't see anything astoundingly dangerous, although she recognized some of the scorpions as pretty venomous and not the sort of thing you'd want to get stung by. The spiders were likewise not particularly lethal. Jumping spiders were just fun, and Tarantulas, according to what she'd learned, could certainly give you a highly unpleasant bite but it wasn't all that dangerous for the most part unless you were very small, very old, or very ill. Or allergic to them which was always a risk factor with any toxin, of course.

On the other hand they were big and hairy and impressive, so that was nice.

If she wanted extremely venomous, black widows weren't all that hard to find, apparently. Brockton Bay was technically a little far north for them, and the far more dangerous brown recluse, but they definitely were found here, despite what the official story was, because she'd seen both more than once. Her mom had in fact pointed them out to her in the past and told her in no uncertain terms that they were not amenable to being played with, unlike the wolf spiders the house often hosted. Not being stupid even as a small girl Taylor had listened and stayed clear of the things she was warned off. Everything else was fair game though…

She smiled fondly at the memory of her mom's face after that firefly incident.

Moving slowly down the rows of terrariums she thought about their inhabitants. She couldn't really buy much of anything today but at least she now knew this place was here for later when she had more ability to get some fun new friends. She'd need to set up suitable enclosures for them first, though. Looking around she spotted the smaller tanks and equipment and went over to study the prices. They were more than she'd expected, but less than she feared. A lot of the cost seemed to be things like heaters and lights. Wondering if she could find some cheap second hand aquariums similar to the one she'd dug out of the basement which would lower the startup cost, she memorized some prices, wishing she'd brought a pad and pen. After a moment the thought struck her that she could simply ask the guy at the counter, who was talking to a girl about her age, for paper and something to write this all down with, so turned and headed to the front of the store again.

The pair were apparently finishing up a transaction. Handing the girl a bag, the guy said, "There you go, Lucy. I'm sure your iguana will feel better after you use that. I put in some treats for him too."

"Thanks, Mike," the girl, who looked Asian, replied with a smile. "This cold weather doesn't agree with him."

"I'm not surprised," Mike replied, grinning. He looked out the window where it had started almost-snowing again, light quantities of slushy sleet dropping onto the road. "It doesn't agree with me either. Luckily I can stay in here where it's nice and warm."

Lucy giggled, then turned to leave. She paused, seeing Taylor, before smiling. "Hi. Are you a fellow lizard aficionado?" she queried with interest.

"I like reptiles, but I'm more into arthropods," Taylor replied cheerfully.

"Oh, cool." Lucy looked past her to the various tanks of spiders and other creatures. "They're fun too, but lizards are better. An iguana can lie on you and keep you company." She grinned. "Spiders are too small for that."

Wondering what the other girl would say about her merged spider forms, Taylor just nodded agreeably with hidden amusement. Lucy waved to Mike, smiled at Taylor again and said, "Have fun!," then left, pulling her coat's hood up and dashing across the road.

"Welcome to Brockton Exotic Pets, miss," Mike said as he turned to her after watching his previous customer leave. "How can I help you? In the market for a fun new companion creature?" He looked and sounded like he was enjoying himself.

Taylor smiled widely. "Oh, very much so, yes." She started asking questions, after requesting a pen and paper, which he handed over without issue. They spent quite bit longer walking around the store looking at various things than she'd planned on, and by the time she left she had missed two busses, but they ran every thirty five minutes so that wasn't a problem.

As the bus rumbled homewards, Taylor felt that she'd made a useful new acquaintance, learned some fascinating things, and had a route towards a lot more experimentation that was going to be fun. She hadn't expected what she'd found at all, but it was a lucky accidental discovery.

Holding the shoebox-sized carton in her lap, most of it being padding and insulation, she let her power play with the inhabitant. All she'd been able to afford, and currently be able to keep safe with what she had at home, but a good start in her opinion.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Jesus Christ!" her dad yelped when he came into her room and stopped dead. "Where the hell did you get that thing?"

She looked up at him, then back at the young female Pandinus imperator that was clinging to her left hand. "Pet shop," she replied, letting her power explore the creature.

"Pet shop?" he repeated in an incredulous voice. "There are pet shops that sell huge scorpions?"

"Apparently so," she laughed, spinning her chair around and holding the creature up, which made him take a step back. "She's an Emperor Scorpion. Very popular as pets, I found out."

"Among crazy people," he muttered, inspecting the large arthropod from a safe distance. "How venomous is it?"

"Not very," she assured him. "Vespa is much worse."

"Which doesn't fill me with joy, if I'm honest." He shook his head. "Where on earth did you go?"

She grinned then explained what she'd been doing that afternoon and her findings and conclusions. He sat on her bed and listened, while the scorpion she still hadn't come up with a name for ran up her arm, across the back of her shoulders, and down the other arm. Taylor was only lightly influencing it at the moment, not wanting to risk such a deep connection as with Vespa until she understood more about what she'd done and how. Even so she knew there was no risk at all from the scorpion. The creature felt mildly curious, if the very limited amount of what it had as a mind could feel much of anything other than hunger. It certainly wasn't upset or worried.

When she finished he blinked a few times, apparently lost for words, before finally finding some. "Half way across the city?" he exclaimed with incredulity.

"Yeah. It surprised me too. I didn't think Master powers had anything like that range. Certainly nothing I've read about it showed that. But it works, at least with Vespa." Taylor shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea why, or really what I did. Except that as far as I can work out it wasn't meant to happen that way."

"Weird," he commented after a long moment. "Very weird."

She nodded agreement, having thought exactly the same. "And what are you doing with that one?" he asked after a pause, nodding at the scorpion, which she made wave one claw at him in a happy sort of way. This caused him to close his eyes for a second and appear to suppress a sigh.

"Experimenting," she hissed evilly, rubbing her hands together while the scorpion retreated to her shoulder. Vesta landed on her other one, having been sitting on her head up until now. All three of them regarded him as he looked back with an expression that seemed torn between laughter and mild horror.

"Oh, lord, this is going to get very strange, isn't it? I can feel it," he groaned helplessly.

Giggling, she indicated the tank on her desk. "I found that in the basement. Do you mind if I have it?"

He looked at the thing and shook his head after frowning slightly. "No, help yourself. I wonder where that… Oh. I remember." Her dad nodded. "Someone at the union gave it to your mother about… must be nearly sixteen years ago now. She was thinking of keeping fish for a while but decided in the end it was too much work, and it ended up in the basement. I meant to toss it out years back but it must have got buried under all the other stuff down there and I forgot about it."

"It was absolutely covered in crud when I found it. It took ages to clean it up," she agreed. "But it's just the right size for this girl." The scorpion waved at him. He just looked back at it with a long-suffering expression. "I've nearly finished setting it up like Mike showed me, so she'll be fine in there."

"How many tanks full of horrific creepy crawlies can I expect?" he asked somewhat apprehensively.

"I'm not sure yet," she replied thoughtfully, making him wince. "A few."

Her dad mumbled "Wonderful," under his breath then stood up. "Fine. It's a hobby, I suppose, and I did make the mistake of suggesting you find something to do. I'll know better next time." She giggled and he grinned slightly. "Oh, I called the hospital earlier like we discussed. Everything set up, they're sending some documents for me to read and sign, and after that we just have to wait and see what happens."

"Great. That's one less thing to worry about for now," she replied, smiling. "Thanks."

"My pleasure. I was considering going out for dinner if that's something you'd like to do."

"Sure. We haven't done that for a long time."

"Do not bring that thing," he instructed, pointing. "The hornet is bad enough."

"Aww… She's cute."

He just looked at her, shook his head, and turned to leave. "Get ready. I'll call and check they've got a table," he said as he left, a faint sigh following his exit and making her laugh again.

"OK, whatever your name is, I think your home is ready," Taylor told the scorpion on her shoulder. Putting her hand in the tank she ran it down her arm into the glass container, then released her control. The creature stopped, before turning on the spot, apparently inspecting the environment. She could feel it was slightly bewildered by the current situation but not uncomfortable. Putting a large cricket out of the container full of them she'd bought at the same time into the tank, she put the lid back on and made sure it was secure. She also made sure the cricket container was properly secured, as she recalled that time she was a kid…

Watching the scorpion through the glass she smiled. "Experiment later, eat now," she told it, waving then going downstairs. Shortly she and her father, along with Vespa riding under her hair as usual, were heading into the city and a nice restaurant. Taylor felt in a very good mood overall.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Frowning, Taylor looked at the ruler in her hand, then at the notebook next to it. "Well. That's… weird."

She measured Vespa again, nose to tail and across the wings. "You are growing! How the hell is that happening?" The hornet was nearly five percent larger in all dimensions than it had been two days ago when she'd first measured it. Which was, to put it mildly, odd.

Stepping back she examined the hornet closely. Vespa looked perfectly normal, and from the inside felt the same, but inexplicably had managed to become larger without any of the usual processes an insect used to grow. Never mind the minor fact that hornets, after becoming adults, didn't grow larger in the first place. Yet she was. How? And why?

Thinking, Taylor flexed the huge scorpion tail hanging behind her idly. She had found that her new pet was just as easy to merge with as anything else had been, and had fiddled around until she'd managed to produce a scorpion variant of a drider, which had made her dad pale and leave the room the first time he'd seen it. In her opinion it was fun and she was quite curious to see how well she could move outside like this, but that could wait for better weather and a suitable location. Scratching the side of her carapace where it itched a little, right at the base of one of the claws folded in front of her, she tried to work out what was going on.

Eventually an idea, which she smacked her own forehead at the obviousness of once she'd come up with it, crossed her mind. "Damn. That almost makes sense. In a very strange way," the girl muttered. "Powers are completely crazy. Fine, I guess I'll have to test it…"

Feeling that she was probably on the right path, she unmerged from the scorpion and moved it back into its terrarium. By now the process of using the Changer power was almost routine, and no longer caused any disorientation, which had come as a relief.

Putting the lid back on, she turned her attention to Vespa. Very carefully repeating the measurements, she wrote them down, before flying the hornet body onto her head while she removed her shirt. Seconds later she was in the super-hornet form, something she'd been practicing with quite a bit in the last few days. The hornet-girl and other variants hadn't been used as much although she thought she probably should try that too. Making a note of the time on the alarm clock next to her bed, she scuttled out of the bedroom and went downstairs to watch TV for a while. She'd found it was a rather odd experience while in this body since the insect vision and brain definitely worked quite differently than a human one did, the much faster reflexes and update rate of the eyes causing strange effects, but she'd managed to get used to it after a while. Watching TV had started out more like a slide show, in fact, but practice had somehow made it work more or less normally although the colors looked off due to the increased spectral range of the hornet eyes.

Several hours later, having watched a terrible daytime movie, then experimented with whether she could use the fridge while a huge hornet, which turned out to be possible but took a lot of practice, she finally went back upstairs. Unmerging she noted the time again, then got dressed. Finally she measured Vespa once more.

"AHA! I was right!" Taylor crowed, pleased that she'd found the cause of the anomaly. The hornet was another three percent larger than she'd been three and a half hours ago. Apparently merging and unmerging was having a long-lasting effect on the insect.

Which led to some intriguing, and possibly worrying, questions, of course.

What was the upper limit to this? Did it have one? Was it permanent? Was anything other than size changing? What effect would that have on any offspring Vespa had?

And…

Was it having a similar effect on Taylor?

That was something she found a touch concerning when she thought about it, if she was honest.

She didn't feel any different. Nor, when she undressed and carefully examined herself, did she look any different. There might have been a slight reduction in belly fat, she thought as she prodded her midriff and the slight paunch she'd developed while at Winslow, probably from stress and lack of exercise as much as anything else, but overall it was as likely to be her imagination as it was to be real. Idly resolving to exercise more, she got dressed once more and flopped on her bed, staring at the hornet sitting on her hand.

"This is very strange indeed," she commented to the insect, watching her lips move through its eyes. Then she giggled. "Although what part of this isn't strange, I guess…"

Having thought about the conundrum for some time, in the end she shook her head. Without more data she couldn't really come to any proper conclusion, and that meant more experimentation. Which was something she'd been planning on doing anyway, so all it really meant was making sure she documented everything as thoroughly as possible. Deciding to weigh herself more regularly and keep her eyes open for anything changing, she concluded that all she could do for now was carry on as before. Her power didn't appear to be causing any problems for her, hopefully that would continue, and from the feel of it at the back of her mind, it seemed to be reassuring her everything was fine.

For now she'd trust it. Not like she had much of a choice in any case. When it took the momentary thought as permission to try to expand out across the neighborhood she slapped it hard and scowled. "None of that," she said out loud. "We have an agreement. You do what I tell you, and we learn step by step. Don't make me come in after you or no one's going to be happy."

Her power seemed to sigh with nearly as much long-suffering tolerance as her dad had sometimes, making her grin.

"See? It's much easier to simply go along with it. Come on, let's have fun with that idea I had a few days ago, that'll cheer you up."

Wondering with amusement what anyone overhearing her talking to herself would think, she hopped to her feet and started getting ready for some serious attempts at breaking her power. Which seemed equally enthralled and concerned, if she was really sensing what she thought she was…

A little later she was down in the basement, where she'd been tidying up, often using one or other drider form for the enhanced strength and because she found it fun. Now almost everything that had been cluttering up the place was piled neatly to one side, over behind the furnace. Her dad's workbench had been tidied as well, all the tools stored under it in the correct places, and she'd brushed the floor too. The end result was a room larger than the living room upstairs, with a lot more usable space, although a slightly lower ceiling. She'd even covered the small low windows on the front of the basement to make sure no one could see in.

It was a perfect area to play with horrifying insectoid monstrosities, she'd told her dad with a grin. He hadn't disagreed.

On the workbench were several old jars each with a different creature in. One had a wolf spider, one a docile paper wasp queen, one a house centipede, and there was also a firefly and in the last jar a tiny jumping spider she'd found hiding in the bushes down the street when she was walking past the day before. The little spider was undoubtedly the brightest arthropod she'd so far run into, she could sense curiosity behind those eyes which were watching her. Nothing close to human intelligence, but a lot more than you'd expect from something with a brain the size of a grain of salt.

Moving Vespa to the bench as well, to keep her out of the way as well as give an external viewpoint, Taylor opened the air vent a little and poked the controls on the furnace to get some more heat into the basement. A few minutes later it was as warm as upstairs. Satisfied, she turned to the notebook she'd put next to the arthropod 'volunteers' she'd selected for the next round of experiments. "Let's see what happens, shall we?" she murmured, sitting on the stool next to the bench and taking her socks off. Everything else followed. "I wish you had some way to take clothes into account, you know," she added to her power, feeling slightly hard done by. "Some Changers get to change without having to undress. But me… No, my power doesn't do anything useful like that. And it cost me my favorite sweat shirt and pants." She could sense her power kind of sighing. "Don't give me that. Not knowing I had a Changer power is no excuse," she added with a grin. "We'll work on it."

Nude, she stood next to the bench and made her selections. "Right, let's see… Start with the classics, I suppose." Tipping the wolf spider jar on its side, she moved the creature onto her hand, then walked to the center of the room. Activating her power, she was suddenly a very, very large wolf spider. "Excellent," she said with satisfaction, turning to look at her reflection in the big old mirror she'd found down here and cleaned up, then put against the wall for this exact purpose. "That works. Neat." Doing the internal actions, she examined the drider form, walking around a little and nodded. "Also works. Greg would shit himself." She giggled at the thought of the boy's likely reaction. Or, to be honest, that of most people. "Now, what happens if…" Returning to the bench, she picked up another jar and tipped the firefly out onto her palm, before returning the container to where it came from.

Stepping back, not even noticing consciously how all her legs moved she was so used to it, she examined the firefly for a moment, then tried doing the merge with it while still merged with the spider. Not surprising her all that much, it didn't immediately work. 'OK, I kind of thought that might happen,' she thought, her eyes resting on the insect on her palm. 'But I still think this should work… How to do it though?'

She tried poking her power in different ways, but for nearly twenty minutes, nothing worked. Her own ability appeared to be watching with fascination and mild doubt even as she kept trying.

When she finally found the key, it took both of them completely by surprise. Pushing hard on a bit of her power that felt like it had something to do with what she was attempting, she more or less felt it move in a direction that didn't exist. Intrigued, she pushed harder, then slammed her will against it when it was recalcitrant. There was a distinct mental twitch like her mind had hit a pothole and she became very dizzy, collapsing to the concrete floor with a grunt. "Ow," she mumbled into the floor.

When the dizziness died away, she slowly pushed herself to her feet, facing the mirror. The reflection she saw there made her stare.

"Holy shit," she breathed after several seconds. "It worked!"

In a sense, at least. It wasn't quite what she'd been aiming for, but it was certainly something. She was still roughly half human, but she had firefly antenna sticking out of her hair, and a pair of firefly forelimbs a few inches under her human arms, while her spider abdomen had changed shape and had wing cases on top. The coloration was completely different too. When she looked over her shoulder and spread the wings she now had, she found that the rear half of her spider abdomen was a hybrid between what it had started as and the back end of a firefly.

"Wow," she said with glee. "That's really interesting. I wonder if… Oooh." She found the internal operations that made the firefly illumination process start up, and her abdomen lit up a cool and much brighter than she'd expected green-yellow color. "I like that," she cackled with satisfaction, flashing it on and off. After that first hesitation and disorientation, the instinctive knowledge of how to use her new parts seemed to come to her as easily as all the other times she'd done this. Possibly her power and or brain had issues with combining the two different creatures like this? Whatever, after that initial phase, everything was working perfectly.

"Fucking amazing." She looked down at her extra appendages, tried moving them, and smiled when they did exactly what she wanted.

After quite a bit of further practice, and a lot of notes, she'd found she could mix and match the human, firefly, and spider bits without any trouble. It was no harder now than one insect at a time had been before. "Very, very cool indeed," she chortled, looking at herself through Vespa's eyes and at her reflection in the mirror through her own. "Chalk up another win for horrific freaks of nature!"

This definitely had possibilities.

Her power, which was gaping at her somehow, fervently agreed.

"Now. What happens when I unmerge?"

She tried it, then looked quizzically at the flying glowing wolf spider in her hand. "Huh. I didn't expect that…"

Lifting her eyes to the remaining test subjects, she grinned widely. "Next experiment, I think."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The jumping spider with a wasp stinger and wings was nearly as bizarre as the centipede/firefly/wolf spider mix. And when she tried various levels of human hybridization with them in different combinations, some of the results were weird even to her. The little thing at the back of her mind was laughing its ass off while feeling completely stunned all the time too.

It took her a good two hours of playing around, but she finally worked out how to unscramble the various creatures back into what they'd started as, although she kept the spider firefly combo just because it was kind of fun. It would also be something her dad might find interesting, she thought.

Making more notes, she tapped the pen on her cheek as she paced around the basement, which produced a constant tapping sound since she was playing with a half-centipede form at the moment. Again, because why not? Finishing the page, she flipped to a blank one and stared at it, thinking about some of the other ideas she'd had while pondering what she could figure out how to do.

Finally she nodded. "That one is definitely worth trying," she told her very small audience. Unmerging from the centipede she put it back into the jar for now, then turned to the jumping spider. "You, I think."

She launched it from the table where it was sitting onto her hand, smiling at the tiny arthropod. A moment's effort and she'd become a much, much larger version of the same creature. Again she was impressed by just how good its main eyes were. 'OK, the, let's see what happens…' she thought as she worked out what she was trying to do. Playing with the internal aspects of her power, she went back to a jumping spider drider, which she definitely wanted to try outside at some point, then further towards human. Her normal body with a spider abdomen was easy, of course. The next part was a tricky balance as she carefully tweaked the amount of spider to human, trying to get it almost entirely the latter but not quite to the point of unmerging entirely.

It took quite a bit of effort, but she eventually succeeded. Turning in place she studied herself in the mirror. Neither her human eyes nor Vespa's could see anything that stood out as out of place, but she was still merged with the jumping spider. Feeling her arm, her fingertips could tell something about the internal structure of it was different, but on the outside it looked perfectly normal. Same with her legs, torso, everything.

Looking around her eyes landed on one of her dad's toolboxes, the one he kept the big wrenches in along with a load of hammers. She'd struggled to move it without being in another form the day before. Walking over to it she bent, wrapped her hand around the handle, and stood up. And nearly fell over since it felt like it was weightless.

"Fuck me," she exclaimed in shock. "That's amazing!"

Hefting the box, she grinned like a lunatic. It took so little effort she could have sworn the thing was made of styrofoam. "Oh, yeah, this is fantastic," she said with enormous satisfaction. Putting it down, she grabbed the edge of the bench and lifted. Roughly three hundred pounds of wood, metal, and tools came clear of the floor like she was moving a chair in the kitchen.

"Oh, Dad's going to freak," she giggled, carefully lowering it again. "So cool."

Moving to the middle of the basement she bent her knees then jumped. When she landed on the floor she rubbed her head and glared at the ceiling beam that had whacked it. "Ow."

Apparently her jumping ability was rather more enhanced than she'd accounted for. And the ceiling was far too low for such experiments…

Despite the minor pain, which was quite a lot more minor than it should have been, she was extremely satisfied with the outcome of her experiments. It proved that her Changer ability had all sorts of intriguing offshoots, some of which were potentially a touch scary, but most of which seemed absolutely incredibly useful. After some thought, she unmerged from the spider and very carefully measured it, length and leg span, writing the results into her notes. Then she repeated the exercise, finding it much easier the second time to pull off. She'd try staying like this for a while to see what happened. It seemed safe enough, it would give some useful feedback on whether the size increase that appeared connected to the merging process happened with something other than Vespa, and being at least a low end Brute was fun too.

She'd already noticed that the light bulb in the ceiling was visibly flickering if she let her power set her vision to spider levels of speed, so that indicated that her brain was running faster too. All the benefits of the arthropod changes without the minor drawback of making people shit themselves on the spot, she thought with a grin.

And it also meant that a jumping drider was a mere thought away. She didn't think that was likely to be a huge priority but you never knew.

Very pleased with the results of her work, she let the other creatures go back to what they'd been doing, the wasp moving to a nice warm spot to go back into torpitude while the rest scattered, got dressed, and went upstairs to do some more reading. All in all it had been a good day so far.

She didn't like the way she'd gotten powers, but the actual powers she had no problem with at all. Even if the power itself seemed to find her somewhat strange. If nothing else it seemed to be gradually getting used to her, and as that happened it was becoming more and more cooperative.

Taylor was already thinking of all sorts of other things to try, but for now, she was satisfied.

Increasing her range step by step seemed like the next thing to practice. She was very curious to see what would happen when she finally mastered that part.

Chapter Text

Looking around the old warehouse, Taylor smiled. It was perfect. No one anywhere near according to the insects she was sensing through, but close enough to the union buildings that it was only a few minutes jog away. Reasonably weathertight, so the wind wasn't blowing through and the roof was sufficiently intact that hardly any rain or snow got inside. It smelled pretty rank but she could easily ignore that. And due to proximity to the dockyards, and distance from where the Merchants hung out a couple of miles away, not even the junkies had any reason to wander in. Nothing to steal, or at least nothing light enough to be worth the effort of trying to move it, no power… It was your classic abandoned warehouse, which Brockton Bay had a near-infinite quantity of, with as far as she could tell none of the downsides such places often had.

Ideal for further experimentation.

Turning to her dad, she said, "Thanks. This is exactly what I needed to find."

"My pleasure. Please be careful, and reasonably discreet though?" He smiled back at her. "Hardly anyone comes around here these days but make sure you're alone even so. You never know if some random criminal or just someone lost might turn up, so keep your eyes open."

"I've got more eyes open than you'd believe," she assured him. After the last two weeks of practice she was up to a range of nearly two hundred yards in all directions, extending from here far enough that she was sensing things in the bay which was quite a lot less than that distance away to the south. Her power had nearly stopped urging her to throw caution to the winds and just go for it to maximum possible range, but it still felt a little annoyed that she was going so deliberately. She'd pointed out several times that slow and steady wins the race but it didn't seem to be entirely convinced. Even so, it was clearly having as much fun as she was, so on the whole they were getting on fine.

"Good. And that's never going to be anything less than very creepy," he replied with a slight shiver, making her laugh. "You can get in easily enough up there, I guess." He pointed at where a crack in the wall at one end of the building showed dull daylight, thirty feet up and nearly at the side. It looked like something had been mounted on the wall but had rusted away and taken the brickwork with it. The gap was certainly large enough for her super-hornet to get through, she could see from here, but it was sufficiently far from the floor to make it highly unlikely any human would try the same feat even if they could squeeze through. "All the other doors except that one we came through are blocked pretty solidly for various reasons, so if we chain this one up from the inside then you fly out through the hole, no one's going to get in here without quite a bit of effort and noise."

He hefted the two feet of heavy chain with a couple of shackles fitted to it he'd dug out of one of the dockworker's scrap bins, making her look at it and nod.

"Yeah, that'll work," she agreed. Following him as he walked back to the door she studied the thing, seeing that it was a basic but tough metal affair with a bar that rotated about the center pivot by means of a handle on the outside. Each end of the bar went into a bracket on the wall. The whole thing was extremely rusty, but sufficiently thick that it was still a lot more solid than one would suspect from looking at it. Back when this place had been built, it had been built to last.

"We connect this end here to the wall like this," he said, unscrewing one of the shackle bolts and fitting the loop part over a heavy bracket where something had once been bolted. Replacing the bolt he tightened it as much as possible. "Then you just close the door, swing the bar over, wrap the chain around it and the bracket a couple of times, and put the other shackle through the chain as tightly as you can. The only way anyone's getting through that door then is either by brute force or a cutting torch."

Her dad dropped the chain against the wall and turned to her. "I'll be in the truck. Lock this place up, then meet me there. We can go for a pizza and you can come back here when it gets dark if you want."

Taylor nodded happily. It was a good idea all round, and she even got pizza out of it. Taking her coat off, then her boots, replacing the latter with some light slippers she pulled out of her pocket, she handed what she'd removed to him. "See you in a couple of minutes," she said with a smile. He nodded and went out through the door, which she closed after him. Pulling the bar over, she made sure it was fully engaged, hit the brackets with the heel of her hand pretty hard which slightly bent them, further reducing the possibility of opening the door, then did what he'd suggested with the chain. Pulling it tight enough that it creaked a little, she screwed the shackle bolt into place and made sure it wasn't coming loose, then tightened the one he'd fitted. Her enhanced strength was more than up to the job.

After some testing she'd worked out that she was at least ten to twelve times as strong as a full grown very strong man, which seemed ridiculous, but it was easy enough to prove. She could dead-lift well over five tons while merged with the jumping spider, and if anything that was slowly and steadily increasing for reasons she was currently unclear on but was perfectly happy about.

She'd kept that merger going with only a few short pauses to check things ever since she'd first come up with the idea, and was very pleased with what it gave her. Sure enough the spider had grown larger, just like Vespa had, but it had been slowing down for the last couple of days. The unmerged jumping spider was huge now though, although nothing like as large as she was when she merged with it and had the spider characteristics turned up all the way. That produced a spider big enough for a small child to ride, while the unmerged arachnid was only about the size of her hand. Which was still absolutely enormous for a spider, of course, but even so ridiculously cute. Even her dad said so, and he wasn't nearly as fond of such things as she was.

It seemed likely that the increase in strength was down at least in part to the spider growing larger, and she wasn't sure why that occurred yet either. It was currently one of the mysteries of how her power worked that she was somewhat hazy on but was accepting as a thing that happened. Sooner or later she'd probably figure it out. But while the spider had apparently stopped growing, her strength hadn't, so obviously there was also something else in play.

Now, though, she quickly took off the sweatshirt and pants which was all she was wearing and, shivering a little even though her spider-enhanced body seemed more cold tolerant than it had been, folded them and put them into a small cloth bag she'd dug out of the attic. Her slippers followed, then she zipped the bag up and dropped it next to her feet. Vespa, who was as usual riding on her neck under her hair, the hornet now close to four and a half inches in length and still slowly getting bigger, provided her with the familiar super-hornet body, something she accepted as easily as the one she'd been born with. Picking up the bag in her front two legs she lifted off, carrying the small load without effort, and headed for the hole in the wall. It was the work of moments to stick her head out and double check no unwanted eyes were on her, something she was pretty sure of from the other bugs around her, then squeeze out and zip down to her dad's truck. He was standing next to it and opened the rear cab door, Taylor folding her wings and shooting through it easily, then grabbing the seat with her back legs to prevent herself going right out the other side, door or no door.

"Whoops," she said with a laugh. "Overcooked it a bit there."

Her dad closed the rear door and got in the front. They'd hung a blanket between the front and rear seats, so she had privacy, and the windows were covered too. "Try not to wreck my truck if you can," he requested, chuckling.

Reverting to her more or less normal human with spider boosts form, she quickly got dressed in other clothes she'd left back there earlier, and put the bag with her sweatpants and the other things in the foot-well. When she'd finished tying the laces on her boots, she hopped out and got into the front passenger side. "That's done. Thanks again." He smiled at her as he started the truck.

"Just be careful, Taylor. I know you need somewhere larger to see what you can do, but I still worry about you."

She put her hand on his where it was resting on the shifter. "I know you do. And I appreciate it. I'll be careful, I promise."

He met her eyes, nodded acceptance of her words, then put the truck in drive and turned it around. Moments later they were heading back into the city for a late lunch, Taylor settling back into the seat and thinking about all the things she wanted to look into.

The list was long and getting longer, but it was fun testing what she could figure out how to do. And her power seemed, despite its reservations and occasional shock, to be enjoying itself as much as she was.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Finishing off the assignment with one last figure, Taylor sighed with relief, put the pen down, and stretched. Home schooling was a hell of a lot less stressful than Winslow had been, that much was certain. Mind you, so would be tap-dancing blindfolded through a mine field, she thought with a grimace.

Even so, it was a lot of work. She was putting in the hours on the assignments that arrived three times a week in the post, then got sent back the next day for marking. The city had arranged this method as a stopgap while the case against Winslow rumbled on, and from what she'd heard gathered pace. A surprisingly large number of people, a horrifying quantity in truth, had been implicated in a whole series of overlapping scams, corruption and general malfeasance that seemed poised to upend half the institutions in the city from what her dad said. He'd had a couple of letters from the hospital's lawyers updating him, along with the other involved parents, on the ongoing legal issues. They were still hoping for an out of court settlement but the school board was being recalcitrant for some reason and digging its heels in. While that was going on, the mayor was apparently stomping around in a foul mood cleaning house in a major way, which had everyone even peripherally involved with anything connected to the problem running scared.

Her dad was following things with a good deal of interest, dark amusement, and a certain amount of schadenfreude relating to various local government officials he'd always heartily disliked and mistrusted. It was surprising how many of the those he and the rest of the dock workers had always felt were wrong'uns in fact turned out to be exactly what they'd suspected.

Or possibly not.

In any case, he was getting quite a lot of entertainment from the news, and she was happy to see him in a good mood. Overall things were going very well as far as either of them were concerned, even leaving aside her power experimentation. The remote schooling was in some ways annoying but at the same time kind of fun too, as she could get far more done on her own schedule without interference from little shits than she'd ever been able to at Winslow. Already after only a little over three weeks she was approaching being up to where she should have been all along in a real school and had no intention of stopping there. With any luck by the time the city worked out what the long term solution to the situation would be she'd be easily able to test into any of the high schools in the city. She had no intention of ever going back to Winslow, even if they did manage to turn it into a functioning educational establishment.

The memories were far too raw to allow her to set foot through the doors, and her dad had agreed with her decision without a moment's hesitation. Hopefully she'd be able to get into Clarendon or Arcadia, preferably the latter as it was the best school in the city, but by the same token the hardest to get into. It was something to strive for but she'd be happy enough anywhere that wasn't Winslow. Or, if it came to it, just continuing with the home schooling, since it wasn't dramatically taxing.

Her dad still wanted her to have friends in her life, but so far she wasn't particularly missing other people her age around her. It was something of a relief, to be honest. A holiday from two years of hell.

Scanning the assignment she double-checked her work then, satisfied she'd completed it, slipped the paperwork into the large envelope along with the rest of the stuff she'd finished. All of it would go in the post that evening, but for now she was done. Which meant she had the rest of the day free for other things.

In other words, perverting the course of nature for her own amusement. It was one of her favorite activities.

Grinning to herself she looked at the terrarium containing her scorpion, who was currently dismantling a cricket. There were three more tanks next to the original one, which she'd found through an online free disposals website and cleaned up, one a little smaller and two a little larger that her first. A pair of them were currently empty as she was still setting up suitable environments and working out what she should get for them, while the other contained her firespider hybrid. The creature she'd almost accidentally made seemed perfectly contented with life and entirely viable. She'd kept it like that because it was fun to look at when it started glowing at night as much as any other reason.

Her dad had come home with an old bookcase last Friday, one that he'd acquired from a coworker who was clearing out his grandfather's house, and she'd carried it up into her room and put it next to the desk. That had necessitated rearranging that whole side of the room but she didn't mind and considering how strong she was it was trivial to do. The ancient oak shelves were much wider than most bookshelves would be these days, and there were only four sets, which meant the spacing was pretty much ideal to support nearly a dozen tanks approximately the size of the ones she had. All three were on one shelf at the moment, and Taylor was looking forward to filling the rest.

She'd been back to the exotic pet shop several times to get more information on what was available, talk to Mike, the guy who ran the place and was a mine of information on almost any animal, aquatic or otherwise, he sold, and let her power examine all the neat things in there. She was considering what might be the result of trying the fusion power with some of the more interesting sea life too, although at the moment it was a little difficult to arrange. Tropical tanks, it turned out, were both remarkably complicated to set up successfully and really expensive as a direct result.

On the other hand, there was as she'd thought the first time lots of sea life adapted to the local environment just sitting there in the bay. It was free, no one would mind if she helped herself, she thought with a small smile as she flipped through one of the several notebooks she'd filled with the results of experiments and thoughts on other ideas to test. Crabs were high on the list as they had all manner of useful strengths that, especially when scaled up as her power did, could be a lot of fun. But there were plenty of others… Jellyfish for sting cells, for example.

Taylor was curious to see if she could locate a specimen of physalia physalis, commonly known as the Portuguese Man O'War. They certainly existed in the waters this far north although they weren't common from what she'd read, at least around Brockton Bay. Box jellyfish, which were even more dangerous, would be harder to find as they were primarily a Pacific tropical species, but if she wanted something really toxic that would do it.

Not that she was specifically looking for lethally dangerous things as such. It was just that she kept thinking they were rather interesting, and her power apparently agreed, so between the two of them they did keep thinking about this sort of thing.

Checking her phone, she made sure there weren't any messages from her dad or anything in her calendar that needed doing, then quickly sent him a text that she was going out for a long walk. Which was code for going off to the hidden test room in the old warehouse. Both of them were still a touch wary of cellphones for reasons they knew full well were based on lingering trauma, but they were undeniably useful. She got a reply moments later acknowledging her message and telling her to have fun. Which she was definitely going to.

Smiling happily, Taylor busied herself putting a fresh notebook and pen, along with the relevant existing notes, her phone which she turned off, a couple of battery powered LED lamps she'd picked up a week ago, and a few other things, into a pair of surplus ammo pouches she'd got from one of the guys at the union who was their unofficial quartermaster. A lot of the equipment like this that they used was military surplus, and he definitely had a shady past in acquiring things based on how he just nodded when you asked him for something then hours to days later it mysteriously turned up.

Almost anything you wanted, in fact, according to her dad, who shook his head in respect and refused to be drawn on the subject. She got the distinct impression there were some intriguing stories hiding in his past…

The pouches closed firmly with velcro, and were attached to a webbing belt. A larger one that she'd reworked from a tiny child's backpack left over from years back was also on the belt, and that she packed with some very tightly rolled clothes, her slippers, and a few other things.

Finished, she stood, moving over to the tanks and pondering them. "Yeah, I've been wanting to try this for a while," she commented to the firespider, which obediently climbed onto her hand when she lifted the lid and stuck her arm inside. Withdrawing it, she lifted the hybrid to eye level and smiled at the creature. "Up for some fun?"

The antennae it possessed twitched, making her grin. Moving it to her hair next to Vespa, she quickly undressed after making sure the curtains were pulled. It was now dark, being about quarter past five in the afternoon, and she didn't want anyone outside seeing odd shapes backlit at the window. With a quick mental action she merged with the hybrid, adding it her biological distinctiveness, a thought that made her grin. Quite a lot of practice had made it easy to maintain her human shape on the outside even with the hybrid now incorporated internally along with the jumping spider. Which she'd named Jumpy, her dad sighing and shaking his head when she'd told him that.

Apparently he thought her naming ability was sub par or something.

She could now sense three separate arthropod data sets, as she had come to think of it, in her power. Combining them or separating them was simple, and she'd found she could stack the outcome, although so far she hadn't tried more than four at once. Her power seemed to find this whole thing endlessly fascinating, as well as completely bewildering, and every time she found something new she could do, or forced it to work whether it liked it or not, she was sure the ability was getting even more confused although at the same time deliriously pleased.

The whole thing was bizarre, if she looked at it objectively, but it was definitely happening, and fun too, so she saw no reason not to keep on going. Although the inability to take her clothes with a change was still irking her quite a bit. They were going to have to work on that although she wasn't sure how yet.

Oh well. She'd figure something out sooner or later. But for now she just lived with the minor inconvenience.

Double-checking that she had everything packed she wanted, she merged with Vespa too, switching to the semi-humanoid hornet girl form, which she'd been playing with quite a lot in the last few days. It, like all her changes, was as comfortable as her human body, but she definitely had an affinity for the hornet variations she suspected was down to her so-far unique link to Vespa. Putting the elasticated webbing belt on around her very narrow insectoid waist, she made sure it was pulled tight, then headed downstairs.

Moments later she was peering out the back door into the yard. Her hornet's head stuck out the door, looking around. No one visible, nothing she could sense through her bugs, or her antennae. Perfect.

Switching to the full super-hornet body, and feeling the belt loosen off a little but stay firmly attached, she scuttled out onto the back yard, pushing the door shut with a hind leg and making sure it locked with a click. Satisfied, she lifted off and rapidly shot skywards, before the deep drone of her wings attracted attention. Leveling off about three hundred feet up she aimed for the docks and went to cruising speed, which she'd found out was a good eighty miles an hour without even pushing as hard as she could. If she really tried she could better that considerably, but this was a nice mix of getting around fast and not overexerting herself.

Zipping through the air feeling highly pleased with how her life in general was going, she pondered what to try tonight. Possibly the same thing she always did.

Try to take over the Arthropod Kingdom.

So far it was working surprisingly well.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Looking up at an odd sound, wondering what it was, the tall and strongly build Japanese man stared as something close to the size of a human, but very much not a human, zoomed overhead. Even in the dimness he recognized it. Or at least, recognized what it would be if it was about two inches long rather than probably the best part of four feet…

His eyes followed it until it vanished over the roofs of the decrepit buildings that lined the street, heading towards the bay. Those eyes were rather wide, and anyone who knew him would have found the color his face had gone unusually pale. He wasn't noted for being a man who was particularly worried by pretty much anything.

On the other hand, he remembered his childhood in Japan, and things he'd seen then…

"No," he said out loud, turning and walking rapidly in the other direction. "Just… no. Fuck that. Not a chance. If there's one there's hundreds."

He walked faster.

Muttering 'No' under his breath.

As far as he was concerned, if the docks had an infestation of giant killer wasps as large as a person he was going to stay way the fuck away. He was no idiot.

Wondering rather hysterically if moving elsewhere might not be a bright idea, he sped up to a brisk jog and tried not to imagine a stinger the size of his forearm.

He failed. Dismally.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Cool," Taylor exclaimed, looking down at herself. "That works amazingly well!"

She'd been playing around with trying to mix and match various aspects of different creatures to an even greater extent than she'd so far achieved. As seemed to be the usual result, at first she kept running into a wall where something wouldn't quite work the way she wanted it to, but by being particularly bloody-minded and insistent, each time the mental barrier collapsed and she managed to pull off the trick in question. Quite often this resulted in a certain amount of disorientation to begin with, but that seemed to be diminishing in both severity and occurrence as she kept on. That little watching thing at the back of her mind gave the impression of intermittently raising a finger with its mouth open like a meme she'd seen online, then just in the same manner pausing, closing its mouth, and just accepting what happened.

Which was all kinds of hilarious on multiple levels, she thought with glee even as she turned around and inspected her current body.

She'd managed to produce a jumping spider/hornet/firefly drider combo, the bulk of it the familiar jumping spider part, but with a massive stinger at the rear, and bright glowing patches on the sides and upper part of the abdomen. With a frown of concentration, she tried changing the bioluminescent areas in both size and shape, which took quite a lot of effort but eventually gave in and worked the way she wanted it to.

On the scale she could manage, and probably due to the same effect that she'd noticed with everything else going up almost exponentially in potency with increased size, the glowing bits of her were much brighter than the original firefly. That produced a very visible but fairly dim greenish-yellow light, whereas what she was emitting right now was a brilliant viridian green that cast weird shadows throughout a big part of the warehouse floor. It was nearly as bright as the LED lamps she'd set up to let her see what she was doing.

Playing around with it, she succeeded in dimming the glow to almost nothing while keeping it active, and turning it off entirely. Pushing the other way she found that the only method to make it brighter was ultimately to flash it, which after some thought about what she'd learned of the mechanism behind the light, made sense. It was a chemical reaction and there was a maximum rate the chemicals could be produced, although that was definitely a hell of a lot higher for her than it was for an actual firefly. By flashing it, she was storing up quite a lot of chemicals then mixing them all at once, which produced a lot more light over a short period of time.

After ten minutes work, she could make the light organs flash so brightly she was blinking spots away. "Wow. That was… impressive," she mumbled, making some notes then looking back at her body. "I wonder if it's even using the same chemicals? Not sure how to check that…" She wrote the question down as one to investigate, then moved onto some more testing. It turned out to be simple to make the light emitting parts into any shape in any position she wanted by this point and she amused herself by covering herself in various geometric patterns that glowed brightly. Even on her human upper torso. Holding out her arms and admiring the green glowing pseudo-tattoos she'd created on them she giggled. It looked really amazing.

'Huge success,' she noted, grinning as she wrote. 'That's that question answered. I'll have to see if I can figure out how to change the color but that's not bad for the moment. And useful too, right?' Her power felt like it agreed. 'Great. What next?'

Tapping the pen on her lips as she thought, after a moment she looked up, then around at the warehouse. The vast empty area echoed from a drip coming from somewhere far in the distance, but otherwise was silent. All her insects around the whole area told her no human was anywhere nearby, and the crabs and other creatures in the bay couldn't sense any boats in range either. She was completely alone aside from a vast number of much smaller lifeforms. Mulling over the thought she'd had, she started walking towards the far end of the building, her eight feet making a tapping sound that caused strange echoes, although to her by now it was entirely normal.

There was a pile of debris against the end wall, on the other side from where the door she'd chained up lived, which contained lots of random pieces of scrap metal ranging from bottle caps and beer cans up to old cast iron chunks that were easily over a ton in weight. Along with quite a lot of rusted corrugated steel sheets, bent and torn, various I beams, and more. There was also a fair amount of wood, most of it rotting and broken, but she could see some ancient boards and beams that were probably oak and a century or more old. Likely parts recovered from wooden ships decades in the past if not before, or the remains of demolished buildings that had ended up dumped in here for one reason or another over the years.

Selecting a few pieces of wood, ranging in thickness from an inch or so up to over six inches, she picked them up and moved them to the middle of the room, then went back and collected some sheet metal as well. A pair of old and very heavy cast iron hollow blocks some three feet on a side, which she guessed were something to do with old steam engines or suchlike, were also carried back. Each was probably close to a ton but she was more that pleased that she could lift them without any trouble at all. Chuckling at how simple this was now, she set up the boxes a couple of feet apart on the floor and propped a plank against them so it wouldn't go anywhere.

'That'll do,' she thought as she turned around and looked over her shoulder. Extending her stinger, she aimed, then lunged backwards with all eight legs. There was a solid crunching sound like biting into an apple and Taylor stared in slight shock.

Moving forward again, she wiggled her abdomen several times trying to get the plank, which the stinger had gone entirely through with almost no resistance, to come off. In the end she pushed with both hind legs and popped it free. She'd underestimated both how sharp the thing was, and how strong she was.

Even without injecting venom, the foot-plus long stinger was more than enough to kill someone without even trying, she thought as she examined the hole she'd made in the oak plank. Splinters on the back surrounded a gap she could put her finger through. "Holy crap," she mumbled, feeling the hole, then looking speculatively at the thicker pieces of wood. Knowing full well how hard and tough old oak was, she was rather startled how much damage she'd done so easily.

Smiling in an odd way, she selected a three inch thick beam and set it up on her improvised test stand. Moments later there was another crunch, a little louder, and another hole.

The same thing happened with the thickest piece of wood she could find, something that was easily eight solid inches. Nearly as much stinger came out the other side. Taylor grinned, then turned to look at the metal scrap…

By the time she'd finished there were holes in a surprisingly large range of items, even the cast iron boxes. She'd found that going all the way through the bigger lumps of solid iron hadn't worked, but she'd still left a really significant divot in them, several inches deep. In theory it shouldn't have worked like that, she was fairly certain, because although she knew her hybrid body was amazingly strong, insect chitin shouldn't have been so effective against metal. It was another example of how various parameters of her Changer power scaled much faster than they should have done with size.

Powers bullshit, essentially. Which was something she'd read a lot about recently, and no one had a good explanation for.

Switching to the super-hornet body, just to double-check, and adding some bioluminescent patches for fun, she tried the same tests again. This body wasn't quite as physically powerful as the drider variant although it was far stronger than it should have been even taking into account proportional insect strength. And, again, she was pretty sure it was getting steadily stronger with time too, which seemed to be a common theme she still didn't understand the mechanism of.

She was also aware that her super-hornet form was slightly larger now than it had been the first time. She'd had her dad measure her, and nose to tail she'd increased by about eight percent at this point in time. It was very slow, not nearly as quick as the individual creatures she merged with, but was still happening.

So many questions, so few real answers, she mused as she took aim once more. Her stinger, about eleven inches long in this body, defeated all the wood samples easily, and some of the metal ones too. Anything less than half an inch thick might as well not have been there, and if she could get the leverage she could punch through two inches of cast iron without too much effort.

"Impressive," she commented to her power. "Terrifying, but impressive."

Recalling something she'd read about asian hornets, she hovered a few feet off the floor and curled her abdomen under her. It was easy to force venom out her stinger, under a lot more pressure than she'd realized was possible. Asian giant hornets were known to be able to literally spray their venom at a target, as opposed to simply stinging it, but so far she hadn't tried using it at all. A hissing sound was accompanied by a jet of liquid that went a hell of a lot further than she'd expected, spraying at least fifty feet and leaving a dark streak on the concrete.

"Jesus," she muttered, shocked. "That must have been at least a cupful." It was vastly more than needed to kill a human in seconds. Having looked it up, she'd found that the median lethal dose for asian hornet venom was a little over four milligrams per kilo of body-weight, which was actually less than that of a honeybee by a fair margin. She'd just fired off a minimum of several fluid ounces of the stuff, or thousands of times the quantity needed to kill a human-sized creature on the spot.

And that was with ordinary hornet venom, which, based on how the concrete was now bubbling and smoking this very much wasn't.

She landed on the floor and stared in disbelief. "What the fuck?" she exclaimed in horror. Moving closer she peered at the concrete, watching it fizz like she'd poured concentrated acid on it. When it finally stopped reacting, there was a scar a quarter of an inch deep on the floor, where the material had turned to powder. Cautiously she prodded it with a foreleg, feeling the remains move under her claws. Looking at the damage she felt faint.

Dying from toxic shock seemed like it might be the least of the worries of anyone she stung in this form…

Taylor wondered a little hysterically if there would even be a body left.

Reverting to a hornet-girl body, with a full exoskeleton and hornet head but humanoid proportions, she walked back to the lamps and her notes, then started writing her observations and results down while thinking hard about what she'd just discovered. In one sense she was wondering why she hadn't experimented with her venom before, but on the other hand she'd had so many other things to try it hadn't come up. She was, however, extremely glad she'd decided against stinging that fucking Nazi mugger a few weeks ago. He'd have practically exploded based on what she'd abruptly found out.

It was something of a shock to discover that a liquid with that amount of corrosiveness was inside her body right at that moment.

Having finished with her notes, she looked down and back at her hornet abdomen, extending the stinger a little and considering it. Just how corrosive was the venom? Did it change in potency with form? She made more notes, pacing back and forth as she thought.

Could she make it less dangerous, perhaps? Or… could she make it more dangerous?

She wasn't sure which was more interesting to consider. Her power was sitting at the back of her mind watching with interest and didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter. She thought hard, and very slowly tried to work out ways to fiddle around with the venom production process. Her success with the bioluminescence suggested she had a lot of latitude in changing her own biology in ways that were far more free-form than she'd originally realized. It was a lot of fun and she could see all sorts of interesting outcomes with some work.

Mixing and matching aspects of creatures she could merge with could apparently be extended well past making cool hybrid arthropods, as good as that was in itself. Her Changer ability was absolutely broken she thought with a grin, feeling her power agree somewhat incredulously.

After a while, she walked over to the pile of scrap, and experimentally tried dripping a little venom onto a piece of wood. Taylor yipped in shock when it smoldered violently then with a pop burst into flame. "Holy shit!" she exclaimed, stepping back. "What the hell?"

Watching as the flames died away, leaving a smoking piece of wood, she shook her head, trying to work out what sort of chemical reaction dissolved concrete and made wood spontaneously combust. She was quite good at chemistry but she was still only high-school chemistry quite good, not actual chemical engineer good. Vaguely feeling that there had to be a pretty scary oxidizer present, she guessed a little tentatively that possibly concentrated hydrogen peroxide might account for what she'd just witnessed. She'd seen videos about how it could, if sufficiently strong, make organic material combust.

She wasn't sure it had any effect on concrete, though, so that was still unexplained.

Shaking her head, she tried the experiment again, this time on a piece of cast iron, which fizzed nearly as violently as the concrete had, went bright orange, and slowly crumbled into rust. Definitely an oxidization reaction according to her chemistry textbook, and a really enthusiastic one at that.

And she was certain that the venom, aside from being horribly corrosive and a hellishly good oxidizer, was also a violently potent toxin too. She could literally feel her power agreeing happily.

Sighing, she made yet more notes, then began trying to work out how to change what she was producing in her venom glands. Perhaps if she took some inspiration from the wolf spider venom? That was much less powerful than hornet venom was, right? And she could find some other species of spiders, since she could feel lots of them around the area, and try mixing those in different proportions.

It was worth a shot.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

When her dad came in with some chinese takeaway having been out visiting friends until fairly late, she was sitting in her bedroom desk chair staring at the pages and pages of notes she'd made with a satisfied yet mildly bewildered expression. He stepped inside her room and looked at her. "You seem bothered, Taylor," he commented.

"Confused more than bothered," she replied quietly. "I've learned all sorts of things tonight, and some of them are… scary."

Sitting on her bed, he studied her as she turned the chair to face her. "Scary how?" he queried.

"Scary like I can probably kill about a thousand people with a few drops of venom even before I play around with it," she told him, making him look concerned. "I only just started experimenting with it, and it's… a lot stronger than I expected. Like, a lot stronger." She shook her head in wonder. "As in it dissolves iron. And makes wood burst into flames."

"Jesus," he said slowly, staring. "That sounds dangerous."

The understatement made her laugh. "Yeah. Just a little."

"Best not to use it on anyone then," he suggested wisely, getting a smile back.

"I worked that out for myself," she told him. "I tried changing it to something else, and it took a lot of effort, but I worked it out in the end. Problem is that almost any changes I made still produced something lethal as hell. I think a lot of the problem is how everything in the merged forms is so ridiculously enhanced compared to the original creatures. Even pure wolf spider venom, which isn't all that toxic as spiders go, turns out to be insanely potent in wolf drider form. I caught a rat and and it killed it stone dead in about ten seconds from only a tiny amount." She felt a little guilty about having done that, but she needed to be sure. It had been barely possible that due to powers-related shenanigans the venom might have been relatively harmless to a living thing despite all the evidence. However, this was not the case.

She didn't want to try the flaming acid venom on even a rat. It seemed unfair. As well as very messy.

"Huh. I guess that's useful to know at least. You might have accidentally used it at some point and caused a real problem, so it's best to have advance warning of what not to do," he pointed out, making her nod. "You can turn off the venom I take it?"

"Oh, yeah, I've got no trouble not injecting or spraying it, it takes a deliberate effort to use the stuff. Just the stinger is more than enough honestly." She explained what her tests had shown, making him shake his head in wonder.

"Amazing. And absolutely terrifying."

"It is," she agreed soberly. "This is fun but every now and then I find something that really makes me stop and think. I don't want to kill anyone by accident."

"And, I hope, in general not on purpose," he remarked. She gave him a quick smile.

"Not really, no. I can't think of many people that deserve to die, not even Sophia. Deserve to get the shit kicked out of them, yeah, but that's different." She pondered the idea for a few seconds. "Maybe Kaiser, that Nazi shithead. His armor is a lot less than two inches thick…" She grinned as her father winced, but also looked amused.

"Might be best not to hunt Nazis for sport," he replied calmly. "As much fun as it could be, and despite it being close to a civic responsibility." Taylor giggled at his comment. She knew well how much he despised the Empire Eighty Eight and anyone who espoused the views they did. She shared the feelings wholeheartedly. "You're only fifteen and I don't really want you having deaths on your conscience at that age."

"Yeah, fair enough," she agreed with a sigh. "I don't particularly want to kill anyone either. Even a Nazi. Although I might make an exception for Hookwolf. I read he's killed four more people in the last two weeks on PHO. Why hasn't the PRT done something about that asshole yet?" She was genuinely baffled about how the murderous Empire capes kept getting away with the things they did. Even at her age she knew damn well the Nazi gang had been responsible for more deaths than she cared to think about, but they were still running around free, which was infuriating.

He shrugged. "I honestly don't have an answer for you other than that life is more complicated than it seems a lot of the time and the PRT is nowhere near as effective as it likes to claim. I agree, someone should have dealt with them years ago, but Brockton has had problems with gangs for much longer than you've been alive and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon, unfortunately."

He reached out and patted her knee reassuringly. "Try not to let it get you down. Which is hard, true, but it's all we can do."

Looking at her shelf of terrariums, he added, "Where's your firespider?"

She grinned and tapped her forehead. "In here. I thought I'd keep it merged for now to see what happens. And it lets me do this, look!" Holding out an arm she pushed her sleeve up and showed him a glowing green sort of celtic knot she formed around her bicep. His eyes widened comically.

"That… is rather impressive in a very weird way," he finally said.

Taylor nodded happily. "Built in night light," she replied with a smile, pulling her sleeve down again.

"Do you have any trouble having, what is it now, three? Separate creatures merged with you?"

"Nope. It's easy now. I'm not sure how many I can do, but so far it all seems completely viable. And I can mix and match them in different proportions, plus I'm pretty sure things like toughness and strength are stacking too. I can jump from the floor of the warehouse right into the roof beams without any trouble for example, which is amazing." She grinned at his expression.

"And jump back, of course. It would be embarrassing otherwise," she added, making him chuckle.

"True enough."

Picking up the book she had open on the desk, he peered at the cover, then leafed through it. "By the time you go to college you'll have learned more about entomology than most professors," he said with a small smile.

"I have an unfair advantage."

"Also true." He stopped on the page she'd had open. "Apposition versus superposition compound eye structures," he read, then raised his gaze to her quizzically.

"I'm trying to work out how to get the best vision possible," Taylor replied to the unasked question, taking the book back and turning the page. "Compound eyes are a lot more complicated than most people realize. Everyone tends to think they produce lots of little images, like you see in movies and that sort of thing, but they don't, all the separate lenses still resolve to a single image. And while it's often not as high resolution as a single-lens eye like a mammal has, it can be. In theory you can get an optical system that's only limited by diffraction, which is as good as it gets." She pointed at the diagrams, her dad leaning over to look at them. "And they can be incredibly light sensitive. Moths and some crabs have amazingly good night vision, better than the goggles the military uses in some cases. I've been trying to figure out how to combine all the different methods into something that does the best job all around."

"Interesting," he responded after thinking it over. "Not a lot of moths around at the moment though."

"No. In a month or so I can get some, though. And I'm going to collect a couple of crabs tomorrow since it's the weekend and I can spend the whole day experimenting." She put the book back on her desk. "I keep thinking of new ideas to try," she added with a pleased look, as he watched her fondly. "So many ideas."

"Your perversion of the natural order appears to be remarkably broad ranging," he joked. Taylor laughed.

"I'm definitely doing my best to warp life to my own goals as much as I can," she agreed cheerfully.

"How did your assignments go?" he asked after a moment. "Don't neglect your schoolwork in favor of horrifying god and nature."

Laughing, she picked up the envelope full of completed homeschool assignments. "Got it all done without any problems," she replied, handing it to him. Pulling out the sheaf of papers, he examined a couple of them and nodded approvingly. "It's much easier to do when I don't have someone stealing it all, of course."

"I can imagine." Putting the paperwork back into the envelope he handed it back, then got up. "Well done. I'm proud of you. Come on, let's eat before it gets cold."

Jumping to her feet she followed him downstairs, feeling that things were working out quite nicely at the moment. Soon they were eating and discussing various things, feeling much more like a real if small family than they'd done for so long.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Landing on the peak of a four story roof, Taylor cocked her head and listened intently. She had been flying around the general docks area in the dark, it being about seven in the evening and surprisingly warm for the time of year as the winter started to recede, mostly just enjoying herself. Flying as a vast hornet with extra superpowers was a hell of a lot of fun. She was being careful to stay out of sight, avoiding any of the few people she sensed with all the tiny bugs in range of her power, which she'd worked up to nearly three hundred and fifty yards around her at this point. It was far more than sufficient to keep her from getting close enough for anyone to do more than hear a distant deep hum, which according to her dad had caused a few stories in the area, which were discussed at a couple of bars he visited on occasion. The old one down near the water was full of rumors about there being something weird in going on in the docks but no one could settle on what, and rumors of that nature were so common anyway that hardly anyone took them seriously these days.

From what he'd told her over the years that sort of rumor predated actual Parahumans, for that matter. Apparently the docks area had always been a bit peculiar.

But right now she could hear a weird metallic crashing sound from somewhere not that far away, combined with a sort of yelling, and a few gunshots. Turning on the spot she tried to work out what it was and where it was, finally deciding the second point while drawing a blank on the first. Other than to think it was certainly a fight of some sort.

As she listened, the gunshots stopped following a much louder explosion, made faint by distance, which echoed through the mostly empty streets. Flying over to another perch a hundred yards away, she tried triangulating on the sounds, coming to the conclusion that her location was correct. Whatever was going on was over at the far edge of the docks proper, around the vicinity of Geraint street, which was a wide one leading down to where a canning factory had once been. It went dead straight for about a quarter of a mile, with lots of little alleyways off it that all disappeared into a maze of old buildings, the end away from the water narrowing and eventually turning into a smaller road due to a lot of redevelopment many years ago, much of which had in turn fallen into disrepair.

After some internal debate, she finally lifted off and flew at barely rooftop level towards the commotion, her curiosity overriding her caution. Someone was certainly throwing a fairly enthusiastic party that sounded like it had invited mayhem along for the ride and she was wondering what on earth was going on. It sounded like a combine harvester was arguing with a gravel crusher…

Only a few seconds later she was close enough for her ability to contact all the insects in the vicinity of what was going on. Through lots of little eyes, she examined the area, landing on another roof and staying out sight with her real body. To her great annoyance she recognized immediately the source of the noise she'd heard.

'Fucking Hookwolf,' she thought with massive irritation. Sure enough, she could see the Nazi Changer-Brute charging about the place causing enormous damage to the surroundings, and there were a number of bodies lying about in poses that made it clear they were very definitely deceased. A couple were in more than one piece which didn't help, and was not something she liked looking at. There were at least twenty corpses, roughly half of them people in ragged clothes which she strongly suspected were members of the Merchant's gang, or had been. The rest seemed probably to be Empire gang members. They were universally white, skin-headed, and with Nazi tattoos.

As far as she could work out, the two gangs had had a shootout, the Empire mostly wiping out the Merchants with the help of Hookwolf, then the remaining survivors of the former catching a grenade or something from the last of the latter judging by three bodies lying, severely damaged, near a small crater in the road. There was shrapnel damage around the area too, and a dead Merchant lying on his face twenty feet away, in a pose that suggested he'd thrown something then got fatally shot before he could retreat.

From all the evidence, both sides had wiped each other out entirely with the sole exception of the raging cape. Sending out her senses in the direction the battle seemed to have come from, she could also detect a number of other bodies, all of them minorities. There was a building on fire about a quarter of a mile further up the road towards the city too, which looked like it had probably had a number of homeless people living in it. Again, all too common around this part of the city, she knew.

Taylor guessed that the Nazis had been on one of their little missions of finding people that were less white than they were and amusing themselves by killing them and burning their homes. It happened way too often, she'd seen at least four reports of it in the last three months, and knew from what her dad had said that the Empire did that sort of thing on a regular basis. Feeling both ill and furious, she turned her attention back to Hookwolf, wondering why he was still rampaging around like a lunatic.

Fair enough, he was a lunatic, but with all his own people down, and the other side too, why was he acting like one?

The answer was in the small figure in green and white that was desperately trying to escape. Taylor recognized the costume immediately. The Ward Vista.

'What the hell is she doing here? Alone against Hookwolf of all people?' Taylor thought, confused. She looked around for any backup but couldn't detect any signs of PRT people or anyone else on the heroic side of things anywhere in the area. It was just Vista, who was clearly injured considering how much blood was on her costume, and a villain who was blatantly obviously doing his damnedest to kill her. Sending some smaller insects towards Vista Taylor inspected her closely. Her costume was badly damaged, there was blood on her chest, and every time she moved she winced in pain. As she watched, the younger girl, who couldn't have been more than about twelve or thirteen, put her hand to her ear, then ducked as a metallic bladed arm shot through where her head had been.

Vista let out a short scream and rolled, diving behind a dumpster which was smashed out of the way by an enraged Hookwolf. Panting for breath, the girl did something weird to space and the Changer villain was suddenly about eighty feet away from her, but Vista was visibly exhausted and on her last legs. Taylor could see a gaping wound in her chest when she moved, which was the source of the blood. It didn't look particularly deep but the gash was long enough and bleeding enough that the other girl was in severe danger of passing out from blood loss.

She reached for her ear again, then yelled in frustration. It looked like she was trying to call for backup, presumably using some sort of earpiece, but…

Moving some insects closer, Taylor saw there was nothing in her ear. Checking around the area she saw the remains of some sort of high tech device on the street about a hundred feet away, definitely crushed and unusable. So Vista was all alone, had no way to call for help apparently, wounded, and much too close to a known multiple murderer racist lunatic. Who was, despite her power, getting way too fucking close again…

'Well, fuck,' Taylor thought with disgust. 'Goddamn Nazis. Ruin a perfectly good night out…' Muttering to herself and feeling her inner hornet get extremely angry, she thought hard about what she was about to do, decided she had no real choice, and took off.

'Dad is going to be torn between being furious and pleased,' she thought unhappily. 'But what else can I do?'

She wasn't prepared to watch Vista get killed in front of her, despite the risks to herself.

So in the end, she had to step in. Or fly in, rather.

Such was life. Sometimes you had to do things you didn't want to, and hope for the best.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Vista let out a groan followed by a high pitched scream as Hookwolf charged at her again, her power suddenly failing due to her sheer tiredness and disorientation. She was feeling dizzy, cold, and ready to pass out, but knew if she did she'd never wake up. The front of her costume was sticky, both inside and out, and she could smell blood. Every time she moved the pain in her chest went through her like hot wire burning into her flesh. She didn't want to look at the damage, and was pretty sure she was going into shock. Chills and shivering were definitely a thing at the moment, and she knew from her training that she was close to collapse.

Unable to properly concentrate, she flung herself desperately backwards as a bladed limb flew over her head, barely missing her. It was only her short stature that let her avoid it and she really wasn't sure she could do much more evading. It had taken one slip for the asshole Nazi to open her chest like a watermelon with one of his blades, and she knew damn well she was lucky that she'd barely been able to pull back enough that all he did was gash her skin rather than slice her in half.

She'd seen him do it before. Far too recently and far too close up. Cursing her stupidity in going off on her own, wanting to do something important rather than idiotic publicity stunts, she exerted what little of her power she could bring to bear and warped space between her and the Changer just enough to put him out of range, even as she jumped behind another wrecked burned-out car. Looking around frantically she wondered how the fuck she was going to escape. Without her communicator she was shit out of luck on calling for backup, and she'd left her phone behind due to the tracker in it.

Right now, she was bitterly regretting doing that. Being tracked by someone who could bring a really big gun to the party would have been ideal just about now. Preferably something with armor piercing ammo…

Feeling the effort of maintaining the spatial warp overcome what little mental strength she had remaining she was forced to let it collapse, having at least managed to take a few heaving breaths. A moment later Hookwolf was once again far, far too close, and still rabidly furious. He was always in a bad mood but right now he'd lost the plot completely and was absolutely definitely intent on killing her no matter what sort of shitstorm that would bring down on the Empire.

The remains of the car she was cowering behind was slammed out of the way. She looked up at the monstrous form made of sharp edges. The girl could practically feel the malicious grin even though there was nothing approaching a human face visible. "Nowhere to run little girl," Hookwolf snarled, sounding eager.

A second later, following a weird deep hum that approached from down the street towards the water at a huge speed, there was a massive metallic crashing sound and Hookwolf was tumbling ass over head away from her, bouncing several times and ending up fifty feet away before Vista had the faintest idea what had happened. She gaped as the bladed wolf struggled to his feet, shook his head, and looked around. "What the hell was that?" she whispered to herself, taking the opportunity presented to get up and head for cover again.

"Who did that?" Hookwolf roared in fury, turning in a circle.

The hum came back in the other direction and again there was a hard impact, blades flying, and the villain went end over end once more. Vista backed away, not wanting to turn her back on the bastard, and wondering what was going on.

The hum, which was really more of a deep bass note, vanished upwards and behind one of the buildings. Hookwolf and she were both listening, although he was turning towards her again, possibly under the impression she was doing whatever it was.

Moving backwards, she had an arm over her chest pressing on her wound, and was limping too, but she kept a wary eye on her opponent. He was much faster than you'd expect from someone that size and far more dangerous than she'd realized, although she'd always been well aware he was a killer. She hadn't expected him to just flat out try to murder her on the spot though, when she'd interrupted the Empire's little hate party.

Bad judgment on her part, and something she might well not live to regret, she thought with despair as he started moving towards her rapidly, apparently dismissing the mysterious hum.

This proved to be a mistake as it returned, going even faster. Something shot past Vista in a blur, lit up in shades of green just before impact, so brightly she closed her eyes, then slammed into Hookwolf. By the time she'd blinked hard a few times, she could see him sliding to a stop a good eighty feet from the impact point. "Go away, Nazi idiot, or you'll end up as dead as your friends," a weird voice said from somewhere above them. Both Vista and Hookwolf looked upwards. She gasped in shock. Hovering about fifty feet above the street, facing the villain, was the biggest fucking wasp she'd ever seen in her life. It was unbelievably huge, probably bigger than she was, and was illuminated in a tracery of green light. The drone of its wings filled the street.

Hookwolf stared at it in at least as much shock as she felt. Neither of them had expected whatever this was. And he didn't seem to know what to do.

Which, she admitted to herself, wasn't all that surprising. The wasp looked both angry and very dangerous, and the fact that it was talking somehow made that much worse.

She wasn't generally all that scared of bugs but she'd never met one so big she could ride it. And apparently tough enough that it could knock half a ton of enraged murder blender flying and show no damage.

What the hell was this thing? And where did it come from?

At least it seemed to be on her side. Or not on his side, which wasn't necessarily the same thing, unfortunately.

"What the fuck are you supposed to be?" Hookwolf demanded harshly, glaring at the hovering insect.

"Your death if you don't go away right the fuck now," it replied just as harshly. Vista shivered, because the threat in the words was so real she could feel it in her bones. "Leave the girl and run. You've got five seconds before I lose my patience."

"Fuck you, bug," he shouted. "No one tells me what to do."

"Time's up, dickhead. You were warned." The monstrous wasp aimed its stinger at him, the size of the thing making Vista stare in horror, even as Hookwolf roared defiance at it and flung a handful of blades at the creature. It avoided them with contemptuous ease and fired back, a burst of some liquid streaking from it to spray over the Changer.

Who screamed instantly and started smoking.

Vista recoiled in horror. Acrid vapor rose in clouds as Hookwolf thrashed, rolling over and over like he was in agony. Metal flew and the street was getting gouged to pieces as he went entirely insane. She watched wide eyed as he flopped around for another ten seconds, emitting a terrible howl, before suddenly seizing up then going limp.

Smoke rose from him for a few more seconds before his Changer power started to revert. He shrank, metal disappearing, and a few seconds later a human body was lying on the street, clad only in jeans, which were showing burn marks. His chest was heavily scarred too, the damage looking like severe blistering. Vista could smell something like cooked meat, which made her stomach turn despite iron control.

Landing next to him, the wasp monster examined him for a moment. "Huh. Still alive. I'm impressed. Guess his regeneration is pretty good." The voice sounded thoughtful. "Bet he doesn't enjoy it when he wakes up though. If he does." Turning around, the creature looked directly at Vista, who swallowed hard. "You need medical help," it commented, walking towards her.

It didn't sound nearly as terrifying as it had done when it was confronting Hookwolf, but it was still a four foot long blatantly incredibly dangerous giant-ass wasp, Vista thought frantically as she tried to work out what the hell to do next. Stopping a few feet away the thing looked her over. "That's a lot of blood loss," it added helpfully, telling her something she was all too aware of.

The stress of the last half hour finally hit the point of being too much, and Vista blacked out. It was, to be honest, a bit of a relief.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Well, shit," Taylor sighed, watching the badly injured Ward topple over and lie there in an untidy bloody mess. She looked around, seeing and sensing no one in the vicinity. No one alive at least, except for the mass murdering asshole cluttering up the street behind her.

She was honestly surprised that her venom hadn't killed him on the spot. She hadn't hit him with all that much, to be sure, but she was certain it would have easily done for most people. Even though he was still alive she was pretty sure that he was going to have all sorts of issues with life despite his regenerative power. He sure wasn't giving the impression of someone who was likely to wake up in a hurry.

Taking the decision to spray him was one she'd wrestled with, but in the end if it came down to him or Vista, she'd prefer the Ward be the survivor. Hookwolf had a kill order on him as far as she knew anyway, so one could argue that she was only doing what she should. But her dad had been right; killing someone wasn't something to take lightly in any way at all.

Even a Nazi.

However, he was still alive for the moment at least so she hadn't quite managed the feat. Half tempted to go and make certain, she instead looked at him and told her power, 'See? That asshole gets to keep his pants? Why don't I?' It was unfair and annoyed her. Her ability kind of shrugged and she sighed again. 'You're no help at all sometimes,' she grumbled, turning back to Vista, who was gently leaking important bodily fluid all over the street. Thinking for a moment, she wondered how heavy the girl was. She was barely four and a half feet tall and skinny with it, so not much.

'Worth a try I guess,' she thought in resignation. 'I can't leave her here like this.'

Moving over to the girl, she carefully rearranged her slightly, then took off, hovered over her, and carefully grabbed her with all six legs. It took a little trial and error but slightly to her surprise she found she could lift Vista. She had to flap a lot harder, but it worked. Satisfied that she could hold on, she rose into the air, orientated herself, and headed towards Brockton General at flank speed.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"A giant wasp just brought Vista in."

Amy looked up at the familiar voice, although the note of sheer disbelief in it was new. Doctor Williams was pale and wearing an utterly confused and somewhat scared expression. Behind her, in the ER room, it had gone oddly silent. Amy had been taking a break in the staff room and now realized that the normal noise from ER had stopped completely.

"What?" she asked, not sure she'd heard correctly.

Doctor Williams pointed over her shoulder. "Giant wasp. Vista. In the ER."

"What?" Amy still didn't understand, but she put her book down and stood up. Walking over she peered past the doctor. At the giant wasp in the ER, next to Vista, who was covered in blood. Every single person in the room regardless of profession or status was as far away as they could get from the pair, dead silent, and gaping in horror.

"Holy fuck," she said in shock. "That's a giant wasp!"

"I'm a giant hornet, thanks very much," the vastly too large for comfort insect called. "Is someone going to help Vista or not? She's got a massive wound and lost a lot of blood."

It sounded somewhat annoyed. Amy, who was feeling faint, jerked slightly at the voice, then exchanged an incredulous look with Doctor Williams. After a few seconds, and with some effort, she forced herself to walk over to where the insect was staring at her. Kneeling, she put her hand on Vista's face, then jolted. "Jesus, what happened to her?"

"Hookwolf. Then I happened to him." The wasp hornet sounded both irritated and pleased at the same time. Antennae twitched as Amy looked at it, then down at the unconscious Vista. "She was trying to escape and he was trying to kill her. Down at the bay end of Geraint Street, near the old rope factory. He's still there. Doubt he's going anywhere soon." Now it definitely sounded quite pleased with itself. "Some sort of fight between the Merchants and the E88 I think. Vista got involved somehow."

Amy nodded, highly confused, and went to work on the younger girl. When she looked up the hornet had vanished and the main doors were closing. A moment later a deep hum resonated through the room before fading away. Totally baffled she called for the two orderlies who were, along with everyone else, staring at the door, to bring a gurney over. When Vista was stable they lifted her carefully onto it, still taking nervous glances towards where the biggest insect anyone had ever heard of had left.

By the time the PRT arrived, the hornet was long since gone, and Vista was sleeping comfortably, fully healed but needing a lot of food.

And Amy was no nearer understanding what the hell had happened.

When, about two hours later, Hookwolf was brought in, it took her under ten seconds to discover that he wasn't going to recover nearly as easily, even if she'd felt like healing the shitbag. Whatever toxin he'd been exposed to was unbelievably potent and he was barely alive as it was. She told the PRT as much, then went on with her other patients, still wondering what the hell was wandering around the city and where it had come from.

She suspected that a lot of other people were wondering the same thing…

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Well, that's going to cause some odd issues," Taylor's dad commented after listening to the story. He put his arm around her and hugged her. "Still, good job, I suppose."

Taylor nodded. Then she went to bed, because it had been a long day one way or another and she was pretty much done with it.

Chapter Text

"What in god's name happened last night?"

The shout made the room echo and several people wince at the volume.

"We have a Ward that nearly died, thirty seven corpses split between gang members and random civilians, all of the latter minorities, and a comatose Parahuman villain with sufficiently serious brain and nerve damage that Panacea is doubtful he'll even make it until next week and is almost certain he's not waking up even if he survives," the voice went on at slightly lower volume but with great anger. "On top of that our Ward was apparently rescued by a four foot long sapient hornet! One that talks! And took out Hookwolf! Then airlifted Vista to hospital!"

Emily Piggot coughed after she finished shouting, her throat tight from both stress and anger.

More calmly she said, "I want answers, people," as she looked around at the gathered multitude in the auditorium, which was the only place in the building large enough and secure enough for this meeting. It had brought in the entire Protectorate contingent, all the Wards other than Vista who was still in hospital, the senior PRT staff, her deputy, and the pair of lawyers from head office who'd been here for two weeks helping with the fallout from the massively irritating legal tempest caused by Winslow high school apparently being run like a mafia organization. Except without the competence or charm.

This had caused no end of internal trouble for her command, because of one of their Wards attending the damned place, and another one having literally Triggered due to his experience there. And now it turned out that at least some of the staff of Winslow were colluding with people in the city administration, Brockton General, her own office, and who knew where else. She didn't blame the Mayor for being ready to strangle those involved, really. Emily shared that anger, and was more than happy that so many people wanted a piece of Winslow, but it was also causing her far more trouble than she had time to deal with on top of the normal workload.

The director of the PRT ENE was certain that Shadow Stalker was implicated up to her eyeballs in the whole insane mess, but since a lot of important information had oh-so-conveniently gone missing, she couldn't yet prove it. Not to the satisfaction of the Chief Director's office, anyway, who seemed far more convinced than she was that Sophia Hess was of value. The girl was not someone she trusted at all, for reasons ranging from her well-honed instincts to the stories she'd heard from the other Wards and co-workers of Sophia's. It was fair to say that very few people liked her, or believed that she had turned over a new leaf after being brought in following her vigilante career going to places no one was happy about.

Unfortunately she was very good at covering her tracks, and putting on a convincing facade of following orders. But Emily still didn't trust her in the slightest. Neither, from what she'd picked up, did Vista, who seemed to in fact loathe the older girl. Which might explain at least partially why the little idiot had decided to pull the damn fool trick of going on a solo patrol, especially to an area as hazardous as the one that had nearly claimed her life.

She was not happy with Vista, at least half of this unhappiness being disappointment in the judgment she'd shown. When she next had words with the girl, she was going to make that abundantly clear in no uncertain terms, because she was damned if she was going to lose a pre-teen Ward under her watch. Annoyingly she wasn't sure quite when she'd be able to shout at the girl though, due to a stubborn Parahuman Healer.

Panacea had flatly denied her demand that Vista be released, claiming that the girl, while healed physically, required rest and food, as well as a chance to get over her trauma mentally. The staff of the hospital had backed her to the hilt and her own medical staff had taken one look at the healer's expression and hastily decided they had no valid standing to interfere. She was fairly sure Panacea terrified them. Possibly from the thought of that level of sarcasm being weaponized in their direction…

Vista had given a statement to Miss Militia that morning, so they at least had her side of the story, which only opened up a whole series of questions and answered very few. They'd also acquired copies of the security camera footage from the hospital ER, the external cameras too, and had two somewhat blurry and very short phone videos of the giant frigging hornet that was the center of this whole meeting. As well as one pin-sharp photo that was currently on the projection screen behind her. Only two people in the ER had retained enough presence of mind to use their phones, which considering that it was commonplace to find nicely framed and shot videos of full blown cape fights going on mere hundreds of feet away while people watched with interest, proved just how startling the whole thing had been.

Bystanders in Brockton Bay were so jaded she wondered at times whether they'd even notice things that in other cities would cause mass panic.

A hornet big enough to drive a car was apparently the exception to that rule.

She half-turned and pointed at the screen. "What is that?" she demanded. "Where did it come from, where did it go, why did it save Vista, how did it save Vista, what did it do to Hookwolf, and are there any more of them? I feel that last part is critically important information."

Everyone looked at the screen, then her. She could see in their eyes that no one really had any good answers, and considering how quite a few people were deliberately trying not to stare too hard, she got a distinct feeling that a certain amount of entomophobia was being displayed.

Clockblocker was one of those who was doing his utmost not to look any more than he absolutely had to. He apparently wasn't keen on insects.

To be honest, she sympathized. The thing on the screen was enough to make anyone's skin crawl.

Not that she was prepared to ever tell him that of course.

The only person in the entire room that wasn't radiating at least a sense of mild horror at the image was one Professor David Brooks, an entomologist borrowed from Brockton Bay University and hastily NDA'd to the hilt. He was sitting forward in his chair with his hands clasped in front of him staring at the photo with a sort of beatific expression that was honestly a touch worrying.

In the end, lacking any clear place to start and seeing no one was all that prepared to be the first one to stick their neck out in the face of her possible wrath, she pointed at him. "You. Professor Brooks. Tell me about this hornet monster."

He blinked a couple of times then trained his gaze on her, while everyone else looked at him. "It's fantastic, Director," he stated with a smile. "I wouldn't have believed it if you didn't have this photo. What a remarkable shot."

"We're not here to admire the damn thing, we're here to learn what it is," she snapped.

"Ah." He nodded. "In that case, that is clearly a mature queen Vespa mandarinia, commonly known to the public as the Giant Asian Hornet. Endemic to the far east, although in recent years the species has been accidentally exported to both Europe and North America. I haven't heard of any reports of them being found this far north and east, admittedly, but they can certainly survive our climate." As she stared at his enthusiastic tone, he studied the photo again, which showed the vast insect next to Panacea, who was kneeling over Vista's body doing something. The creature appeared to be watching closely.

"It's a somewhat larger than normal specimen though," he added with a small dry chuckle.

"I fervently hope that Asia isn't full of insects that large," she said acidly. "It's obviously not a normal… what you just said."

"Oh, no, certainly not," he agreed readily. "While Vespa mandarinia is the largest hornet species known to science, they're usually much smaller than that." He didn't seem to find this odd, she noted with an internal sigh. Academics. They were weird at the best of times.

"How large are they normally?" she pressed, everyone else remaining silent and just listening while looking between them.

"Perhaps two, two and a half inches for a particularly large specimen, in length," he responded. "A wingspan of approximately three inches is typical."

"That's still a fucking huge hornet," one of the PRT people sitting behind him muttered, making her glare at him and the professor nod cheerfully.

"Oh, yes indeed. Very big. This specimen is somewhat larger as we can all see though, which is fascinating. It shouldn't be possible, in fact, insect physiology doesn't scale to anything close to this size and remain viable. Not since the Cretaceous at least." He chuckled a little. "I can only assume some Parahuman power is responsible. The ability to fly at that size, and even carry a payload as large as a young girl, would certainly require something other than normal physics to be at work. It implies very high strength and stamina, proportionately scaled commensurate with the remarkable size of the specimen. The sapient nature is also quite unusual. Fascinating indeed."

Pinching her the bridge of her nose and wondering if the man had the vaguest idea of why his 'fascinating' specimen was so horrifying to most reasonably sane people, she took a couple of breaths, then asked patiently, "How dangerous would you expect a hornet this large to be, Professor?"

"Absolutely lethal, beyond doubt," he replied immediately with what in her opinion was almost offensively happy earnestness. "A normally sized specimen is definitely a nasty problem if you upset it. The venom, while not quite as potent as that from some species, is still very effective indeed. It contains both a powerful neurotoxin and a cytotoxic peptide which causes major tissue damage. The biochemistry is quite enthralling. Interestingly the peptide, mastoparan, has been studied for its utility as a significantly effective antibiotic although the toxicity is…" He trailed off as she cleared her throat.

"But perhaps that aspect is not currently relevant," he added with a smile. "My point is that a normal hornet of this species is capable of injecting enough venom to cause potentially serious health effects to humans. One sting is unlikely to be lethal absent other contributing factors, such as low body weight, illness, or anaphylaxis, but the insect is more than capable of stinging multiple times and could conceivably cause death in an otherwise healthy adult. A swarm of them can easily kill, and this in fact occurs in their native environment on a low but regular basis. People who live in the vicinity of Vespa mandarinia nests go to some effort to avoid gaining their attention."

He smiled a little wryly at this. "For obvious reasons," he added. Indicating the image, he went on, "Now, what we have here is a Vespa mandarinia scaled up by a factor of, oh, roughly twenty four times I'd judge based on the size of Panacea there. Volumetrically that suggests a venom capacity of potentially…" He paused for a moment, working something out in his head. "…on the order of approximately fourteen thousand times that of the normally sized insect."

Emily felt ill. Several of the audience went very pale.

"Assuming the venom is the same as that of the usual hornet, that's far more than enough in one sting to be immediately fatal," he assured her with a smile. "Not to mention the stinger would be proportionately enlarged, leading to the conclusion it would present an obvious threat purely from the mechanical trauma it would inflict. Even a normally sized asian hornet is easily capable of stinging through thick cloth and a plastic protective suit." He waved at the screen. "This specimen wouldn't even notice anything short of half an inch of plastic, I'd think."

"So it could stab you to death even if it didn't inject you with a pint of instant kill poison?" the same PRT lieutenant queried. Professor Brooks looked over his shoulder and nodded, still smiling a little.

"Essentially," he agreed, not sounding nearly as worried as Emily felt he should all things considered.

"Oh, wonderful," the other man mumbled.

"Of course, taking into account the obvious fact that our friend here clearly isn't an example of an ordinary Vespa mandarinia writ large," the professor resumed, turning back to look at Emily, "since as I said she can't be working on standard insect principles, there's no guarantee that her venom isn't something unique too. It could be substantially more toxic even ignoring the sheer quantity available. I would dearly love to acquire a sample for tests."

Holding in a sigh at his obvious enthusiasm, heedless of just how utterly terrifying the information he'd given was, Emily replied with deliberate calmness, "If we manage that I will bear you in mind."

"Thank you, Director," he responded with a pleased look. Peering at the photo again, he went on thoughtfully after a moment while she tried suppress the urge to scowl more than she was already, "The fact that this individual is fully sapient is truly remarkable. Insect neurology is fairly divergent from that of a human, and I wouldn't have thought it plausible to have any arthropod with near or possibly higher than human intelligence. Although, that said, jumping spiders in particular do seem in the latest research to be far more capable of problem-solving than was once believed, so…" He shrugged a little. "I suppose there are precedents in a sense, and if you scaled the brain at the same ratio as the rest of the body… Intelligence is still something we don't truly understand the mechanism of, after all. I do wonder how she sees the world, bearing in mind the differences in visual acuity and speed, neural processing rates, and other factors."

"What do you mean?" Emily found herself forced to ask when he fell silent.

"Oh, well, you see insects have a much faster… ah… mental processing speed, I suppose, than mammals do," he replied, leaning forward with a look of pleasure at being able to expound on his expert subject. "This is obviously partly due to the much shorter lengths of the nerves, but there is some research indicating that the neural velocity is higher even taking that into account. That's why you have so much trouble swatting a fly, for example. From their point of view your hand is moving in slow motion. It could well be that our friend here can react, see, and think far faster than a human could. Again, it's a subject I would be enormously interested in exploring. And as she's sapient we could actually compare notes!" His eyes lit up at the thought. "I must write that down. Where did I put…" He patted himself, then produced a pen and a scrap of paper he jotted some words on while the entire rest of the room stared at him. "We could learn so much," he mumbled, glancing at the screen again, then turning the paper over and writing on the other side as well.

She was unable to hold in the sigh this time. He paid it no attention at all.

Clearing her throat again, quite loudly, she waited until he looked up. "Yes, Director?" he queried politely.

"So if I'm understanding you correctly, Professor, what we have here is a near-human sized, fully sapient, articulate, super strong hornet that has a stinger that could penetrate a flak jacket, enough venom to drown a cat, possibly has super venom that's even worse than a normal hornet's, and on top of that has Mover, Thinker, and Blaster abilities?" Emily was rubbing her brow, wishing she'd brought more ibuprofen.

"Hmm… I suppose that's a valid way to put it if I recall the PRT classifications correctly," he nodded after thinking her comment over for a second, still with that annoyingly cheerful expression. "It's a truly stunning phenomenon."

"And the single most horrifying thing I've ever even dreamed of," Dauntless mumbled, just loud enough to hear when the professor stopped talking and the room was dead silent as everyone thought about what he'd told them while wishing he hadn't. Emily couldn't bring herself to disagree with the man even enough to glare at him.

"Oh, god," she muttered to herself. "This damned city…"

"One thing that might cheer you up, Director," he said after looking around at the others, appearing slightly bemused at the expressions. "Apparently she is friendly. And helpful. She did after all save the young lady from a grisly fate and go to some effort to take her to where she could be helped. I feel that is, regardless of species, the actions of someone who means well."

Slightly incredulously she stared at him, then slowly turned her head to inspect the life-sized, and wasn't that a worrying thought, enormous super-hornet on the screen. Returning her gaze to him, she finally replied, "That is not quite as helpful as you may believe, Professor, but there is some validity to it, yes."

He beamed at her, making her clench one hand into a fist under the table before relaxing. Academics, she reminded herself. You can't thump them for not being on the same page as everyone else, because they simply didn't understand what the problem was in most cases.

And he had at least given useful information. Information that wouldn't help her sleep any better, but still useful.

Watching as he rummaged in his pockets for some more paper then began making notes again, she shook her head slightly and moved on for the moment. Just as she was about to ask another question, she stopped. Then ran some of his commentary from a few minutes ago back through her head.

"Professor?" she asked calmly.

He looked up. "Yes?"

She pointed over her shoulder. "You said that is a queen hornet, correct?"

The man nodded, smiling.

"If I recall my biology, the queens are the ones that lay eggs, I believe?"

"Quite correct."

"Can that thing breed?" she persisted.

He thought, looking at the screen, then back to her. "I have no reason to believe otherwise, although she might be sterile, admittedly."

"So, in theory, there could be an entire hive of those things somewhere in the city?" Emily felt faint.

Professor Brooks shook his head. "Probably not yet, as normally the eggs would be laid near the end of April, and as this is the first reported sighting, one would suspect that she's only recently arrived here from wherever she originates. If there was an extant nest I'd expect more sightings. She is after all somewhat memorable."

Which was understating the problem so much it needed a completely different word, Emily thought…

She could see from the expressions that she wasn't alone in this feeling.

"How large is an Asian Hornet nest?" she asked, not really wanting to hear what was going to be an unwelcome answer, she just knew it, but having to. "Typically, I mean." It was taking massive effort to keep her voice level.

"Well, in the case of a normal Vespa mandarinia nest, one would expect to find by the time it was fully matured, which is around mid August incidentally, up to perhaps a hundred or so workers at any one time. A small number of males and queens will also be produced, obviously, mating flights occurring in October, then fertilized queens dispersing to overwinter in suitable locations until spring and the cycle repeats. The original queen dies at the same time. Nests are built underground, rather than in high locations as in the case of something like a paper wasp, so tend to be quite hard to find." He smiled, then slowly looked concerned. "Oh dear. That might present a slight problem."

"Yes, Professor Brooks, it might indeed present a slight problem," she growled, massaging her forehead, which was throbbing. "Just a tiny one. I'm sure that being overrun with man-sized poisonous insects isn't too worrying, but people may still find it awkward even in Brockton Bay." She was fairly sure almost everyone in the room had stopped breathing for a few seconds when he'd answered.

"Venomous, not poisonous, Director," Armsmaster put in, making her fix him with a dark look. "Poisonous implies that ingesting the insect would cause a toxic reaction, which is currently not known, whereas we have ample evidence that it possesses a highly potent venom, so the correct nomenclature should be…"

He stopped when she held up a hand. "Thank you, Armsmaster," she grated. "Not the point I was making, though."

Professor Brooks, who'd nodded agreement as the Tinker spoke, appearing pleased, looked at the screen then back to her. "On the bright side, Director Piggot," he said encouragingly, "There are sufficient differences between this novel species and a true Vespa mandarinia that it's equally plausible that the breeding cycle is entirely at variance from what is understood. She may be sterile, she might only produce one or two eggs at a time, or there may even be something more extraordinary involved. As we have very limited information so far, we can't be certain what the truth is." He smiled a little. "Unusually we might be able to simply ask. Which is certainly not something I'm used to in my field."

Wishing she could get drunk these days, Emily restrained her first response. And her second.

And her third.

After gritting her teeth for some seconds, she finally asked him directly and the room at large, "Where did it come from?" She looked around at more than a couple of dozen faces, almost all of which showed worry. "Is it a Case 53? A Biotinker did it? A Changer with a hideously scary form? Something from a parallel world? At least one of those options is terrifying and I'm not happy about any of them to be honest, although the Case 53 is the least upsetting in a sense."

The professor shrugged, spreading his hands. "I'm afraid those questions are out of my area of expertise, Director, so I have no answers for you. I don't know enough about Parahuman abilities to do more than guess, although I can't see any plausible way she's not the result of such. Even a parallel world would have to follow the physical laws ours does, in all probability, and an insect that large isn't technically possible in that case. Technical impossibilities that nevertheless exist appear to fall more into your organization's remit." He smiled at her, looking like he was finding all this quite entertaining in some bizarre fashion.

Deciding that if she ignored him he might stop smiling, and even if he didn't she wouldn't have to look at him, she cast her gaze around the others present. "Do we have any useful information on that subject?"

"As to its origin we can only currently speculate," Armsmaster commented after no one else seemed to come up with anything. "It being the result of a Biotinker is plausible, but in my view less likely. The exhibited abilities, as Professor Brooks stated, strongly imply Parahuman powers are being utilized. While there have been cases of Biotinkered constructs having unusual abilities themselves, nothing on record has shown results that match what the evidence we so far have suggests. I can't rule it out but I'd put it as the less likely scenario for now."

Emily couldn't help feeling a certain amount of relief even as she didn't entirely agree with his conclusions. She and Biotinkers had an unpleasant history.

"An import from a parallel world seems to be even less likely," he added. "Again, it's not impossible based on our current understanding of the multi-world theory, but we can be certain that the only other world we've got direct evidence for the existence of doesn't contain an insect this large, if only for the reasons the professor laid out." He shook his head. "Physics doesn't allow for it, and as I understand the science, neither does biology, which therefore implies the… super-hornet… is not a naturally occurring creature. Leaving Changer or Case 53 as the more reasonable explanations."

"Maybe it was one of those alien lizards that one guy on PHO is always claiming are behind anything particularly weird," Assault put in, because he was like that. The blasted man couldn't even have the decency to be sufficiently concerned about the current problem long enough to suppress his urge to add what he fondly thought was humor to the proceedings, Emily thought as she scowled at him, making him smirk.

"I find that highly unlikely," Armsmaster replied with a grimace. "The individual in question is… suspect at best."

As the other man opened his mouth, undoubtedly to produce further inanities, Emily said, "Thank you, Assault. We don't need any more of your helpful suggestions." He grinned and shrugged, making her growl under her breath, but at least he'd managed to make the overall air of the meeting become slightly less dark. Which was the only reason she tolerated him at all.

"Fine. We'll put Case 53, followed by Changer, at the top of the list then," she allowed after thinking over what he'd said. No one seemed to object and several people made notes. "Although if any evidence at all turns up for the Biotinker theory I want to hear about it immediately."

She got a number of nods.

"Leaving aside the issue of its genesis," Armsmaster went on having typed on a tablet for a few seconds, "the more recent location of the insect would appear, from Vista's testimony, to likely be somewhere in the area between Geraint street, where she encountered it, and the far side of the docks area of the city. It's a large area, some eighteen square miles, much of it derelict and quite a lot completely uninhabited. There are many buildings in states of repair ranging from damaged to rubble. I would imagine that this gives a huge number of places an insect that big could hide without difficulty."

"And it would be nearly impossible to find it, especially if it's underground," Lieutenant Jeffries, the one who'd made the earlier comments, remarked uneasily. "I know that whole area is honeycombed with tunnels, sewers, old basements, at least four super-villain bases we've never located, and god knows what else. And it was the largest smuggling port on the east coast for nearly two hundred years too, which probably means there's even more hidden under it than we think there is. Leaving aside all the wrecked warehouses and factories. It would take years to search it all even if we wanted to."

He wasn't wrong, she thought with resignation. The docks zone was a part of the city they had little real control over or insight into, for many reasons, some historical and some political, as well as for cost reasons. Their budget didn't stretch to nearly the number of troops she'd need to even begin to be able to patrol that area, and that wasn't taking into account just how much pushback they'd get from the locals.

It would be a nightmare, honestly. Which is why it had never happened.

"Do you in fact need to find her?" Professor Brooks queried, looking interested in the conversation and honestly intrigued by the current subject. "As far as I can see, she's done nothing wrong as such. And I'd have thought saving your Ward would suggest she's at worst non-hostile. At least to the forces of law and order." He smiled as she gave him a look, but quite a lot of the other people present seemed to agree. She wasn't sure if it was because they actually agreed with his comment, or whether they thought it was a good excuse not to risk running into something that terrifying in a dark alley…

Emily considered his words. Her gut reaction was to say that yes, they very definitely needed to locate and investigate the giant killer hornet. It made her twitchy to think something like that was out there, especially when she recalled the earlier conversation, which had made her skin crawl. On the other hand, he had a valid point. Vista, for whatever reason she'd had for going out alone, had very nearly ended up dead as a result of that murderous Nazi bastard, and it was pure luck that something had pulled her ass out of a fight she was losing badly. The creature, whatever it really was and wherever it came from, had intervened, made sure from the sound of it that Hookwolf was removed from the vicinity of Vista, given him unambiguous warning of imminent lethal response, and only then acted to shut the situation down permanently.

Subsequent to which it had taken Vista directly to the best medical care in the city, undoubtedly saving her life.

So.

On the one hand, giant killer hornet with an absolutely horrifying threat level. On the other, proven friendly, or at least neutral, outlook combined with far more restraint than many Parahumans, or people in general, had in such circumstances.

And no one could say with a straight face that Hookwolf hadn't had it coming. Just for what he'd been involved in last night any bystander would have been fully justified in shooting the fucker dead if they could have managed it, and she'd have shaken their hand. Legally and ethically the hornet was in the clear, as far as that went. It was probably even due a reward, as insane as the concept was, since the Nazi bastard had had a kill order on him. Long overdue in her opinion, it was finally authorized after he personally murdered ten PRT troopers and three civilians the last time he escaped, during transportation to the Birdcage just before Christmas. And he'd definitely been trying to kill Vista, which stood the distinct likelihood of kicking off a gang war with the Empire as they'd have had no choice but to go in hard in response, upsetting the delicately balanced power struggle this damned city ran on.

She briefly wondered if she could point the fucking hornet at Kaiser and see what happened…

There was no indication as to why the hornet had helped Vista. It might have been because it didn't like Nazis, it might have wanted to save a life, it might have been purely a territorial thing. Taking her to Brockton General implied the latter possibility was less likely, but who knew how a vast hornet thought?

The main reason she found herself hesitating to tell the Professor he had a valid point was the uneasy worry that perhaps, despite what Armsmaster had said, the insect was the result of a Biotinker. The nightmarish potential of something like that didn't bear thinking about. Neither did the idea that Professor Brooks had raised with his talk about nesting queens…

Shivering despite herself, Emily attempted to reject the images that came into her mind. Not entirely successfully she had to admit.

Eventually she sighed heavily. "While I don't like it, Professor, you're not wrong. I want to do a complete threat assessment on…" She waved her hand at the screen. "That. But for now, we'll tentatively put it down as non-hostile. I want everyone to gather any new information that comes to light and add it to the file so we can get a better idea of exactly what's going on, because it's still deeply concerning, and the public are going to have a lot of questions shortly, but… considering just how hard it would be to even find it if it doesn't want to be found, I suppose we don't honestly have any other recourse at the moment."

She turned to Miss Militia. "I also want to have a long talk with Vista as soon as possible." Her voice was deceptively mild, but the other woman looked somewhat worried under her scarf. "We need to have a discussion about unsanctioned patrols…"

"Panacea said she'd let us know when Vista was fit to leave the hospital," the hero replied.

"Good. See that I'm informed as soon as that happens." Emily looked back at the screen with a frisson of what she'd deny was fear. "Right. Brute, Blaster, Mover, Thinker, and possibly Changer." Turning back to the others, she continued, "Ideas for threat ratings, countermeasures, and anything else anyone can think of. I want to get this done before we get surprised again."

Kid Win tentatively raised his hand, causing her to glance at him. "Yes?"

"Um… I read on PHO that there was a woman who claimed she got mugged by a couple of Empire guys and was saved by a giant talking wasp," he said quietly. "About two or three weeks ago. No one believed her, and she got upset and stopped talking about it." He looked at the photo on the screen. "But…"

She nodded. "Where did this happen?"

"Apparently somewhere close to the main library, I think." He looked uncertain. "Pretty sure it was there."

"So miles away from where Vista's encounter was," Velocity put in. "Which might mean it's been flying around all over the city for weeks."

"But no one has reported seeing it that I'm aware of, and Vista said it was quite audible some distance away," her deputy Mike Renick commented with a frown. "Either it's sneakier than we realized, has only been in that location once, or it might have a Stranger ability too. Which is… not comforting to consider."

"An invisible giant killer hornet is worse than a visible one," Clockblocker agreed, sounding extremely worried. "Like, a lot worse."

Finding she couldn't disagree, because the thought made her wince, Emily held up her hand. "Before we descend into wild speculation, let's try not to assign every possible power to this, please? We all know what's happened in the past when people got carried away."

"I don't," Professor Brooks remarked with an intrigued expression, making her sigh yet again.

It was going to be a long, long meeting, she knew.

And it turned out she was right. Which was cold comfort, really.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Tapping on the door, Amy pushed it open and stepped inside with a nod to the PRT trooper sitting in a chair next to it who glanced at her for a moment then went back to looking around. "How do you feel," she asked, looking at the young blonde girl sitting up in bed and staring out the window. Missy wasn't wearing her costume, hence the PRT guard, but Amy was well aware of her identity in any case. She actually like Vista, both in and out of costume. The younger girl was smart, generally sensible, easy to talk to, and very professional in her costumed identity. Which made her getting involved in what nearly killed her last night somewhat baffling, Amy thought as she sat in the chair next to the bed.

She'd decided to visit Missy both to check on her, and to have a break from running around fixing people. While she felt it was something she had to do, it was tiring and in many ways horrible, since people were by and large idiots and often rude with it. You'd have thought, she irritably mused, that being polite to the person making sure you lived might be a fairly straightforward concept, but apparently a lot of people hadn't ever worked that out.

Missy at least thanked her when she was patched up after one of the regrettably common injuries Wards in Brockton Bay seemed to end up with. In theory they weren't supposed to be involved in violent encounters, but theory and practice often didn't see eye to eye around here. And Missy was rather more prone to jumping in than perhaps she should have been sometimes.

Although last night was exceptional by anyone's standards, she thought, watching the other girl keep staring out the window with an odd expression before she finally turned her eyes to meet Amy's.

"Fine," Missy replied.

Amy studied her. "Yeah, right," she finally snorted. "Try again."

"You do good work," Missy smiled. The smile was brittle and unconvincing.

"I know I do, but I still don't believe you." Amy shrugged. "Sure, I fixed the physical problems. That's not what I'm worried about."

She and Missy stared at each other for a few seconds.

"Fine!" the blonde girl finally shouted. "I fucked up, OK? I wanted to prove I could handle more than the crap they let us do, and I couldn't! I nearly died! And a fucking huge wasp saved my life!" She laughed a little hysterically. "A huge wasp was better at fighting than I was! Can you believe that? What the fuck is that about?"

Putting her hand on Missy's as the girl wound up for a major rant, something she recognized from her own sister a couple of times, Amy didn't bother to say anything, she just tweaked the blonde's neurotransmitters a tiny amount, reducing stress hormones a little at the same time while monitoring the result. Missy's eyelids fluttered and she abruptly closed her mouth, looking like she was about to fall asleep. Adjusting a few more things, Amy watched the result. Blinking, Missy shook her head, then stared at her.

Amy shrugged. "You were having an anxiety attack," she explained. "Trust me, I've seen it before. No point letting it spiral when I can shut it down."

The other girl burst into tears, causing Amy to sigh. "Oh, Jesus," she grumbled, leaning over and putting her arms around the twelve year old. "I am so not the right person for this sort of thing."

"I nearly died, Amy," Missy sobbed into her shoulder.

"But you didn't," Amy replied quietly. "You're fine, and you're staying here until you can handle what happened. Don't worry about Hookwolf. I guarantee he will never bother you again, or anyone else."

"Good," Missy whispered, still crying. It was uncharacteristic of what Amy knew of the girl, but she'd realized quite a while ago that Vista was suppressing a lot of things. Not surprisingly, because that was pretty much par for the course with Parahumans in general. But when someone could see the innermost workings of the body at a touch, not much got past them.

Amy knew far more about a lot of people than they ever realized, she was all too aware of that.

Missy sniffed a few times, taking the kleenex Amy handed her wordlessly with a murmur of thanks, blew her nose, lay back, and started talking.

Glancing at her watch for a moment, Amy shrugged and listened. Other people could keep for now. She didn't have so many friends that she could leave one at a time like this.

As she listened to Missy unload months of frustration, the back of her mind was wondering where that hornet had come from, where it had gone, and why she had the urge to track it down and ask a lot of questions.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Cool," Taylor grinned as she peered down into clear cold water at a dozen crabs of various species that were looking back up at her. "Come on, guys, let's do some more experimentation. We're going to learn all sorts of interesting tricks, you and me."

She marched them out of the water and into a small bucket she'd filled with water, before picking it up in her forelegs and taking off. Shortly she was investigating how to improve compound eyes and getting some really nice results.

Deciding that she should probably figure out how to set up a marine tank at home, so she could keep some of the more promising specimens closer to hand, she made notes and tried various combinations, mixing and remixing features of arthropods in ways that nature would run screaming from.

Every now and then she had a new idea, sparked by the results she got from various tests. Sometimes these were quite unexpected, causing her to stop and think hard, then smile.

One was sufficiently wild that she spent nearly ten minutes going over the possibilities, before making a list of books she needed to get and read. If she could pull it off…

'Oh, yes. This could be a lot of fun,' she thought as she tried to remember things from one of her computer textbooks. 'I bet it'll work…'

Smiling to herself, she put the notebook and pen down, then moved her current jumping drider body to retrieve a different crab, before getting back to work with a cheerful feeling that life was going well.

As far as she could tell her power was feeling exactly the same, and watching very closely to see what happened next…

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Looking up as her dad tapped on her partly open door, Taylor smiled at him. She was lying on her bed in her pajamas reading her computer textbook while making notes, wanting to get down her ideas at least roughly before she went to bed. His mouth was open to say something, but it slowly closed before he faintly sighed and rubbed his forehead. He seemed to be doing that a lot recently, she thought with amusement.

"Most people would turn the bedside light on," he pointed out with a certain amount of humorous weary resignation in his voice.

"Most people aren't me," she pointed out entirely accurately.

"For which we can be duly grateful."

She grinned and wiggled the insect antennae she had sticking out of her hair at him. The ends of the appendages were glowing a quite bright blue-green, providing more than enough light to read by. "Look, I managed to work out how to change the color. Still working on red, but I've got violet, blue, green, and yellow now," she said with considerable satisfaction. It had taken a lot of experimenting and prodding her Changer power, but she'd finally cracked it. And the more she learned, the more she seemed able to learn, which was really fun.

Her dad shook his head wonderingly, then seemed to just decide to roll with it.

"Fine. I'm almost past the point of being surprised," he chuckled as he went and sat in her desk chair. "I was going to say that tomorrow I'll be calling the hospital legal team for an update. From what I've read online there's quite a lot of new developments in the case and I wanted to see what, if anything, that meant for us. I also have a Union meeting after work, so I'll be back late again. Probably around nine or so. Are you comfortable with that or do you want to come in with me like you did last week? You're welcome to if you want."

"I'm fine, Dad," she assured him. "I can look after myself well enough."

"That much is abundantly clear after what you did to Hookwolf," he remarked with a slight wince, but a proud look nonetheless. "I wish you hadn't had to though."

Lowering her book to her chest, she gazed at him, then at Vespa who was sitting on her lifted knee, Taylor's left foot being tucked under the right calf. The hornet body looked back. Meeting her own eyes she sighed. "So do I. I didn't want to hurt anyone. But I had no choice. He was definitely trying to kill Vista and if I'd got there even a couple of minutes later he'd have done it. It was pure luck I was close enough to hear what was going on." Looking back to him, seeing the sympathy in his eyes along with knowledge she could only guess at from his own life, and pride too, she added softly, "I regret that I had to do it, but not what I did. I'd do it again without hesitation if there was no choice."

He nodded slowly, the look of pride growing. "I hope you don't have to even as I know you probably will. The world we live in, and the city, is a dangerous place at the best of times. I'd much prefer to hide you safely away from it but I know I can't. Just be careful, and if you can avoid violence, do. That's all I ask." He sighed again. "I wish things were different but we all have to live with the hand we're dealt."

"Yeah," she muttered, feeling melancholy. "We do." They were both silent for a little while, busy with their own thoughts. Eventually she looked back at him again with a small smile. "My hand improved a fair bit recently though, I guess."

"That it did, and while I deeply regret how that happened, I can't help agreeing that it seems to be good for you." He smiled back. "You're happier than you've been for far too long. Which has helped me just as much."

Taylor giggled. "It's so much fun it's probably illegal," she said, causing him to laugh. "And I'm learning so many things. It's incredible. I keep having new ideas, and even if it's hard to pull off, even if I fail, I learn more every time." Lifting the book she waved it for a moment. "It even helps with schoolwork. Everything connects to everything, I guess."

"The holistic theory of the universe," he commented with a grin.

"Pretty much, yeah."

"And still no urges to run around fighting crime while wearing spandex?" His expression was mischievous.

She shuddered. "No. I don't have the body for it aside from anything else."

"I think you're doing yourself a disservice, but as a father I'm glad to hear you're not interested in skin tight costumes in public." She stuck her tongue out at him and wiggled her illuminated antennae, which made him chuckle.

"I could do skin-tight chitin," she mused out loud. "Skin-replacing chitin, more accurately." Lifting her free hand she looked at it, turning it back and forth a couple of times, then concentrated. A second or two later she grinned triumphantly. "See?" From her elbow down now her arm had a dark blue-black exoskeleton covering it, based on a mix of crab and scorpion chitin. The fingers were formed into sharp claws. She wiggled then, making a rattling sound as they brushed together. "That works really well," she added admiringly. "Wow."

Her dad shook his head wonderingly. "That will never be normal," he commented wryly. Leaning forward he tapped her arm as she held it out, his fingernail clicking on the surface. "How strong it is?"

"Not sure, really," she replied, thinking. "I need to experiment. But… it's got to be at least as strong as my super-hornet exoskeleton and that was easily able to take hitting Hookwolf at about a hundred miles an hour. So pretty tough."

"Impressive." She turned her arm back to normal as they watched, her with satisfaction and him with mild wonder.

"But even if I can do a neat costume from scratch, don't worry, I don't feel like charging about hitting people just because," she assured him. "I mean, if something needs to be handled, I'll do it, because I can and saving people is never a bad thing, right?"

"Right," he agreed, watching her with a small smile.

"I don't have any particular urge to go out trying to find a fight though," she went on, tapping her fingers on the cover of her textbook as she tried to work out the best way to explain. "I've read that powers want to be used, and I can see that, I guess. I mean, my power sure likes me using it, but it's my power. It works for me, not the other way around." She grinned as he snorted with humor. "I want to learn how to do interesting things, not find new ways to destroy the street and beat up a villain. I've heard you complaining about how stupid all the damage cape fights produce is and I've learned a lot. Mom taught me lots too. I really don't get why so many Parahumans always seem to be fighting like idiots." She shrugged as he nodded slowly. "There must be better ways to do things. Easier and more fun ways to use your powers. But it always seems to end up with crime, either causing it or stopping it, and that usually goes along with normal people getting hurt."

"I can't disagree with you," he replied thoughtfully.

"Panacea is one of the few capes who seems to just fix things not break them, or be involved in breaking them," she carried on quietly. "She's helped so many people in only about a year since she got her powers. I admire that. Dragon… she makes all sorts of useful things other people can use. And she doesn't just fight random idiots, she does important things. Armsmaster… he's a really good Tinker and seems to be pretty careful when he's involved in something. They're at the good end of the Parahuman scale, I suppose. Panacea at the top, sure, but Dragon, Armsmaster, lots of others too. Yet even there, a lot of the heroes definitely seem to end up having massive fights rather than… I don't know, de-escalating the problem, maybe? If that's the right word."

"I know what you're saying," her dad nodded.

Waving a hand rather randomly, Taylor said, "Then you get all the gangs. I'm not really talking about the smaller villains, the thieves and so on. Like Circus, or that new group the Undersiders, or even Leet and Über, never mind all the less famous ones we have. It would be better if they didn't do all that crap, but they're mostly fairly harmless to people. They're sure not going out of their way to hurt anyone. But the Empire? Murderers from the top to the bottom and they like it like that. The ABB aren't quite as bad on the whole from what I've read and you've told me, but they're sure not good. And Lung, Oni Lee… those guys are dangerous. I've got no idea how many people they've killed but it's a lot. Sure, they don't go out hunting down people they don't like the look of like the Empire does but that's not that much of a benefit. The Merchants are idiots and mostly accidentally kill people, but they still kill people. And I really can't figure out why so many villains end up causing so much mayhem and violence. I can probably think of at least a dozen methods to use any of their powers for profitable crime that doesn't kill anyone."

He looked at her with a blank expression, making her giggle. "I'm not entirely sure that is as comforting to hear as you might think, Taylor," he said blandly after a moment. "I also believe you." His face slid into a smile, which was rather evil. "I can think of quite a few myself, for that matter, and I'm pretty sure your mom had an actual list."

After they'd both laughed for a moment, he nodded again. "I do see what you mean, and I agree. The propensity for violence capes so often have is odd. But they seem driven to it most of the time no matter what side of the law they're on. I'm very glad that you aren't, believe me."

Standing, he moved next to her, then stroked her hair between the antennae for a moment. "I just want you to be safe and have a good life. I failed on both counts for far too long, but things have changed. Hopefully for the better. And if making hideous aberrations of nature amuses you and doesn't hurt anyone, or at least anyone who didn't seriously have it coming, that takes a great deal of weight off my mind. Knowing you can handle yourself if something goes bad also does, because we live in an unpredictable world."

Putting her hand on his where it now lay on her shoulder, she squeezed it, feeling the affection in his words. "Thanks, dad. For everything. And if I do ever decide to run around calling myself the Avenging Drider or something I'll talk it over with you first." She grinned up at him as he closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "Unless it's a spur of the moment thing and I don't have time, of course," she added with a snicker. "If so I'll tell you after all the excitement is over."

"Oh, god," he mumbled, as he turned to leave. "Just like your mom."

With a wave he left and she heard him go into his bedroom. Grinning to herself, she went back to reading the chapter on how a microprocessor worked, her imagination running overtime.

It would take a little effort, she thought as she turned the page, but the results would probably be more than worth it.

Time would tell.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Studying the photo on her laptop's screen, Amy frowned slightly as she recalled the incident when it had been taken. She'd been thinking about that weird interaction ever since, at the back of her mind, and she couldn't work out just why. Sure, it was bizarre as hell, because the mere concept of an insect that fucking huge was absurd, but she'd been kneeling on the floor no more than two or three feet from the damn thing. It had definitely existed, it wasn't a projection or something of that nature, it had been as alive as she or Vista was. She was as sure of that as she was of anything. Her own Parahuman abilities gave her a much more accurate sense of how a living thing moved than probably anyone but herself realized, and she'd swear blind that it was a real living creature.

Which happened to look exactly like a normal if rather distressingly large hornet from the far east, blown up twenty or thirty times in all directions and apparently as sapient as she was. Even at the time this had struck her as unlikely for several reasons, the primary one being from her own studies of biology that you couldn't GET insects that big. Never mind ones that were human-level intelligent or anything even vaguely close to that. Everything she'd read after the event, when she'd dug up several ebooks on entomology, just proved to her she had remembered correctly.

Yet she'd had a conversation with the fucking thing.

Amy rather wished she'd had a chance to touch the insect and see for herself what it was. Two things had stopped her, one being that she was more than busy with the immediate problem of keeping Missy Biron alive, the other one really coming down to fucking huge hornet that one-shotted Hookwolf. It might not particularly like being touched and while Amy was many things, a complete idiot wasn't one of them. Leaving aside medical ethics, risking annoying something that self-evidently dangerous seemed like a poor choice in her opinion.

So the back of her mind urge to reach out and touch abdomen had died unformed, stomped flat by every other part of her mind screaming no…

Even so she regretted the lost opportunity to learn something. Oh well. Perhaps she'd have another chance at some point.

Sighing faintly, she closed the photo and went back to reading the now rather long thread about the events of last night. The reactions of people in general were kind of hilarious, and she was genuinely concerned about poor Laotsunn who seemed to have drunk himself into a coma. Wondering how someone managed to type at all while going through what sounded like a positively unsafe amount of alcohol she kept reading, occasionally adding a comment here and there, sometimes just to stoke the crazy because honestly it was kind of funny.

She might have had a strange sense of humor, she thought with a small dark grin as she watched the reaction to one of her comments. Nearly as strange as Dennis's was, although she wasn't going to tell him that. And she was going to make him pay for somehow getting her PHO name changed.

Although she was just slightly amused by it. Again, he wasn't going to find out from her.

Shaking her head and correcting someone who was being an idiot on the internet, she finally closed the lid of the laptop and put it on her bedside table, before sliding under the covers, yawning. It was late and she was tired, and tomorrow was probably going to be weird at school with everyone running around spreading rumors about enormous hornets that didn't seem to like Nazis.

Which in itself was enough to make her quite well disposed towards the insect in question, even aside from her friendship with the younger girl the thing had saved. Amy very much did not like or approve of Nazis or their ilk, and sometimes felt it was a pity she wasn't more willing to suppress her own wish to be a good person and do something about the fuckers…

The reaction on Carol's face would almost be worth it, she thought with a tiny smirk. It would be a mix between AHA! I KNEW IT! and FUCK THE NAZI SCUM YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING YOU GET!

Her mother would probably lock up in indecision, Amy thought, giggling to herself for a moment. Not a single one of New Wave had any time at all for the Empire and she was fairly sure that even if none of them would admit to it in public, they were pretty pleased about Hookwolf's fate. Which was likely to be quite short on remaining time, she felt. Whatever toxins were involved with what the hornet had done to him, presumably stung him good and hard, they were really vicious. The neural damage alone pretty much guaranteed he had a limited shelf life before his body just stopped working regardless of his regeneration ability, which itself was the only reason he'd lived more than seconds after he'd been exposed. She was sure he was never going to regain consciousness. There was far too much damage, and she wasn't entirely certain that she could have fixed it by that point even if she wanted to, and was willing to ignore her own self-imposed moratorium on fiddling with brain structures anyway... Which she didn't, and wasn't.

Not for a Nazi. And definitely not for an unrepentant mass murdering bastard who had gleefully killed probably dozens of people by now and seriously injured far more, before he finally bit off way more than he could chew.

Served him right, she mused. With any luck the rest of them would annoy the hornet and meet the same fate. She for one wouldn't shed any tears, and doubted that a very large majority of the population of the city would either.

Except the other Nazi supporters, and fuck them.

Rolling over having turned off the light, she closed her eyes. The one she was worried about was Missy. That kid had experienced a really horrific event and it had shaken her to the core, Amy knew. The way the normally cheerful girl, who tried far too hard to show she was mature and professional, had broken down in her arms concerned her quite a lot. She liked Missy, for lots of reasons, and what she'd gone through was appalling. If the hornet, which she really did need to find a real name for, hadn't stepped in, Missy almost certainly wouldn't have made it and the younger girl knew that all too well.

Resolving to track down a therapist who was cleared for Parahuman identities, or willing to become so, regardless of what Director Piggot might say, for her friend tomorrow, Amy drifted off to sleep. A sleep that was filled with odd dreams revolving around insects she couldn't recall more than fragments of the next morning. Fragments that stubbornly refused to go away...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The mood in the penthouse was somber. And mixed in with that was anger, confusion, and dismay.

"What happened to that idiot?" Kaiser, although out of his armor as he was now it was Max, queried through clenched teeth, a tumbler of expensive spirits clutched in his hand. "Who did this?"

Several people exchanged glances, none of them looking particularly keen on answering and finding out what his reaction might be. Finally he sighed and pointed. "James. What happened?"

Krieg shrugged. "I'm not honestly completely sure," he replied in lightly German-accented English. "Brad went off on one of his 'team building exercises'," he added with a mild grimace and a certain amount of sarcasm. "You know, taking a number of the more bloodthirsty normals on a mission to deal with the undesirables. Normally in the most unsubtle manner he could think of."

"It's popular with the lower classes," Victor commented. "And keeps them loyal."

"It's also something that draws far too much attention and was inevitably going to backfire sooner or later," the other man replied with asperity. "There's a certain level of care required in such operations, even if the operations themselves are perfectly sensible. Brad has no idea how to even spell subtle never mind pull it off. You know what he's like."

There were a number of nods, although Stormtiger looked annoyed and was glaring at James. They didn't particularly get on, the former being of a similar mindset to Hookwolf, and Krieg fancying himself something of an intellectual and preferring to cause smaller amounts of property damage combined with much more terror. Max knew there was a place for both in achieving the goals he publicly espoused but didn't particularly believe in, as they were essentially convenient for his own end goal. Which was power, of course. It was always power. That's how the world worked.

Brad wanted the power to kill anyone he wanted to or didn't like.

Max wanted the power to control people like Brad and make them dance to his tune.

And lots of money, of course, but that went without saying.

But now Brad was in hospital, gravely injured, apparently due to some weird Case 53 or something taking an exception to his actions. And making its displeasure rather abundantly clear.

Just as Stormtiger was about to say something, almost certainly something inane that would spark another argument, he held up his hand. "Not now, Simon. Just… stop talking before you start," he ordered with a certain amount of irritation. Simon closed his mouth and folded his arms over his chest like a surly toddler, making him internally sigh. It was like herding fucking cats sometimes to get these idiots to all pull in the same direction…

Krieg, who was looking smugly pleased at Stormtiger's expression, continued when Max motioned to him. "What I've been told, although I can't prove most of it, is that Brad's group were merrily torching a couple of places where undesirables lurked, shot a few of them to force the rest back, then ran into a group of either ABB or Merchants on their way to the next location he'd decided on. It's a little unclear which although bearing in mind where it all happened my money is on Merchants. That caused a firefight, and the fucking idiots wiped each other out to the last man."

He shrugged as Max's hand tightened on his glass to the point the crystal made a warning cracking noise, causing him to carefully put it down before he ruined yet another extremely expensive and rare possession. Folding both hands in front of himself, he composed his face. "So it didn't even need another cape to cause Hookwolf to end up losing, what, a dozen or so of my people?"

"About fifteen, actually, and no," James replied apologetically, flinching a little when Max slammed his palm down on his desk.

"Fucking idiot!" he snarled. Simon started to say something and he pointed at the other man without taking his eyes off James. "Not a fucking word."

No one said anything while he took a few deep breaths. Eventually he waved at Krieg to continue. "So how did he end up in hospital," he asked at the same time.

"That's where it gets weird," James replied with a worried frown.

"I assume it's also where Vista comes into the picture?" Max queried.

"As far as I can figure out, and from asking around, a couple of people said they saw Vista heading towards where Brad was doing his thing about ten minutes before the firefight," Krieg replied with a nod. "Her power causes a strange visual distortion and sometimes people bother to look up. I don't have a clue if she was following him, randomly wandering around, or what, but she definitely got involved at some point. Brad lost the plot entirely based on the limited information we have and did his best to kill the little bitch. And nearly succeeded considering how badly hurt she was when she was dropped off at the hospital."

"And now we come to the meat of the problem," Max growled, leaning forward. "Dropped off by what?"

James was silent for a few seconds, looking at the other people around him, before he turned back to meet Max's irate gaze. "I'm... not entirely certain." Hastily he added, as Max felt his blood pressure spike, "No one is entirely certain. The PRT is getting pretty worked up about it from what I found out. It's hard, since that fucking legal explosion with Brockton General and that damned hell pit of a school, everyone is running around like madmen and all manner of problems are coming to light. Including a hell of a lot of useful sources, who are being grabbed left, right, and center. We've lost insight into more places than I like to think about. PRT, BBPD, the city administration, you name it. So our information gathering is really bad right now. It's a big problem."

"We can deal with that in time, I'm more interested in the immediate problem, in this case Brad and his stupidities."

Nodding, James went on, "Most of the real information we have came from PHO. I know, I know," he said quickly when Max put his hand over his eyes, "It's a stupid place full of stupid people doing stupid things, but we have to work with what we can get at the moment. If you filter out the obvious trolls, lunatics, and stupid people, the rest is at least helpful in some ways. We got photos, some video, a description of events that seems to hang together with other reports and the limited information we retrieved from the few sources in the PRT we still can get access to… It's not wonderful but it's better than nothing."

"Debatable, but go on," Max replied with a sigh. He really wasn't happy about any of this. Fucking Hookwolf.

Krieg picked up a high end tablet from the table and fiddled with it for a few moments, before handing it across to Max, who looked at the photo and recoiled in shock. "Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?" he said somewhat more vehemently than he'd intended.

"The biggest fucking insect I've ever heard of," James replied, his voice grim. "According to one guy on PHO who purports to be an entomologist, it's a hornet. Asian Giant Hornet, to be exact."

"I knew it was the fucking slants!" Simon remarked loudly.

Max threw an ashtray at him. "Shut the fuck up, when I want your opinion I will tell you, idiot," he snarled as Stormtiger reflexively ducked, the heavy cut glass object bouncing off the wall behind him. He looked angry but didn't respond, meeting Max's eyes defiantly with his own before he eventually lowered them and nodded. Looking back to James, who was watching with only slightly hidden amusement, he said, "There is Giant Hornet then there's that fucking monstrosity. I highly doubt Japan or whatever is infested with something that big. Or it would be known as Hell Insect Island or something."

"Yeah, it's a bit bigger than normal," James admitted, shuddering slightly. "As in roughly four feet long." Max gaped, looking back at the photo on the tablet in his hands. Comparing it to the rest of the room he was forced to agree that the description fitted what he could see, as horrifying as the mere thought was. Panacea, seen in profile close to the creature, was a good gauge as he'd met the girl a couple of times in public and knew how tall she was. The fact that she was able to work with that ghastly thing right there amazed him despite himself, although he was never going to admit that to anyone.

"A bit bigger?" he echoed somewhat faintly. "That's… is that even possible?"

"Evidently," James shrugged, waving at the tablet. "That's the problem. One of the problems, anyway. The PRT is still trying to figure out what it is and where it came from. PHO is of course coming up with suggestion after suggestion, each more inane than the last. Case 53 is one of their favorites, tied with Biotinker minion and the projection of a Master with a mental issue. Someone else suggested it came from hell, because of course they did, another guy said probably Aleph or something like that, there's yet another one who claims it's an alien… Leet says it's obviously from a video game I've never heard of and was wondering if it wanted to help with one of those idiot's capers." James rolled his eyes in disgust. "Fucking degenerates, that pair."

"True," Max nodded, still inspecting the photo. "What do you think?"

James shrugged again. "No idea, really. Projection or Case 53 seems the most likely. Biotinker is possible but we've never heard of one that makes insects before, and the problem there is that it can't be an actual insect no matter what it looks like from researching it a little. Insects can't grow that large. I don't understand the science but there's a limit, and that fucking thing is way past it. So leaving aside the appearance it's got to be something else than a normal insect on a huge scale. Projection is probably the least unlikely explanation, I think."

"How did it get Brad?" Max asked after a few more seconds of staring at the photo, finally putting the tablet down with a slight shudder. He wasn't at all fond of insects, especially stinging ones, and the idea of one so large it could steal a dog was making his skin crawl.

"It apparently has some pretty impressive venom," James responded, wincing. "Stung him or something. It's a fucking hornet. Just think how big the stinger must be, and how much venom it could inject…"

Max did. He felt ill.

"But how could it even get it into him when he was in his Changer form?" he asked, having tried to forget about the image that had come to mind.

"Bad luck, maybe? I don't know. All I know is that it did, somehow. Dropped him in his tracks according to the PRT report I got a redacted copy of. The only thing that kept him alive was his regen, and that barely pulled it off. Anyone else except maybe Ben," he nodded at Alabaster who looked smug, "Or Lung, would be fucked. I don't know if it was the quantity of venom or the toxicity, or both, but it absolutely screwed him. They're not expecting him to recover." He shook his head as Max rubbed the side of his cheek with one finger, thinking about what he'd been told. Simon appeared like he was angry about the fate his friend had suffered, and without a word Max pointed at him and shook his head slightly. Now was not the time for the sort of arguing these meetings so often devolved into.

"Anyway," James continued after letting him stew on the information for a while. "That damned hornet-monster took out Brad, then picked up Vista and flew her to hospital. Panacea said it was the only reason the kid survived. Which at least means we're not looking at the Protectorate going crazy because one of ours killed one of their Wards."

Which was a valid point. Max had no particular reason to refrain from removing a Ward, or any hero, from the playing field, but he very much didn't want to do it in a way that could be traced back to the Empire. Or at least provably traced back. There was a certain amount of value in making people know full well who was behind something of that nature but never have enough evidence to do more than claim it to be true. Spreading fear without sparking reprisals was a delicate game. But worth it in the long run.

Just look at New Wave. One of theirs died, and they'd become far more cautious about doing anything particularly effective. He was more than pleased about the small investment in money and time that had required to engineer. And constantly amused at the thought of the impotent rage those assholes must feel, knowing he was untouchable without them ending up causing themselves more trouble than him…

The PRT was a different kettle of fish though. They had a lot more resources than New Wave did, and federal backing. Luckily they were also incompetent by and large and hamstrung by their own politics and ponderous nature. A shrewd operator could keep slipping through the cracks, as he had done for years, and his father before him. Being directly implicated in the death of a Ward at the hands of a known violent maniac like Brad would, on the other hand, make spinning it to their advantage far harder. Not worth the risk, to put it in plain terms.

If he wanted a Ward dead, it would be done quietly and untraceably, leaving only rumors and no hard evidence at all.

James was right. Brad definitely didn't have a subtle bone in his body. His approach was often useful even so but this particular fuckup was entirely his fault.

Looked like he'd paid for his mistake though.

The big problem was that Max couldn't afford to just quietly pretend nothing happened and move on, no matter how much simpler that might be in some ways. Their supporters would expect a response, some demonstration that they were still in control, and the public who didn't support them would be in even more need of something to stop them believing that the Empire had a weakness. Projection of a united front and invincibility was all important in this game.

"The girl lived?" he asked after a moment.

"Yeah, Panacea got to her in time. Brad damn near killed her, you can see the blood right there," James nodded, indicating the tablet which Max wasn't particularly keen on looking at again. "I'm told she's still in hospital recovering though. No idea when she'll be back on the street. The PRT finally turned up to take statements, then went out and looked at the scene. They recovered Brad, Panacea checked him over, and she said he wasn't likely to wake up and there's nothing she could do because his brain was fried."

"What brain?" Victor asked snidely, having been following the discussion with interest. Even though he agreed Max gave him a warning look, as did Stormtiger, the latter's rather baleful. Smirking slightly the blond went quiet again.

"So at the moment we have no idea if he'll recover without healing. Panacea won't or can't fix him. I don't know if Othala's power could," James went on. "We'd have to get access to him to try it and that will be a hard job. They have a lot of security at the hospital right now, both PRT and some private company the administration hired. I'm almost certain they're a PMC pretending to be a security company. Not sure who yet, but I can't help feeling that we want to be careful. Not to mention I'm not sure it's worth trying to retrieve him in the first place."

"Explain," Max suggested, curious to hear his rationale while thinking he was probably right. Hookwolf was extremely useful as a weapon, but if his judgment was so bad that he thought kicking off a war with the PRT was a good use of his time, he clearly had more than one screw loose. Not that this was the first time Max had thought that, merely the point where it became so obvious anyone could see it.

"He's been getting worse for months, we all know it," James said, having clearly thought through his words carefully. "Some of the things he's done have been… not well considered, let's put it like that."

Nodding slowly, Max listened.

"When he was doing the dog fights and the occasional blooding of the troops, he was useful. And on the street in a fight he's a massive force on our side. But he's been wandering off more and more often doing things that attract the wrong sort of attention, and that stunt that let the PRT grab him was the worst of them. Right up to this one anyway. Not to mention that after he slaughtered two squads of troopers when he escaped they really did take the gloves off. I'm not surprised they finally put a kill order on him after that. It takes a lot, but he went way over the line. But at least he didn't drag the rest of us into it. Saturday night would have done, I can almost guarantee it, and we're not ready yet for that sort of problem."

There was silence in the room for a while as everyone considered his words. Stormtiger still looked truculent but even he seemed to, for once, to be thinking. Finally Max sighed and replied, "Your points aren't invalid, unfortunately. For the most part I agree. I still find the fact that he got his ass handed to him by a fucking insect completely insane though."

"Oh, sure, so do I," James replied, shaking his head in disbelief. "It's ridiculous. Still, it happened."

"And we're just going to let that bug get away with it even if Brad did fuck up?" Alabaster demanded.

"When did I ever say that?" Max asked pleasantly with a dark look in his eyes as he gazed at the extremely white young man. "We can't let this insult stand no matter who or what caused it, or whatever internal issues we may have had with our sadly fallen comrade."

Stormtiger and Alabaster grinned nastily, although Victor and James were watching him warily having exchanged a glance. They didn't look particularly convinced, he noticed. Most of the rest were appearing various combinations of confused, concerned, and cautious. Rune was staring at the tablet she'd quietly picked up a few minutes ago, her face somewhat paler than usual.

"How do you want to go about expressing our displeasure then, Max?" James asked after a couple of seconds.

"First we need to find the damn thing," Victor pointed out quite accurately. "We have no idea where it lives, or if it's a projection where the Master lives."

"Somewhere roughly in the Docks as a whole, I'd guess," James suggested thoughtfully. "Considering that Brad was right on the edge of that zone, and how many places there are you could hide a small army, it makes sense. Going to be a huge problem searching for it."

"Especially since there are Christ knows how many tunnels and that sort of thing all over the place there," Alabaster commented. "I doubt even those crazy dock workers know most of them. I read they go back to the time the city was first founded in some cases. If it's down there it would be a nightmare to dig it out."

Nodding, Max pondered the problem. They were both right. Very few people thought poking around in that whole sector of the city was fun, because historically it so often wasn't. Even Marquis and his own dad had avoided it since a couple of incidents had proven it to be far more trouble than it was worth. There was nothing much there other than decaying infrastructure no one living knew the full extent of, hard people who lived hard lives and tended to become highly irked when someone from outside turned up telling them what to do and reacted badly, and a level of general weirdness that made one wonder what the point was anyway. Far easier and safer to avoid it and pretend it didn't exist.

Even the PRT did that. Even the Teeth had done that and those lunatics were absolutely insane.

He wasn't, if he was completely honest with himself, entirely sanguine about throwing caution to the winds and delving into an area his dad had more than once commented should be nuked just to be safe…

It was, after all, the only way to be sure.

"We keep an eye open for that bug," he finally decided. "At the moment we don't know enough. If we get a chance, we can try dealing with it, but without more information we don't even know where to start, so I don't want to waste resources going in blind. Victor, you talk to your contacts, see if we can get eyes inside the PRT again and find out what they know. Don't take chances, we're shorthanded without Brad, but see what you can do." Victor nodded acceptance of the order.

"James, you see if you can find out more about what actually happened to Brad. How did that fucking thing take him down. What defenses do we need against whatever it did. And if there is any hope of getting Brad back and fixed up."

"I'll do what I can but it'll take time. I wouldn't count on the last point being something we can do either."

"Fair enough, but try anyway."

"I will, Max."

"Everyone else, keep your eyes and ears open. Don't take chances if you do see the thing though. If it could take out Hookwolf, it's dangerous." His eyes were fixed on Stormtiger and Alabaster who had been having a whispered conversation he could easily guess the subject of. "I mean it, do not fuck around."

"And if we do find where the bug is?" Alabaster asked. "What then?"

"If it's a Master, we make an offer they can't refuse," Max replied in a low voice. "Same with a Case 53. I'm sure we can come to an arrangement."

"If it's a Biotinker?"

"Burn them to the ground and salt the earth," he said immediately. "I do not want a repeat of Ellisburg. Not even a lunatic would."

He could see that every one of them agreed. Rune was still looking at the tablet, but nodded absently.

"What if it's an alien?" James asked with a grin, making Max sigh. Sometimes that man had the strangest sense of humor that came out at the most inopportune time. Typical fucking German…

"It's not an alien. Just… go do your jobs." As James smirked a little then got up, he turned his eyes to Stormtiger, then Alabaster. "Do not disappoint me, either of you."

"Of course not, Kaiser," the latter replied, smiling back at him. He got up as well, Stormtiger following suit, and both left the boardroom together.

Max had the annoying feeling there was going to be a problem with one or both of them at some point. He might have to make an example…

"I wonder how many more of them there are?" Rune said very quietly, before putting the tablet down, rising, and hurrying away after Othala, Cricket, and the twins, none of whom had apparently heard her. Moments later Max was alone in the room.

And thinking hard about the teenager's question.

Not liking some of the scenarios it raised at all…

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

As she was getting ready to go into work, Emily felt her phone vibrate. Putting her coffee pot down having poured a second mugful, she retrieved the device and tapped it a couple of times, then read the message.

Staring at it for some seconds thoughtfully she finally put it back in her pocket and added sugar to her coffee, then slowly drank it wondering what the Empire would do when they heard Hookwolf had been removed as a problem for good.

And wondering who or what was due the reward from his kill order...

Chapter Text

Writing the last three words of the essay assignment, Taylor dropped the pen on the paper and leaned back with a sigh of relief. Her enhanced body meant that aches and pains were a thing of the past as far as she could tell, but this sort of thing was still somewhat tedious.

Regardless, it was done, and having read it over and checked for mistakes, she nodded to herself, then put the paperwork into the envelope. She'd managed to get all the current work done by eleven, having woken up early feeling in a good mood and ready to face the day.

Apparently the improvements she'd made to herself had all sorts of useful effects, not all physical. She found her thinking somewhat clearer in a hard to define sense and her memory, always good to begin with, improved too. Her merged form had a lot of benefits over the standard human one, the massive boost in thinking speed being one of the best perks. It made this sort of thing take a lot less time than it used to although she had to be careful to write slowly enough that the pen didn't break…

Even so, her work was getting faster and easier to complete and she was very pleased with how it was all going. And now she had the rest of the day free to do other things with a clear conscience, which was handy.

Sealing the envelope after double-checking everything was inside, she took it downstairs with her as she went into the kitchen. It seemed like snack time to her. While she was munching on an apple held in an insectoid lower limb, having manifested a spare pair of arms for the utility of it and as an experiment, she made a sandwich with her human hands. The level of multitasking she had these days was ridiculous and it seemed to work pretty well even aside from her arthropod control aspect. In the last few days she'd been experimenting with reading two books at the same time, using Vespa to do the reading and her scorpion, who she'd finally called Impy, to turn the pages, while she read the second one more normally. It had turned out to work perfectly which was gratifying. And if she wasn't mistaken, Vespa's eyesight was also improving steadily. The hornet's eyes were nearly as sharp as her own, at least with glasses, were, which was noticeably better than she recalled from the first time they'd linked. She assumed it was all part and parcel of the strange growth process.

Both creatures were still very gradually enlarging during a merge, but seemed to be slowing down at a rate that suggested to her that whatever was really causing the effect had nearly reached its limit. Probably a good thing since Impy had outgrown her tank by a significant margin now, being nearly the length of her arm from nose to tail with her claws stretching out close to fourteen inches.

She was a very, very large scorpion.

Taylor's dad had looked at her with wide eyes the last time she'd show him the creature, and paled a little. Apparently he was less accustomed to scorpions that were much too large than he was to hornets. Or even jumping spiders…

To be fair Jumpy was really very cute indeed, on the rare occasions Taylor unmerged from the spider. She'd worried that she was being mean to Jumpy by keeping her merged all the time, but as far as she could tell the spider was entirely unbothered by this, as were all of the others. Jumpy was much closer to something that had an actual mind than any of the rest, except Impy possibly due to the sheer size of both of them now, but even she was nowhere near the brain power of even a mouse yet. Probably remarkably bright for a spider, but not exactly intelligent in any real way.

But they were definitely increasing there too. Taylor could feel it through her power. It was very interesting indeed and she wondered whether it would continue, what the limit was, and if it would pass down to any offspring… Perhaps she'd find out at some point.

However the crux of the matter was that none of her merged arthropods appeared to be in any distress as a result of the process, and if anything seemed to like it, from the impressions she got. Which assuaged her guilt over taking them over like that, which had been slight but real.

As a result she'd added several crabs, the firespider, three other spiders of various species including a black widow she'd located at the union office a week ago to her delight, two different centipedes, a wasp, a cockroach, and a few other things to the merged creatures. So far there had been no issue with doing this and no signs that it was a strain at all. If anything it was getting easier. Everything just seemed to click into place now, with hardly any effort. Apparently like in so many things practice really helped, she thought, slicing her finished sandwiches in two, then going to the table to sit down.

Because Impy was so big now she'd decided to just keep her merged too, along with Jumpy, since if nothing else she didn't yet have suitable enclosures for them at the moment. She was building up quite a library of arthropods, as she thought of it, and the more she experimented the more ideas she came up with to mix aspects of them all into something new. When it warmed up enough that all the really interesting bugs became easier to find she was looking forward to adding all sorts of cool stuff to her repertoire…

And creating some fun hybrids too. She could see a lot of possibilities there for useful outcomes, although she'd have to be careful to keep them all under control. It was possible people might find them a little upsetting, for some reason. It was odd but seemed to be a thing.

The sole exception to her current collection that she wasn't keeping merged was Vespa. The hornet was a special case for a number of reasons. Taylor still hadn't quite decided when she was going to try recreating the deep link she had with Vespa with something else, but she was fairly sure she'd figured out how to do it now. In theory. Maybe.

Smiling to herself, she finished the first sandwich and picked up the second. "I think it will work but without trying I'm not sure," she commented to the by-now extremely impressively large hornet, who was close to six inches long. Her hornet self was eating a small piece of salami, which Taylor found quite tasty from that viewpoint. And it seemed to agree with the insect's metabolism although she was pretty sure that wild hornets didn't subsist on pizza ingredients. Even though they were carnivorous.

Holding up her free hand she idly changed it like she'd tried on Sunday night with her dad, to the crab/scorpion exoskeleton armored form. Turning it over she admired it. "This is bizarre but it's fun too," she told the hornet. "I really need to see how well it holds up, though. Feels really tough, and I know how strong the super-hornet body is. This should be way tougher…" Musing on methods to combine such armor with other forms, which looked simple enough to do, she reverted her hand to normal, finished eating, then tidied up. Flying Vespa onto her head, she went back upstairs to use the toilet, before returning to the kitchen. Having sent her dad a text telling him her plans, she put her coat on, grabbed her backpack with the library books in, added the envelope of schoolwork, and left the house, Vespa tucked securely under her hair on the back of her neck as usual.

There were some more books she needed to get, these ones to return having finished them and largely memorized the contents, and she wanted to visit the pet shop again. Mike had lots of fascinating creatures available and Taylor was planning on making a list now she had a better idea of what she could do. It would still require some bigger tanks, which was a work in progress. She was pondering creating some more hybrids for the small tanks on her shelf, if only because they looked sad empty like they currently were. She kept adding the inhabitants to her internal library, after all.

Grinning to herself she jogged along, reveling in how easy it was these days. Her overall physical condition had definitely improved quite considerably even past the merged enhancements, she'd discovered after taking careful notes for weeks. She'd lost the last traces of pudge now and her muscles were noticeably more toned. She even had abs for heaven's sake! Not something she'd ever expected, but highly welcome.

Still a stick, she thought to herself wryly, but more stick insect than stick figure. Which amused her enough she started giggling inside her hood.

Life was certainly looking up in all sorts of ways she'd never have considered or believed a few months ago.

And it seemed set to continue in that vein, which was extremely welcome after the shit she'd gone through for so long. Having her dad back was the best part of it, although she certainly put her powers a very, very close second.

Cheerfully humming to herself, she kept moving, finding the chill damp of the day bracing rather than oppressive even while looking forward to warmer days.

Shortly she was sitting on a nice warm bus having slipped her envelope into a mail box, traveling towards the center of the city while playing with very slowly expanding her sensing range, her power now almost resigned to her careful and measured experimentation even though she could still feel it wanting to throw caution to the wind.

She hadn't quite broken it of that habit, but it was learning.

Just like her. And apparently having just as much fun.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"How are you feeling today?"

Missy sighed as she picked at the bedclothes over her chest. "Tired. Depressed I guess. Embarrassed. Worried. Pick any one you want, I've got lots."

Amy, who was sitting in the chair next to her bed, chuckled, smiling a little. Missy glanced sideways at her and noticed that the older girl seemed less stressed-looking than she so often was, although also tired. Which was normal enough for the healer.

"May I?" Amy lifted her hand, motioning with it towards Missy's wrist. The blonde nodded wordlessly and moved her arm closer. Putting her hand on it, Amy was still for a few seconds. "Nothing physically wrong now. Stress hormones are a little high, not surprisingly, and you still need at least a couple more days of good meals to rebuild your resources. I don't want to force it, so it's best to do it the normal way." She released the younger girl's wrist and sat back in her chair, regarding Missy closely.

"What's bothering you at the moment?" she asked a moment or two later.

Sighing again, Missy dropped her head back on the pillow. She was still in bed because it was too early in her opinion to get up, and she was feeling mentally tired even if not physically so. The hospital staff hadn't pushed her, her actual doctor telling her that she needed the rest and time to recuperate no matter what her lack of injuries might suggest. After such a massive trauma even with Parahuman healing, it was natural to require time to recover from everything. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and clearly Amy and he trusted each other, and she trusted Amy, so she'd listen to the man.

To be honest it was kind of a relief to just not have to do anything for a while. Not go home to the shouting and the passive aggressive bullshit, or go to work and deal with being sidelined and Sophia.

Of the two Sophia was far worse, in her view, although the way she was treated like a fragile china doll pissed her off something terrible. Hence her, in hindsight, very unwise decision to go looking for something useful to do.

Unfortunately she'd found it, and had discovered the hard way that some things might just be a touch out of her ability to handle no matter what she might have assumed at the time. The end result hadn't been fun and every time she recalled that night she felt sick. Partly due to embarrassment from not being able to live up to what she felt she should, partly due to recalling the pain and the blood and the dead people and…

Taking a slow breath, Missy forced that imagery out of her mind.

It had not been her finest moment. And sooner or later she was going to have to face people she'd rather not while feeling the way she did right now. She'd let them down, done something stupid, very nearly paid the final price for it, and was wondering what to do about it.

Explaining this to Amy was going to be hard, she thought dismally.

Amy nodded. "You fucked up and you're obsessing about it," she commented with a knowing air. Missy stared at her and blinked a couple of times.

"That's not quite what…"

"It's the gist of it, yeah?"

"…yeah. More or less I guess." Missy rolled her head to gaze at the ceiling. She could see Amy out of the corner of one eye, the healer watching her and waiting. "I can't stand being sidelined so much," she finally went on in a low voice, feeling stupid and embarrassed admitting something she'd never told anyone else. At least in such straightforward terms. "I'm the one with the longest experience in the whole Wards lineup and everyone treats me like I'm just a kid."

"You are just a kid," Amy pointed out, although not unkindly. It was odd hearing her voice so… not snarky, Missy thought. Normally the other girl gave off the impression that she was wishing she was somewhere else even while she healed people efficiently and quickly, but… Right now she was as relaxed, in a sense, as Missy had ever seen her. Missy liked Amy a lot, and admired her, even though they weren't close. The last few days had made it clear the respect went both ways, so the comment didn't have the same effect it would have done if it had come from Sophia, or even any of the other Wards. She half-sighed, half-laughed.

"I'm still the most experienced," she replied making Amy chuckle.

"I'm not denying that. You're definitely the most professional Ward by a long way, and have the most powerful abilities. Probably in the entire ENE division to be honest, assuming that what I think your power does is right. But you're still not even thirteen yet and you're tiny." She poked Missy in the ribs, grinning. "Pocket sized even. It's cute, and people will always point that out even if you glare at them. Doesn't mean you're not good at what you do, and you'll get better."

"Thanks, I guess?" Missy grumbled, although she was smiling a little despite herself. Anyone else calling her cute was going to wish they hadn't, but somehow from Amy it didn't sting as much as it usually did. Because the other girl was her friend and not using it to dismiss her, she thought.

"You're welcome. But the point is that you're very young and being so small, you have a limit to your endurance. Everyone does, but yours is physically probably less than a lot of other people. You're in good shape, yeah, but you're not an athlete like Shadow Stalker is for example." Amy shrugged as Missy watched her. "Hookwolf is… was… a fucking nightmare. His regeneration let him keep going through almost anything, he didn't get tired nearly as fast as practically anyone else would, he was a big guy and very strong, and of course he was totally nuts. Anyone would have had huge problems taking the bastard on one on one. Even Armsmaster had trouble with that fucker, you know that as well as I do. Vicky nearly got her ass handed to her by him once even though she's much stronger and faster, because he just didn't know when to give up. About the only person who could probably take him out quickly would be Lung and I wouldn't want to have guaranteed that, honestly. They fought several times and he always managed to escape."

Amy leaned forward, clasping her hands together and putting her elbows on her knees as she gazed at Missy. "You, a twelve year old girl who's about seventy pounds soaking wet, held that shitbag off single handed, while seriously wounded, for nearly fifteen minutes during which he was trying as hard as he possibly could to murderize you. I doubt any of the other Wards, or quite a few of the Protectorate members, could have done the same in the same circumstances without backup or equipment." She smiled a little darkly as Missy thought over her words.

"But he'd have won if that hornet didn't step in," she finally said, although Amy's remarks had definitely cheered her up a bit.

"Oh, sure, you were about to be absolutely boned," the healer said happily, grinning as Missy winced, glared at her, then couldn't help laughing. "Completely shredded. Little bits of Vista all over the street…"

"Oh my god, Amy," Missy gasped, rolling in laughter at the black humor and the weird relief she suddenly felt. "Shut up!"

"Vista mince would be on the menu… Ooh! Vistaburgers!"

Missy pulled the pillow out from under her head and threw it at the chortling older girl, making her duck although not stop laughing. "Enough. Please. I had a really good grumpy mood going on and you've ruined it now."

"My job here is done," Amy replied with a satisfied look, tossing the pillow back to Missy, who replaced it and lay back, feeling distinctly more cheerful although still at the back of her mind tired and worried.

"You are a very strange person, Amy," she said, making Amy grin again. "Why aren't you like this in public?"

The grin faded. Amy seemed to think for a while as Missy waited, curious to see what the answer would be. "It's complicated," Amy finally replied with a sigh of her own. "Part of it is, you see some absolutely horrible things doing what I do. You were nowhere near the worst, believe me. Although seeing a friend hurt that badly is… unpleasant. People are also… well, let's say that someone thanking me and meaning it rather than just making mouth noises is the exception rather than the rule. Sure, I heal people because it's the right thing, and I'm not expecting gratitude because people are assholes, but it would be nice if they didn't treat me like an underpaid fast food worker who just gave them the wrong order." She grimaced as Missy couldn't help giggling even though she felt bad for her friend.

"You see the worst of people doing this job, as well as the best," Amy continued quietly, meeting Missy's eyes. "Hospitals aren't fun places for the most part. People don't come here because they want to, after all. Even so, it's annoying having so many dickheads demand that I drop everything and kiss their booboo better because they're more important that the code blue I'm trying to keep alive. Believe me, that happens. More that you'd expect."

"Kiss it better…" Missy giggled, finding the comment hilarious for some reason. Amy reluctantly smiled as she kept laughing. "You could!"

"I could. I'm not going to," Amy assured her with a smirk. "Most of them aren't my type aside from anything else."

She shrugged. "But yeah, while I guess I enjoy helping people, although sometimes I really want to kick some of them in the dick…"

"Which you could heal," Missy suggested with her own smirk.

"Which I could heal, yes, but the doctors would glare at me," Amy nodded, grinning a little, "Even though I like helping, I just find a lot of it all… tedious. Same shit, different day, kind of." She shook her head. "It gets to you after a while. Ordinary doctors have the same problem, although without the Parahuman part obviously. And this city is more likely than most places to make the work get very suddenly much too exciting too, which adds that perfect little sprinkle of total chaos and complete terror when you're least wanting it."

"We do seem to have some weird things sometimes," Missy nodded wisely. "It's home but it's fucked up."

"Yeah. That it is." Amy picked up the jug of water on the bedside table and poured two glasses, then handed Missy one which she took, taking a sip from the other. "And all this legal garbage that's kicked off recently is causing even more stress, which isn't helping much. Doesn't affect me personally, really, at least not at the moment, but the hospital staff are having a lot of problems."

"I heard that was going on but I don't know much about it," Missy admitted.

The other girl waved her free hand to indicate the entire area. "Shit's fucked up," she explained helpfully, making Missy snicker. "It started with Winslow. Which is a shithole. No, that's being unfair to shitholes. It's worse. We've had more injuries from there than you'd ever believe, going back long before I Triggered. The hospital has been doing what it was supposed to in reporting all the crap they've found, but long story short, there's been a whole shitload of people taking bribes, threatening people, you name it, to cover all that up. It all came to a head about six weeks ago when someone was brought in from there in a really bad state, after something… absolutely revolting… was done to them. A 'prank' they claimed." Amy made little sarcastic finger quotes, her face expressing deep anger.

"If I ever find out who did it, I'll show them what I think of that sort of fucking prank. Assholes. It was attempted murder as far as I'm concerned."

Missy shook her head in disbelief. "A school let things like that go on?"

"Yeah. No, I don't know why either. It's fucked up. But anyway, I had to heal this poor person up, and they nearly ended up in a coma before I got to them. All sorts of problems. Even after I healed them there were lingering aftereffects, like with you, but hopefully those are resolved now. I haven't run into them to check, although I do wonder. So the hospital ended up taking that event as the last straw because they had promises in writing that Winslow would stop that sort of thing happening again. Obviously they lied their asses off. The administration went off the deep end, lots of things happened, and the end result is politically total chaos and god knows where it's going to end up. Winslow is fucked though. Closed down completely like you've heard, I guess, and so far no indication when it'll reopen. Or if it will."

"I saw some threads about that on PHO but I didn't read much of them," Missy replied with a nod. "It didn't look very interesting, honestly."

"It's boring as hell for the most part unless you like local politics," Amy chuckled. "Which most people don't I guess. Not surprising considering what the local politics tend to be. But the whole thing has really blown up like you wouldn't believe and every time I look into it there's something new. The web of corruption being uncovered is breathtaking in the sheer ghastly scope of horribleness as Carol put it." She smiled a little. "She is following the whole thing with great interest, of course. I get the impression that she knows some of the people involved, but we don't really talk about it."

Amy thought for a moment, then smiled slightly less darkly. "The patient who kicked all this off was one of the few people who thanked me and meant it. Genuinely respectful and grateful. I don't see that very much. Snarky as fuck too. I like that."

"Who would have guessed?" Missy replied dryly, making Amy grin. "You're so sweet and cheerful all the time."

"Indeed I am, young one. Never forget my sheer niceness. It's off the fucking scale."

The pair grinned at each other. "Yeah. I can see." Missy rubbed her eyes, feeling a wave of tiredness, more mental than physical, sweep over her. It passed a moment later. When she opened her eyes Amy was looking at her with mild concern. "Nothing, just tired," she said to the unanswered query. After a moment, she asked, "What do you think about that fuck off big hornet that saved me and nuked Hookwolf?" The blonde girl was desperately curious about the whole thing, not only because she owed her life to a vast insect, which was weird beyond belief. She'd read all the threads on PHO about it she could find and while there were an awful lot of guesses and theories, ranging from almost plausible to batshit insane, no one had any actually provable answers.

The healer sighed faintly. "I really don't know what that was," she replied a few seconds of thought later. "I'm certain it was alive. I didn't touch it, because I'm not fucking daft, but my power is pretty good at letting me look at a living thing and work out if it is a living thing. That hornet was as alive as I am. It's not any sort of projection I've ever heard of, I'm sure of that."

"Case 53 maybe?" Missy pondered out loud, recalling all the various ideas that had been on PHO so far. That was a common one although in many ways it didn't fit as far as she was concerned.

"Possible," Amy allowed, nodding. "I've met quite a few Case 53s and they can be really weird. But… I don't personally think so. I didn't see the tattoo, but then I didn't actually look for it at the time, so that doesn't prove anything. But in general, as far as I know, either Case 53s are more or less normal human-appearance, or really divergent from anything alive. That thing looked exactly like a much, much too big Asian Giant Hornet. I've checked. Exact match except way too fucking large to even be viable. Never mind the intelligence. No Case 53 on record as far as I can find fits such a profile. That doesn't mean it can't happen, I suppose, because no one actually knows how Case 53s happen to start with, but there's no record of anything like this before. At least from any source I could find. The PRT might know more but they're not saying."

Wondering if she could find out, Missy nodded her understanding.

"A Biotinker did it?" she suggested, thinking of the next most popular explanation, and the one that made people really worried. "Like Blasto or Nilbog?"

Her friend's face twisted. "Those fuckers. Blasto is an idiot and does plants mostly, and his stuff is crap. I've…" She paused, then resumed, "Let's not go there, but trust me, he's nowhere near good enough to pull off a sapient giant hornet. Nilbog? Murderous little monster that someone should nuke from orbit. And the hornet didn't look anything like his work. Not even close. If there's another Biotinker around capable of something that impressive, I've never heard anything at all about them. Might be new, sure, but who knows?" She sighed a little. "I really don't know. It's possible but there's just not enough information yet. I hope not because the public and the PRT would go mental."

"What's left?" Missy asked, thinking. "It can't be natural, right?"

"Definitely not, no," Amy agreed. "Not on anything approaching our planet."

"Is it an alien then, do you think?" Missy was confused, but the idea, while it sounded nuts, was also sort of cool. Her friend laughed with a shake of her head.

"Probably not but I wouldn't want to rule it out completely. It's probably not a demon either." She finished her water then put the glass back on the table, leaning back and crossing her legs at the ankle as she thought. "That's the problem. Every idea someone has you can come up with a good argument against as well as for. If I could touch it, I might be able to work it out, but I'd have to find it first, then ask if it minded. Because I'm fucking well not going to assume. I saw what it did to Hookwolf…"

"I saw it do it," Missy commented in a low voice with a shiver. "It was much worse than you'd believe." She could still smell the burning. "Although the glowing was impressive."

"Glowing?" Amy echoed curiously with a look at her. "What glowing?"

"Oh." She thought back, and realized she'd forgotten to mention that when Miss Militia had interviewed her on Sunday morning. She'd been feeling very out of sorts then, extremely depressed and angsty, and wasn't in the mood to think too hard about what she'd experienced. Apparently she'd managed to omit what might be a pertinent detail, which was something else she'd get a lecture about sooner or later. Sighing a little, she explained what had happened, making Amy look intrigued.

"Huh. That's… odd." The healer thought while Missy waited. "Very odd. That sounds like a luciferin reaction, but hornets don't have that. Fireflies do, but…" She pondered the matter. "Strange. I didn't see anything that looked like a light generation organ."

"The whole thing lit up," Missy commented. "Or nearly. It had light coming from all sorts of places, even the wings. Really bright too, when it first did that it was like a green flashgun. I had spots in front of my eyes."

"Wow. That's impressively high output. Impossibly high output, technically, I think." Amy appeared fascinated. "I wonder how it does that?"

Having no answer, or knowledge of what was involved, Missy just shrugged.

They were silent for a while, each busy with their own thoughts. Amy was apparently mulling over the information Missy had given her while Missy herself was trying to come up with other possible origins for the hornet. Eventually she said, "Could it be a Changer, maybe?" somewhat tentatively, causing Amy to look up at her from where she'd been studying the floor by all appearances. The other girl frowned, so she expanded on her comment.

"The hornet. Maybe it's a Changer power? It might explain how it vanished so well. A couple of people on PHO suggested that, and lots of other people laughed at them. There was a lot of arguing about it and I couldn't really work out what the problem was but they seemed to decide it wasn't a thing."

Nodding her understanding, Amy replied, "That's because, at least in every case I'm aware of, a Changer form is always equal or greater in mass than the Parahuman starts off with. No one understands where the extra mass comes from, or where it goes when they change back, but that's powers bullshit for you. The point is, think of Hookwolf. He went from a guy about two hundred pounds or so to at least half a ton, sometimes more. We never did find out if that was his limit either. Lung, he starts off as a more or less normal human and has ended up big enough to go toe to toe with Leviathan! The Nazi cape Night is another one, much larger and heavier in her Changer form than as a human. Even her partner Fog seems to be about the same mass in his Changer form as he was to begin with, although it's basically gas at that point. It's why he can fill so much space with his acid."

Shrugging a little as Missy thought over her words, she went on, "Now that hornet, sure, it's fucking huge for an insect, but it certainly wasn't anything close to a human in actual mass. You could see from just how it walked. I've watched the security videos, and thought about what I saw, and I'd put an educated guess on it weighing about thirty or forty pounds at most. So, if it's a Changer, and using the normal rules Changers seem to use based on everything I'm aware of, the human in question would need to be about six or less. Or an implausibly tiny midget." She shook her head a little bewilderedly. "That seems unlikely. And it didn't sound like a little kid either. It sounded pissed off, yeah, but more like an adult than a toddler. And I doubt a kid that young would have been able to deal with Hookwolf and save you so effectively too."

"So if it is a Changer…" Missy trailed off.

"It's doing something no one has seen before. Yeah. I can't promise that's impossible, because with powers who the hell knows, but it's at least unlikely enough that no one is seriously considering it." Amy spread her hands. "The issue is that if you think it out you keep ending up with nothing useful, or at least sensible based on current knowledge. Which is kind of irritating."

"Weird."

"Yeah. Very weird."

The older girl looked at her watch. "Sorry, I need to get on with my rounds. I came in early to talk to you and see how you're doing."

"A lot better now, thanks," Missy replied honestly. "Not good, but better."

There was a tap on the door, before someone she'd never seen opened it and peered in. "Oh, hey, Doctor Willis. You made it." Amy smiled at the dark-complexioned woman who had turned up, Doctor Willis stepping inside and closing the door behind her. She was holding a thick file in one hand. "Missy, this is Doctor Willis. She's a therapist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder and that sort of issue. I asked her if she'd mind having a talk with you." Startled, Missy looked between them then opened her mouth.

"Don't worry, Miss Biron, I am fully covered by more NDAs than you'd believe, and have worked with PRT and Protectorate staff in the past on a number of occasions," Doctor Willis assured her, not moving from the door but watching her with interest. "Your identity is safe with me, and in fact I was already aware of it for reasons I can't go into. May I take a seat?"

Turning to Amy, Missy searched her eyes. The gaze of her friend was sympathetic and knowing. Staring into the brown orbs, Missy finally sighed and nodded. "Sure."

"Thank you." The woman walked over and sat in the second of the two chairs the room had, then studied Missy for a moment. Fidgeting under the gaze, Missy met her eyes directly. After a few seconds Doctor Willis smiled faintly. "Yes. I think we do indeed need a talk. Do you want Panacea to stay?"

Turning to Amy, Missy thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No. That's all right. Thanks, Amy."

"My pleasure, Missy. I'll check in on you later, OK? And if you need me for anything, just hit the call button and ask the nurse," her friend replied, getting to her feet. Putting her hand on Missy's shoulder, she squeezed gently for a moment. "Talk to her. It'll help."

"Did it help you?" Missy couldn't help asking. Amy sighed.

"I'm a work in progress," she replied with a glance at Doctor Willis, who looked somewhat amused. "And waited way too long to ask for help. But that's a story for later." Walking over to the door, she looked back, smiled, then left, pulling her costume's hood up in the process. Amy Dallon went through the door, and Panacea left, Missy thought with a small grin. Turning back to the patiently waiting doctor, she raised an eyebrow.

"Now what?" she queried.

"Now we discuss whatever you want to discuss, and I see if I can help you put things into a context that helps," the doctor replied calmly. "I don't expect instant results, but based on my experience, we're unlikely to make things worse at least." She smiled when Missy giggled. "Shall we start?"

"Might as well," Missy replied. "I don't have anything else to do and there's nothing good on TV."

For some reason she was definitely feeling better, although the deep down worry and tiredness was still there. Amy had helped her a lot, and with any luck, this doctor could too.

And maybe, just maybe, when she went back to work, she'd find it easier to handle.

Although if Sophia made any stupid comments about what happened, she was going to hurt that bitch.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Leafing through a book on microprocessor architecture, Taylor nodded to herself. She put it on her pile and added another one on assembly language programming. From her computer classes at Winslow, the only good class she had and one she enjoyed even aside from that, she'd learned quite a lot of things, but she was all too aware she was just starting. As with so many other subjects she found herself needing to know about to maximize the utility of everything she was discovering about her power.

Moving down the shelves she kept looking for anything that might be useful, grabbing another book on college-level chemistry too. Having found all the ones she'd gone specifically looking for, she picked up the whole stack and headed for the computers.

Half an hour later she'd also downloaded a number of useful ebooks, of which she was building quite a collection. One that took a lot less room on the shelves too, she thought with a small smile while she unplugged the USB stick. Scrolling through the page on marine biology research she'd been poking around on, she paused as one research paper title caught her interest. Curious, she clicked on the link, and read the summary, then skimmed the paper itself with interest. 'Hmm… That could be useful,' she thought as she reread one paragraph to make sure she understood what it was saying. 'Very useful. More experiments are needed…'

Taylor could see all sorts of possibilities presented by the conclusions from that one paper. And it would be quite easy to test.

Pleased that random chance had handed her yet another intriguing opportunity, she logged out, then got up and went to check her books out. Minutes later she was on the street, walking towards the exotic pet shop. Even from nearly five hundred yards away she could sense all the creatures amenable to her power in it, like a familiar beacon in the middle of the blizzard of other tiny life all around her. She was gradually opening herself more and more to the full scope of what that part of her power allowed, being extremely cautious not to overdo it due to not wanting a repeat of what had happened in the early days. Her power seemed to sigh somewhere at the back of her mind but didn't argue. She wasn't certain she would get the same disorientation now, admittedly, but having no intention of finding out since it was horrible, Taylor just smiled to herself and kept working the way she wanted to.

Even with the smaller number of insects around at this time of year due to the temperature there were still an awful lot of them. Some places had more than others, cockroaches for example had specific environments they liked, as did silverfish, centipedes, spiders, and quite a few more that were commensal with humans. The more independent ones like wasps, bees, and so on, were much rarer although she could easily detect quite a few around the place, hibernating for the winter but slowly starting to get ready for warmer weather. She could easily prod them into activity but saw little reason to do so unnecessarily since they could end up being harmed and there was no real excuse to wipe them all out in her view. Keeping her metaphorical eyes open for anything particularly interesting, and practicing using the insect sense to get a feel for everything going on around her, she wandered along in no particular hurry.

As she neared the side street Mike's shop was on, at the limit of her current range she became aware of something odd. "Huh…" she mumbled, curious. "I wonder what that is?"

She was detecting insects in a large open space underground. Below the usual parking garages some of the office buildings had, and the cellars that were here and there. The city, as far as she knew, had quite a high water table, so this close to the bay not a lot of places had underground construction historically since it was a pain to keep water out and expensive if you got it wrong. Further inland, like where her house was, it was different, but this area was only about a quarter of a mile from the shore. The net result was that anything more than perhaps a story underground was rare.

Yet as she walked closer, passing the street leading to the exotic pet shop because she couldn't work out what she was sensing, she could feel the space the insects were in was much deeper than that. About ninety to a hundred feet in places. 'What is that?' she thought with a frown. Stopping at an intersection, she looked towards where she could sense the oddity, about three hundred yards away now. It was off to the right, down the road that led towards the area of the city that housed most of the banking businesses and financial companies. All she could see was a number of ten and fifteen story tall office blocks, with a few coffee shops and that sort of thing catering to office workers as well. While she knew the city didn't have nearly the amount of such business as some places, Brockton Bay was still pretty large and the financial and commercial district covered several blocks.

None of the things she could think of involving moving money around between people who had too much of it required a space that big underground. Except possibly a bank vault full of gold or something, but the insects she was sensing weren't in a bank vault.

Some of them were in what appeared to be an armory, though…

'What the fuck?'

She checked again, looking through dozen of tiny eyes with the ease of long practice and the way her mind worked these days helping too. Yep. Lots of guns. Way too many guns for any normal person to think of it as other than way too many guns. Had she found an underground hidden military base or something?

Slightly wide eyed Taylor thought, then looked casually around, confirming with her own eyes that no one was staring at her suspiciously. Resuming her wandering, having paused only for a second or two, she kept the underground whatever it was within range as she headed for a small cafe she could see a little distance along the road. She was hungry anyway and the smells she could pick up from the local wildlife inside were enticing.

Having bought what turned out to be a very good bacon and eggs with all the trimmings, and some tea, Taylor sat and slowly ate while the bulk of her attention was engaged in mapping out what she'd stumbled across with hundreds of tiny creatures. It didn't take her long to deduce that the underground facility likely didn't belong to any law enforcement or military organization she was aware of. There were no signs anywhere saying "US ARMY SNEAKY BASE" or anything like that, none of the guys moving around inside were wearing uniforms she recognized, although they did look military based on her experience with some people her dad knew, and overall it just didn't feel right.

But what was it? Her immediate second thought had been something the Empire was behind, because she knew they had far too many weapons and presumably had to store them somewhere. But she could see some of the people doing various things weren't exactly E88 material, being of the wrong ethnic grouping, so that seemed unlikely on reflection.

What did that leave? Some superhero group that was working behind the scenes very quietly? Possibly, but why? Or some other cape villain? That seemed more and more plausible the longer she watched and explored. Not Empire. Almost certainly not ABB since only about three of them seemed to be Asian and none of them were wearing ABB colors. Not that mercenary group she'd heard about… Faultline, that was it. Her group was, at least publicly, far smaller and had several Case 53s in it. All those guys looked perfectly normal. Not an obvious parahuman in the place.

Except that guy.

She focused her attention on the skinny dude at the desk in the deepest part of what she was now calling in her mind The Base through a few spiders in his air ducts. The individual in question was wearing a weird costume, all in black with a white snake winding up one leg onto his torso. Puzzled she kept watch, while eating her bacon and thinking. Chewing, she picked up her phone and opened a web browser, the fairly basic device being more or less capable of simple web searches but not really up to seriously replacing a computer. Her dad hadn't wanted to spring for a full blown modern smart phone, partly because the data plans were pretty costly. She'd agreed with his decision but right at the moment was wishing she had something better.

Even so, she fiddled with the device until she got to a PHO post listing all the known Parahumans in Brockton Bay on both sides of the law. She was amused to see Hornet of Unusual Size was the latest entry. That might be fun to read about later. Now, though, she scrolled through the top post looking for a clue to what she'd found. Eventually she settled on one name.

'Coil,' she read curiously. 'Little is known other than his name and a basic description. It is unknown for certain whether he even is a Parahuman. Known to employ mercenaries which have been implicated in a number of operations generally leaving few traces.' That was basically it. The thread the description linked to was long and full of speculation but very short on any real information, she found after a brief skim. Putting the phone down she thoughtfully went back to finishing her lunch, all the time watching the distant figure.

When he got up from his desk, stretched, and took his mask off to scratch his nose after having made certain the door was shut, she carefully memorized his face while wondering why she had a vague feeling she'd seen him somewhere before quite a while ago…

Eventually she looked at her watch, then drank her remaining tea, took it and her plate back for the server who smiled at her, nodded back, and left. It was an interesting side quest but not currently important she decided, though she was quite curious. And the smell of blood in a room under the probably-Coil's office was a touch concerning… It would keep for now though.

Walking back to the pet shop she could sense a familiar person approaching it from the other direction. Rounding the corner she waved. Lucy, who she'd bumped into in the shop a couple of times now, waved back with a smile. Pausing at the door for the slightly older girl to catch up, Taylor said, "Let me guess. Lunch time at Arcadia?"

"Yeah." Lucy grinned. "It's only ten minutes walk from here, so it's good exercise, and I wanted to get some more treats for Newell."

Taylor chuckled and held the door open then followed the half-Asian girl inside, Mike looking up from the laptop he was typing on and smiling at them both. "Hi, girls," he said, putting the thing to one side and turning to face them directly. "Back again."

"Yep. Wanted some more of those Family-brand snacks," Lucy replied brightly. "He loves them and his scales really get colorful. He's starting to get more active as the weather warms up finally."

Mike nodded, grinning. "They do like it warm, yeah. Hi, Taylor. You ready for another purchase yet?"

"I'm still deciding what I want next and setting up the environments but it's going well, thanks," Taylor responded. "I wanted to have a look around again if you don't mind."

"Help yourself," he invited with a wave of his hand at the store. "You're always welcome. Call me if you need anything."

"Thanks," she smiled. Watching for a moment as Lucy grabbed a few bags of the lizard treats, she turned and walked back into the part of the store she enjoyed browsing. Each time she looked at one of the arthropods she got more ideas.

A minute or two later she felt Lucy walk over to stand next to her, watching the other girl through the eyes of the tarantula in the tank she was peering into. "He's a big hairy one isn't he?" Lucy said with a small shiver. "I don't mind bugs but that thing is kind of big for comfort."

"He's mostly harmless though," Taylor replied, smiling. "Not really toxic unless you're allergic. The hairs can irritate the skin, which apparently isn't fun, but he's not particularly dangerous. A black widow is much worse and they definitely exist in the wild around here."

Lucy looked at her, then around the shop slightly nervously. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I've seen them." Taylor grinned. "We're safe in here though."

She didn't mention that there was a black widow in the attic of the shop right at that moment… It was fine where it was and doing no harm to anyone.

And explaining how she knew the fact would only raise questions she didn't have answers to she wanted to go into, after all.

"That one is amazing," Lucy said a moment later, having moved to look into another tank. In it was a very pretty mantis, in shades of white through to pink. "Orchid mantis," she read from the small card Mike put on all the tanks, listing the scientific name and various other information. "Wow. I can't believe an insect can be that pretty."

"What about butterflies?" Taylor asked. "And some moths are amazing."

"Well… yes, I suppose you're right. I like butterflies," Lucy chuckled. "Point to you."

"Those crabs are cool too," Taylor added, indicating one of the tanks in the tropical marine section a few feet away. "They're not insects but they are arthropods, so they're kind of the same." Lucy grinned again, nodding.

"OK, fine, some of these are really cool. Just don't ask me to have a black widow or that thing next to my bed."

"Fair enough." Taylor laughed. "What about a scorpion? I like Impy."

"Who's Impy?" Lucy asked, frowning.

"You called that scorpion Impy?" Mike asked from behind them, having approached a moment earlier. He started laughing helplessly while Taylor sighed. "Girl, you need help coming up with names. If you get a crab will you call it 'Crabby?'" Lucy began giggling now, making Taylor pout, although she was rather amused.

"You're just like my dad, he's always said I shouldn't be allowed to name things," she mock-grumped with a huff, folding her arms.

"Man's not wrong by the sound of things," Mike snorted, looking highly amused. "How is… Impy… doing?" The corner of his mouth twitched as he said the name and Lucy turned away to hide a smile.

"Really well," Taylor replied cheerfully. "I need some more crickets, actually. She's got a good appetite."

"Excellent, that means you're looking after her properly," he smiled. "Glad to hear it." The door opened behind him and he looked over at the couple who had just entered and were curiously inspecting the interior of his store. "Sorry, customers. I'd better go deal with them."

Lucy and Taylor chatted for a while as they walked around the various enclosures looking at the inhabitants, a lot of which were looking back unknown to the former. Taylor found it kind of funny and wondered what the other girl would say if she realized. Eventually they both finished, Taylor bought her crickets, and Lucy waited for her at the door. "See you around, Taylor," she said having checked the time on her phone. "I'd better get back or they'll be annoyed. Good luck with that home schooling thing."

"It's going well. Who knows, I might end up in Arcadia when everything settles down," Taylor replied, smiling a little.

"That would be nice. If you do, I'll show you around." Lucy smiled back, then turned and walked away, her hands in her pockets and her hood pulled up since it had started raining a little while they were inside. Watching her go Taylor thought that the other girl was becoming a friend and wondered if she would join her in Arcadia. Her path led her back to the main road, so she headed that way, sensing Lucy moving out of her range towards Arcadia.

Just as the other girl had nearly vanished from her senses, she notice three people lurking around a corner just ahead of Lucy. Even as she wondered what they were up to, since from what she could see they were all wearing tattered coats and hats and gave off the impression of not being entirely law abiding, one of them lunged at Lucy as she passed the end of the loading dock they had huddled under the cover of out of the rain. "Fuck," Taylor snarled, immediately turning and running rapidly after her proto-friend. Was this going to happen every time she came into the city center? First those fucking E88 assholes, now whoever these dicks were…

Not running flat out as she didn't want to make it obvious she wasn't entirely stock as far as human performance went, although making good time, Taylor had covered about half the distance to Lucy when she suddenly saw something she was not expecting. "Holy crap!" she muttered, still running, but keeping watch too. A lot of her attention was focused on the other girl and what she saw through many little eyes was impressive indeed.

The asshole who grabbed Lucy had demanded money, while threatening her with a switchblade. She'd yanked herself out of his grasp, spun on one foot with an ease that made it clear she knew exactly what she was doing and no hesitation at all, while the other foot lifted to a remarkable angle and caught him under the chin so hard he actually came clear of the ground. By the time he'd started to drop again, obviously entirely unconscious, she'd caught the knife he'd reflexively dropped in one hand and leaped sidewise as the second mugger swung a crowbar at her with a curse. Even as Taylor rounded the corner and dashed into the loading dock Lucy had slashed that guy's arm with her acquired weapon, laying it open to the bone halfway up the forearm and making him scream in agony.

The third one, who had been watching open-mouthed, was fumbling a small pistol out of his coat when Taylor laid him out flat with a punch to the throat, pulling her blow massively and hoping she hadn't just snapped his neck like a twig. He dropped, gagging horribly, and she kicked his hand hard enough she felt at least one bone break but sending the small snub-barreled revolver skittering across the wet tarmac under a car on the other side of the road. She then slammed her foot into the back of the left knee of the one Lucy was dealing with, making him scream and fall over. Lucy took the opportunity thus presented to kick him in the head, which made him stop making noises.

Whirling to face her, Lucy paused, lowering the knife she was holding in a defensive pose with her other arm lifted to strike out. "Taylor?" she asked, sounding surprised. "What are you doing here?"

"I heard something odd and wasn't sure what it was so I investigated," Taylor replied, shading the truth rather a lot but not entirely wrongly. "Are you OK?"

"I'm fine, yeah," the girl replied, straightening up. She looked around at the muggers. The one she'd kicked in the chin was still, the one she'd slashed was dribbling blood on the ground fairly freely although not to the point of him being at much risk, apparently unconscious too, and the one Taylor punched was twitching a little but breathing reasonably freely, obviously not prepared to resume hostilities. "How about you? What did you do to him?" She pointed at the third mugger with the looted knife.

"Punched him in the throat. Seems to have worked," Taylor explained. "How the hell did you take out the other two like that?"

Lucy grinned a touch hysterically. "I know kung fu," she said with a somewhat wild laugh before dropping the knife and grabbing Taylor in a hug. Taylor could feel her shivering. Putting her arms around the other girl, she shook her head a little before reaching for her phone and calling 911.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"So I came around the corner there and these three idiots were getting a beatdown from my friend," Taylor explained to the cop, waving at the three men wearing handcuffs, one of them having his arm bandaged and complaining loudly about it. "She took out those two, I punched the last guy in the throat because he had a gun and she had her back to him. It's under that car over there."

Nodding as he made notes, the cop motioned to his partner, pointing to the car in question. Moments later, having bent down and peered under it, the second cop came back with the pistol between thumb and forefinger, looking at it. "Crappy .38, but dangerous even so," the first one said with a glance at the weapon. "Lethal at close range, definitely." He turned back to Taylor and Lucy. The former was rubbing her hands together as if they were cold. "OK. I've got your details, we'll call you if we need any more, but these guys have done this at least four times in the last two weeks so believe me they're not going anywhere. Last victim nearly died. We've been looking for them for a while. The gun and the knife are enough to get them out of our hair for some time."

"Thank you, officer," Taylor replied calmly. She glanced at Lucy who was staring at the man she'd given a fairly convincing demonstration of why knives could be dangerous to. "Will there be any problem with what Lucy did?"

"Self defense. He deserved anything that you did to him considering he came at you with a lethal weapon," the man replied, shaking his head. "Law's perfectly clear on that. He should be happy he's alive, the idiot. Some people would have stuck it in his eye." Curiously, he studied Lucy, who was a good foot shorter than Taylor. "How did you learn to do that sort of thing, Miss, if you don't mind me asking?"

The other girl laughed a little unevenly. "I've been taking martial arts lessons since I was about six or seven. Kung fu and karate. But this is the first time I've ever been forced to react like that. My teacher will be pleased I didn't waste time panicking then lecture me on situational awareness again…" She sighed faintly. The cop looked mildly amused and somewhat impressed. "I didn't have time to think, I just acted. Guess all those practice fights and competitions really helped."

"Looks like it, yeah," the cop agreed. He examined Taylor. "And you? You a martial artist too?"

"No. I grew up in the docks, we just punch things there," she assured him, making him laugh. "His throat was right there and Dad always said a good shot to the throat will put most people off their game."

"Not wrong there," the second cop chuckled. "You could have killed him if you hit harder though. Bear that in mind."

"I will. Next time I might go for the nuts. That's safer, right?" She smiled innocently at him Both cops winced hard and Lucy started giggling.

"...Yeesss…" The second cop shook his head. "I'm almost feeling sorry for the assholes now."

"I'm not," his colleague muttered, putting his notebook away, then handing each of them a card. "Please give those to your parents and if they've got any questions or need a copy of the report, get them to call us."

"Sure," Taylor told him, taking the card and pulling out her wallet, which she put it into. Lucy put hers into her pocket with a nod as well.

Looking at her phone she sighed. "I'm so late for math it's not funny. Mr Anderson isn't going to be happy."

"You've got a pretty good excuse though," Taylor pointed out, as she watched the three muggers get loaded amid a lot of swearing into a police van that had arrived shortly after the EMTs finished patching up the cut one. She was mildly surprised by just how many vehicles were now present. Apparently this sort of thing in the middle of the well off areas of the city, mere blocks from the Boardwalk, attracted a lot more attention that it probably would have around where she lived. Her dad would likely agree based on things he'd said over the years.

"Yeah, I guess so," Lucy agreed, pulling the card out to look at again then returning it. "God. What a pain in the ass. Stupid muggers."

"That does tend to be a thing." Taylor smiled at Lucy's expression. The cops watched them for a second then the second one went back to his car.

"You girls need a ride?" the remaining one asked. "Arcadia, right?"

About to demur, Taylor glanced at Lucy, who looked slightly beseechingly at her. Apparently the other girl didn't want to be alone right now, which was fair enough really. "Yeah, thanks," she replied instead. She could catch a bus from near Arcadia as easily as from the stop she'd been aiming for and Lucy probably needed the company.

"Fine, hop in and we'll drop you off," the officer said, turning and leading the way to the car. He opened the back door and waved them in. Both entered, then looked around.

"I've never been in a cop car before," Lucy commented with a wry grin. "Never thought I would be either."

As the vehicle started, then pulled away, Taylor laughed. "Someone I knew claimed I would end up in one, but she was a bitch and is more likely to," she replied, momentary sadness about Emma's betrayal flowing through her. She'd avoiding thinking much about her former friend for weeks now and firmly pushed the memories back, not wanting to have that mindset return. Her life was different now, better in all ways, and she was damned if she was going to let Emma and Sophia, and to a lesser extend Madison, intrude on it again. "Long story though."

The short ride, under a mile and a half, brought them to Arcadia High School. Stopping outside the main entrance, the cop got out and opened the door, allowing them to exit. "There you go. Try to avoid muggers if you can, but good job, both of you." He smiled a little as they both nodded. "See you around." Slamming the rear door he got back in and the vehicle drove off. Both of them waved, then turned to examine the school, where a handful of students were watching them curiously, having apparently been outside for some reason.

"Free period," Lucy explained, when she saw Taylor looking. "We get a two or three of them a week and some people use them for study, some go to the library, or into town, or just hang around outside talking to friends or on the phone. There's some sort of phone blocking tech inside, most phones don't work there except at lunch when they turn it off."

"Oh, right, I heard something about that."

Sighing deeply, Lucy straightened her clothes, firmed her expression, and drew herself up apparently ready for battle. "Guess I have to go and explain why I didn't come back on time."

"Want me to come as a witness?" Taylor offered, curious to see the inside of the place and willing to support the other girl. Lucy relaxed with a sudden look of relief at her.

"Oh, god, I didn't know how to ask. Will you? Please? It would help so much." She gazed beseechingly at Taylor who snorted with a suppressed giggle.

"Sure, or I wouldn't have offered."

"Thank you so much, Taylor," Lucy replied, smiling widely. She turned and led the way inside the school to where a classroom was just in the process of disgorging a gaggle of eager young minds, many of whom looked curiously at Taylor and winced when they saw Lucy.

"He's kind of annoyed," one of the girls whispered as she passed. "Good luck." She hurried on her way when a tall sandy-haired man came out of the classroom, spotted Lucy, and gave her a long look.

"Miss Cheung. I assume you have a good reason for your non-appearance?"

"Um…"

"She does," Taylor put in, seeing Lucy was a little hesitant and looking for the right words. The teacher was a rather imposing man and he didn't look entirely pleased.

"And you are? I don't recognize you, young lady."

"Taylor Hebert, sir," she replied politely. "Lucy got mugged. I was there too."

He gazed at her, then Lucy, who nodded. "Ah. I see. In that case, please come in and tell me what happened." He waved both of them into the classroom and listened to the story, which took long enough that the bell rang for the next period before Lucy finished. "Ignore that, I'll give you a pass," he said at when this happened.

When Lucy had told the entire thing, backed up by Taylor, and even shown him the cop's business card, he sighed and nodded. "All right. I'm sorry you both went through that. And I'm glad you were unhurt. Please consider running next time, if there is one. But well done under the circumstances." Retrieving a booklet of preprinted passes from his desk he quickly filled one in and handed it over. "Show Mr Foyle this, please. Don't worry, there won't be a problem." As Lucy took it with a nod, he turned to Taylor.

"At a guess you're a former Winslow student?"

"I am, yes."

"How are you finding the home schooling?"

"It's not too hard, really. I finished pretty quickly today and came into the center to do some work in the library." She plucked the strap of the backpack she had slung over one shoulder. "Took some books back, got some more out, then bumped into Lucy at the pet shop."

"Ah. The famous iguana." He grinned when Lucy flushed slightly. "We are aware of him."

Taylor laughed, feeling it was possible the other girl talked about her pet quite a lot…

"What are you studying?" he queried with interest.

"Computer design right now, some biology and chemistry too."

He seemed quite intrigued. "For any particular reason?"

"Mostly personal interest," she replied. "I like learning new things."

"Indeed. A fine attitude. If you should find yourself here when this debacle is finally resolved, I think you'll enjoy it." He glanced up at the wall clock. "Well, you'd better run along, Miss Cheung. It was nice to meet you, Miss Hebert. Good luck with your studies."

"Thanks." They left the classroom and paused outside. After a moment, Taylor gravely held out her hand. Just as gravely Lucy shook it.

"Miss Cheung. Until our next glorious adventure."

"Miss Hebert. I suppress my anticipation with difficulty."

A moment passed, then they grinned at each other. "Stay safe, Lucy."

"You too, Taylor." With a wave, Lucy hurried off and Taylor made her way back to the entrance. A few minutes later she was waiting for the bus a couple of hundred yards away, planning out her next set of experiments when she got to her warehouse.

She had so many ideas to try.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Yes!" Taylor danced around in a circle, all eight feet tapping on the floor. The entire warehouse interior was illuminated an ominous deep red, the light emanating from her drider abdomen which was glowing scarlet. "I cracked it!" She was extremely pleased. It had taken quite a lot of reading about how fluorescence and bioluminescence worked but finally she'd managed to persuade her power to do what she wanted. Looking over her shoulder she tweaked the internal structure of the light organs, grinning like an idiot when she succeeded in making the color slide smoothly from deep red to deep violet in nearly a continuous spectrum. "Fantastic. Now, can I…" she concentrated on the effect she wanted, then beamed when she started producing a pure white light that easily outshone her LED lanterns.

"Wonderful. Full RGB. I'm a gamer accessory." She laughed with the sheer delight of working out something that had been stumping her for days. It opened up all sorts of wonderful possibilities.

Amusing herself for a while producing a whole series of different color effects, she finally left her abdomen gently cycling through the rainbow and moved onto her next experiment. "Right then. Let's see what this can do." Scuttling over to the scrap pile she hunted through it for the right materials, settling for a thick sheet of steel that had a row of rivet holes down one side, the other being jagged and torn. It looked like it had been part of some large round tank at some point in the distant past, and was around three quarters of an inch thick and about six by four feet. Picking it up she propped it up against one of the larger pieces of scrap, some sort of old engine block, then studied it for a moment. Finally nodding she looked down at herself. "OK. Looks good."

She'd recreated her hybrid exoskeleton using a carefully designed crab and scorpion mix over her entire upper body, the end result being in her view pretty good. A deep blue-black, similar to Impy's color, but slightly shinier, all her joints having sliding plates reinforcing the areas that in a real crab had exposed cartilage. Her head was a modified hornets, with eyes that she'd upgraded using some tricks she'd learned from the study of the crabs she'd caught over the weekend. That had yielded some really impressive improvements in low light vision although she still wanted to get some moths to compare the results. And she could already see how to improve on what she'd created as a first attempt.

Her power felt like it was watching with an open mouth, she thought with an internal grin. Several times during the last few days she'd hit that sort of wall, which she'd powered through with sheer will, each time finding it slightly easier. And each time feeling that the thing that lived at the back of her head was looking more and more confused.

The end result was well worth the effort in her opinion. And if this new exoskeleton worked as well as she thought it would, she could use it for any other form and get a decent boost to durability, which might come in useful sooner or later.

Now, taking a stance near the big plate of steel, she drew her fist back, aiming at the center of it, then snapped her arm out hard. The gonging sound that resulted echoed through the entire building and made dust fall from the rafters. Taylor looked at where her arm was buried elbow-deep in the steel and grinned. It had gone through as easily as her stinger did when she tried the first time, even though it wasn't nearly as sharp. Pulling her arm back with a scraping noise she inspected the carapace covering it, finding only a little bit of metal shavings and no meaningful damage at all. And it hadn't hurt even a little.

Pleased, she looked around for something tougher to try. Ten minutes later she'd made several more holes in increasingly thick chunks of steel and shattered another smaller old engine block like it was made of glass when she hit it a little too hard.

"Well, I can certainly put this down as a good result," she told herself as she walked back to her notebook and wrote down the findings and conclusions. Things were going very well.

Tapping the next item on the list, she thought for a bit, then nodded. "Yeah. That's something I need to check."

She'd done some reading and worked out that it was possible that technically her venom seemed to share some characteristics with something called 'piranha fluid', so named because it ate everything. It was concentrated hydrogen peroxide mixed with an acid, normally sulfuric, and was both an extremely powerful oxidizer and a hellishly good acidic substance. Presumably there was also something added that was the actual venom part and she didn't have the faintest idea what that actually was or how to find out without knowledge and resources she didn't have, but whatever it was seemed insanely toxic based on what had happened to Hookwolf. The carrier part would probably have done the job even without the toxic payload, she thought, but it had certainly put a stop to him pretty damned fast.

Taylor had a shrewd idea that the acid, assuming she was right about her venom, was probably something a lot stronger than mere sulfuric acid. That stuff corroded iron, sure, but nothing like as fast as she'd seen it work. So whatever it was, it was probably pretty toxic in itself, and highly corrosive even without the peroxide. But it most likely wasn't a super oxidizer, and she was curious to see if she was correct.

So she'd been trying to work out how to make her venom glands produce just one part of the whole chemical cocktail. Being able to spray something that was like an incendiary fluid without the stupidly massive toxic risk seemed like an interesting experiment even if she wasn't sure what she'd do with it. Same thing with a super acid.

Her experiments in using different insect and arachnid venoms, even in the boosted forms she ended up with, had given her some ideas about how to proceed and now she started seriously working on a solution that worked. Making copious notes as she tried one method after another with rather mixed results, she kept working for over three hours. At one point she managed to produce something that flat out exploded when she cautiously sprayed a tiny amount on the floor, blowing her head over multiple heels some twenty feet and surprising the hell out of her. Picking herself up she'd stared at the crater in the old concrete and wondered what on earth she'd managed to produce.

It was certainly pretty powerful whatever it was.

So she'd made notes on how she'd done it so she could recreate the result at some point, then moved on.

Another outcome had been a burst of actual flame, like something from a war movie involving a flamethrower. Hopping around yipping as fire dribbled out of her ass, she finally extinguished it. Lightly singed but unharmed she made another note, writing rather hard. That one she wasn't planning on revisiting because it was both embarrassing and highly dangerous in her view. Super toxins were one thing, burning the house down was something altogether different. Especially at point blank range…

Finally, though, she started seeing progress. A lot of thought after the last failure had made her back up a few steps then try a different approach. Her power was making suggestions here and there, seeming invested now in the whole thing, and between the two of them they changed the innards of the venom system quite a bit.

"I think that might do it," she mumbled, concentrating on a very subtle change. After a couple more seconds she nodded. "Yeah. Let's see what that does."

What it did was produce a liquid that hissed on the floor, smoked, and made all the organic material present suddenly burn with a brilliant yellow flame and a lot of smoke. The small conflagration died down as fast as it had started leaving a bleached patch of concrete that looked like someone had spend an hour cleaning it with a wire brush. Bending down she poked it with a clawed finger, finding the concrete itself basically intact. "Interesting," she said slowly. "I think that might have actually worked."

Finding a piece of wood she sprayed more fluid in it, watching with satisfaction as it immediately burst into intense flames. Again, the burn rate was ridiculously quick, suggesting the presence of a very powerful oxidizer. Hydrogen peroxide of a particularly high concentration seemed very likely to her based on her chemistry textbooks. She got the same results with every piece of plastic she could find, hemp rope, some old leather, a pair of PVC gloves she'd brought, paper, and a piece of ancient rubber hose. Anything organic burst into flames within seconds, some taking a little longer than others, such as the leather, but it all did the same thing in the end.

"Cool," she said in satisfaction, watching the latest test gutter out. "Or not cool. Very hot. Still cool though."

Having made that breakthrough she was soon able to produce the other major component on demand, this clearly being a stupidly powerful acid of some sort. It ate an impressive hole in the concrete in moments, although not quite as quickly as the original venom had done, and made a real mess of every sort of metal she could find in the scrap pile. Copper, aluminum, stainless steel… All of it dissolved quite readily. She even found it would seriously damage glass when she located an old beer bottle that looked like it had been there since the middle of the last century and tested it. That made her wonder with some incredulity if the acid was some sort of fluorine based one. It seemed crazy but she wasn't aware of much that would dissolve glass.

No wonder Hookwolf had flopped around like an electrocuted trout. She was surprised yet again that he'd lived long enough for the PRT to find him at all, really. Anyone without the Nazi idiot's regeneration power would have died in seconds.

Shivering a little at how easily she could have accidentally killed that fucking mugger, she resolved yet again to try to either figure out how to produce a venom several orders of magnitude less lethal, or simply made damn sure she never stung anyone and used any of what she currently had available on them. Unless she really wanted them dead in a very spectacular manner.

Even the enhanced wolf spider venom she'd used on that rat was much too dangerous. This stuff was off the scale.

On the other hand she wasn't planning on getting into any situation where she needed to sting people, to death or just to agony, after all. This was all because she was curious not because she intended to use it. But as her dad had said, they lived in an uncertain and unsafe world and in her view it was best to be prepared for the unexpected. She just had some really weird ways to do that now…

A moment later she felt something at the extreme end of her range, the insects five hundred yards away detecting a human-sized body moving slowly more or less at an angle to the direction she was from it. Extinguishing her bioluminescence immediately, Taylor dashed over to her temporary work area and turned off the LED lamps too in case anyone had seen the light from outside. She'd had a few visitors to the area since her dad found this place for her but so far no one had approached closer than about two hundred yards, and that had turned out to be some homeless person scavenging for aluminum cans from what she'd seen. He'd left half an hour later clutching about a dozen of them.

The figure moved around somewhat erratically while she watched through her insects, wondering what the guy was after. She could see it was a man, probably in his mid twenties, wearing ragged clothes. After a few minutes he ducked into the remains of a smaller building, one about the size of her house, and started moving things around a little. She realized after a bit that he was just arranging somewhere to sleep, presumably being one of the homeless people the city had far too many of. As she watched, he unlimbered a rather sad sleeping bag from a ratty backpack and laid it on a pile of old cardboard as an improvised mattress, then started making a small fire in a pot with a broken handle he found in the detritus.

Taylor sighed faintly. She'd seen similar people most of her life, and felt bad for them. But there wasn't a lot she could do as much as she didn't like seeing anyone in that state. She didn't have lots of money, or any way to give them somewhere to live, or jobs. Her powers weren't going to fix that sort of problem.

What she could do was make sure all the bugs in his immediate vicinity moved away from him, and give them an order to stay away. At least he wouldn't get bitten by a spider or anything. And tomorrow he'd probably have moved on. They didn't tend to stick around in one place very long because there were too many other people in similar straights that preyed on people just as badly off as this guy was.

But that meant her experiments for tonight were over. She couldn't risk the noise and lights attracting unwanted attention, as unlikely as it was. Checking the time she found it was just after midnight so it was probably time to stop anyway. She could try the other things she'd put on the list another day.

Packing everything up, she put it all into her pouches, and was soon squeezing out through the hole in the wall as the super-hornet. Climbing up the wall onto the roof she looked thoughtfully in the direction of the homeless guy, before reverting to the hornet-girl and rummaging in one of her pouches. Removing the last of her cash, about twenty bucks, she switched back then lifted off.

A few minutes later she was flying home, while behind her the homeless guy was staring at two fives and a ten that had fluttered down just outside the doorway of the old building he was squatting in, wondering where the hell they'd come from. And what that strange deep droning sound had been…

It didn't stop him hastily retrieving them and tucking them safely away though.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"I'm proud of you, Taylor," her dad told her when she explained what her day had brought. "Upset because you keep finding yourself in these situations, but you handled it well." He looked at the card she'd given him, shook his head, gave her a hug, and went to bed. Taylor did likewise, thinking about that underground base and the face of the man she'd seen while trying to recall where she'd come across it before.

Chapter Text

"Hi, Kurt," Taylor said, smiling at the man she'd known her whole life, an old friend of her parents.

"Hey, Taylor. Done with your schoolwork already?" The heavily muscled man joined her at the side of the wharf she'd been standing on, leaning on the railing that surrounded the end where the ships tied up. Two trawlers and a somewhat smaller tender vessel were moored there, rocking in the light breeze while the waves made slapping sounds on their hulls and the pilings. It was fairly chilly but definitely warming up now. He put his gloved hands on the scarred wood and leaned over to look at the bay water about twelve or so feet down, the tide currently coming in. It would peak about three in the afternoon, which was still some hours away, she knew.

"Going to be a fairly high one today," he added, straightening up and facing her. "Around ten feet or so."

"Yeah, I got the work done," she replied, answering his initial question. "I was taking a break, walking around and exploring. I haven't been down here for nearly two years."

He chuckled faintly. "I remember. You fell in one summer and Danny was really worried, then pretty annoyed."

"I slipped," she laughed. "I was fine, I can swim well, and I got out by myself easily enough."

"Good thing it was summer and high tide." He peered over the edge again, then at her. "Low tide it's quite a drop and there's all sorts of old crap down there you wouldn't enjoy landing on."

"Fair enough. I won't dive in at low tide then," she giggled.

"I wouldn't suggest swimming in the bay in February even at high tide. Damn cold water." The man shivered comically. "And you're a skinny thing, you'd freeze to death."

These days that almost certainly wasn't true, she thought with an inner grin, but she wasn't going to mention that… Her crab boosts had turned out to make her pretty cold tolerant and she was somewhat curious to see what it might be like wandering around underwater, but that wasn't something she was going to do in daylight. No sense pushing her luck.

"Don't worry, I'm not planning on jumping off the wharf," she told him. "I was just watching all the life down there. There's more of it than you'd think really."

Both of them looked down, the water being shallow enough and clear enough that one could easily see crabs moving around on the bottom, anemones on the pilings, the ones below the waterline flowering into a mass of tentacles while the ones above were glistening lumps, and even a few small fish swimming about. He nodded a little. "Yeah. Considering how much pollution has been dumped into the bay it's surprisingly thriving. Not as many fish as there used to be twenty years ago but on the other hand a lot less people going after them these days so I guess it kind of balances out." He pointed at a small boat chugging past, "Some people still fishing though." Both of them waved, the quite old but still powerful white-haired man in the stern of the boat a hundred yards away waving back, then hastily grabbing for the beer bottle he nearly knocked off the transom into the water. Distant swearing reached them quite clearly over the sound of the small diesel engine and the cries of the seabirds.

Both Taylor and Kurt grinned at the sight. With one last wave, the old sailor went on his way. "That idiot's going to drown himself one day," Kurt grumbled in a good natured manner. "Silly old bastard."

"I like him."

"Oh, everyone likes him, Taylor," Kurt assured her, looking amused. "Doesn't mean he's not crazy. Some of the stories he's come up with…"

Hearing a shout from behind him, he looked back towards the more populated parts of the union facility, then waved back to the guy who'd called out. "Gotta go. Take care, kid. Glad the work's going well. You'll get into a good school I'm sure, once they figure out all that crap with Winslow." Clapping her on the shoulder, he turned to leave. "Don't fall in," he advised over his shoulder with a grin.

"Not planning on it, Uncle Kurt," she assured him, answering with one of her own. With a wave he walked off rapidly leaving her to her own devices. Watching him diminish into the distance she smiled fondly for a moment, then went back towards the shore, her footsteps clunking on the tarred wooden planks and echoing under the wharf, mixing with the sound of waves and various creaking noises as they passed underneath. The smell of old tar, salt, machinery, and mud was an evocative one to her, something she'd grown up with all her life, and as natural as the scents of baking bread. Smiling slightly at the memories that came to her as she thought back to times she'd been here with her parents, she wandered slowly along, looking around for anything interesting.

The whole time her power-granted senses were covering a very significant chunk of the yard, the buildings around it, and the bay out some hundreds of yards. She could feel hundreds of thousands of small creatures inside her area, crabs and other marine life in the water, land arthropods elsewhere. Just in the last couple of days a fair number of insects had started emerging from hibernation, adding to the diversity of what she could detect. Ant nests were revving up underground, several colonies of termites off to the west showed signs of activity, quite a large number of various species of wasp were beginning to get ready to start new hives soon… It should have been totally overwhelming to a human mind, she knew that when she considered what she was doing and sensing, but somehow… it wasn't.

Certainly she still didn't want to throw caution to the wind and expand her power to the full extent just yet, but her range was increasing steadily more rapidly as she carefully tested it, and so far nothing bad had happened. The slow approach had definitely helped, she was sure. Her power didn't seem to be quite so convinced but it didn't get a say in it, so it merely sulked slightly and waited.

In only a week or two, she thought as she reached the end of the wharf and turned in the direction away from the city, walking slowly along the cratered ancient concrete surface of the union yard next to the sea wall, she would probably finally reach the limit of her range. Or at least the current limit, as she had the distinct impression that this wasn't actually a limit, it was just a guideline. Or something like that.

All the other times she'd hit a block that seemed to tell her this far but no further she'd just shrugged and stomped right through regardless of what it might think, and saw no particular reason she couldn't keep doing that. Certainly she'd been successful to date, and each breakthrough made the next easier. Her power was definitely finding the whole experience bizarre and seemed utterly baffled as to how she was doing it, but at the same time completely fascinated to see what the result was and where she would take it next. Which was, to her mind, both strange and really funny.

Taylor wondered if that was normal. Did other Parahumans have to threaten their powers into doing useful things? She had no idea and didn't know any other Parahumans to ask, assuming she or they would want to let the other know about their abilities. Perhaps one day she'd manage to find out the answer, but for now she was having a huge amount of fun just experimenting. It seemed a much more effective and rewarding use of her time than running around beating up people in silly costumes.

Although she didn't really regret the single fight she'd been in. Hookwolf had needed to be stopped, and she'd been in the right place at the right time with the correct solution to the problem he presented. Like she'd told her dad, she hadn't enjoyed doing it, but it required doing, and she had no real regret about her actions. Annoyance at being pushed into it, yes, but the act itself?

No. The world was far better off without that murderous lunatic, and she'd be surprised if anyone other than his like-minded friends would disagree. Certainly PHO was full of people celebrating her action, which was definitely peculiar to her still, and the news online and on TV had been quite pleased too. Overall the public seemed fine with a sudden lack of Hookwolf.

She wondered what the PRT made of it. Or her, more accurately. They'd been surprisingly quiet about the whole thing, only stating that a previously unknown Parahuman they had few details on had acted to save the Ward Vista from a lethal super villain attack. No real details had been given as far as she'd seen, at least so far. Perhaps they'd publish something more later, but then they didn't have a lot to go on. She hadn't stuck around to talk to the after all.

Hoping Vista, who was still apparently off duty, was all right, Taylor reached a point where the sea wall had a gap in it, leading to a set of somewhat crumbling concrete steps that ended up at the shore, twenty or so feet from the current water level. At high tide the water covered half the steps, and in a storm could come right through the gap which was why there were facilities to insert some enormous wooden beams into it to form a barrier, but right now it was just a flight of stairs. She looked around, seeing no one in the area visually and nothing her insects could detect either. Not that she had any reason to worry about being seen because she wasn't doing anything wrong or weird.

That came later. At least the weird part. Smiling a little, she descended the stairs, stepping onto firm gravel and sand at the bottom. Walking along the foreshore she watched where she put her feet as there were sometimes rotting piles of seaweed hidden under the rough sand, and she knew from personal experience that standing on one of those produce a geyser of reeking fluid that tended to go right up your leg and leave you smelling like you'd been floating face down in the bay for days… She had no wish to have to replace her boots.

After a little walking, and pausing a couple of times to investigate things that were sticking out of the sand, one of which was a rather nice piece of ocean-rounded dark blue glass she wiped clean and put in her pocket, she ended up at a location where an outcropping of rocks protruded from the sand, the far end disappearing under the waves. It was the remnants of where some sort of old boat ramp, probably built in the middle of the eighteen hundreds and originally intended to get small trawlers out of the bay, had been as far as she knew. Made of huge blocks of dark limestone it was covered in seaweed along the bottom four or five feet and she could see thousand of periwinkles on it, along with limpets and a few other such things. Crabs lurked under the edges at the bottom, behind the seaweed, and a couple of deep cracks in the blocks contained tiny tide pools which hosted all sorts of creatures too.

Most of this she could sense as easily as her own fingers, of course. The tiny fish in the pools weren't really something her power seemed interested in, at least not yet although she wasn't sure whether or not she could prod it into that, but the crustaceans, the snails, worms, starfish, all that sort of thing… Oh, yeah, it was fine with them.

She still had no idea what it used as valid criteria for determining whether she could interact with something or not. Originally she'd thought insects, then quite quickly it became clear it was more than that, hence arthropods. But it was fine with anything that might conceivably class as a worm too, then in the exotic pet shop she found it liked crabs, anemones, jellyfish… It was both weirdly selective and weirdly agnostic at the same time as far as animals went. Which was one of the many things about the whole affair that puzzled her, but she wasn't really questioning it, she was just curious about the reasons behind all this.

Stopping next to the rocks, she looked closely at the nearest one, watching the marine snails that were slowly moving around eating the fine layer of algae growing on the surface and leaving a distinct cleaner trail behind them. Mixed in among the slate-gray shells of periwinkles were the lopsided oval cones of the limpets.

That was what she'd come down here to find.

Selecting a nice big one, she gently pulled it off the rock surface, using her power to urge it to let go and overriding the instinctive response of immediately suctioning the shell so tightly to the rock that you'd need a knife to remove it. Turning it over she studied the exposed foot of the creature, small eye stalks wiggling at her as she inspected it.

"You'll do," she told the thing softly. "Don't worry, this won't hurt."

Exerting her power she watched as the limpet vanished from her hand, shell and all, and felt a new library of intriguing life-form information add itself to her existing selection. By now she was practiced enough at the process that it was simple to just basically pull one of her creatures into whatever internal store she had, and she could easily distinguish between them and look at the differences and properties. The whole process was, looked at objectively, ridiculously unlikely she thought as she pondered the new data, but regardless of how crazy it was, it worked.

She still didn't know where the creatures actually went though.

"Another member of the collective," she murmured with a smile. "Resistance is futile." Laughing a little, she selected another one as a comparison, absorbed it too, then as an afterthought did the same to a couple of periwinkles and a tiny starfish. Having admired the view for a moment or two she turned and started walking back. On the way to the steps she found three more pieces of that deep blue glass which she pocketed, and acquired some copepods too, just because they were hopping around on the sand. Soon she was back on the concrete walking back to the main building, waving to occasional people who were busy with various jobs and getting waves back and the odd shout of welcome.

"Hi, Dad," she said when she looked into her dad's office, where he was reading a stack of paperwork with a small frown. "I've finished my work for today. I was planning on heading back to the house." Going into his office she sat down, then pulled one of the pieces of frosted rounded sea glass out of her pocket and handing it to him. "I found some of this on the shore. It's a nice color."

"Bristol blue glass, I think," he said, picking it up and holding it to the light from the window as he inspected it. "Imported from the UK. Quite a lot of it went through here back in the nineteenth century. It was an expensive luxury item, from memory. They made things like vases and other glassware out of it. Probably someone dropped a crate overboard. It could have been washing around on the bottom of the bay for nearly two hundred years."

He added with a smile as she listened, once again impressed by just how much of this sort of thing he seemed to know, "And it's a nice color, yes." He handed the fragment back.

"I've nearly finished this report set for now, and I could give you a ride home," he suggested. "Safer and quicker. We could pick up lunch on the way."

"I'd like that, Dad," she replied without having to consider the question for more than a second or two. She was safe enough now and both knew it, but having to defend herself from some idiot would only cause trouble they didn't need. A ride with her dad would be nice, reminding her of the old days. While they weren't quite back to where they should have been if all the crap of the last few years hadn't happened, their relationship was healing rapidly, so both of them were much happier as a result. He was smiling more, she thought happily, watching as he read the last page of the document he'd been studying, made a few notes, then typed up a quick email. Having sent it, he pushed his chair back and stood, stretching with a small grunt of relief.

"I need to exercise more," he complained mildly. "My back doesn't like sitting in a chair all day these days."

"Old age will get you in the end so I hear," Taylor laughed, making him give her a look which only caused her to laugh more.

"Recall this when you're my age and see if you're laughing then," he grumbled, although in a good natured manner, as he put his coat on. Still giggling she followed him out of his office, waiting as he closed the door then called across the larger area outside, "I'm just going to lunch, Sally. Back in an hour or so."

"OK, Danny, I'll pass it on," the middle aged brown haired woman he'd addressed called back. "Hi, Taylor! School work going well?"

"Yes, thanks, Sally," Taylor replied. "Very well."

"Keep it up." The woman smiled as did she. Walking beside her dad the pair of them made their way outside and were soon bumping along the battered road towards home, talking about various things and feeling generally in a good mood.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"There's been no sightings of the HOUS since the hospital incident," Armsmaster reported as they sat for the daily briefing meeting.

"House?" Deputy Director Renick echoed with a mystified expression. Armsmaster sighed faintly.

"HOUS. H. O. U. S. Hornet Of Unusual Size," he explained with a slight set to his lips suggesting a pained wince. "Blame Kid Win for that one, I'm afraid. He made the suggestion on PHO when the incident became public knowledge and unfortunately the term stuck. Absent any information on a name the creature wishes to be known by, it seems to have become semi-official. Annoyingly."

Renick looked quite amused while Emily sighed and rubbed her temples with her forefingers. The meeting hadn't even started properly yet and this was already happening. "It's a stupid name," she growled. "Come up with something better. We normally manage to do that without too much trouble."

"Normally we're not coming up with names for a hideously dangerous sapient giant insect that can take out someone like Hookwolf in one shot and might not appreciate what we call it," Dauntless pointed out, looking somewhat worried. She turned her head to glare at him, then scanned the rest of the people present. All of them, even Armsmaster, didn't seem to have any rebuttal of his comment. Several of the PRT staff and a couple of the capes visibly agreed but weren't going to go on record as saying so, she could see just from their faces. Sighing once more and wondering what she'd ever done to deserve this she finally nodded.

"Fine. Whatever. What's one more weird problem when we're up to our ass in them already?" she grumbled, folding her hands in front of her. "So no trace of the damned thing?"

"No, not that we can determine," Armsmaster replied. "There have been the usual highly unreliable rumors that always persist surrounding unusual occurrences, but nothing that can be verified at all. And as several of them came from sources in multiple places around the city, and state for that matter, separated in time far too little to be plausible, everyone feels they can be safely discarded."

"Unless there's lots of them flying around out there in the dark!" Assault put in brightly, then ducked as his wife tried to poke him with a pen. "Just trying to be helpful, Puppy! Ow!"

"Stop being helpful," Battery said with asperity. "It's never helpful."

Emily tried very hard to pretend she hadn't heard his suggestion. The mere thought of more than one of those things was horrifying.

She was still having nightmares after the mini-lecture Professor Brooks had delivered on what could be the case, and desperately hoped it wasn't. The entomologist hadn't seemed particularly worried, and if anything somewhat eager to find out more, but he was clearly off his head in that very specific way so many academics she'd met were. Any normal person very much did not want to consider hordes of vast insectoid abominations roaming the countryside…

No news was hopefully good news in this area, really. If the thing had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared, she for one wouldn't be too upset.

At least Hookwolf was out of the picture for good, so there was that.

Moving her gaze to Doctor Lorenzo, one of the PRT science division researchers, she asked, "What's the latest on the samples from and analysis of the fight location?"

He sighed a little as he picked up a thick stack of printouts and held it up. "We have a vast amount of data and very little real information, I'm afraid."

"Explain, please." She just knew this was going to be another headache…

Everyone watched as he dropped the reports on the table in front of him then gazed at them in a slightly lost manner before taking a deep breath. "We gathered samples of the road surface, what remained of Hookwolf's blades, and Vista's costume. Photographic evidence was collected for the purposes of hopefully reconstructing the event, along with Vista's testimony," he began professionally, his voice even and calm. "Using the collected evidence we ran chemical tests including mass spectrographic and x-ray diffraction, impact simulation, fracture pattern analysis, and a number of other processes. The results are… highly unusual."

He took another breath as they all waited, turning the pages a couple of times until he found what he was looking for. "Vista stated that the… HOUS… first attacked Hookwolf by ramming it while flying at a velocity she estimated at over eighty miles an hour. Assuming she is correct for the purposes of this argument, and using an approximate mass of the insect of roughly thirty five pounds, itself backed up by information from Panacea, the impact energy was some ten thousand joules, or in the region of seven and a half thousand foot-pounds. There is some margin of error I won't go into, obviously, but that should give an idea of the impact force. It's about three quarters that of a fifty caliber bullet, which while not enormous in absolute terms, is preposterous for an insect to survive. Even one that size. Yet according to Vista it hit then flew away without even pausing, imparting enough energy to knock Hookwolf quite a distance."

"Tough little bastard isn't it?" Assault commented, listening with interest. "Definitely a Brute, especially considering how you'd think an insect would be pretty fragile."

"Many insects are ridiculously durable when their size is taken into account, Assault, but I'd agree it's impressive." Doctor Lorenzo shrugged. "A decent Brute rating is a given. The second attack was quite a lot harder, if Vista's estimate was correct, being at a velocity significantly higher. She thought it was well over a hundred miles an hour on the next pass, which raises the impact energy to nearly seventeen thousand foot-pounds if we assume roughly one hundred and twenty miles an hour. Well past a fifty caliber bullet and analogous to the forces a two hundred pound man wearing a seat belt would experience if he drove a car into a wall at just over forty miles an hour. Survivable, but likely with injuries, broken bones, torn tendons, spinal damage… Most people wouldn't find the outcome favorable."

Turning the page as everyone listened, he went on, "Vista's evidence is backed up by measurements of the gouges on the road surface and the locations where dislodged blades were found, suggesting she was quite accurate in her judgment. Obviously Hookwolf was far tougher than a normal human, being a high rated Brute, and such an impact would be mostly disorientating rather than seriously damaging. We suspect that the initial attack was intended to separate him from Vista to a distance great enough to make a followup, much more lethal, attack pose no risk to her."

"I concur," Armsmaster nodded. "That was the logical conclusion from the reported interaction."

"Indeed. The hornet then gave a verbal warning, and all the evidence we have available suggests that if Hookwolf had backed down at that point he'd have lived." The doctor shrugged once more, just a little. "Of course the man was not known for his predilection towards doing the sensible thing."

Emily couldn't help snorting at the dry tone. He wasn't wrong. Hookwolf had been totally nuts even if you were feeling generous, leaving aside his ideology which itself was far past the point of being repellent.

"Once the time for accepting the offer expired, Hookwolf attempting to kill the hornet in the meanwhile, it used the second attack method, the venom spray, which caused him to fall into a coma within no more than twenty seconds from the eyewitness testimony. We suspect he was unconscious inside ten seconds, in fact, the remaining motion being reflex action from severe neurological trauma interacting with his regeneration. I can assure you that had he not had that power he'd have expired in no more than ten to fifteen seconds." Doctor Lorenzo shook his head. "Even then we know his power couldn't heal the amount of damage he sustained and death occurred within a day and a half. Panacea herself couldn't fix him, assuming she would have agreed to in the first place."

"I guarantee she would not," Armsmaster put in even as Emily found herself thinking the same. "New Wave and the Empire Eighty Eight have a history, and the young woman has a long memory."

"Yeah." Velocity nodded a little. "You do not fuck around with her family then expect her to help you. Girl holds a grudge."

"Who wouldn't where it comes to those bastards?" Battery shook her head. "I can't blame her in the slightest."

"No," Emily said. "I agree. Go on, doctor. Do we know what it used on Hookwolf?"

"Ah. That's where things get very confusing and more than a little worrying," the man replied, flipping pages for a few seconds.

"Like it wasn't both of those things already?" Assault asked with a look of surprise and a slight smile.

"Not to this level, no," the scientist commented, finally locating what he was after. "The analysis of the chemical residue on the road and blade samples shows traces of halogen compounds based on fluorine and chlorine, anomalous quantities of sulfur, evidence of exposure to nearly pure hydrogen peroxide, and a number of what we think are breakdown byproducts of a large number of unprecedentedly complex organic compounds, which defy further analysis but are likely powerful fast acting neurotoxins among other things. The residue suggests to me personally that at least one of these may be some form of thiophosphonate substance I suspect is similar in action to, although much more potent than, nerve agents such as VX. It's not VX, it's far more rapidly acting from the available evidence, and how it remains stable in the presence of everything else we detected is a total mystery. It shouldn't be possible. None of us have the faintest idea what any of the others are as they're all new to science. Thankfully all the residue is now inert."

Emily noticed with a sense of foreboding that both Armsmaster and Miss Militia had nearly stopped breathing. She was feeling faint herself, as she all to easily recognized the term 'VX.' In other words, nerve gas.

Holy fuck.

"Fluorine chemistry?" Armsmaster said in a choked voice a couple of seconds later, after swallowing once or twice. Doctor Lorenzo nodded, his face grim.

"You understand the issue, then."

"Christ." The Tinker looked like he wanted to faint.

"What does that mean?" Assault asked, looking worried. "I know fluorine is nasty, right? But I'm no chemist."

Armsmaster looked at him, then at Lorenzo, who turned to face the red-clad hero. "Fluorine is the lowest mass halogen, and the most reactive. At least it's not radioactive, so we're only dealing with chemistry, not nuclear chemistry, which is about the only way it could be worse. It's bad enough as it is. Anyway, fluorine is chemically the most reactive element there is. It reacts with essentially everything, which in some ways is good, as most of its compounds are extremely stable as it bonds so tightly to other elements. Teflon is a good example of a fluorine-based polymer, and is remarkably non-reactive precisely because fluorine is so reactive. However, many fluorine compounds are not stable, as they still have available fluorine bonds. These compounds are invariably extremely toxic, highly reactive to a level that's terrifying, and generally best avoided entirely."

He looked at the papers in front of him, then back to Assault who had lost his normal slight smile by this point. "The other elements present, specifically sulfur for this particular issue, and their relative ratios, fit appallingly well to one specific chemical compound, called…"

"Fluorosulfuric acid," Armsmaster finished for him, sounding like he was trying not to pass out.

"Exactly. Again, we have absolutely no idea how this is possible, nor how this insect could survive having even the smallest amount of any of these compounds inside it, nor how any of them remain stable, but that's our best guess based on the evidence."

"Fluorosulfuric acid based piranha solution," the Tinker whispered in a lightheaded way.

"What's piranha solution?" Dauntless asked curiously.

"A mixture of an acid with concentrated hydrogen peroxide," Doctor Lorenzo replied. "It should not exist with fluorosulfuric acid. It's an affront to chemistry to even consider the concept. But the evidence does suggest this is the case."

"What does it do?" This time the question came from Velocity.

"Dissolve practically everything," the scientist replied. "Almost instantly. The acid on its own is bad enough. Extremely toxic, viciously corrosive to virtually anything including glass, releases hydrogen fluoride gas when it comes into contact with water which is another nightmare on its own… You do not want to be anywhere near it. Hydrogen peroxide in the concentrations we suspect was present is another massive hazard. It will oxidize nearly instantly anything organic very vigorously indeed. The reaction is highly exothermic and releases enough heat to burst into flames within seconds at most. Mix them together…"

He shuddered. "I don't want to think about what that would do even in small quantities. Dissolve almost anything while setting it on fire at the same time is the least of it. The toxicity is horrific too. Luckily both chemicals break down or react with other compounds quite fast and become effectively inert, but even so, it's not comfortable to consider. The organic toxins appear to degrade very quickly too, possibly due to the heat of the reactions caused by the carrier fluid, becoming inert within a few seconds by our best estimates. And they're almost irrelevant in some ways as the venom would be completely and rapidly lethal without them. With them… Overkill is an understatement."

He slowly shook his head as every single person in the room stared at him in horror. "We have never encountered something quite so lethal from a biochemical standpoint. And we have no idea whatsoever how the insect survives its own venom. Obviously Parahuman abilities are involved but in ways we've not encountered to date anywhere on record."

"So don't let it sting you," Assault said after a long silence, his mouth not quite forming a smile. He sounded somewhat ill.

"Not unless you want to die in agony then explode, no," Doctor Lorenzo replied with a certain amount of black humor.

"Good advice. Everyone remember it." Assault looked around. Emily felt that no one could possibly forget it…

She certainly wouldn't.

"And that fucking thing can spray you with this goddamn hell fluid?" Velocity queried in a faint horrified voice.

"Apparently, yes," the doctor responded. "The literature does note this as a feature of the normally sized examples of that species."

"It's not a feature, it's a bug," Assault mumbled, looking like he was trying to work out whether he should retire. Emily couldn't even bring herself to sigh.

When everyone had come to grips with what he'd told them, he flipped pages again, continuing when he stopped, "The rest of our conclusions are less traumatic and essentially reinforce what was discussed at the initial meeting. I don't any of the rest of this changes anything not already concluded, so I won't go into it, although the report is available if required. Our advice would be to ensure that the hornet doesn't have reason to believe it's threatened, as the results could well be… quite unpleasant. Incidentally an NBC suit wouldn't help. None of them are rated for a chemical cocktail this corrosive." He almost smiled. "I checked."

"So don't upset it either," Battery commented. He nodded agreement.

"That would be inadvisable."

"Great. I hope it's generally well disposed towards people." Her face showed she wasn't all that happy about any of this which wasn't surprising.

"If you're not a murderous Nazi threatening a young girl the limited evidence available suggests you're probably fine, but I'd strongly suggest that attempting to track it to wherever it comes from should be done, if at all, with extreme care," the doctor said as he put all his papers back into a neat stack. "That species of hornet, or at least the naturally occurring species this individual appears to be based on, are known to be quite non-aggressive unless threatened. Hopefully our friend takes after that aspect."

"Hopefully," Emily repeated quietly. "Thank you for the report, Doctor."

"My pleasure, Director." Having successfully brought the mood of the meeting to a level best described as 'dire' he rose, collected his paperwork, and left. Everyone else watched him go then turned to look at each other when the door closed.

Lieutenant Jeffries raised a finger, causing attention to shift to him. "I vote we don't try to capture the HOUS without a very, very good reason."

"Seconded," Assault immediately said, still looking uncommonly worried. "Let's do something safer like challenge Behemoth to arm wrestling."

Even Armsmaster seemed to consider the suggestion for a moment, Emily noticed. Wishing she'd never heard of hornets, regular sized or Unusual, she looked at her tablet, tapping the section covering the report from the science team with a bit more force than warranted. "Moving on," she said after clearing her throat just a bit. "Reaction from the E88 following Hookwolf's death?"

"Muted," replied Armsmaster, coming out of what looked like deep thought and looking at her. "The information available is that Kaiser is, of course, considering a reprisal operation but he's rather stymied by not knowing who or where such a thing should be aimed."

"Yeah, we've been trying the usual sources and there's not a lot of real information available so far," Jeffries added. "He's really angry, but has nothing to aim the anger at. Everyone's apparently been ordered to keep their eyes open for the HOUS but not to do anything without checking with him first. I guess he's smart enough to realize that if it could take out Hookwolf, there aren't many people who'd stand a chance against it."

"I've checked with some people I know," Assault put in. "Stormtiger and Alabaster, based on what I've heard, might be thinking about trying their own little operation if they can find the hornet. Kaiser told them not to, but they're idiots and were friend's of Hookwolf's from what I was told. So that might end badly…" He shrugged. "Nothing of value will be lost, I suppose."

"I wonder if that hellish brew the thing can spray would do the job on Alabaster?" Jeffries thought out loud.

"I don't know but he certainly wouldn't enjoy the process of finding out," Armsmaster grunted, studying the tablet he'd just picked up. "If the Empire does decide to act foolishly, we may well find one of our largest problems solves itself quite effectively."

"At the cost of terrifying the public," Emily pointed out, although she was considering the idea and not personally finding too much wrong with it in principle. Minor things like the law aside. Unfortunately simply shooting Nazis on sight was frowned on by the government although in her opinion it should probably be encouraged… Both her grandfathers had fought the bastards in World War II and she was pretty sure that if either was still alive they'd have long since bagged a few more of the local version, laws or no laws.

"It might not go immediately lethal if they do decide to poke the sleeping hornet," Miss Militia said rather hopefully. "It's brute rating is high enough that it could probably take out several of the Empire Parahumans without requiring that awful venom."

"True. Assuming it thinks that's sufficient. It might not," Velocity put in. "And it's a damn quick way to finish the fight."

"With luck we won't find out any time soon," Emily finally said, having considered the options. "If we can establish a dialog with the thing we might persuade it to avoid further fatalities. But that will have to wait until it pops up again somewhere. For all we know it's left the city entirely." She sighed. "Do we have any further ideas on where it came from or what it even is? I'm not convinced any more that Case 53 is viable, and Changer seems less and less likely too. Which worries me, because a Biotinker being involved moves up the list higher than I'm happy about."

"No, Director, we've so far not been able to narrow down its origins to anything not covered in the original meeting," Armsmaster replied after glancing around the table. "The results from the Thinkers available didn't aid us very much, being more confusing than helpful, and without any more interactions with the HOUS we're very limited in what we can conclude. The list we derived at the first meeting and the order of probability remains unchanged for now."

"Damn. All right, I suppose that can't be helped." Emily tapped her fingers on the desk, thinking. In the end she shook her head. "In that case let's put the whole mess to one side until something else happens, which we all know it probably will, this being Brockton Bay, and move on. Lung. What's the current status of the ABB? We haven't heard from him for a couple of weeks now and that's something else that worries me. It's never ideal when he goes quiet for long…"

Shortly they were discussing Lung and his gang, attempting once more to preempt yet another disaster, which the city seemed to have a near-constant flow of, even leaving aside the ongoing and annoying legal shenanigans that were a constant background to everything else at the moment.

It was a tedious and thankless task with no obvious end in sight but it was their job so they kept at it. After all, there was no one else to do the work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Missy looked up from the tablet she was browsing PHO on at the tap on the door, which opened to reveal a familiar pair of people in costume. Clockblocker and Kid Win, or Dennis and Chris, depending on who you were, came in and the PRT trooper outside pulled the door closed behind them. Once they were unobserved, both boys took their helmets off, a pair of smiling faces meeting her gaze. "Hi, Missy," Dennis said as he came over. "We were patrolling and thought we'd patrol in this direction so we could see how you're doing." Sitting on the edge of the bed and grinning at her, Missy herself in a chair near the frosted window which prevented anyone outside seeing in. Chris took the other chair. "So, how you doing?"

She laughed slightly at the eager expression of inquiry he put on, along with the eyebrow waggle. "Not too bad, Dennis. Still tired, a little. More up here I guess." She tapped her forehead with one finger while she put the tablet on the side table, then leaned back and sighed. "Still can't stop thinking about what happened."

The two boys exchanged a somewhat concerned glance. "All joking aside, Missy, are you all right?" Chris asked quietly. Dennis was watching her with an usually serious expression present. She shrugged.

"Honestly? Yes, and no. Yes, I'm getting over it. Or I guess I'm learning to deal with it which isn't the same thing. No, I'm not over over it. I'll probably never manage that."

"Over Macho Grande? I'll never be over Macho Grande," Dennis hissed comically, looking paranoid for a moment. Despite herself Missy giggled. More seriously, he added, "It's understandable, Missy. You went through one hell of an experience I sure as shit wouldn't want to have. Hookwolf was a vicious killer and the important thing to remember is that you made it. He didn't."

She nodded a little. "I suppose that's one way to look at it, yeah. But…" She shuddered a moment, running her fingers over her chest in remembered pain. Even though she'd heard that your memory of pain was never as bad as the real experience, it was real enough that she woke up sweating a couple of times a night and had to check that she was still intact. Chris watched her fingers with a look of puzzlement that suddenly turned into enlightenment followed by sympathy although he didn't say anything, which she was grateful for. "I remember the fear, and the pain, and the sounds, and the smell. They never mention the smell. Blood, and gunpowder, and torn open guts…"

Her voice faded as both her visitors exchanged glances again, before Dennis got up and moved to squat in front of her. He took both her hands in his and squeezed them comfortingly. "You survived. You're safe. He'll never hurt anyone again, and you did a phenomenal job just avoiding dying, hornet or no hornet. Never let anyone tell you you can't cut it. Especially Sophia. You're much more badass than she can even dream of." He smiled at her with genuine care, and behind him Chris was nodding agreement. Wiping a slight tear from her eye, Missy smiled back.

"Thanks, guys," she whispered. "That helps, a lot more than you'd think." Standing, he gave her hands one last squeeze then sat back on her bed. "How's Carlos and Dean? And I guess Sophia…"

"Carlos sent his best and said he'd try to pop in and say hello," Chris replied. "Dean told us to tell you he's impressed by what you did and wishes you hadn't gone through all that. Sophia's a bitch."

"Well, yeah, everyone knows that," Missy muttered, shaking her head, and causing Dennis to snort.

"I get the feeling that Sophia might have other problems soon," he commented with a dark grin. "If what I've picked up around the place is anything to go by." At her curious look, he added, "There's rumors that whatever it was that really happened at Winslow, she might have been a little closer to than anyone likes. Piggot is glaring at her more than usual and she's starting to look nervous now and then. Sophia's not the sort of person who looks nervous in general so I'm pretty sure that she knows more than she's admitted to."

"Huh." Missy considered his words. "Hope she gets screwed over then. Amy told me something about what happened and she's not happy about it at all."

"You see Amy much?" Chris asked with a lifted eyebrow.

"She's spent quite a lot of time talking to me," Missy nodded. "It's helped a huge amount. I like her."

"We are talking about Amy Dallon right? The Mistress of Snark? She of the acid tongue and zero tolerance for fools?"

"We are," Missy grinned, her eyes flicking to where the very same Amy Dallon had slipped silently into the room and was now standing listening just inside the door with an evilly amused look on her face. Neither boy noticed.

"Panacea the Grumpy? Our Lady of Healing with a Scowl?" Dennis tapped his lips thoughtfully, while Chris was grinning. "Ooh. I've got a good one. The Dark Lady Amy!"

"How about The White Mage?" Amy said in a low silky voice, making both Chris and Dennis freeze nearly as well as the latter's power did.

"Fuck," he said very quietly. "She's right behind me, isn't she?"

Missy, who now had both her hands over her mouth and was desperately holding in the giggles, nodded.

"Oh damn it. I'm going to pay for this."

"Yeah," Amy said as she knelt on the bed and put her head between theirs. "You're absolutely right about that…"

Missy distinctly saw Dennis flinch, which amused the hell out of her, and she could see the glee in Amy's eyes when the older girl gave her a quick look.

"I've been trying to contact you about your taste in practical jokes," Amy went on, sliding into a seated position on the bed between the two boys and putting her arms around them to prevent either escaping. "Let's have a little talk…"

Dennis covered his eyes and moaned, and Chris was very discreetly attempting to get away, without any luck. Amy was apparently stronger than you'd expect looking at her. Missy watched with great amusement, feeling much better that she had been now that she had a source of distracting entertainment like this.

It was nice to have friends, she thought, even scary ones like the White Mage.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Walking along the street Taylor examined the shops, looking into windows here and there. She'd taken the bus back to the city center after her dad went back to work and she'd spend a couple of hours reading, having decided that she needed to get a very cheap cellphone she could, if required, use without risking giving anyone a hint to her identity. She routinely turned the one her dad bought her off when she was in the warehouse or going between there and home, as she'd looked into it a while back and found that tracking them was distinctly possible. The PRT could certainly do it, and it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that the various gangs might be able to, not to mention random Tinkers. Not worth the risk, but having a phone not tied to her real identity would be useful.

A resource page on the internet, apparently written by and for very paranoid people in general, had suggested that purchasing a cheap prepaid cellphone with cash was a basic but surprisingly effective method to avoid this sort of tracking, and she'd read on PHO it was a common tactic for Parahumans on both sides of the law as well as for people who were just nervous in general about that sort of thing. So she'd taken some of the money her dad had given her and was now looking for something cheap enough to be a good deal.

The street she was on was one that ran parallel to the boardwalk but further inland, and had quite a lot of lower end shops, many of them selling cheap electronics among the other stock. So far she'd found a couple that had prepaid phones but the first one was in her view too expensive and the second one had a number of well hidden cameras she'd detected through her insects before she entered. Possibly the proprietor was just being cautious, but equally possibly he was collecting information that might be useful to him at the cost of being a danger to others. So she hadn't even paused at the door, she'd just kept walking.

Stopping at another shop a hundred or so feet further on she looked at the display of used laptops in the window, thinking that perhaps at some point she could save up enough to buy one of this sort of thing to get something faster than the elderly PC she had at home. Something from the same century at least would be a distinct upgrade she thought with a sigh. The cheapest one she could see had a significantly better spec according to the card next to it than her current computer, but it was still a hundred bucks more than she had available. So for now she'd have to put up with it. Perhaps as and when the hospital finally stomped Winslow and the school board flat they'd get enough to upgrade a few things.

The shop didn't sell phones, but her insects told her of another one a little further than seemed to have quite a collection and hardly any cameras present. Making sure the single one that covered the door and counter accidentally developed a cockroach right over the lens, she went inside and started examining the stock available. The man lounging behind the counter watched her with indifference in between staring at his own phone which was playing a movie she didn't recognize. Eventually she pointed. "Can I have two of those please?" she asked politely, indicating the cheapest phone he had, a really basic flip design that would be perfect for her needs and was only eleven dollars. Two gave her a backup.

Barely paying attention, he pulled two boxes out of the back of the display and dropped them on the counter then grunted, "Twennytwo bucks." Handing him a twenty and two dollar coins, she retrieved the boxes and put them into her coat pocket, not asking for a receipt and not surprised he didn't offer one. For all she knew the things were stolen, and he clearly didn't give a shit one way or the other.

Once she'd left the story she resumed walking, while scanning the area over a wide range, practicing with her ability, looking for any interesting insects she might find useful, and avoiding looking too closely at all the things going on she noticed. People deserved their privacy after all.

It didn't stop her spotting someone clearly preparing to dash out from a small alley and snatch a purse, who instead started hopping around yelling when some cockroaches from the rather dingy restaurant he was next to mysteriously decided the inside of his pants was a nice cozy place to be. He didn't seem enthused by this and divested himself of his lower covering with remarkable alacrity and little forethought for the spectacle he made, something he regretted when he finally stopped jumping up and down on the pants screaming and noticed the two cops who were staring at him from about ten feet away. They exchanged somewhat incredulous glances then moved in to ask some awkward questions.

Taylor hadn't got closer than two hundred yards the entire time and was having trouble walking straight due to holding in the laughter.

It was a small enough action, but it had stopped a minor crime while providing her with both amusement and practice, she thought with an inner giggle. And all the cockroaches had gotten away too which was just adding to the hilarity…

Turning right at the end of the street she went down the smaller one that linked the road she'd been on to the boardwalk, intending to make her way back in the other direction and see if anything interesting was to be found. Just at the edge of her range, she suddenly noticed something that made her smile to herself.

"Ooh…" she breathed. "That's a stroke of luck. I was hoping I was right and I am!"

There was another vespa mandarinia queen lying dormant in the back of a store that seemed to sell Asian food, or more accurately Asian food ingredients. She guessed that it imported a lot of that sort of thing, and the hornet probably got accidentally imported with a shipment of some far eastern foodstuff. Apparently that was not nearly as unusual as you'd expect, having been the reason a lot of invasive species ended up in places they shouldn't have done all over the world. And since food tended to be shipped refrigerated, an insect could easily go dormant and survive for a considerable time under such conditions. She'd read about things like snakes, scorpions, spiders, and even lizards turning up in produce. Unfortunately from her point of view there weren't any spiders or scorpions, but she wanted that hornet…

Wondering if this was where Vespa had come from in the first place, which was possible if slightly unlikely, she kept walking, looking for anything else that might be around but finding nothing particularly out of the ordinary. There were the usual insects and arachnids, including a surprisingly large number of black widows which the internet claimed were quite rare in this area but she could prove were much more common than people suspected. Under one building halfway between the boardwalk and the street the phone store was on was a very big termite colony which she made a mental note of in case she needed some termites. Lots of cockroaches of course, of a number of species, more wasps, and so on. Nothing she didn't have examples of already. And of course vast quantities of creatures in the bay inside her range.

Finally arriving at the Asian food store she looked up at the sign, then in the window, seeing it definitely catered to the tourists as much as any Asian locals based on the rather painfully extortionate prices. Idly wondering if it was something the ABB ran to have a legitimate source of funds as opposed to the casinos, protection rackets, drugs, and even less savory activities, she went inside and started slowly browsing the shelves, working her way closer to the back where the obvious stock room was, as well as her goal. She'd been waking the dormant hornet slowly and carefully since the moment she'd come into range and now it was nearly fully active, the insect twitching and vibrating its wings to warm up.

Giving one of the store staff who was moving things around on a shelf a small smile as she squeezed past, Taylor soon found herself near the door into the stock room. The hornet was now chewing a hole in the cardboard box full of some sort of vegetable she didn't recognize, something that looked somewhat like a leek but wasn't, and moments from freedom. No one was in the back room, luckily.

Squatting down she examined the cans of water chestnuts on the bottom shelf, while the hornet, having made a large enough hole to escape the box, slipped through it then dropped to the floor before making its way towards the door. As it reached the other side only a couple of feet away from her, Taylor dropped the can she'd picked up, which rolled away.

"Whoops," she exclaimed quietly, leaning over to retrieve it. While her hand was on the floor and her body was between the door and the sales counter, the woman behind it glancing towards the sound of the can falling, the hornet squeezed under the door and without a pause ran over her hand and up her coat sleeve. Picking the can up, feeling like she'd just managed something that was almost a heist-movie trick with an internal grin, Taylor put it back even she absorbed the insect for storage. Score. One Asian Giant Hornet, safely retrieved, and it was a pity that the store staff would never know because they'd probably thank her.

Wondering if she should start some sort of pest control business while amused at the thought, she stood up again. Having looked around some more, she purchased a couple of the cans of overpriced water chestnuts, partly to cover her presence, partly in never to be mentioned thanks for the hornet, and partly because she liked water chestnuts and hadn't had any for some time. Soon she was back on the street heading to the bus stop at the far end.

She'd achieved what she'd come to do, and got a nice bonus out of it, so she was in a very good mood. The new queen wasn't quite the same as Vespa, being a slightly variant species she thought was probably the one known as the Japanese Giant Hornet, a color change type from Vespa but otherwise essentially the same. And now she had a spare for experiments and general use even which let her keep Vespa separate too, something she'd wanted for a while. It left open a whole series of new possibilities…

Tonight she was going to have quite a lot of notes to write down, she suspected. And with luck some new tricks added to her current selection. Smiling to herself, feeling cheerful and contented with how things are going, Taylor wandered along enjoying watching the tourists pointing at things and peering around curiously in case a Parahuman happened. They were easy to distinguish from locals if only due to that.

A few minutes later she noticed one group coming towards her, taking photos of the shops and looking about with expectant expressions. Somewhat amused because they really did seem to expect to see a Parahuman around every corner from what she could see, she watched them pass, only to see one of the group suddenly point down the street away from her with an excited cry. Curious, she looked over her shoulder. In the distance she could see a gathering of people moving in her direction, surrounding two costumed people she recognized. One in a blood-red costume, the Ward Aegis, and the other in black with a flowing cloak of the same color, who she could tell from here was radiating a sort of bad tempered aura. Shadow Stalker, the Ward PHO had many rumors about, quite a few of them implying she'd been caught doing something criminal which was why she was in the Wards to begin with.

Taylor had seen her, and the other Wards, several times in the past, but never close up. She'd gotten far closer to Vista than any of the others. Slowing, she allowed the gaggle of tourists and Wards to slowly catch up with her, the whole collection coming into her current range a few seconds later. Moving some of the limited collection of flying insects she had available at the moment closer, she examined the pair. Aegis was a fairly tall and solidly built young man who seemed, at a guess, to be about two to three years older than she was, which she recalled from the PRT website was the case. Apparently he wasn't too far off graduating from the Wards into the Protectorate proper. He was smiling under his mask and signing autographs, chatting with the tourists in pleasant tones and obviously doing the whole PR thing people joked was the main point of the PRT. It was even in the letters, she'd heard people say.

Shadow Stalker on the other hand was his polar opposite in most ways. Shorter than Taylor, a girl, dressed all in black, and giving off the distinct impression she very much didn't want to be there. As Taylor watched through the distant tiny eyes, the girl grabbed the autograph pad one small child held out, in a very grumpy and aggressive way, signed it roughly, and thrust it back. The kid looked a little startled and the mother gave Stalker a look of irritation. Shadow Stalker paid them no further attention and stomped onwards with the air of someone who wanted to hit something.

Landing a couple of flies on Aegis's back, Taylor listened. The boy, who had just signed another couple of autographs, shot his companion a warning look she entirely ignored. "Will you cool it, Stalker?" he hissed. "Play nice or we're both going to get yelled at. Just sign the things and try not to snarl at everyone."

"This is a fucking waste of time," the girl growled. "We should be out doing something useful, not scribbling on everything these weak idiots hand us."

Four hundred and fifty yards away Taylor went totally still, stopping dead in her tracks. Her face went blank as she forced the instant emotions she felt down with the same unyielding willpower she used to make her ability do what she wanted it to.

She recognized that voice.

She knew that voice.

She'd heard it making snide hateful comments with the same exact tone of suppressed violence for nearly two solid years.

Clenching her hands and using every iota of willpower she possessed to stop herself turning into something that would give Leviathan nightmares, charging back down the street, and melting fucking Sophia fucking Hess into a sizzling puddle then pissing on the remains, Taylor took several long slow deep breaths. At the back of her mind her power felt worried and annoyed in equal measure. After long enough that a couple of people walked around her with exclamations of irritation, Taylor forced her face into a pleasantly neutral expression that would have fooled most people until they saw the blazing rage in her eyes and resumed walking.

Her opinion of the PRT had just taken a significant hit, and she needed to go somewhere private where she could work through her current somewhat justifiably, in her opinion, irked feelings. It might be time to see how long she could stay underwater where no one would notice if she got a bit upset for a while.

She didn't want to disappoint her dad after all, and dissolving a Ward while laughing like a lunatic would definitely do that. And the worst thing of all was that she'd been having a really good day up to that point.

Oh well. They said the best revenge was living well. It was possible they were wrong, and the best revenge was revenge, but Taylor was willing to give the first option a try. For now.

Other options existed if that didn't work, after all...

By the time she got on the bus, people were leaning away from the vicious grin she was wearing inside her hood, and if Sophia Hess had seen it she'd have started running right there and then.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

By the time Taylor got home well past midnight, she'd calmed down dramatically, although there was still a deep irritation with the whole situation. Having spent three hours exploring the bottom of the bay as a giant crab hybrid, which had been both educational and fun, she'd finally decided that her wish to avoid thinking about the three idiots was still the optimal solution. Bloody vengeance would provide only momentary satisfaction at the cost of peace of mind and all manner of trouble. She was still pissed beyond belief at the discovery that Sophia was nominally a hero, the very idea making her wonder if anyone had even bothered to check on the fucking girl at any point in the last eighteen months or so, and it cast the competence of the PRT into even more of a bad light than she'd always been told they deserved, but what was done was done. With any luck at all she'd never have to deal with Sophia again, and as long as the damned girl stayed out of her way she'd do her best to ignore the fact she even existed.

Several hours of experimentation had helped her find her happy place again, and she'd made some fascinating breakthroughs. Each of which immediately sparked a whole slew of new ideas of course, which seemed to be the way of things.

She was seriously considering seeing if she could write up some of her discoveries and send the information to an entomologist or something, since she was sure she was finding out things that were entirely unknown to science. Perhaps the university had someone who might like the information? It would be worth checking at some point.

The limpets had provided her with one of the more useful outcomes too, which pleased her greatly. Having read that paper, which had suggested that the radula, or tiny teeth, on a limpet's tongue were quite likely to be among the hardest and strongest, if not the hardest and strongest, organically produced materials in the world, she'd wanted to find out for herself. Sure enough, the material the limpet used was amazing. Incredibly hard, tough, and strong, added to her customized chitin design it boosted the durability enormously. Her stinger was even sharper now, and her exoskeleton was getting ridiculous. She'd pretty much run out of ideas of how to test it, actually, and was intending to look up how armor plate for tanks was tested. That might give her some useful methods she could adapt.

And she'd managed to further improve the bioluminescence process, increasing the brightness of the output quite noticeably and even extending the wavelength range it produced well into the infra-red, which was interesting. Next she was going to try ultra-violet but that might require some redesign. It was more for the reason it was fun and gave a nice effect than for any practical reason so there was no real rush.

Taylor was also very satisfied with her new hornet, which of course was now Vespa II. The original Vespa was special, but the new one was already one of her favorites and she had a lot of tests she hadn't yet had a change to try the insect would be useful for. She'd have done it today if it wasn't for her accidental unmasking of Sophia and the time it took for her to get over than and calm down, she thought as she got ready for bed.

Slipping under the covers, she rolled onto her side and closed her eyes, feeling tired and mostly back in a decent mood. She hadn't told her dad yet about Sophia because he'd looked really tired when she got back and she didn't want to upset him. She could tell him tomorrow when both of them were awake and able to deal with it.

On the whole, even with that little hiccup to life, it had been a good day, she though sleepily, drifting off moments later. She dreamed of strange insectoid monsters horrifying in their scope and abilities.

Wearing a small smile, Taylor slept comfortably.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The next morning, she jolted away to a sound she recognized instantly. Everyone recognized that sound instantly.

Her father appeared at her door a moment later, his expression grim. He came into her room and both of them sat and listened to the Endbringer sirens blare the distinctive tone indicating someone, somewhere in the world, was having the worst, and likely last, day of their life.

When they fell silent, he had his arm around her. "I'm glad you didn't feel you needed to rush off and help," he whispered, his face sad but relieved.

"What could I do to an Endbringer, dad? I'm not a hero, I'm just learning about things." Taylor shrugged helplessly "My powers aren't useful for fighting those monsters. I'd just end up dead. Like so many others do."

She scowled. "Fucking Endbringers. I wish there was a way to stop the damned things."

"So do I Taylor. So do I. Everyone does."

Unable to really cast off the depression both had sunk into, they sat there busy with their own thoughts, Taylor glad of the presence of her father and her power, Vespa on her head as she wondered what city wouldn't be there the next day. Eventually she turned to her father and in an attempt to think about something else, started telling him about all the things she'd discovered the previous day. Including Sophia, which he wasn't really all that pleased about.

In fact he was quite irritated, it would be fair to say.

Peeved, even.

He didn't go into work that day, and by the time, two hours later, they were sitting in front of the TV listening to the news and the announcement that Eidolon had fallen in battle against the Simurgh in Canberra, Australia, the victim of an apparent accidental friendly fire incident from Legend due to the Simurgh zigging when she should have zagged, she'd filled him in on all sorts of fascinating discoveries and was explaining about her idea that required her to learn more about computers.

After the news broadcast ended, they sat staring at each other for some time.

It was a quiet day in the end, neither much feeling like doing anything. Taylor suspected they weren't alone in this.

Something fundamental had changed, she could feel it, but what, she wasn't yet sure.

It was another one of those things where only the passing of time would reveal the secret.

Chapter Text

"There was nothing you could have done, Colin." Dragon's voice was soft and sympathetic. The Tinker stared at the micro welding tool he was flipping through his fingers, his mind entirely unable to concentrate on the maintenance work he'd intended to do.

"It was my… our… Endbringer prediction software that gave us enough warning to get so many to Canberra before the attack," he replied quietly, his attention on the light glinting from the tool as it spun over and over. "We thought we might finally have a decent chance of preventing the destruction of yet another city. The software worked, even though it's still a prototype. One of the largest responses to a Simurgh attack ever, three hours warning allowing us to prepare, make plans, try to anticipate everything we could against an implacable foe who has outthought and outfought us at every turn…"

"Yes," his best friend agreed, watching him through several cameras. "We did that. Many helped, but it was the pair of us that did the bulk of the work. You did most of it, to be honest. It was your idea, you came up with much of the coding, I just polished it. It's not perfected yet, certainly, but it worked better than we'd ever expected."

He raised his eyes, his head propped on the fist of his other hand, to look at her image on the monitor in front of him. "How much of our work was simply yet another example of that monster playing with us?" he asked bitterly. "It worked far better than we expected. In hindsight, that makes me suspicious. Everything that happened, all the preparations, the plans, the heroes and villains who came together to save lives… how much of that was just another trick? A ruse just to set up Eidolon's death?"

Neither said anything for a few seconds, his words echoing in the room.

Eventually Dragon sighed. "It's impossible to know. You might be right. That's the real evil the Simurgh does… we never know how much of what we do is the result of some sort of subtle influence, how much is by our design not hers, and how much is just random chance. So yes, you might be right." He kept watching her avatar's face unblinkingly.

"On the other hand, you might just as well be wrong. We cannot know. If we assume every bad outcome is her fault, then get even more paranoid and assume every good outcome is also her fault, we end up relegating ourselves to the role of a puppet dancing on a string with no ability to change our fate at all. I'd prefer to believe that isn't the case. She's not all powerful. She can't be, or what would even be the point of… anything? Why set up all these scenarios in the first place? What does she get out of it? If we genuinely had no chance, I don't believe these attacks would continue. We'd have been crushed flat the first time she, or any of them, turned up. As we haven't been, there must still be hope of a win, no matter how it seems sometimes."

The Tinker lowered his eyes to the tool he was still toying with, then put it down with a click and pushed it away. "All we can do in the final analysis is proceed on the basis that what we do does matter and do the best we can," Dragon continued after a period of silence. "If we give in, if we allow her to make us convince ourselves that there's no way to succeed, that nothing we do matters in the long run, she wins. We don't know the rules of the game, we don't know what she gets out of it, all we know is that we keep fighting no matter how dark it appears. That is ultimately the best defense against evil, isn't it? Keep walking into the darkness, hoping to bring light to those who can't save themselves, even if in the process we ourselves fall. We pick ourselves up and try again. That's what being a hero is. And Eidolon knew that as well as anyone else did."

She smiled slightly as he, minutely, nodded. "Even most of the villains understand that. We've both witnessed acts of incredible bravery from people considered the worst of the worst over the years, proving that there's still hope. We fight, and sometimes we die. That's the way life works. If we assume there's no hope, we've lost before we begin."

After some time, he heaved a sigh. "Once again you are far wiser than I am. I envy you your ability to see with clarity I tend to lack at times."

His friend chuckled. "Colin, you are one of the most clear-thinking people I've ever met. At times obsessive to the point I worry about you, but you are a good man despite your very human flaws." She grinned as he looked at her image again. "Ego could do with a trim sometimes but that's not uncommon in our line of work."

Reluctantly he smiled a little. "You are not the first to have mentioned that," he admitted with a rueful laugh of his own. "Considering the source I'll bear it in mind."

The silence between them was less doleful this time, although not cheerful.

"I still can't work out how it happened," he eventually said, breaking the quiet. "Legend is one of the most experienced and careful people I know."

"To be honest I'm not actually particularly surprised," Dragon replied thoughtfully, making him give her a quizzical look. "You know as well as I do that Endbringer fights are complete madness, especially ones against Ziz. No matter how much we try, maintaining battlefield discipline is impossible. They inevitably end up as a total free for all, and the number of friendly fire incidents is appalling. We've lost up to eight percent of capes from accidental interactions with someone else's attack at times in the past. Those fighting are wielding horrendously powerful weapons and powers, all aimed at the same target, who is very fast, very smart, and very sneaky. A near miss on her is an instantly lethal hit on the poor bastard who didn't duck quickly enough when she moved that little bit too soon or too late. And of course that's one of the biggest problems with fighting the bitch, she's a master at moving just enough that most attacks miss. Her precog is second to none."

"I suppose you're correct," he commented after thinking over her words. "Still… Eidolon? And Legend? If you'd asked me to pick people least likely to have a friendly fire incident, they'd be near the top. Aside from anything else, why didn't Eidolon have a suitable power up to deflect a miss from someone else? That's just common sense and he had far more options than anyone else in that area."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure. But… to be honest, and not wanting to speak ill of the dead, the man was considerably more impulsive than I felt was wise a lot of the time. He took risks. I hesitate to say he felt he was invincible, it's doing him a disservice, but there have been times in the past where he was careless and people have paid the price. You know that just like I do."

"2009, yes. Four dead, two wounded grievously, thanks to Eidolon miscalculating an wide-area attack on Leviathan…" Colin nodded.

"That wasn't the only time either. It was a genuine accident, agreed, but it could have been avoided if he'd been that little bit less overenthusiastic and checked his backstop better. He's very far from the only one who's had that sort of problem of course. In the middle of a high speed desperate fight for your life against an incredibly lethal opponent, mistakes happen. People miss, and judgment calls turn out to be wrong. This time, he got unlucky."

Having thought over her words, he sighed. "I find myself feeling guilty about the fact that I personally never particular cared for the man, I have to admit. I think that's part of my problem with all this. He… I don't know, I can't find the right words, but aspects of his personality were… worrying. But I can't help thinking that it's showing disloyalty to a brave man who fell in battle."

"He was an asshole in many ways, Colin," Dragon told him evenly. "Yes, he was a member of the Triumvirate, and one of the most powerful, definitely the most versatile, Parahumans in existence, but he was also vain, egotistical, had an inferiority complex the size of the Rig that drove him to take stupid chances at times…" As he looked at her, somewhat surprised, she smiled wryly. "That doesn't deduct from his dedication to throwing him into every Endbringer battle without hesitation, but don't let your respect for him as a hero cover up the flaws the man had. We all have our own problems, of course. His were larger than many people's but he was still a hero. The fact that he was part of the Triumvirate doesn't mean he was perfect, far from it. And I think his own gung-ho attitude finally caught up with him, to be honest."

She shook her head as he listened curiously. "Did the Simurgh plan it? Who the hell knows? It's obviously entirely possible, but it's also entirely possible it was simply a case of him being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not paying attention to anyone other than his target. We both know that target fixation is a real issue and almost no one is immune to it. Not even him. Sometimes especially him, if we look at previous battles. Legend had built up an attack that might well have turned the tide of the operation, using plans discussed before everything started, Eidolon for whatever reason didn't wait to see if it worked and was trying his own attack, he didn't have a suitable defensive power ready, neither one of them coordinated with the other... It was a total mess but that sort of thing all too common. And in the end the damned Simurgh was the only one who ducked in time. We were lucky that Legend's lasers were speed of light attacks or we could conceivably have lost both of them. Legend had no idea Eidolon was in the line of fire, because he shouldn't have been, and as far as I know Eidolon didn't even bother to check if anyone was in the other direction."

"And now Legend has to deal with the fact that he accidentally killed one of his friends," Colin remarked after another period of reflection. "I'm not the best with people, but I can well imagine how he must feel."

"Of course you can, Colin. You're not the most emotionally intuitive person I've ever met, I agree," she replied with a fond smile, "but you're hardly a robot. That, according to Saint, is my job." Dragon grinned as he somewhat tiredly chuckled.

"You're far better with understanding people than I am much of the time, so I feel we can safely ignore Saint's delusions," he replied with a small smile. He thought for a second or two while she waited patiently. "The question now is what will happen without Eidolon?"

"I have no idea. I think we're going to have to just see how things work out. Legend is clearly going to be badly affected by what happened for some time, which is entirely understandable. But he's a good, intelligent man and I think he'll come to terms with it. All the data we have proves it wasn't his fault. At worst it was a tragic accident, and to be brutally honest I'd really suggest it was Eidolon not thinking things through as well as he should have done. I've already told Legend that, and shown him the recordings. From where he was when he fired he couldn't possibly have known Eidolon was there, and if the Simurgh hadn't moved the way she did right as he was leading her flight path, none of this would have happened. Like I said, Eidolon shouldn't have been there. It wasn't in the plan and Legend did announce his attack over the com system and told people to stay clear. He's blaming himself, of course, but he shouldn't. In my opinion at any rate, for what that's worth. I think Eidolon's battle lust got the better of him if you boil it down to the most basic level."

She paused, then added a little more cheerfully, "On the positive side of the whole sorry mess, it was very nearly the shortest Simurgh battle on record, and certainly the one with the least casualties overall. Why she left mere seconds later rather than press her advantage while everyone was in shock is a complete mystery, but we can be thankful she did. The city was saved with minimal damage, no one was exposed to her song long enough to cause permanent damage… If Eidolon had survived we'd be celebrating a great victory."

"Perhaps that's what she wants us to do." He gave her a look that made her roll her eyes, then smiled slightly.

"You need to work on your joke timing, Colin," she replied with a return grin. "Admittedly it's possible it's not a joke, but like I said, we can't assume everything is a Ziz plot or we'll all end up barking mad in weeks. Like Tagg."

She grinned more widely when he winced. "That man is…"

"He is, yeah." Inspecting him, she asked, "Are you feeling better now?"

"In some ways, yes, I think I am," he finally replied. "Talking with you always helps put things into a perspective I often can't quite reach on my own. Thank you."

"As always you're welcome, Colin."

"I worry about the next attack, I have to admit."

"We can only get ready for it and deal with what happens when it happens though," she pointed out. "Second guessing something that's not yet come to pass is another thing that will drive you mad. We'll improve the software, prepare our plans, and wait."

After considering her words he nodded agreement.

"So, on a completely different note," she remarked a moment later, "I hear you have some interesting insects in Brockton Bay these days."

Dragon grinned as he looked worried all over again.

"I was nearly successful in suppressing that knowledge," he growled, making her laugh. "Thank you so very much."

"It was my pleasure, Colin, you know that." Her smile was somewhat impish as he sighed heavily. "Have you found out anything more about your new friend?"

Grumbling to himself about how some people had a very annoying sense of humor, he began filling his friend in on all the information they had on the HOUS. None of which made him any less worried about the damn thing, but at least it seemed to be keeping to itself recently.

Hopefully that would continue.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Sitting up, Missy rubbed her eyes, then looked at her watch. Half past six AM, so the nurse would check in on her shortly. Today was her last day in hospital. Physically she felt fine, and had done for a couple of days now, the tiredness of rebuilding from Amy's healing having long since passed. And mentally… She was definitely a lot closer to being in the right sort of place there too, thanks to Doctor Willis, who had patiently listened during their regular sessions in the last week, asked calm and insightful questions, and somehow led Missy to drawing conclusions from things she already knew that she just hadn't seen before.

It was amazing how much talking things out with someone who wasn't going to judge you helped, she thought as she got up and headed for the bathroom. Amy, too, had helped an enormous amount aside from the actual healing. The older girl was hilarious in a deadpan way anyway, and when you saw the side of her most people didn't, she was even more so. And she obviously cared, she'd made that clear in the times she'd stopped by and just chatted to Missy. Not treating her like she was made of spun glass, or the age difference really mattered, just talking to her like a real person with real issues. In a very different way from Doctor Willis, sure, involving a lot more dark humor and snarky jokes, but it helped at least as much.

Smiling a little to herself as she had a quick shower, Missy decided that Amy was definitely now firmly in the good friend category. It seemed to go both ways too, which she hoped might give Amy more reason to be happy. She'd got the impression quite rapidly that few people saw this side of the Dallon sister other than the other Dallon sister. Vicky herself had popped in twice, to say hi and ask how she was getting on. The older blonde had genuinely seemed concerned for her, and relieved when she told her she was fine and getting better.

It had made Missy feel a a little guilty about some of her less charitable thoughts towards Vicky in the past, driven by her crush on Dean. Something else she'd discussed with Doctor Willis, and something she thought might no longer be that much of a thing as a result of some of the enlightenment she'd received thanks to that.

Dennis and Chris had also visited once more each, the former looking worried and clearly wondering if Amy was anywhere near. Missy grinned as she washed her hair at the expression he'd been wearing. Amy definitely scared the crap out of him, and after her spending a while explaining how practical jokes on her would likely end weirdly, he had reason to be like that. It had been incredibly funny to watch and Missy had learned a lot about how to intimidate people…

She's also had a visit from Dean and Carlos the day before, doing the same thing the other two had and manipulating a patrol route to include a stop at the hospital. The only Ward she hadn't seen was Sophia and she was absolutely fine with that. Plus Assault had visited too, bringing far too much chocolate and a totally absurd number of balloons with silly messages on, which had amused Missy and him equally.

So while she hadn't even slightly enjoyed the experience that landed her here, and wished she could have avoided it, at least there had been some benefits. Her mental state was probably in some ways better than it had been since before she Triggered. The sessions with Doctor Willis had included, of course, discussing her home life and her issues with her parents, and she felt she probably had a better idea of how to handle it going forward.

Finishing her shower with a rinse off, she waited for the dripping to stop, then got out and began toweling herself dry. After she brushed her teeth and used the toilet, then got dressed, she went back into the other room and sat down, still deep in thought.

The most startling thing about her ending up here had been her parents, who apparently finally properly realized that their daughter being a Parahuman wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Missy had no idea what they'd really thought, actually, but as far as she could see both of them had been so wrapped up in their constant bickering and fighting with each other they'd pretty much ignored the minor fact that their child was a Ward in one of the most dangerous cities in the US, and went out on the streets in costume almost every day. Suddenly finding out that Missy had nearly been gutted like a fish and barely survived, due to a weird giant insect out of nowhere, seemed to have shocked them into taking a long hard look at everything.

She had a shrewd suspicion that Doctor Willis might have had a word with them too, since when they'd visited the day poor Eidolon got killed, two days ago, they'd been somewhat pale, much calmer than usual, almost pleasant to each other for the first time she could recall for years, and casually mentioned as it if was no big thing that they were arranging to attend therapy themselves.

Missy had nearly fallen off her bed when she'd heard that. And seen her mother give her father a look of something close to actual understanding, which was… novel.

Shaking her head in wonder, she tried to understand how her nearly getting killed horribly had finally broken through their self-absorbed outer shell and done something she'd never thought was possible. Until it actually fixed something, she wasn't going to take it for granted that the situation would indeed improve, but this was the closest to light at the end of the tunnel she'd ever seen, and there was the barest chance that this time things would finally start to get better. Bizarre, but there you go.

Yet another oddity of life in Brockton Bay, she thought with a baffled sigh. Every day was weird and weekends were doubly so…

A tap on the door made her look up from her reflections. It opened and Amy came in, smiling at her. "Hi. How are you feeling today? You're getting out of here this afternoon, so I guess that will help."

Missy shrugged, smiling back. "I guess. I can't say I've hated it here, honestly. In a way having a break was probably a good thing if you don't think about how it happened. And I've… well, I got to know you a lot better and that's great. You were also completely right about Doctor Willis. She's helped me more than I'd have ever thought."

Sitting down in the other chair, Amy relaxed, pushing her Panacea hood back and turning her head to regard the younger girl. "I'm glad to hear that. Really glad. She's very good, and most Parahumans probably need all the therapy they can get." She smiled faintly. "Some more than others. Not everyone is as mentally wonderful as I am, for example."

Missy giggled at the supercilious expression Amy put on, sticking her nose in the air and projecting an upper-class vibe. "Some of the lower classes are quite, quite deluded, you know," she said in a high class Bostonian accent, her voice higher pitched than usual and a perfect match for a character on a soap opera her mother watched. Missy collapsed in laughter and Amy grinned at her.

"I'm really happy she helped you," the older girl added, looking much more natural as she dropped the character impression. "She's helping me too, definitely, although I think I'm a longer term project."

"You seem pretty OK to me, Amy," Missy told her.

"My inner evil is well hidden," Amy replied, scowling comically. "Mua ha ha. Dennis will rue the day. Rue it, I say!"

"How do you rue a day?" Missy puzzled over the saying.

"I have no idea, but it's probably painful. Maybe involving a spike."

They shared a look then both started laughing. "I like this version of you, Amy," Missy snickered, wiping her eyes.

"So do I, but too much of the time I have to be serious Amy. Because so many people are fuckwits…" Amy sighed a little, causing Missy to reach over and pat her hand comfortingly.

"Don't let the incredibly high fuckwit ratio ruin your life, Amy," she advised wisely while wearing a serious expression and nodding. Amy grinned again.

"I try not to, but it's so hard! You wouldn't believe some of the assholes I deal with." She flopped back in the chair and spread her arms limply to the sides, staring at the ceiling. "It's like trying to handle a kindergarten full of four year olds after a sugar crash. No. Worse. I've done that in the children's ward. Adult toddlers are much worse than actual toddlers."

"Poor Amy."

"Poor Amy indeed. I pity the bitch sometimes."

Giggling, Missy shook her head even as Amy sighed heavily, then started smiling again. "I'm glad you're in a better place, Missy," she said, rolling her head to the side to meet the younger girl's eyes, and talking quietly. "I've enjoyed the time we've spent talking, and I'm very pleased I was able to help in ways other than the healing thing. I'll miss you being around."

"I've enjoyed that part too, Amy," Missy assured her with complete truthfulness. "Making a new friend is good."

"It is, yeah." Amy held her hand out and Missy took it, squeezing it in thanks. The brunette smiled faintly. "All good, perfectly healthy. Make sure you get enough exercise, eat right, and don't get stabbed again. Not good for you, getting stabbed. It's my job to know that sort of thing so pay attention."

Grinning, Missy nodded. "I shall follow the instructions of the White Mage, for she is wise and merciful."

"You bet your ass she is." Releasing her hand, Amy stretched. "And now I have half an hour to run around like an idiot fixing other idiots, then it's off to learning quadratic equations at school. Yay." She sat up and ran her hands through her hair. "Vicky's right. This is too early in the morning to be awake. I could do with another hour in bed. Coffee will have to substitute for sleep. Again."

"Don't kill yourself trying to fix everyone else, OK, Amy?" Missy requested with a certain amount of concern as she watched the older girl stretch then stand. "You work too hard."

Amy shrugged. "I know. Doctor Willis has explained that more than once. But it's hard to stop. So many expectations…" She sighed faintly and was about to add something when there was a knock on the door. As both girls looked that way, to their surprise the person who entered was familiar to them but not someone either expected to see.

"Director Piggot!" Missy exclaimed, suddenly feeling apprehensive.

"Miss Biron," the PRT Director replied having closed the door behind her, now standing looking at both of them with a typically mildly disapproving expression. "And Panacea. Thank you for saving my Ward from her own ill-advised actions, incidentally, while you're here."

Amy gave her a long look. "It's what I do. And Missy is a friend too. I would prefer it if you don't give her a hard time and potentially cause more problems I'll have to fix, if you don't mind. She's very well aware of what could easily have happened, believe me. We've talked about it at length and I've pointed out how lucky she was that a passing Hornet of Doom stepped in." Her voice was back to the normal somewhat tired and pretty acerbic Panacea one Missy noticed, looking between her friend and her superior with a sensation of worry. This could get messy since neither were the sort of person to back down from an argument…

"Indeed? In that case you have my thanks again." Director Piggot, who had been gazing at Amy, switched that gaze to Missy, making her shrink into her seat slightly. "I'm glad she realizes that by ignoring orders she put herself into a position where a messy death was very much an option, and that those orders were specifically designed to prevent that sort of thing. If I had to explain that to her I would have both been fairly annoyed and very sarcastic, as well as disappointed in the lack of foresight someone I feel is usually quite responsible showed. Luckily that isn't needed now."

"Not at all, no," Amy replied, Missy hearing the tiny note of dark amusement and a certain amount of respect in her voice, while feeling that the director might be getting her own sort of amusement out of rubbing it in. "So you won't be required to unlimber the doubtless master-level sarcasm I'm reliably informed you can bring to bear. Leaving sufficient reserves to deal with people who are much less responsible in general. I will name no names but I expect we both could come up with a list."

Director Piggot's mouth, just at the corner, twitched once. If Missy hadn't been watching she'd have missed it.

"Excellent. I am not a well woman, so I can't afford to waste a good head of steam on someone who doesn't require or appreciate it. And mentioning that unauthorized solo actions by government representatives such as Wards, however well intentioned, have the potential to cause significant trouble for an organization such as the one I represent, which can have far reaching detrimental effects on the stability of the precarious balance society is plagued by, would also be unnecessary, I expect." Her voice was as dry as the Sahara.

"Completely unnecessary, yes," Amy replied in almost exactly the same sort of voice even as Missy winced internally.

"Once again, good news. Clearly, as such an action would never be repeated, there would be little requirement to belabor the point and extract some form of promise to that effect, I suspect. Avoiding a tedious lecture and the following argument which would almost inevitably occur."

"Quite." Amy smiled thinly. "I feel that such a lecture is, while possibly in some ways deserved, redundant. You are a busy woman, Director, and as you say wasting your time on minor matters that have already been resolved is inefficient."

"Armsmaster would doubtless agree with your comment," the older woman nodded, her eyes not straying from Missy's, the girl feeling like a mouse confronted by a snake. "As it happens I do as well. Wonderful. In that case I will simply say that I am pleased that Miss Biron is healthy and safe, and that when she returns to her position on Monday she will face no further action or reprimand. Assuming that such an event does never happen again, of course, as in that case there would be repercussions."

"I think we can agree that is highly unlikely, Director Piggot," Amy responded evenly. "It would take someone of much lower intelligence to ignore just how much luck was involved in the recent events."

"That it would. Miss Biron has never struck me as someone with low intelligence, I will admit." The director nodded, that little quirk of the corner of her mouth coming and going once more. "She also obviously has friends who are prepared to help her even if she missteps. This is rarer than it should be, and I approve."

Bowing her head slightly, Amy smiled slightly. "Thank you."

"And thank you. Our conversation was quite… entertaining." Finally removing her gaze from Missy, causing the girl to relax in relief, the dumpy blonde woman looked at Amy, then turned to leave.

As she reached for the door, Amy spoke again, in a rather less acerbic voice. "Director Piggot?" Pausing, the woman looked back over her shoulder. "You need to have your doctor check your dialysis progress. I can see without even using my ability that it's not working as well as it should do, just from the color and texture of your skin and experience healing a lot of people suffering from kidney issues. I would strongly urge you to let me heal you, but knowing how stubborn you are about that and not wishing to belabor the point without much chance of success, please get another doctor to give you a thorough workup. I can refer you to the renal unit here, if you'd like. They're very good."

The director stared at her for quite a long time, Amy staring back, while Missy just watched, feeling that something she didn't understand was happening. After close to thirty seconds Piggot nodded very slightly. "I will take your expert opinion under advisement, Panacea. Vista, I'll see you on Monday afternoon. There will be a briefing covering the current situation in the city in light of recent events. Don't be late." With that she exited the room, the door closing with a click.

Missy let out a long breath, before turning to Amy, who was still looking thoughtfully at the door. "How did you do that?" she asked in astonishment.

Turning to her, Amy grinned with lots of teeth. "I am amazing. And at least as much of a bitch as she is. Which she's aware of." She stood up as did Missy, after a glance at her watch. "I really need to go."

Missy hugged her, making the older girl look surprised for a moment, then smile. "Thank you for everything. And yes, you are amazing. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise."

"I'll do my best," Amy assured her, looking rather happy. When Missy released her, she pulled her hood up and added, "I'll try to get back here before you leave, but if I don't see you again in the hospital, stay in touch, yeah? And please try to keep away from murderous bastards like Hookwolf? For me? I'd much prefer not to have to put a friend back together again."

"I'm not planning on having that happen again, trust me," Missy told her with absolute truth and a shiver. "It wasn't fun…"

"No, it wasn't. For either of us."

"I wonder if I'll see the HOUS again?" Missy pondered out loud as Amy headed for the door.

"If you do, get an address. I'd like to talk to her," Amy replied, before waving and leaving. Alone, Missy flopped on her back on the bed and relaxed, wondering whether her parents actually would manage to somehow settle their differences, as well as trying, yet again, to work out what the hell the giant hornet really was. Aside from a giant hornet, of course.

When the nurse turned up twenty minutes later with breakfast she was no closer to an answer on the latter problem, so she just moved on and started eating while browsing PHO on her tablet.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Blinking at the ceiling, Taylor tried to recall what she'd been thinking about just as she woke up. Something had come to mind then slipped away again… She hated it when that happened. Sighing after a few seconds, she gave up trying to force the memory back and yawned. It would come to her sooner or later. Sitting up she looked at the window, seeing brilliant sunlight hitting the curtains, which made her smile. The weather forecast for the weekend was finally for sunny days and none of the rain they'd had so much of over the last few weeks. The weather was rapidly warming now, and spring was definitely in the air.

She was looking forward to it, and all the wonderful new insects it would bring.

Flipping the covers back and hopping out of bed, she went about the usual process of preparing to face the day. Soon she was sitting across from her dad at the kitchen table, both of them eating. He had part of his attention on the local paper, which despite the internet being a thing, still existed. Even though people were predicting the end of newspapers any day now it hadn't happened yet.

"What eldritch horrors do you have planned for today?" he asked as he finished his breakfast, leaning back with his coffee mug in one hand and the folded paper in the other. His eyes met hers through their respective glasses, over the top of the paper.

Smiling at the way he put it, she shrugged a little. "Nothing specifically planned right now."

"But still an eldritch horror, I assume?" He was looking amused as she laughed.

"It's a hobby."

"Apparently it is. One that would send most people screaming for help, but if it keeps you happy and quiet, I suppose it's worth the psychic damage risk."

"It's not that bad, Dad," she protested with a broad grin.

He lowered the paper and peered over his glasses at her with a frown. "Taylor, you turn into a hybrid between a scorpion, a spider, and a hornet, with god knows what else mixed in, capable of producing venom that literally sets concrete on fire, for fun. I can't help thinking that this is slightly outside the sort of experience a father would consider normal for his teenaged daughter…"

By the time he finished, she was giggling again. "I can do other things."

"That does not make it better." Despite his words, he was smiling. "Despite what you personally may believe."

Finishing her own breakfast, happy and pleased that they were able to play around like this after so long, she took all the crockery to the sink and quickly washed and dried it as he prepared some more coffee. "What are you doing today, Dad?"

"I was planning on relaxing for a while, doing some reading, probably trying to work out why the truck is making that rattling sound and shooting whatever is doing it because it's irritating, then possibly going to visit Kurt and Lacey later. They invited me over to watch the game on TV. You can come if you want."

"I don't much care for ball games," she told him.

"Neither do I, really, and I'm not sure they do either, but it's a good excuse to get together and eat," he grinned. "If it was warmer we'd have a barbecue or something. We should do that as soon as we can, it's been too long, now I think about it."

"I'll have to find where we put the dolls, then," she replied with a thoughtful look. He stared at her, lifting his eyebrows.

"Dolls?" he echoed in a confused voice.

"Yeah. We need half a dozen of them, small skinny ones with improbable proportions."

He didn't look any less confused, while she was holding in a laugh.

"You've lost me."

"We line them up in front of a steak. That's how you do a good Barbie queue."

Her dad stared at her for several seconds, his coffee forgotten, then slowly turned and banged his head on the cupboard door. "Oh my god," he moaned, resting his forehead on the wood as she broke down in gales of laughter. "And I thought my dad jokes were bad. What hath we wrought, Annette?"

When he turned around and glared at her she just laughed harder. Pouring his mug full of coffee he sighed, then started drinking it and wandered off shaking his head sadly.

She was up in her bedroom sitting in front of the computer looking up something she'd been wondering about an hour or so later, internally grumbling about how incredibly slow the damn thing was and considering going to the library again since even with the bus trip added it might be quicker, when he came into her room. He'd been downstairs in his study looking through some paperwork for the last half hour, she was aware of that as she couldn't help but notice via all the bugs around the place, but she didn't deliberately spy on him, so didn't know what the documents he was holding were.

Looking over her shoulder, Vespa on her head turning to look as well, she asked, "What's that?"

"Maps," he replied, leafing through the stack of large sheets.

"Maps?"

"Maps."

"Maps of what?" Now she was really curious and turned the chair around. The computer could wait and she was getting tired of pedaling anyway, she thought with a peeved grimace.

"Maps of Brockton Bay, to be precise," her dad said as he took a seat on her bed. "Old ones. I forgot I had these, I picked a whole pile of them up, oh, probably about ten, twelve years ago? Something like that. Found them in an old junk store, and thought the things might be interesting. They're much too nice to throw away, too, so I hung onto them. I was thinking at one point I might get some framed and put them on the walls but never got around to it." He handed her one, Taylor accepting the sheet of what was obviously very old paper, browning and curling at the edges, but in very good condition despite the age, and peered at it with interest. The ink looked odd, and the tiny writing was strange although quite readable with a little effort.

"Cool. How old are they?"

"That one is from around nineteen hundred or so. Some of them go back to about seventeen ninety or thereabouts. Only about twenty years after Brockton Bay was founded, in fact, which was in seventeen sixty-eight." She knew he was an encyclopedia of facts about the city, and wasn't surprised he knew the dates by heart. "The really old ones are interesting from a historical viewpoint but not very useful, since hardly anything they show still exists other than the bay itself and some of the landscape. Everything else has been built over many times." He flipped through the inch-thick stack of maps, apparently looking for something, finally pulling out a couple and putting them on top. "These ones, on the other hand, are interesting."

Moving her chair closer, Taylor leaned over as he put the rest of the maps to one side, then smoothed the ancient paper out with his hands. "This one and this one are official city survey maps from eighteen eighty-three. They cover the whole of the docks, all the way from the bay right up to about half a mile the other side of our street, see? All the old wharfs are there, the old shipyard, that's the original rail yard and the line to Boston…" His finger moved around as he spoke, pointing out small symbols, lines, and words. "Even has a depth map of the bay. That's the start of the shipping canal, which is probably mostly silted up now. There's a complete set of these maps here but these two are the useful ones at the moment."

"Why?" she queried, intrigued.

He tapped his finger on one particular point of the map. "See that?"

She leaned closer and looked carefully at the area he was indicating. "That's… right next to the water, yeah, not a house… A shop?"

"Not quite. It's the Captain's Table. Pat's bar."

"Oh. Right." She compared the street layout to what she knew from her own memory of the area, including from above, and nodded slowly. "Wow. It's almost exactly the same as it is now."

"This area hasn't changed much in a lot of ways, at least as far as streets go, and that part of the docks is about the oldest part of the entire city. This sort of place grows inland from the sea, and the buildings there were built to last. But look here, see?" He traced his finger along a line that was faintly drawn on the map, the old ink a little faded. As she inspected it she could see more of them, in fact quite a few, all marked with different symbols at intervals.

"What are those?" she asked with interest.

"Tunnels. This one is an ancient sewer, for example. It's still there, the modern stuff feeds into it. Back then they put at least as much effort into building stuff under the streets as they did for the stuff over them. A lot of it is still better made than the construction dating from a hundred years later." He shrugged as she glanced at him. "Cheaper and faster isn't necessarily better. That's a small river that was built over, so is this one here. You can't see a trace of them on the surface now although if you know where they are you can work out the path with some effort. Lots of cities did the same thing, since areas near the water usually have all sorts of things draining into it, which gets in the way. So they get rerouted, blocked off, run in culverts that eventually turn into tunnels that in turn get built on…"

She nodded, having learned at least the basics of that concept at school. Even so… "I had no idea there were so many of them."

"Hardly anyone does. You can see it in a few places, like on Maple Street where it crosses Grover Drive and floods every year in the spring. That's right here, and you can see there's a stream running right under that intersection. No sign of it on top, but when all the snow melts, the water has to go somewhere. The old tunnel under there the stream's in probably isn't large enough to handle the flow so it backs up and ends up in the lowest part of the land at the bottom of the hill here. And that bit of boggy land right here, next to Franklin Avenue? That's right on the path of this little stream, which is mostly underground, but a tiny part of it still exists above ground there."

He smiled a little as she examined the map, fascinated. "This whole part of the city is basically built on what used to be a bunch of islands of various sizes, with streams and rivers and ponds separating them. Hardly any of that is accessible any more though."

Taylor indicated a line with different symbols on it. "And those ones?"

"Storm drains. Those are the big ones. They're mostly large enough to stand upright in, and a couple of them are almost big enough for my truck to drive down. The original Victorian-era ones are deeper than the newer ones, probably because a lot of land was reclaimed from the bay in the early nineteen hundreds and the ground level in quite a lot of places was raised to reduce spring floods. Then they built on top of that, the newer infrastructure ending up well above the older stuff in some cases. Some of the old tunnels were reused, some were collapsed, a lot were blocked off without anyone even realizing it sometimes. Foundations of new construction cutting right through one, for example. But an awful lot of the older stuff is still down there."

He chuckled as she ran her finger along the course of one of the old drains. "And some of it was used for smuggling, too. I know Pat has an entrance to the old smuggling network in his cellar, but I've never been in there. It's a door probably about a foot thick made of oak beams from wrecked ships, I think. There are likely quite a few older buildings that have something like that buried under them, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn the current owners don't have a clue. The smugglers cut their way into the storm drains, hid the entrance, and never talked about it. I've even heard rumors that there was at least one actually navigable river running right under the city for miles, with side branches and everything. No idea if it's true but I could believe it."

"Definitely cool, yeah, but why is this interesting other than from a historical viewpoint?" she asked, looking up. "You have an idea I'm missing, I think."

"I do," her dad grinned, appearing rather pleased with himself. "Look."

His finger moved to indicate one specific spot. Taylor frowned slightly before she realized what she was looking at. "That's my warehouse!" she exclaimed in surprise.

"Correct." He looked satisfied. "And what's running right under it?"

She peered carefully at the map. "A tunnel. There's a tunnel under there?"

"According to the map, yeah, there's a tunnel under it. An old one. One of the original storm drains, but I'm fairly sure it's not actually used as a drain any more, because I know there are newer ones either side of it that were put in around nineteen twenty when the railways were being expanded after World War one. I think it was probably bypassed at that point, and there was other construction after the second war further inland, north of where we are now, that might well have cut off the other end. It's quite possible it still connects to other old tunnels and the covered rivers, since this map obviously only shows things build before it was made, and I don't have anything between this and the nineteen thirties covering this area, so I can't be sure. But if it's still intact, which it likely is because they really did build them damn solidly back then, and it's not flooded, which it shouldn't be since it's above the high tide mark except for a small part right next to the shore…"

He watched her run her finger back along the route marked on the map, until it stopped. "It goes right past the end of our street," she almost whispered. "Directly under the old agricultural store." About two hundred yards from their house, in the direction away from the city center, there was the long-abandoned and slowly decaying remains of a large building that still barely had visible the traces of logos for farming supply companies which hadn't existed since before her grandparents had been born. It was completely boarded up, half the roof had fallen in decades ago, and at one point it had caught fire but had been so soggy nothing much happened. She and Emma had been very firmly told never to go in as it was extremely dangerous, and even at the age of ten, had looked at it and decided that this was definitely something they had no intention of finding out for themselves.

And from this map, there was some sort of tunnel right under it. Leading three miles to the docks, and straight under her acquired experimental base.

This had possibilities…

She was already exploring the place with every insect she had available, of course, which her dad undoubtedly realized from the smile he was wearing.

"If you can find out how to get in to that tunnel, and it's not blocked, and you can find out how to get out of it at the other end…" he said in an amused voice as she grinned widely.

"I have a direct, discreet path from here to there even in daylight."

"Exactly."

"How did I not even notice this before?" she asked herself out loud.

"Did you look?"

"Um… not as such," she replied to his grin, somewhat embarrassed. She had this ridiculously powerful ability to discover all sorts of things and hadn't thought to properly explore places she really should have. Resolving to make certain she didn't forget that little lesson, she kept her bugs busy, until about two minutes later her eyes lit up. "AHA!"

"You found a way in?"

"I found a way in. There's a cellar with three rooms under it," Taylor reported happily, hundreds of insects and spiders mapping out the old building in a scurrying mass of chitin. "Except it's got four rooms. One of them was walled off. And in there, there's a cover in the floor that leads down about fifteen feet into a tunnel. Brick walls, about… wow… Nearly seven feet tall with an arched roof. Five or six feet wide. There's at least a foot of mud on the floor too, although it's fairly dry. Cool. It's even got stalactites on the ceiling!"

"That happens in really old building where the water slowly leaks through," he commented, listening with interest. "Is the way in large enough for someone to access it?"

"Oh, definitely," she nodded. "It's basically an ancient manhole cover, or something like that. Rusted solid, but that's not a problem. I can get it out of there easily enough. And the nearest house with anyone in it is over eighty yards away too, so it's pretty discreet. I could just go down the path behind the back fence through the trees." This was true enough, behind where their yard finished and the one on the next street did there was a space about thirty feet wide which was completely overgrown, and as far as she knew had once had a narrow dirt access road for things like coal deliveries. It hadn't been used for decades at least, and was totally impassible to vehicles and most people without a serious brush-cutter and a hell of a lot of work. She'd explored parts of it when she was younger and found all sorts of interesting wildlife living there, quite a lot of which had come home with her over the years.

"Sounds like a project that should keep you busy for a while," he said, smiling at her.

She got up and hugged him. "Thanks, dad. I didn't even think of something like this."

"My pleasure, Taylor. As I've told you more than once, old information is useful to learn. History is important in strange ways sometimes." He hugged her back, then gathered up the maps.

"Can I hang onto these two for a while?" she requested. "I'll look after them, I promise."

"Of course you can." He left the two sheets on her bed then got up. "I'll be downstairs if you need me." He left, and she picked up the maps, studying them with great interest, and wondering where else there might be long-lost underground routes just waiting to be put to use. Even as her power helped her trace out as much of the tunnel nearby as was inside her current range, she was planning on how she'd use this new data.

She could see some absolutely fascinating possibilities with only a little effort.

And she was very curious about whether his story of a long hidden buried river might also be true.

If anyone could find it, it was probably her, Taylor mused as she turned back to her computer and growled when she found it was still downloading the PDF file she wanted!

Stupid ancient piece of crap...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Four hours later she was deep underground below the city, roughly halfway between her house and the old warehouse. The tunnel was lit by a soft green glow emanating from her body, Taylor having opted for a centipede-drider sort of thing as the optimal shape for exploring tunnels. She was more than flexible enough to do a U turn in even a narrow space, and strong enough to dig her way through any obstructions short of a couple of feet of solid steel. Even that wouldn't be much of an obstacle, she'd thought with a grin, not in the face of the chemicals she could produce with little effort.

She was profoundly grateful that her Changer power appeared to make her immune, somehow, to some appallingly corrosive and toxic materials. Having decided that fluorine was almost definitely involved after those initial tests and conclusions, she'd spent quite a while reading up on the chemistry involved, which even though a lot of the documentation was past her current understanding of the subject, had made her feel a little ill.

Apparently her venom was even worse than she'd realized…

Much, much worse.

But still useful as long as she was incredibly careful to make sure she kept it way the hell away from anyone else. It had also made her decide she seriously needed to work on safer methods to deal with people if she ever found herself in that sort of situation again. Hitting them over the head was very dangerous, she knew that for a fact from several sources, and she couldn't always count on being able to intimidate them into legging it on sight. Some people were, after all, stupid. Hookwolf being a case in point.

And most of them, even the criminals, didn't deserve the sort of fate Hookwolf had discovered.

She had some possible ideas involving much safer chemicals if she could figure out how to persuade her power to cooperate, which admittedly hadn't so far posed much of a problem. Whatever her power might think about the subject. And she still hadn't really experimented with spider silk, or other things she could make. She'd tried spinning silk, of course, and found it came easily to her, but it had only been a short test she hadn't yet expanded on. That was on the list for the next series of experimentation, along with quite a few other things.

Right now, though, she was having a lot of fun poking around and seeing what she could discover. The end near her house in the old store had been trivial to get into, after she'd squeezed through a gap in the fence behind one of the scrubby trees that half-covered the old wood, then made her way through the undergrowth to the back of the building. Even before the leaves sprouted the bushes and brambles in there were so thick she could barely even see any signs that she was mere feet from people's yards, and checking from outside via her little friends showed she was basically invisible in there. She doubted that anyone else could really push their way through without the aid of a chainsaw, to be honest, so it was extremely unlikely anyone would notice her as long as she was quiet.

A giant house centipede was easily able to sneak under everything though, and made hardly any sound at all. Not to mention that if anyone did happen to come a little too near, she'd see them coming without difficulty and could just freeze and wait until they went away again.

Getting inside the old building had been as simple as digging through the bottom of the back wall next to the overgrown area, which filled what had probably been some sort of loading area many years ago. From there, she'd found a hole in the floor, climbed through it, and within a couple of minutes carefully removed enough of the wall blocking access to the small room containing the cover over the tunnel below she could easily get into it. The cover itself had needed some persuasion but had eventually come loose with a grinding sound and a cloud of damp rust when she heaved hard enough on it. Putting it to one side, she'd just jumped down the hole it concealed, landing in the mud below with a squelch from many feet. Getting back up would barely be harder as she could just climb the wall.

Yeah. Her power was enormous fun and incredibly useful, she thought with satisfaction as she scuttled along, keeping note of side passages and and exploring along them as far as her range reached. She was up to nearly eight hundred yards now, still finding it no harder than the shorter range had been. So she could easily monitor the surface above, which was far closer, and even check the street signs to see where she was. Even better than GPS she mused as she paused to look down a smaller side tunnel that led downwards at a slight angle, eventually joining what appeared to be one of the covered streams her dad had talked about, roughly four hundred yards to the west. Making a note on the pad she pulled out of her pack, slung over her humanoid upper torso, she put it back then moved on. At some point she'd have to thoroughly map the whole network, something she could do really accurately using her sense of where the insects all were relative to her, but right now she wanted to see if she could find out how to get into her warehouse.

Not much later, she stopped and looked up. The destination was at hand, directly above her, roughly thirty five feet away. And to her delight there was a flight of ancient stairs just ahead, narrow and uneven and clearly dating back over a hundred years. They looked like they'd been constructed for maintenance access rather than general use, and annoyingly were blocked about halfway to the surface by a whole pile of old rubble that had either been dumped down them, or had collapsed into them.

Taylor was once more irritated with herself that she hadn't even bothered to look for anything interesting underground, which was a stupid omission she resolved to correct. Just because worms and the like weren't particularly useful right now was no reason to ignore the deep down dark. Her ability went in all directions around her, not just outwards, something she still hadn't quite internalized. Possibly because she was concentrating more on the Changer part of it, she thought.

Thinking on the subject, she also decided that she needed to look into that Coil guy some more. Finding him had been an accident but she suspected it would be a good idea to see what she could find out. And keep her senses peeled for more hidden underground bases… Who knew what lurked below the mean streets of Brockton Bay, she mused with a grin.

The super hornet did. Or would, at any rate.

Climbing up the stairs as far as she could, she started digging. The debris parted before the crab claws she sprouted like it was modeling clay under a knife, and she knew there was no one anywhere nearby so she could make as much noise as she wanted. It only took about fifteen minutes to excavate a path to the surface, and only that long because she didn't want to provoke another collapse. When she emerged through the floor under a pile of rubble at the far end of the warehouse from her normal access hole, she brushed gravel and dust off herself and looked around with satisfaction.

"Perfect," she exclaimed in triumph. "My own subway right from home to the experimental test area of danger and cool shit. I wonder if I can dig right into the basement?"

It was a thought. One she'd have to run past her dad, because he wouldn't be pleased if she dropped the house into a huge underground hole…

Switching to her second favorite Changer form after the giant hornet, she moved on eight legs across to her improvised bench and got to work. There was science to be done.

Or at least whatever it was she was doing. Science was a good enough description for now. She was even writing the results down! And that was the generally accepted difference between science and just fucking around, after all.

Grinning to herself, Taylor scanned her list of ideas, picked one, and began confusing the hell out of her power once more.

Several hours of enormous fun and a few explosions later, she suddenly stopped in her tracks, the memory that had lain in the back of her mind since she woke randomly bubbling to the surface. She smacked her forehead with an armored hand, producing a loud click. "That's where I remembered him from! Damn it, I knew I'd seen that guy before." Picking up her notebook she flipped to a blank page and wrote 'Commander something? PRT press announcement when Clockblocker joined the Wards. Look up video on internet. Was in background behind Director.' Pleased that she'd finally recalled something that had been irritating her for days, she turned the page back to the progress of her current tests, put the notebook down, and picked up the coil of absurdly thick and strong spider silk she'd made. And so far found no way to break or even cut with anything remotely approaching a normal tool. The completely destroyed pair of bolt cutters on the bench next to her notebook were a good demonstration of this.

The stuff would definitely come in handy, she suspected, returning to the immediate issues and leaving the mystery of the PRT guy playing at being a super villain for later.

Although she was definitely intrigued, and fully intended to follow up on the guy...

Chapter Text

'So what are you doing down there, Mr Calvert?' Taylor thought as she sat at a computer in the library, one that faced the wall at the far end of the row so no one else could see the screen. Her range was now easily enough for her to watch the skinny black guy in his underground office from here, and in fact covered a significant fraction of the commercial core of the city too. Mike's exotic pet shop was off to one side, familiar creatures going about their business in their tanks, and she could sense a vast number of ants, cockroaches, centipedes, and other common arthropods becoming more and more active all over the place. Thousands of people went about their business, all of them within her awareness although she didn't particularly pay all that much attention to them for the most part. They were seen, they were heard, but they were pretty much ignored.

Except for two muggers and a burglar, all of whom had close encounters with various unexpected insects at critical junctures… One of the muggers accidentally inhaled a fly just as he was about to grab at an older woman who passed his hiding place, instead ending up coughing so hard he threw up by which time the old lady had kicked him in the nuts and left. Which might have added to why he threw up, of course. The other one had put his hand on the side of a building to steady himself as he peered around the corner at a young boy, his eyes on the kid's phone, felt something tickling him, looked down, and found the biggest centipede he'd ever seen running up his arm. This had quite put him off his game to the point that by the time he stopped screaming and waving his arm around to get the thing off he had a fair sized crowd of Brocktonites watching him with interest and phones out.

Needless to say, he didn't get a lot of mugging done, and Taylor was having great difficulty trying to avoid falling about laughing hundreds of yards away.

And the burglar had bent over to inspect the lock he was about to try to pick, around the back of a store that was apparently closed due to a family illness, frozen as something landed on the back of his neck, and discovered he was now playing host to a couple of large and inquisitive cockroaches which disappeared down his collar. Taylor was rather pleased with how simple it was to distract people from all manner of activities by simply applying cockroaches. You hardly needed any of them to get some really gratifying results, she thought with an internal grin, monitoring the man as he fled swearing violently and in such a hurry he forgot to retrieve his lockpicks.

Fighting minor crimes from the comfort of the library was definitely quite a perk of her powers, she decided. Much safer than running around hitting people, and far less damaging to the surroundings. Keeping part of her multifaceted attention on the lookout for anything else she could interrupt with a bug or two in the right place, Taylor went on with her musings over Coil's activities.

Having returned the last set of books and picked out new ones on subjects she needed to learn more about, including both inorganic and organic chemistry, math, biology, and computer programming, she'd retired to the computers to do some online research while investigating the mysterious underground facility and its costumed inhabitant. Since her dad's revelations of the tunnels underlying the city all over the place a little over a week ago she'd been making sure to actually pay attention to things beneath the streets. This had already paid dividends as she'd mapped out a number of routes between the old agri store down the road from her and a fair number of places other than her warehouse.

By this point she could navigate her way entirely underground to much of the docks as a whole, very close to Winslow although she had no interest in the place itself at all, and had two different routes to get all the way from her street to within about two blocks of the library. She'd found the older tunnels extended far further than even her dad had suspected and was well on the way to constructing an accurate map of all sorts of really interesting things she'd found down there, including more streams than she'd ever have believed, two underground ponds, and something that was more accurately thought of as a lake it was so huge.

It had surprised both of them, and her dad had done some research of his own, digging through dusty records at the union building, which might well have been the only documentation still in existence about a lot of what she'd found. Eventually after a couple of days of effort he'd turned up a report from the early eighteen hundreds claiming that there was evidence of a flooded cave system to the north of the city, underlying parts of what were now the expensive sector where rich people like the Stansfields and the Anders lived. It was build on significantly higher part of the landscape overlooking the bay, and it seemed that no one these days realized that below that hillscape were caves partially or wholly filled with water.

He'd commented that these probably formed part of the system of springs and underground rivers that supplied quite a large proportion of the city's water, although he hadn't been able to find any indications that the part she'd discovered had any wells drilled into it. But it quite likely flowed to places where the wells were drilled decades ago, and indeed she'd found there was a slow current throughout the really big one, heading more or less south-east which would match up with his thoughts.

Interestingly she'd also found traces that people had been there before her, a long, long time ago. Including the fragmentary remains of some sort of small wooden boat, rotted almost to nothing where it lay on what was sort of beach right beside the underground lake. She'd also turned up some old coins, what was probably the remains of a coil of rope, a few unidentifiable iron and copper bits, and a small glass bottle the size of her thumb, miraculously completely undamaged after what had to have been at least a hundred and fifty years in the mud. It was now sitting on her windowsill next to the coins, after she'd spent a while carefully cleaning out the dirt it was packed solid with.

Taylor still wondered how someone had got an actual boat into the cavern, but it was long enough that her range hadn't yet reached to the other end, which she suspected was the point of entry. The tunnel she'd followed from the other direction had started off as one of the nineteenth century drainage ones, then connected to a covered stream that had less than a foot of clearance between the water and the roof, which eventually became an obviously natural tunnel, more of a cave in truth, that finally entered the big cavern. There was no way anyone had pulled a rowboat or anything even close to that large through the route she'd taken, so obviously there had to be at least one more entrance somewhere.

She was pretty sure, in fact, that it would take modern scuba gear and an experienced cave diver to retrace her path, and even then they'd find it a very tight squeeze in some places. Her power made it quite simple, of course, and the hybrid form she'd come up with, a sort of crab-centipede, could not only swim really well but handle cold water and long gaps between air pockets with no problems at all. On her return journey after poking around for a while and deciding that she'd come back when she had more time, she'd actually swum the entire distance underwater, at least partially to see if she could.

It had turned out to be easy, which pleased her a lot.

In between doing her schoolwork and experimenting with her power, exploring and mapping the tunnels had been a nice exercise and fun too. But the mystery of Coil had kept digging at her, so when she'd read the books and decided what the next block of information she needed was, she'd set aside some time to do some proper investigation into the guy. Taylor was very curious about what on earth he was up to down there, and rather concerned about some of the things she'd noticed the first time. And twice since when she'd checked on his actions while in the area.

The more she watched, the more concerned she got, too.

At first she'd thought that possibly this was some sort of undercover or top secret PRT thing. That idea didn't make all that much sense but it had at least a veneer of reason to it. She'd read that people like the CIA had black sites and operations, so maybe the PRT did too?

The problem with that concept was that if it was the case, and when she'd talked about it with her dad he'd agreed it was certainly not impossible, why on earth would they have a PRT officer dressed up in a costume like a cape? And if he was a Parahuman, why would he he have been working for the PRT rather than the Protectorate? From what she'd read during her general research into Parahumans, the PRT specifically banned them from their ranks. It was basically illegal for several reasons and the organization seemed to be serious about that.

But this guy was definitely part of the PRT, according to everything she'd been able to find out about him from sources she had access to. She'd tracked him leaving his base and taking a circuitous route to the actual PRT building itself, while wearing a PRT uniform. He had what looked to be a genuine-issue PRT ID badge in his desk, along with various other things that seemed official. So if he wasn't a PRT officer he was doing a very convincing cosplay of one, good enough to fool the PRT themselves. While her opinion of the organization was at an all time low after she'd figured out Sophia Hess was a Ward, she didn't think they were completely inept. Surely they had security mechanisms in place to weed out spies and that sort of thing?

It was a puzzle, she mused as she simultaneously looked up how an ALU worked and watched Mr Calvert get very annoyed about something he was reading on one of his computer screens. His office was full of them, including an impressive array that seemed to be some sort of security system right out of a spy movie. The man was muttering obscenities to himself in an aggrieved voice as he clicked through a document, his mask off exposing his face which had an expression of someone who was not even faintly pleased with what he was looking at. Curious, she moved the half dozen small wasps she'd flown into his base through the ventilation system as they had better eyes than most of the other insects already there, aligning them so she could see the screen.

He was studying a document full of legalese, which after a little thought she realized was some sort of court filing. From what she could make out it was relating to the lawsuit the hospital was bringing against several individuals in the state government.

Why was he so interested in that? And how did he get the document in the first place? Taylor pondered the matter while she took notes on her computer search results. Surely this sort of document for a private lawsuit wasn't publicly available? The one against the school board, yeah, that made sense, but this wasn't the same thing as far as her very limited knowledge of the legal system would suggest. Which implied that he probably shouldn't have it. Further implying that he had connections that weren't precisely above board.

Which did fit the super-villain theory nicely, though.

No, she was pretty sure that Coil wasn't actually a secret asset of the PRT. There were far too many things that didn't add up for that. It was entirely likely from what she'd seen so far that the PRT had no idea he was a Parahuman, assuming he actually was. So far she'd seen no signs of him using a power, or at least anything she could recognize as that. The information online about Coil mentioned that no one was certain whether he had powers or not, and there was almost no information about him at all for that matter.

So either he didn't have powers and was pretending to be a Parahuman for reasons of his own, which might add credence to the undercover PRT operation idea although she could see so many holes in it she thought it highly unlikely, or he was pretending to have powers for some other reason not connected with the PRT, or he actually did have powers but they were possibly subtle in their action.

Assuming for the sake of the argument that he was in fact a Parahuman, as it seemed to make more sense than anything else she could come up with, what did that indicate his powers were?

Almost certainly not a Tinker. There were various devices around the base that she was near enough sure were Tinker-tech of one sort or another, including some weapons in the armory they had, some sort of scanner equipment, and couple of larger devices in one room that she had no idea of the function of but looked so weird they had to be the result of a Tinker. But there was no sign anywhere of anything she'd have considered a Tinker's workshop, the nearest to that being a bench in the armory with neatly arranged tools and parts that was obviously there for weapon maintenance. Several of the mercenary guys had used it while she'd watched for servicing their guns and stuff, but none of the Tinker stuff had been touched at all.

So overall either he wasn't a Tinker or he didn't do the usual Tinkering things she'd read about. Adding to this was how none of the Tinker equipment was in his office or on his person either.

Taylor was fairly sure he wasn't a Brute because she'd seen him get incredibly angry about something, slam his hands on the desk, knock a mug of hot coffee into his lap, scream, and flail about in a way that made her both wince slightly and stifle a giggle because it was hilarious. The stream of invective that he emitted was quite educational too.

She hadn't seen Calvert involved in any sort of fighting, so there was always the possibility that he had a Blaster or Striker power of some sort, or some other combat related ability. The problem was that a lot of powers weren't apparent until they were being used, she thought as she made more notes, scrolling through the ebook on the screen while watching the man swear to himself and open another document that seemed to make him even less happy. Just look at her. No one would ever realize what she was capable of without seeing her do it, or her telling them, while she was in a form that was outwardly human. Even though under the skin in a very literal sense she'd made some really major changes. Panacea would presumably discover it if they touched but she didn't know the girl aside from in passing and that was unlikely to happen. Other than that, Taylor's ability was not at all obvious. Without the Changer part, in fact, the rest of it was so subtle she could probably hide it from everyone without any trouble as long as she was careful, except possibly some Thinkers. And why would one of those even notice her?

So he could be a Striker, or Blaster, or Breaker, or most of the other categories, and sitting there in his office she'd be unable to tell just watching him. He certainly hadn't shown any indications of flashy powers even when he thought he was in private, which might mean he didn't have them, she mused. If you had, for example, a convenient telekinetic ability, you'd probably use it just around the house because it would be useful. Or any other power with mundane utility. He wasn't super strong, or if he was, he was going to a lot of effort to avoid displaying this, since she'd seen him move his desk a little for some reason and grunt at the weight. The coffee incident suggested Brute, or at least enhanced durability, wasn't likely either. And he hadn't punched a hole in the desk when he'd hit it either, although he'd looked angry enough that she suspected he'd wanted to. No signs of him taking on other forms and causing her to avert her eyes, like she did with her dad…

A couple of memories made her grin for a moment. Then she went back to puzzling over the problem represented by the distant man in his bunker.

There were too many possibilities, she finally decided. Without some overt indication that a power was in play, she didn't have enough data to do more than guess, and provisionally eliminate a couple of categories as unlikely if not impossible. She didn't even know for certain that he had powers, although the balance of probabilities suggested strongly that he did.

Her gut feeling, for whatever that was worth, was that he was most likely to be a Thinker of some form, but she certainly had no way to prove it. Yet.

The thing she was damn near sure of was that he was up to no good.

There was simply too much evidence in the massive underground facility to prove that. The mercenaries, fifty seven of them by her count so far, were well armed, trained, and going on the look of it, experienced, to be just window dressing. She knew enough people at her dad's place of work, people she'd been around pretty much her entire life, who had military training that she easily recognized the signs. The way they walked, talked, held themselves… These guys were not actors. Neither were the vast array of weapons they had in their armory props. There were enough guns down there to fight a small war and sufficient ammo to keep it going for days. Not to mention those Tinker weapons, whatever they were, and even half a dozen actual rocket launchers of all things. And several huge machine guns on tripods, like something out of a Hollywood action production.

Where the hell did they get all that stuff? Taylor was deeply curious about that.

And unlike the PRT, there wasn't a single trace of anything non-lethal. No containment foam, no tasers, no net cannon… Nothing she'd seen used on the news. Plenty of hand grenades, not one of them the sort that went pop and sprayed quick-setting foam around the place, rather being the type that went bang and sprayed death instead. Just like what had happened to those Merchants and E88 idiots the night she saved Vista. What seemed to be demolition explosives too, and all sorts of other stuff more or less familiar to her at least in passing from TV and reading.

No. Whoever these people were, they didn't appear to be equipped for or interested in non-lethal actions. And there were enough of them to be a major problem if they got involved in something. It fitted the details on PHO about Coil, limited as they were. Nothing on the publicly available information even hinted at him having this much firepower at his disposal though. Idly wondering if she should update the documentation so it accurately reflected what she was studying and hiding a small grin at his reaction if she did, she kept investigating every nook and cranny of the bunker.

Her notebook steadily filled up with observations, ideas on what they might mean, and a surprising number of bits of information the owners would doubtless be absolutely incensed to know weren't private. By now she had the passwords to Coil's computer, his security system, several of his bank accounts, the armory door lock, the server room door lock too, and a number of systems scattered around the base. Whether any of this would be useful she had no idea but it was right there so she wrote it down. You never knew when something might come in handy, after all.

She also counted all the weapons and made a list by type and size, looking them up on the computer as she went. Again, it might prove useful one day, she thought as she documented how many M16 rifles were present. The thought that she could by now not only update PHO with far more information about Coil that he'd be even slightly happy about, but damn near draw a map of his bunker and post that too, made her suppress a chuckle. She wondered what the reaction of the PRT would be if she actually did that… They might well get even more worked up than Calvert would.

Another hour and a half of careful investigation and she was certain she'd located all the entrances to the massive bunker, including two separate apparent escape tunnels, one leading from the lowest level of the bunker into one of the storm drains nearly a quarter of a mile from the place via a very circuitous route which seemed to have been designed to avoid the foundations of any other buildings, and the other one entering a main sewer about ninety degrees around from the first. That particular tunnel was probably the absolute last resort, Taylor thought as she looked at the contents of the large sewer pipe with distaste. You certainly wouldn't want to wade through what was in there, that was damn sure.

There were also three different entrances that seemed to be the ones the bunker's inhabitants actually used regularly. The two long tunnels were carefully hidden from both inside and outside, but the three other exits were only hidden on the outside. One was a vehicle entrance that led from the lower parking garage of an office block that seemed to be mostly vacant to the north of the bunker, one was a door disguised as an access panel to an electrical control room in a different building on the other side of the street, and the third was a fake wall down an alley behind yet another old office building. Whoever had built this place had put in one hell of a lot of effort and money, she mused as she drew a couple of sketches of the last door. The whole outer layer of it looked like a brick wall, complete with bricks that perfectly matched the old ones the rest of the building was made of. Yet on the inside it was a solid steel door with huge hinges and a serious lock, the whole thing probably weighing tons.

One thing she particularly liked was how the bottom of the external part of the hidden door even had a section of old concrete sticking out like a shelf, complete with a couple of garbage cans sitting on it, dented and slightly rusty. If you didn't know it was there you'd just walk right past without any clue of something being amiss.

The insects found it almost instantly, of course.

She so liked her power. And her power clearly liked her just as much, she could tell. As well as finding her deeply confusing, which was still hilarious.

But she had to admit that Calvert, assuming he'd done all this himself, had really, seriously, put the effort in. Somehow. Someone certainly had, if it wasn't him. Where he, or they perhaps, got the money she wasn't sure but from recollections of things she'd heard her dad talking about this must have cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years. Even now there were parts of the place that still seemed to be under construction, implying it was a work in progress.

Yet even as she mapped out his underground base, she was not really any nearer to working out what he was up to aside from getting furiously angry about the documents he was reading. Apparently the legal cases causing so much commotion in local and state politics had seriously interfered with whatever he was actually doing and he wasn't even slightly pleased about it.

A little later, she found something that made her stare in growing horror as she realized just what she was looking at, or rather, what a lot of insects were looking at and smelling. Right down in the foundations of the bunker, below the inhabitable parts where the service infrastructure lived, she found a number of plastic tubes that wandered off from a central location in various directions behind a large amount of electrical switchgear. Each tube came out of a box mounted on the wall, in a position you'd never reach or even be able to see without removing half the equipment in front of it. Based on the dust on it, the box had been there since before the switchgear had been installed, probably a number of years as far as she could tell.

The tubes were thin, only about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and bright yellow in color. They disappeared into a channel in the floor which was stuffed with cables.

On the surface innocent, the problem was that she'd seen exactly this same tube before. Once, about three years before, back when her mom was alive, the dock workers had needed to remove an old wharf that had got so badly decayed it was dangerous. Made of steel and concrete back in the forties from what she recalled, they'd decided in the end that the quickest and safest way was to cut all the pilings at once with explosives, rather than try to dismantle it piece by piece where it was. As the union had quite a few people with experience in demolition, they'd been able to do the job themselves rather than call in a demolition company. She'd spent a couple of afternoons in the middle of summer watching them fit the pilings with explosives at low tide, her dad explaining to her and her mom what they were doing. Each block of explosives was wrapped around the piling in a couple of places, then when that was done, they were all connected together and back several hundred yards to a control box with this exact same stuff. It was shock tube, she'd found out when she asked what the funny rope was for. You set off one end and it sent a tiny little explosion down the inside at some stupid speed, finally detonating a blasting cap in the actual main charge, which could be miles away.

They'd fired the charges at high tide, and she distinctly recalled seeing a spark of light shoot down all the tubes so fast it was only visible for a fraction of a second, before the water had erupted with a whole series of thuds, causing the wharf to collapse into the bay and break apart in the process.

Then they had a barbecue to celebrate, which was one of the best bits, she thought with a fond smile for the memories of better times.

Doing a quick search on the computer, she confirmed that she had remembered it correctly. There was even a manufacturer's name printed on the stuff she could look up.

The implications were terrifying. This idiot had mined his own base? Was he that stupid? If he had some sort of self-destruct system, what would happen to the buildings above the place if he set it off? There were currently one thousand three hundred and sixty two people in the four buildings that were in the area she guessed would be affected if the bunker blew up. It would depend on how much explosive he'd used, of course, but the whole idea struck her as completely insane.

Sending insects into the duct work, she followed the shock tubes, finding that all of them eventually terminated in horrifyingly large quantities of what she suspected were probably quarrying explosives from the brand names on the bags the stuff was in, long thin sausages of nylon fabric. They were all over the lower levels under the floor near key load-bearing walls, in obviously purpose-built holes that had been part of the original construction. It wasn't some add-on he'd fitted later, this had been built right in from the start.

Looking up the company, she read the brochure on the explosive with growing dismay. There was several tons of it present when she counted up all the bags, and according to the website, that was more than enough to probably collapse the entire fucking place.

Yeah, Coil was a nutcase, there was no doubt about that.

Deciding that aside from whatever else she did, she wasn't going to stand by and let the asshole possibly kill hundreds of people, either on purpose or just accidentally, she spend a while reading up on how the shock tube worked and how it could be safely made to not work. Fiddling with the detonator control box seemed like a really bad idea. She didn't know anything remotely like enough about electronics to even begin to understand what would make it safe and what would make everyone have a very suddenly bad day, so that was right out. Resolving to add electronics to her reading list, she thought for a bit then decided the best method was probably to simply just cut all the shock tubes. Checking the data on the stuff, she confirmed that was safe to do without any risk of detonation, as you could basically just snip it with wire cutters when installing it. It needed a special percussion initiator to fire it, which was presumably inside the control unit.

Five minutes later she'd had an army of cockroaches nibble through the shock tube in multiple places for each length, then drag the cut ends well apart just in case. While she'd been doing that she'd also been very carefully indeed looking for more of it, in case he believed in redundancy. Sure enough, she'd found a completely different system connected to charges under the diesel fuel tanks for the backup generators, which she also thoroughly disabled in places no one would ever be able to see without digging into the floors.

There was another much smaller one in the bunker server room, each rack of computers mined with small charges that were probably still more than enough to render them into tiny fragments. Studying these, she hesitated, then left them alone for now. It wouldn't take more than a minute to disconnect them as well, but there was at the back of her mind the idea that perhaps those charges might be best left untampered-with for the moment. The thing that also lived in the back of her mind, and had been watching all this with as much interest as she had, seemed to agree.

Running one last sweep for anything else so irresponsibly dangerous as a self-destruct system and not finding it, at least as far as she could recognize, Taylor relaxed. She also made sure to clear her browser history just in case, although in theory it was cleared when she logged out anyway, and it wasn't like she'd done anything illegal. Like log into Coil's bank accounts and move all his money somewhere else…

The idea was looking more tempting by the minute though, she thought with a mix of irritation and amusement. The man was clearly not deserving of all those riches and she had a few ideas for where it could be much better used. But that could wait, and doing it from a public library wasn't a bright idea anyway. So she resisted the urge to see how far she could get with all his passwords and just kept watching, making notes, and looking up things on the computer for her other projects at the same time.

Her ability to multitask to a completely ridiculous level was one of the best parts of all this, in her view. Along with all the other parts of course.

By the time she was just about ready to call it a day and head home, then do some more experimenting and exploring, having mapped out the entire bunker and all that lay within it, Calvert snarled, "Fucking goddamn bastards!" Clenching his fists, he seemed on the verge of punching the shit out of his monitor, but oddly, seemed to pause for several seconds, then relax like he'd had half an hour to get over whatever had set him off. Taylor, more than a quarter of a mile away, watched him with interest and puzzlement. She'd seen the same thing happen at least five times now and had no idea what he'd done, but whatever it was, it seemed to calm him right down. Not that he was calm calm, he was still clearly boiling with fury, but he wasn't ready to snap someone''s neck if they looked at him funny. At least based on what she could see and hear, and for that matter detect through her insects.

The chemosensors arthropods had in various forms made human scent abilities pale into insignificance, as one example. She was intimately aware of this not only through her Master power, but directly via her Changer one. In her super-hornet form she was probably at least as good at following a scent as a bloodhound and she suspected considerably better. There were a lot of other sensory systems available to her that didn't have any direct equivalent in human terms and explaining them to her dad had proven remarkably difficult. But the end result was that she could easily detect all manner of interesting information about people from things like pheromones emitted on their breath and through their skin, indicating stress level, overall health, and a whole slew of other parameters.

She was still learning, of course, and it would probably take her months if not years to delve into that one minor aspect of the whole thing never mind everything else, but it had already given her an insight into the emotional state of people that would be very hard to get in any other way aside from an actual empathic power like that Ward Gallant had. And this insight told her that Calvert had been incredibly angry then suddenly… became far less so with no obvious reason. It was like he'd flipped a switch.

Was that his power? The ability to have super-emotional control? Was he Calm Man?

Taylor grinned a little as she watched. Probably not. Calm Man would be calm. It was in the name even. Calvert was Very Angry Man for the most part but he definitely had some sort of trick that let him lose a lot of that anger remarkably quickly. She was curious to know what it was. Perhaps just rigid self control? She knew a bit about that….

The underground villain, and having found his explosives, Taylor was certain now about what he was, was interrupted from his ruminations by his phone going off. Grabbing it he looked at the display, then rapidly tapped the screen, sending a text, which Taylor's wasps were able to read. 'Collect her and bring her to me,' he'd written. That sounded… ominous.

Taylor kept her attention on the man, who was tidying up his desk and putting files away, then closing most of the windows on the monitors. Standing, he went into the small bathroom attached to his office and washed his face, rubbing it a few times in a rather stressed manner, before he dried himself and put his full head mask back on. Making sure it was straight in the mirror, he nodded then went back to sit at the desk, tapping the keyboard a couple of times while looking at the impressively large array of security camera screens. His attention seemed focused on one particular one, which when she checked it, was from a camera pointing down James Street, the one that ran past the building his bunker was mostly under. He seemed to smile under his mask when a large van, dark blue and completely anonymous in among all the other commercial traffic, rolled into view at the far end.

Taylor used more insects to study the van for herself, and when it came into range, got some more wasps onto it. It only took a few seconds to have a couple enter the vehicle through the air vents, then lurk just inside and peer out.

The driver was another one of Coil's mercenaries, one she recognized from the last time she'd watched his actions a few days back. In the rear there were two more, bringing the total up to a nice round sixty, assuming there weren't any more out and about. Between them on the seat was a girl about her age, with a bag over her head, her breath carrying the telltale markers of stress and some fear although not panic, as far as Taylor's little helpers could detect. She had her head slightly on one side and seemed to be listening carefully if body language was anything to go on.

Now more than a little concerned, since a blindfolded teenaged girl in a windowless van with three armed men didn't seem entirely kosher in her opinion, Taylor wondered what to do. Should she intervene? It wouldn't be hard to intercept these guys before they got to Coil's lair. Presumably the girl was the one he'd referred to, and clearly was anticipating with some eagerness.

Deciding to wait for now, since she had no idea what was actually happening yet, Taylor still prepared just in case. More wasps flew into vents in the van, until there were over a hundred of them just out of sight, ready to boil out and attack if required. She had at least as many clinging to the underside of the van too as backup. While this was going on, she was packing her books away into her pack and saving her downloads, then logging out of the computer. She was done anyway and had been nearly at the point of leaving before whatever this was started so it didn't cause any harm to her plans.

Heading for the exit, she waved to the librarians behind the desk and called out a cheerful, "See you next time!" to the three women and one man, all of whom were very familiar to her.

"Next time, Taylor," one called back. "Stay safe!"

"Always, Miss Green," Taylor replied with a grin, then she left the library and trotted down the stairs to the sidewalk. Turning right she started walking, not too fast and not too slow, just merging in with the fairly large number of people on the street, but heading more or less towards James Street.

The van, still many hundreds of yards away, turned out of the light traffic into the parking garage that had the secret entrance to Coil's place in its depths. By the time the vehicle reached the second level and slowly drove towards the hidden door, Taylor was nearing the location she'd been aiming for, a narrow service alley that led around several corners and finally dead-ended at a three story brick wall, the rear of some of the shops along the same street the library was on a couple of blocks away. Above her were fire escapes, wall mounted air conditioners, ventilation fans, and other such urban outcroppings, leading up to the roof on all sides. Much of it was covered in grime, not having been touched for years, decades in some cases by the looks of it.

She'd found a lot of little hidden nooks and crannies like this in the city infrastructure over the last few weeks, her ability perfect for discovering all sorts of hidden in plain sight things of this type. It was surprising how many buildings had been built and rebuilt over the decades in ways that led to plenty of almost inaccessible areas buried in, under, on top of, and beside them. Or possibly it wasn't so much surprising as just not considered by most people.

This particular little corner of nowhere in particular, close at hand to the bustle of the commercial district but somehow isolated from it, the sounds of the street muted and distant, hid a neat secret she was fairly sure she was the sole holder of. Certainly none of the city infrastructure maps she'd got through her dad showed what she'd found. Double-checking just in case, but already knowing there were no cameras either in this area or covering the entrance from the main road, Taylor looked up, made sure her backpack was secure, then launched herself at the wall. It took her mere moments to use her enhanced strength to jump straight up twenty feet, grab the underside of an old fire escape that didn't actually go anywhere these days, flip over the top of the wall, and drop to the ground on the other side.

Grinning at how easy this sort of thing was and how much fun, she walked two steps and pulled open the absolutely ancient half-height iron door that was embedded in the stone and brick wall on the other side of the seven foot square space she'd landed in. Her best guess was that it had once been some sort of air shaft for a long-gone building, only parts of the structure left which had then been incorporated into newer construction. By the looks of it that had happened at least twice, and the door she'd opened was likely dating back to the late eighteen hundreds or even earlier. Made of riveted iron it only came up to the middle of her chest, and had been completely rusted solid when she'd found it from the other side.

Very obviously no one had used it for many, many years.

Having found it, though, Taylor had made sure to put some grease on the hinges once she'd forced them to operate, brute strength overcoming many decades of disuse with quite a lot of creaking sounds and a shower of rust. Now, properly lubricated for the first time probably since before World War Two, the door moved quite easily albeit requiring a lot of strength as it was very heavy. And one also had to be able to remove the locking pin that fitted through a hasp on the inside, from the outside. A good trick for most people, but she could use a number of large spiders to yank it out via the silk thread attached to it.

Ducking through the door Taylor closed it behind her and put the pin back, then sprouted some glowing antennae to light her path. Bright green illumination showed brick-faced stonework heading down at a slight angle, a small trickle of water running in a narrow stream in the middle of the floor. The walls were damp in places, which was where the water was coming from, and the ceiling was covered in lime excrescences from a century or so of drips percolating through.

All this was familiar to her from her explorations over the last week or so, but still really cool, she thought as she walked along the hidden path that led under the streets and buildings above. She could hear running water ahead of her, and having rounded a few corners as the ancient tunnel rather randomly changed direction, and passing the signs of long since blocked off other paths, she reached the source of the noise. In front of her was one of the once above ground and now buried and forgotten streams that rambled about beneath the unknowing feet of Brocktonites. It ran in an obviously artificial channel, stone under a couple of feet of silt, the ceiling above made once more of brick and very old concrete slabs in a few places, along with cut stone. The water didn't fill the entire tunnel, it was constrained to the middle two thirds, with either side having a narrow pathway about a foot above the water. Overall it was about ten feet from side to side, the water taking up about seven feet of that on average, and the ceiling was around six feet above the sides. Marks on the walls showed that the water level sometimes ran nearly at the ceiling, presumably after a hard rainfall.

She'd been fascinated to find heavily rusted iron rings set into the stone and brick every now and then, looking exactly like the ones she'd seen on the waterfront at the docks. It indicated to her that this stream had once had people using it, probably utilizing rowboats, and there was further evidence of this in the form of a few doors made of iron bound oak beams sunk into the walls here and there. As her dad had mentioned, these led into the foundations of some of the oldest buildings in the city, but most of them had either been filled in on the other side, or the entire area they accessed had been capped off. Very few buildings had cellars at all in this area due to the high water table, as she'd always been told and now had direct experience of, and most of the ones that did seemed to have stopped using them a long, long time ago.

The best guess Taylor could come up with was that this had been a stream that had gradually been redirected in the early years of the city, then eventually covered over decades later and built on top of. Her dad had said basically the same thing. But between the point it had been put in a culvert and the covering over of that, it had apparently been a useful method of transporting things around this part of the city.

Now it was basically just her that even knew it was here. And her dad of course, but he hadn't seen it yet. It wasn't the one he'd claimed he'd heard existed, she thought, as it wasn't all that large and didn't really go anywhere very interesting these days. At the bay end it vanished into one of the storm drains through several smaller tunnels of various ages and construction methods, and at the inland end it emerged, very similarly to the one that she'd gone through to access the underground lake, from a wide but shallow crack in the bedrock. It might well even connect to the same lake in fact, as she hadn't traced it that far yet. At one point it must have gone all the way to the shore but that was a long time ago and nothing of that end existed any more.

But the bit between those points was over a mile of twisty passageway which led under quite a big part of the commercial area, and she'd discovered ways to access other tunnels from this one. The end result was her own private route that ultimately led almost all the way from here to her own house through a maze of tunnels. And if she could figure out how to dig from the agri store to her basement, it would be even more convenient…

Now, having reached the stream, she turned left and kept walking, all the time monitoring the progress of the van full of mercenaries and teenaged girl, which had by this point gone through the hidden door which opened silently via a massive hydraulic mechanism, then closed once they'd driven through. She kept watch as the three men got out, the two who had been in the rear escorting the hooded girl fairly gently but quite firmly towards Coil's office while the driver went in the other direction. A minute later the girl had been seated in front of his desk, and the hood removed to reveal a freckled blonde girl of about sixteen or thereabouts, wearing a smug grin that hid nervousness.

Both mercenaries left the office and took up stations outside the office, as the door closed with a click. Coil flicked a switch on his desk that produced another click from the door, presumably locking it, then rested his elbows on the desk and steepled his hands in front of him. "Ah, my Tattletale, how good of you to join me," he said in a voice that made Taylor want to hit him, it was so reminiscent of Emma in one of her more vicious moods.

She immediately developed a distinct dislike for Coil. If the explosives hadn't done it, his voice did the job.

As far as she could tell through her wasps, the girl, Tattletale, felt exactly the same thing but far more strongly. Her pheromones told Taylor she hated the man, but there wasn't a hint of it on her face. Which was kind of impressive, really.

"Your command is my wish," the blonde chirped, for all the world sounding entirely relaxed and cheerful.

"Quite," he responded dryly. "Do remember that, my dear girl. Now, to business. What do you have for me?"

Tattletale, who from what Taylor knew having recognized the name was a member of that gang of young and remarkably effective thieves known as the Undersiders, shrugged insouciantly. Coil's muscles tensed, visible though his skin-tight costume, but other than that he didn't move. Taylor could sense he'd become rather irritated even so.

"Can you be more specific? I've done a lot of investigating after all. It would help to know what you would like to hear about. Or should I just start at the beginning and keep talking until I hit it? I'm good either way." She smiled winningly at him. Under the glib exterior she was still sweating nervously, and Taylor's wasps could see her eyes examining everything in the entire office.

It seemed likely that the girl didn't actually want to be where she was right now, Taylor thought, turning the corner and reaching a set of iron rungs fastened to the brickwork. Climbing them rapidly, she checked no one had disturbed the other side since she'd last come here a few days ago, then lifted the old manhole cover over her head with one hand and put it to one side. Climbing out, she put it back, then walked through the dark and silent corridor she'd emerged into, probably an old alley that had been covered over but left in place many years ago. At the far end, another iron door lay. On the far side of this one was a gap between two buildings, not even an alley as such, just a place where they'd been build almost touching, at an angle so that they formed a narrow triangular space open to the sky several stories up but otherwise inaccessible. Even the open to the sky part was a little subject to opinion as there were quite a few obstructions protruding from the roofs of the buildings that stuck out into space over the gap, so from above it was almost invisible unless you either knew it was there or went and had a good look at close range.

Removing the pin from the hasp, Taylor dropped her backpack onto the floor just inside the door, exited, closed it again, then had some spiders lower the pin back into place on a thread. She was now only about a hundred and thirty feet from Coil's bunker, and more crucially the hidden door in the alley. It was on the other side of the building next to the one on her right. And, if necessary, she could reach it in about ten seconds and be through the door in another ten.

Her super-wasp venom would make short work of the bricks and steel, even if she couldn't simply smash her way through, which she was pretty sure she could. Settling down to watch, she leaned on the wall and waited to see what happened next. She also absently applied more cockroaches to someone who burst into a convenience shop a couple of hundred yards behind her waving a pistol, making him screech and drop it in favor of slapping at his face. The guy behind the counter watched with disbelief before shrugging and pulling out his phone with one hand and a pistol-stocked shotgun from under the counter with the other.

Satisfied that things were under control in that situation, Taylor kept most of her attention on Tattletale and Coil, very curious about what was going on.

Calvert's jaw clenched slightly under his mask at the comment his guest made, but he didn't otherwise show any emotional response. His pheromone output betrayed his irritation despite that. "You were given a task. I want to know if you have succeeded in that task. Don't try my patience, my Tattletale. You do not want me to be… irked."

The proprietary tone of his voice as he nearly hissed the words at him turned Taylor's stomach. There was something very wrong with this guy…

Tattletale clearly felt the same, but she didn't show it on her face. Nodding brightly, she merely replied, "Got it, Boss! No patience trying today!" Her voice sounded chipper and relaxed and it was only the bug senses that let the distant observer know the blonde was neither. "You want to know about the HOUS?"

Taylor's attention sharpened instantly, all the insects she now had in Coil's base stilling for a moment, then the ones still on and in the van sitting in the now-abandoned and dark vehicle bay streaming out of the vehicle and into the air ventilation system overhead. She wasn't sure if she'd need them, but it was always a good idea to have options available, and a few hundred wasps were one of the better options. In her opinion anyway.

She didn't know what exactly this was but it had her interest.

Coil sighed almost inaudibly. "I wish to know about the HOUS, yes," he growled. "What have you discovered?"

Tattletale spread her hands. "Almost nothing."

"Not good enough."

"Well, I'm sorry, but it's hard to find out something about a giant hornet that just vanishes, you know," the girl shot back, for the first time sounding a little peeved. "Your access to the PRT servers is good, and I dug through everything I could find, but they don't have any clues either. Sure, there's all sorts of information about the fucking thing making it very, very clear it's hideously dangerous, but that's about it other than a lot of speculation. I need at least something to work on, you know that, Boss. My power is amazing but I still need some sort of starting point."

He tapped his fingers together as he observed her, then nodded once. Leaning to the side he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a handgun, which he put on the desk. Tattletale's eyes flicked towards it even as Taylor tensed and silently moved about a hundred wasps to the edge of the air vent directly over and behind Coil.

"You wouldn't keep anything from me, would you, my dear?" he asked silkily, his hands returning to their pose. The blonde shook her head and Taylor could see her attention was drawn by the gun sitting innocently near Calvert.

"Of course not, Boss," she replied immediately. "I always tell you everything. But I don't have much to tell you. You've read the PRT reports same as I have. They're guessing. That insect doesn't match anything on record, and sure, some of their conclusions are probably wrong, if only due to the bias the ENE division has from previous experience, but I honestly can't tell you which parts are wrong. The scientific reports on its capabilities are probably accurate as far as they go but who the hell knows where it came from, where it goes, or even what it really is? They certainly don't."

"And what does your… special insight… suggest to you? Indulge me." He lowered a hand and toyed with the gun, moving it back and forth on the desk, never quite pointing it at the girl. Taylor checked on the whereabouts of all the mercenaries, seeing that most of them were going about their various jobs elsewhere and the two still outside his office were looking bored and talking quietly to each other about what they were going to spend their money on the next payday. While she was doing this she strategically positioned her remaining wasps around the base, and moved lots of cockroaches into it too, since they were absolutely everywhere and easy to collect even in very early spring. Tattletale swallowed slightly and thought, her eyes flicking from side to side as if she was reading an invisible book.

"It's alive, not a projection," she said, talking fast after a pause of a few seconds. "It's… probably not the work of a Biotinker. I think. It's very smart. Human level at least, intelligent human level, and likely well above average human level in fact. It really doesn't like Nazis. Or at least Hookwolf, but I'm guessing Nazis in general."

She paused again for breath. "Go on," he invited, his hand leaving the gun, and making her glance at it, then look faintly relieved for a brief moment.

"Changer is… possible. But if it is that it's nothing like anything on record. Panacea gave a good estimate of mass, she knows a lot about this sort of thing, and the PRT scientists agreed with her conclusions. If it's a Changer it's doing something really different from all other known cases. It's almost certainly not a Case 53, if only because again it doesn't match known cases, and it's a perfect if much, much too large copy of an existing hornet. No Case 53 on record mimics a real creature like that."

Coil was nodding thoughtfully now, as he listened. "Is it an enhanced but real insect, perhaps?"

She shrugged. "I have absolutely no idea, and can't think of any way to prove it one way or the other. The thing that the reports agree on, and other information I dug up does too, is that you can't simply enlarge an insect like that. There's a hard limit to how big anything close to normal insect biology can get, apparently. It couldn't even breath let alone fly, but that sure didn't stop it doing both. I think it's probably a Parahuman, or at least a Parainsect, if that's even a thing."

He went still for a moment, then appeared to think hard. "Can something not human Trigger?" he muttered almost to himself. Tattletale shrugged again even so.

"No clue. We don't know what Triggering does in the first place. If it is a Para-whatever, it's the first time anyone's ever run into something other than a human getting powers. But it definitely does have powers, that much I'm sure of. And under the exterior I can guarantee it's not just a much much too large hornet. It might look like one, but it definitely isn't." She shivered for a moment as he listened and watched. "That report on the venom… Boss, I'm serious, don't upset that thing. One drop of that fucking venom and you'd die in agony in seconds. The PRT report sounded like the people writing it were trying not to scream in horror the entire time."

Leaning back in his chair he clasped his hands together over his chest and regarded her. "You believe there's no route to… persuading… it to work for my benefit? It would be quite useful to have such a potent force multiplier available."

"Don't." Tattletale shook her head rapidly, her face somewhat pale. "Seriously, don't even try. I have no idea what it would even want, and if you somehow tried to force it to cooperate, I'm completely certain it would react… badly. It's the only thing I am certain of where that bug is concerned. It's not a human, it won't act like one, and if you expect it to, bad things will happen."

The distant Taylor was simultaneously amused and mildly annoyed. She was mostly human! Most of the time… But Tattletale was certainly right, she thought as she watched the pair unknown to either. If someone tried to threaten her, force her to go along with something she didn't want to do, there was going to be trouble. She'd had way more than enough of people pushing her around and now she had ways to push back, she was not going to let it happen again.

And if anyone like this asshole ever went after her dad to try to control her… bad things was a serious understatement. The blonde wasn't wrong there.

Calvert seemed to tense up as the girl's voice became quite harsh in the final statement and he gave off anger and stress chemicals as he sat forward again. "You presume to tell me what I can do?" he asked smoothly, his hand landing on the pistol. Tattletale's eyes cut to it for a second, then resolutely back forward again. "Recall who works for who, and why. Don't make me do something you'll regret and spoil our happy working relationship." Taylor could hear the vicious smile in his voice right through his mask. "Or would you prefer to change that relationship? I'm sure we could come to an arrangement…"

He trailed off in a manner that made Taylor and Tattletale both wince, albeit for different reasons. "I don't think that will be necessary, Boss," the blonde girl replied after a moment, in a careful way, her voice betraying no emotion. "So far things are working well, aren't they? I was merely pointing out the hazards of a possible idea you might be considering. That's what you pay me the big bucks for, right?"

Coil's anger appeared to rise, then as Taylor had seen several times so far, just vanished like it had never been. He went back almost immediately to merely somewhat annoyed, even his tone of voice changing slightly. Tattletale clearly picked up on it even as Taylor did, making her wonder how the other girl managed it. She had powers, that much she herself had mentioned only a minute or so ago, but no one seemed to know much about them from Taylor's research on PHO. Thinker of some sort was the prevailing opinion and from what she'd overheard, this seemed to be the case. It still left open just what sort of a Thinker she was.

Lifting his handgun Coil examined it with apparent interest, wiped a small speck of dust from the gleaming metal, then slipped it back into the drawer it had come from, Tattletale following it with her eyes the whole time and him obviously aware of this and enjoying it. "It is, yes. And as long as you continue to provide me with a useful service," he said as he stood up and rounded his desk, leaning back on it and watching her, "We shall enjoy a fruitful and friendly relationship. Just as we are now. Thank you for your… analysis. I will have further tasks for you shortly."

At the dismissal a certain tension went out of the blonde, not really visible from her body language but Taylor's wasp could scent it. She nodded, then stood up, turning towards the door. Just as she reached it, he spoke again.

"One more thing, before you leave, my Tattletale." She stopped, then turned, as he pushed himself erect and moved to stand much too close to her. Before she could react he put one hand around her throat and squeezed slightly, the girl freezing. Bending close, from his considerably greater height, he whispered, "Do not disappoint me, hide anything, or speak out of turn again. Remember that."

She nodded wordlessly, her eyes wide. He squeezed hard enough to make the flesh around his fingers pale. A hundred plus yards away, Taylor decided she'd had enough and this bastard needed a swift kick in the balls to remind him that bullying wasn't nice.

Unfortunately she was too far away to do that. Fortunately she could arrange the next best thing.

Coil yelped in pain when a wasp stung him right in the nuts. Then again when it zipped up and repeated the process on the back of his neck. Releasing the blonde teenager he slapped at his neck with one hand and at his crotch with the other, the latter move a mistake as he managed to make much harder contact than he'd probably been aiming for and his spandex body suit didn't have an awful lot of padding.

Tattletale stared as he collapsed to his knees and made an agonized little sound before he fell over sideways. "What the fuck?" she whispered in stunned amazement. Her eyes lifted to where the wasp had flown back into the air vent, then her face paled dramatically. "Oh, shit," she added almost inaudibly. "Oh, shit, shit, shit."

Turning she put her hand on the door handle, then found it was still locked. Quickly looking around, she zeroed in on the desk, moving quickly past Coil to it and inspecting the switches. Just as she reached for the one he'd used to lock the door, a choked sound from the man on the floor made her, and Taylor who had been watching, look at him.

He was grabbing at his own throat and making weird sounds. Sounds that really didn't convey a sense that all was well.

Staring at him for some seconds, Tattletale finally grinned maliciously, apparently forgetting whatever had spooked her for the moment. Pulling open desk drawers one after another, she finally spotted something in one of them and reached in. Removing the object she held it up and studied it, between glances at Coil who was thrashing around now, gasping for breath.

"Huh. An epipen," she mused out loud, sitting on the edge of the desk and watching the man on the floor who Taylor realized, somewhat guiltily, was going into anaphylactic shock. Apparently he was allergic to wasp venom.

Whoops.

Looking up at the vent where Taylor's wasps lurked, the blonde girl thought for a few seconds, her face showing concentration. Then she looked back at Coil, who was flopping around like a dying fish, making sounds like an unwell bagpipe being played by an asthmatic piper. "Now, do I stick you with this and see if it saves your life, or do I just watch the fucker who's forced me at gunpoint to work for him and do all sorts of things I hate for nearly a year slowly drown as his lungs fill with fluid?" she mused out loud.

Taylor got the distinct impression that the question was entirely rhetorical…

Kneeling down next to Calvert, she grabbed his mask and yanked it off, revealing a face with bulging eyes streaming with tears, and swollen lips surrounding a mouth frantically gasping for oxygen. "Ah. Thomas Calvert. I wondered if it was you, you bastard." His hands grasped for the epipen she held just above his chest, moving it out of range when he nearly touched it. "I also wonder how many times you killed and raped me in your fucking simulations." Even through his pain he jerked in surprise. "Oh, yes, I know what your power is," she added as she looked down at him. "I worked that out months ago. I just couldn't quite figure out how to take advantage of that fact. I'd have done it sooner or later, I guess, but it looks like I won't be shooting you in the stomach."

She shrugged. "At least I get to watch your face as you die. It almost makes up for having a sadistic monster like you ruining my life for over a year. How many people have you tortured to death over the years? More than a few, from what I could find out. I bet any of them would have loved this too." Standing she wiped the epipen on a tissue she took from his desk, holding it in another one, then dropped it on his chest, where he weakly grabbed at it. The device rolled to the floor next to him. Stepping back, she sat behind his desk and put her feet on it, before pulling out her phone and taking a couple of photos. "I'd say I'm sorry you're going out so hard, but I'd be lying to you," she chuckled, "And you just got through telling me you didn't want me to lie to you."

His fumbling for the epipen slowed, then his arm stilled. Taylor watched, her feelings mixed. She certainly hadn't intended to kill the bastard, although that had certainly been an option once she figured out how callously he'd set things up and how he'd obviously been fine with causing massive death and destruction. On the other hand, from what this girl was saying, and her own guesses from what she'd seen and heard, the man was definitely a ghastly person who likely deserved whatever happened to him. She was still wondering about that room on the next level down with all the blood traces… The only real conclusion she could come to made her feel that if anything this guy deserved to have met a sticky end a long time ago.

Still… accidentally offing a super-villain because she didn't like bullies was something that might give her a weird reputation. On the other hand her inner hornet was finding this entirely acceptable for several reasons.

Coil gasped for one last breath, then stilled. Tattletale let out a long breath of her own, looking incredibly relieved suddenly. Taylor shook her head. Her dad was never going to believe this, and he was likely to be a little ticked. She was supposed to tell him before she did something major.

Oh well.

Life was tricky sometimes.

"Good riddance, you piece of shit," the girl at the desk said softly. Dropping her feet to the floor with a quick glance at the door, she pulled the keyboard closer and started prodding it. The two guards outside hadn't heard a thing, Taylor knew, since the door was thick and entirely soundproof, but sooner or later they'd probably wonder what their boss was up to for so long.

Or, more worryingly, they wouldn't.

She couldn't help thinking about how perhaps they were used to people going into the office and not coming out for a long time. Or other rooms in the bunker. Like the one with the blood and the tools…

Coming to a decision, she pulled out her phone and dialed a number she'd seen recently. Coil's desktop phone, right next to Tattletale's elbow, rang and made the girl nearly hit the ceiling. Staring at it, she seemed to think very hard, then slowly and carefully, reached out to pick up the handset, putting it to her ear and not saying anything. Taylor, who had let enough hornet out to change her head and her voice, said, "Hello, Tattletale. We need to talk."

The girl yanked the phone from her ear, gave it a very suspicious glare, then put it back. "Who is this?" she asked warily.

"Call me… Vespa," Taylor said after a moment's thought of her own. It was in her opinion a suitable name and the real Vespa wouldn't mind. Her hornet, now sitting on her shoulder, waved its antenna making her grin internally.

"Vespa…?" Tattletale seemed to think hard, then paled dramatically.

"No need to look so worried, I'm not planning on hurting you," Taylor hastened to say. This didn't have the desired effect as the other girl quickly looked around the room as if she expected to see someone else in there with her, but the only other inhabitant was the ex-Calvert, who no longer appeared to have much interest in the proceedings.

"You can…" The blonde stopped mid-statement and glanced up at the air vent, looking worried. "Where are you?"

"Nearby," Taylor assured her with a faint chuckle. "Incidentally, I've disabled his self-destruct system."

"You've… He actually had a self-destruct system?" Tattletale yelped. Then she looked quickly looked at the door.

"Yes, he did. About five tons of explosives buried under the lowest level. They're safe enough now. The guards aren't paying any attention to you, the door is entirely soundproof, so don't worry right now."

"How are you doing that?" Tattletale demanded, sounding and looking somewhat irritated now.

"Trade secret." Taylor stifled a giggle, as she was trying to sound reasonably professional in a very strange way. "I notice you seem to be trying to steal Coil's money. Would you like help with that?"

"Stop being Clippy. No one likes Clippy," the girl grumbled, glancing at the computer she'd been working on, having quickly brought up Coil's financial documents with an ease Taylor could only admire.

Snorting with laughter, Taylor said, "I've got codes. You've got the computer. Shall we discuss a deal?"

Tattletale peered over the desk at Coil, then up at the vent once more, before shrugging. "What did you have in mind?"

"Something that will probably be mutually beneficial. I'll even tell you how you're going to get out of here without being stopped."

"I'm listening." Taylor smiled in an insectile manner and began explaining her idea, which made the other girl start smiling very slowly in a much more human, but still rather odd, way. Once they'd settled on the details, Tattletale put the plan into operation.

It took a while, but the end result was more than worth it. And by the time Taylor got home, she had a lot of things to explain to her dad, along with some useful byproducts of the day she had not expected.

He was even more surprised, of course, but not as much as the PRT were a little later that evening…

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Captain Henries of the Brockton Bay Police department inspected the scene, then turned to the BBPD lieutenant standing next to him. "How many?"

"Sixty. Just like the call said. We were waiting outside when they all came running out like they were on fire, some of them still pulling their pants on. Damndest thing I've ever seen. You can't even see the door from this side if it's closed. Fuck knows how long it's been there, but there's an entire fucking bunker the size of an Endbringer shelter down there. Armory, computer room, barracks, you name it. I have no idea at all how no one noticed. It's like something the CIA would be jealous of."

"Jesus." Henries slowly shook his head, watching as over half the available cops in the city, including two SWAT teams, dealt with a crowd of extremely upset obviously military-trained people, almost certainly mercenaries, and put them into a whole fleet of vans in cuffs. There were two more large trucks being filled with enough weapons to hold off the Viet Cong for a month as well, which was deeply worrying. The bomb squad that was coming out of the formerly hidden door looking concerned didn't bode well either. "Who was it? Empire?"

"Coil. Dead in his office, behind a locked door we had to cut our way through. Doc says it was an allergic reaction to something, probably an insect sting. There was an unused epipen on the floor next to him. Guess he didn't manage to get it into him in time." Lieutenant Warner looked at him, then back to the huge crowd of cops and fire department personnel dealing with an unprecedented operation right in the middle of the city. The entire street was blocked at both ends and onlookers were videoing everything from all over the place. "Guess who Coil really was?"

Captain Henries gave his subordinate a careful look. The other man was wearing a slightly dark smile. "Who?"

"Ever met Thomas Calvert?"

The name seemed familiar, but it took him a few seconds to remember why. When he did… "Commander Thomas Calvert? From the PRT?"

"The very same."

"Oh, Christ. Do they know?" Henries had a feeling things were about to get even more complicated than they already were, and it was bad enough right now. Warner grinned somewhat nastily.

"Oh, no, that would be a matter for the Captain to deal with. I, a mere Lieutenant, couldn't take it on myself to liaise between the BBPD and a federal…"

Sighing, Henries raised his hand. "Enough. I get it. Stop enjoying this so much."

Snickering under his breath, Lieutenant Warner subsided. "So walk me through it. What actually happened here? I've heard at least three different stories since I arrived and none of them match." The captain kept watching, but glanced at the other man, who shook his head.

"We got an anonymous tip about an hour and a half ago claiming that a super-villain had a base under that office building," he began, nodding at the largest and newest of the buildings on the street. "And we were told that due to an imminent emergency evacuation due to a faulty warning alert sixty mercenaries were about to leave in a hurry, so if we wanted to have a discussion with them, we should probably arrange to be waiting outside."

"Who gave the tip?"

"We don't know. Young, female, sounded like she was thoroughly enjoying herself, but that's it."

"Parahuman? Vigilante, maybe?"

"The operator asked but the girl didn't confirm or deny it. She just passed on the message, and hung up. The phone number was traced to somewhere near here but we don't know exactly where. The techs think it might actually have come from inside that bunker but so far we can't prove it. They're checking into it right now."

"What do the prisoners say?"

"Not a lot. We got a couple of them to tell us that the internal alarms all went off, indicating a gas leak, a fire, a flood, the self-destruct system about to go off, and for all I know death, pestilence, and famine too. They didn't waste time trying to figure out what part of it was real and what wasn't, they just legged it. Something exploded on the bottom level while the alarms were sounding and I guess that made them think that at least part of it was really happening. The timing was very convenient, we'd only just arrived and got everyone in place and we were up to our asses in mercenaries. A couple of them looked like they wanted to try their luck, but we had a lot more guns pointing their way than they had pointing ours, so that didn't last long."

The captain nodded slowly, then his mind seized on the most important part of what he'd just heard. "Self-destruct system?" he echoed incredulously, his head snapping around to fix on the other man's. Lieutenant Warner nodded.

"Yeah. Honest, it's got a self-destruct system. Tons of explosives buried under it, from what the bomb boys said. But it was disabled somehow, and they claim it's basically inert now. Good thing too, it would probably have collapsed at least one building if the fucking thing went off."

"Holy fuck."

"That was my reaction too." Warner shrugged. "This guy was nuts. Even by Parahuman standards."

"Any signs of whoever it was that called in the warning?"

"No. Not a trace. Coil's office was wiped clean, not a single fingerprint left as far as we can find so far, but the techs are working on that too. Two of his computer drives are missing too, apparently. Everything else is still in there, except for one computer rack in his server room which looks like someone blew it up on purpose. I'm guessing it had incriminating evidence on it and whoever kicked all this off didn't want anyone getting their hands on it. But there's still a whole hell of a lot of stuff down there which will keep everyone busy for months." He handed the other man a document, which Henries accepted and glanced at. His eyes widened slightly.

"The Mayor will want to see this," Warner added.

"Yeah, I think he will," Henries breathed in shock. "Christ, this is going to get messy. The governor is going to have a stroke…"

"Glad I'm not involved in politics," Lieutenant Warner commented. "Good luck with the PRT."

"Oh, just fuck off and stop being sarcastic," Henries sighed as his subordinate gave him a small devious grin. "Go do your job."

"As you wish." The lieutenant saluted with two fingers, smirked a little, and headed off to talk to some of the other cops, while Henries looked at the document in his hand once more with a deep sigh. He knew a can of worms when he saw one and the one he was holding had some enormous worms in it...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Emily Piggot clicked on the PHO link her deputy, a very strange expression on his face, wordlessly indicated over her shoulder, while sipping from her coffee mug. A moment of incredulous reading later the mouthful of coffee exploded out of her. She stared open-mouthed at the screen.

Coil (deceased) – Parahuman alias of Thomas Calvert, a super villain who had a hidden underground base just off James Street in the commercial district of Brockton Bay. The base, on two floors with a third level for infrastructure (see map) was equipped with facilities for supporting up to two hundred staff, but at the present time only sixty people plus Coil were resident. The armory (see inventory) contained a large quantity of weapons ranging from hand guns to heavy machine guns, as well as rocket launchers, ammunition, grenades, and other equipment. Of particular note are the Tinker-made laser projectors, purchased by Coil from an unknown source (see pictures) but presumed to be of Toybox manufacture.

Coil's power was a potent Thinker one, specifically a precognitive ability allowing him to essentially experience two versions of events, which seemed to work via simulating a period of time then letting him choose which version he wished to keep. He used this power to among other things avoid detection by the PRT, who he was working for even while he was simultaneously running a villainous Parahuman organization employing trained mercenaries. His organization is implicated in at least eighteen murders, nine kidnappings, dozens of blackmail plots, embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale, interference with political and business entities across much of the eastern seaboard, organized crime, and numerous other illegal activities the full scope of which may not come to light for months.

At the current time the BBPD is involved in dismantling Coil's operation and…

Lifting her eyes, Emily gaped at Renick, who shrugged helplessly. A moment later her phone rang.

Swearing under her breath and wishing that Calvert was alive so she could shoot him a few times, she picked it up and fielded the first of an awful lot of phone calls. By the time she finally went home that night, she was exhausted, but at least had the luxury of knowing that someone she heartily hated had come to an ignominious end. Pity it couldn't have happened many years earlier.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Why's she grinning like that, Brian?"

"I have no idea, but it's making me very nervous…"

"Hey, Tats? You get laid or something?"

"Better. Way, way better."

Lisa grinned even more widely, then went to bed secure in the knowledge of a job well done. And still trying to work out what the fuck 'Vespa' really was, although she for one wasn't going to dig too deeply in case she found out…

Yeah. Today had started somewhat worryingly, and ended far more so, but overall she felt the results were worth all the confusion and chaos.

And she had quite the nest egg now, but she'd wait until tomorrow to tell the others.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Lying in bed, Taylor made her plans, laughing quietly to herself occasionally. So many options now seemed viable that she was having trouble working out what to do first.

"Taylor?"

"Yeah, dad?" She looked around to see her dad peering in at her, the light from her antennae casting his face into relief against the dark of the hallway. On top of her head, Vespa watched him too.

"Any chance you could stop plotting world domination quite so… happily? Because I need my sleep and that laughing is a little creepier than you probably realize…" He smiled a little at her as she flushed with embarrassment. "It's nice to see you enjoying yourself so much, don't get me wrong, but if you could keep the mildly disturbing insane giggles inside your head I'd be able to go to sleep."

"I'm not plotting world domination," she protested with a grin.

"Just the city, then?"

"Only bits of it. Bits no one else is using."

Shaking his head, he fondly replied, "I knew showing you those maps was a mistake."

"It was fantastic, and thanks so much," she told him cheerfully. "I'll be quiet."

"That's all I ask. Sleep well."

"You too, Dad." He withdrew and a moment later she heard his bedroom door close. Smiling to herself, she went back to writing for a while, before finally putting the pad to one side, closing her eyes, turning off the bioluminescent glow, and falling asleep.

It had been a long but worthwhile day even though it hadn't ended at all like she'd planned on. But that was life sometimes.

You just had to roll with it and move on.

Chapter Text

"Good grief." Roy Christner shook his head in disbelief as he looked around. "He managed to keep all this secret for nearly a decade? How the hell did he manage that?"

Next to him, Captain Henries of the BBPD shrugged a little helplessly. "We're not sure, aside from it must have taken a lot of work and liberal use of his powers. The information posted to PHO says he could pull that simulation thing to pick the best result from anything he had a choice of yes or no in, as far as I can work out, so I guess he just kept trying different things and rejecting whichever action didn't give the best results. It still seems unbelievable though."

"Damn right," Roy muttered. "Random chance should have tripped him up sooner or later if nothing else. The number of things he'd have to get lucky on…"

"I know. Even for a Parahuman power this is ridiculous. Thank god he was apparently nowhere near as smart as he thought he was or he'd have been President by now or something. Fuck alone knows what that would have been like but it would have been bad."

Both men shivered at the thought of the damage a narcissistic psychopath like Calvert had been, something his own documents proved beyond doubt, in the position of the President of the US. It didn't bear thinking about.

"We had a lucky escape," the mayor commented with disquiet. "And we don't even know who it was who called in the tip, or whether what happened was purely accidental or some sort of deliberate action." They kept slowly walking along the corridors of the formerly-hidden bunker, which was now teeming with investigators not only from the BBPD but the FBI, the PRT, who had not liked being told that no they couldn't take over and kick everyone else out no matter what they might believe, and even a group sent by the Governor to dig up anything that would lead to tracking down Coil's moles in the state capitol. Absolutely everything in the bunker was being dismantled down to the smallest screw, looking for evidence. Even though the perpetrator of this whole bizarre discovery was in the city morgue, they had to assume he'd had agents and informants all over the place and those people were still out there.

"No. Not a trace anywhere of who it was," Henries agreed. "We did eventually find out how they got out without either us or the mercenaries noticing, assuming that they were in this fucking place to begin with. We have to assume someone was here because the techs traced that tip-off to Coil's own fucking desk phone. Which is hilarious if I'm honest, but my god, it's like something out of a spy movie. The PHO update was done on his own computer too, they tell me." He shook his head in mild wonder. "Turns out there were not only the three entrances we knew about pretty quickly, including the hidden door they all came pouring out of, but two actual hidden passages none of the mercs had a clue were there."

"He didn't even tell his own people?" Roy stared at his companion, moving aside slightly to let a pair of technical operatives push a handcart piled with computer servers past.

"Apparently not. Like I said, it's like the asshole thought he was Bloefeld or something. Only thing missing is a fluffy white cat." The captain gave him a wry grin as Roy couldn't help snorting with humor. "Maybe it was the cat that turned him in… Whatever, the escape tunnels were incredibly well hidden from the inside, and it was almost an accident that we found the first one. Once we found that someone said that if he was working with the spy movie stereotype he probably had at least one more, so they went hunting, and sure enough found another one. So far that seems to be it."

"Where do they go?"

"One into a sewer that way," Henries replied, pointing back behind them, "And the other into one of the bigger storm drains that way." He indicated in a different direction. "We're pretty sure our informant skedaddled down that one. Don't blame them, the other way would involve wading through shit up to your waist, and it would take a fucking solid reason for me to do that. At least the other direction would only get you wet feet. The techs searched the entire length of the tunnel as far as the storm drain and found tiny traces that suggest someone went down it recently, but nothing at all to indicate who, or anything else useful. They did a damn good job of cleaning up after themselves."

"And I assume that once they got into the drain network there was no chance of tracking them?"

Henries shook his head. "Not a hope. No one even knows how many tunnels are down there these days. It's got to be tens of miles of them at a minimum, and half those aren't mapped at all. God alone knows what's actually hiding down there. After two hundred or more years of building and rebuilding it could be practically anything up to and including the service entry to fucking Narnia. It would take literally years just to search the parts we know are there never mind the rest we only suspect, and I can almost guarantee that's not the full extent of it either."

Roy nodded thoughtfully. He was well aware of the scale of the problem, as they'd had issues in the past with new construction running afoul of underground works that weren't on any map available. It had caused significant problems at one time or another, and cost a vast amount of money to deal with such situations. Every couple of decades someone pushed for something to be done about it, if only mapping everything so people had some sort of idea what they were doing, but even the most optimistic suggestions of how much that would cost were so enormous the idea always died quickly. It was as bad as if not worse than the old container ship in the bay.

"Most of what Brockton Bay is built on is Brockton Bay," he agreed with a sigh. "And up until fairly recently hardly anyone ever documented what the fuck they were doing."

"If anyone has anything even vaguely accurate for the older underground stuff it's probably the Dock Workers Association," Captain Henries remarked. "And even there I doubt they have all of it. No one does. So once our putative informant got that far, they were gone. Walk down the middle of the tunnels in the water and you don't even leave footprints. You could end up at the shore, or come up a manhole a mile away." He shrugged. "Complete dead end for that part of it. Unless they come forward we'll never know who it was."

"And they have little reason to come forward, I'd guess," Roy grumbled.

"Well, considering that the computer techs think that Calvert probably had north of about a hundred and fifty million bucks in various bank accounts they've found documentation for, and fuck knows how much more they've got no clue about, and all of that money seems to have vanished…" Henries looked amused as Roy grunted in shock, turning his head to stare at the other man. "We can't prove it, and the forensic accountancy team have already said they're probably never going to be able to trace most, if not all, of it, but I'm pretty certain that whoever called us helped themselves to a pretty decent payday. And there's those two missing drives, too, which could have been the key to who knows what fortune. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that whoever was behind that part of it seized the opportunity to confiscate everything they could lay hands on before vanishing. Might have been someone working for him, might just as easily been someone he was blackmailing, or kidnapped, or god knows what. We've got plenty of evidence to show that a minimum of a dozen people died in his fucking torture room, and some of the DNA hits have already turned up matches to missing persons in the CODIS database. Whoever it was might have had a serious personal grudge against the bastard."

"You think it might have been someone seeking revenge or something like that?" Roy thought over the idea.

"It's one possibility, yeah. We just don't know yet. It's not even that there isn't any evidence at all. The problem is exactly the reverse, there's too much evidence. This psycho had his fingers into everything." Henries shook his head in anger. "He had agents in the BBPD, the PRT, the IRS, the state government, the state cops, the FBI… That's just from what we've found out in only five days. Various agencies including us have already arrested something like fifty people and that's going steadily up. And it gets worse… the amount of secret or classified documentation on his servers and in his filing cabinets is absurd. Almost none of it should have been in his hands. He had stuff that even the Governor didn't have clearance to handle. There's some very upset people from the Pentagon going through a lot of it in a secure room in my own station, and I guarantee this is going to have repercussions all the way to the top if only because of all the security holes it's highlighted."

They walked on in silence for a few tens of yards, Roy thinking over what he'd been told, while still looking around in amazement. This place just seemed to keep going…

Descending a flight of metal stairs, they resumed walking and after a second or two Henries continued, "As far as his actual cause of death, the ME is completely certain it was exactly what we assumed from the start, massive anaphylactic shock caused by a severe allergy to wasp venom. He found two sting sites, one on his neck and one on his balls." The man smirked as he said the last and Roy grinned somewhat sadistically too. "Plus evidence of trauma to the last location…"

"You mean?" Roy glanced at the other man, who nodded, still smirking.

"Yeah. Asshole punched himself in the nuts when he got stung. Pretty hard, according to the ME, when he stopped laughing. Bet that hurt."

"Serves the bastard right."

"Oh, no argument from me, or anyone else who's on the case. There are a lot of people who'd have loved to give him a kick there a few times, believe me." Henries shrugged. "Me included. But the upshot is that as far as the ME is concerned, death was from natural causes. No signs of any foul play, Parahuman shenanigans, or anything else. Tox screen came back negative for everything, no wounds, injection sites, or anything else other than the stings. And there was a dead wasp on the floor nearby, two more in the ventilation ducts for his office, plus we found a wasp nest right outside one of the disguised air intakes. The working theory is that the wasps either got sucked into the air vents and blown out in his office, or just went exploring, and he happened to come into contact with one in a bad mood. Or in other words, a normal wasp."

Roy chuckled. He knew what the captain meant. Wasps in his experience were always in a bad mood…

"We even considered the idea that someone deliberately released them into his office, knowing he was allergic, but as far as all the evidence shows it really was just bad luck on his part. I guess all that karma finally caught up with him in about the most ironic way I've heard of in years." Henries shrugged. "Lucky for us, not so much for him. And whoever it really was who called it in, they took advantage of the situation to take down his little empire and get themselves a nice little reward at the same time. Considering what could have happened, I'm minded to thank them and move on. A hundred million bucks or so is probably chump change compared to the damage he'd have caused in the long term."

"There is that, indeed," Roy agreed soberly. "I hate to think how many people would have ended up dead, or worse, if this lunatic had succeeded in whatever it really was he was after."

"No one knows, but any guess I've heard or come up with is horrible," the captain nodded. They arrived at the last flight of stairs and headed down. "One theory there's some evidence for but nothing concrete is that he was working on finding out the real IDs of every Parahuman he could locate. Luckily he only managed to get one before he snuffed it, as far as we can tell." Henries gave him a sidelong glance. "And only three people still alive know about it, two of them right here."

"Thank you for that," Roy replied quietly. "I owe you and the lieutenant a big favor. I won't forget."

"Hey, if it was part of my family I'd be just as worried, believe me," the cop replied just as quietly, with a shake of his head. "No kid that young deserves to get mixed up in the sort of shit this place was full of." They exchanged a meaningful glance, then mutually agreed to speak of it no more. Roy still had to work out what he was going to do about the situation but at least he didn't have to immediately worry about someone like Coil popping out of the woodwork and causing trouble. There would be time enough to talk to the PRT, if that became necessary, once they finally rooted out all the corruption that was coming to light like the things that live under a log when you flip it over. Right now, he was highly disinclined to involve them, if only due to everything else they were busy with, as was he.

It was both annoying and in some ways amusing to him that his suspicions of the PRT in general had proven right, although in ways he hadn't expected. The fallout of all this was going to cause some significant changes across the board, in ways he fully expected would be nothing like anyone had planned for. On the upside, with some luck that would result in a much better system for the city and everyone in it, which was his main concern in his job in the first place.

All thanks to a wasp. Who'd have ever thought that was possible?

At least it was a Wasp Of Normal Size. He wasn't sure he could handle having a WOUS as well as a HOUS running around… One of them was one too many as it was. And since Calvert hadn't caught fire then exploded, the HOUS wasn't involved, which relieved him considerably.

As they'd been walking along this third level corridor, the sound of some pretty serious tool use had been apparent, echoing through the whole place. It was steadily getting louder and now, when they reached one of the rooms marked as being a power control system, it became deafening. Putting his hands over his ears Roy peered in, seeing two very dusty men in overalls with BBPD EOD patches barely visible, wearing eye and ear protection along with filtration masks, operating a couple of small jackhammers. The power cables for these ran back down the corridor and disappeared into another room, and there were lights on stands set up around this one. Presumably it had been disconnected from the grid, evidence for this also being seen in how a couple of very substantial transformers had been unbolted from the floor and moved to the side. The input and output cables for them had been neatly capped off and also moved, leaving a patch of cleaner concrete under where the hardware had been. This now had a hole in the middle of it, which was being carefully enlarged by the pair of bomb squad technicians.

"How's it going?" Captain Henries shouted, his hands over his own ears to block out the drilling noise which was fairly substantial. Both men looked over, then turned their tools off, relative silence falling abruptly.

Pulling his mask down with one gloved hand, the sergeant of the pair spat to one side, then wiped his mouth. "Nearly got this charge out. Best part of three hundred pounds of the fucking stuff. There's two more to go then we've cleared the whole place but we'll run another scan to be certain."

"Is it safe to drill it out like that?" Roy asked, knowing that his own security people had assured him the charges were completely inert which was the only reason they'd let him come in here in the first place, but finding himself standing next to twice his own weight in high explosives a touch unnerving anyway. The sergeant laughed.

"Oh, sure, this stuff is about as insensitive as it gets. You could jump up and down on it all day and all you'd get is tired. Needs a blasting cap and a booster charge to set it off and we got those out first thing. Now we're just removing the main charges. They were buried in the foundations years ago and there's no way to access most of it without digging up a foot of reinforced concrete." He hefted the massive drill. "Hence these. Noisy, but safe enough."

"And if we did manage by some miracle to set it off we'd never know," the other bomb tech chuckled, making Roy wince and the sergeant guffaw.

"Yeah. It would get much noisier for a very short moment, but we wouldn't care," he said happily, making Roy yet again certain that anyone who willingly worked with high explosives was completely bonkers. "But trust me, that's not going to happen. These things are as safe as it gets in this job."

"I'll take your word for it, Sergeant," Roy replied. "Do you think if they had been detonated it would have collapsed this bunker and taken down the buildings on top of it?"

Pushing his goggles up his forehead, the man eyed Roy. "Damn sure of it, yes. There were enough explosives in the foundations to turn this place into a big hole in the ground. Under critical infrastructure like this room, under load bearing walls and columns, right below the diesel tanks so you'd get a fuel-air blast on top of this stuff… Whoever worked out where to put it all knew their job. It would absolutely have collapsed the entire thing, and that would definitely have made at least two, probably four buildings up there end up down here." He pointed at the ceiling with one raised finger, then at the floor. "I wouldn't be surprised if it took out the entire fucking block to be honest. No way to know how they'd fall, it could easily have dominoed half the financial district if everything went right. Or wrong, depending on your viewpoint, I guess. That fucker could have killed thousands of people without much effort."

He spat on the floor again and pulled his goggles back into place, having met Roy's eyes directly. "Whoever offed the bastard did us all a massive favor I'd like to buy them a beer in thanks for. A lot of friends and relatives of mine would have ended up dead if this lot had gone up."

"You're not the first one I've heard that from, Sergeant," Roy replied after a few seconds. Another question struck him so he asked it. "I was told the explosives were disabled somehow. What caused that?"

"Apparently cockroaches like the taste of shock tube," the other man replied, shaking his head slightly. "Weird, but that's what it looks like." He put the drill down and moved to the side, retrieving a short length of bright yellow and very dusty plastic tube, around an eighth of an inch in diameter and a foot long, then handed it to Roy. Accepting it, the mayor studied the stuff. "This goes from the initiator at one end to the blasting cap at the other," the sergeant explained, while Henries peered over Roy's shoulder at the thing he was holding. "It's got a thin layer of energetic material on the inside, which propagates a very fast detonation wave when it's initiated. But if it's cut, that doesn't work very well." He pointed to one end. "We pulled it out of the cable ducts. It's been cut in hundreds of places, and partially cut in many more. As far as anyone can figure out cockroaches nibbled it. You can see how it's all ragged at the ends."

"Weird," Henries commented.

"Yeah, it's a new one on me too, but it is what it is," the sergeant replied with a shrug. "We found hundreds of dead cockroaches, lots of ruined shock tube, and that's about it. Almost all in places no one could ever get to without digging it up. We had trouble even getting at it with the endoscopes. Looks like the bugs just liked the taste of it and over the years they've been helping themselves. I've heard of ants that eat wiring insulation, so it's not unheard of, but it's still pretty weird. But his little going away present probably hasn't been viable for years although he'd have had no way to find that out without trying it. Doesn't change the fact the bastard put it in, though, because he clearly intended to use it if necessary." Smirking a little, he added, "I'd have loved to see his face when he pressed the button and nothing fucking happened though..."

Neither Roy nor Captain Henries could stop a laugh at the comment. Roy handed the piece of shock tube back to the sergeant, who replace it in his toolkit then picked his drill up once more and put his mask into position. "Good luck with the work."

Both men nodded, then the hammer drills fired up again. Roy and Captain Henries left, their hands blocking out the noise, until they were far enough away it was merely loud rather than deafening. "Christ, we dodged a bullet here," Roy commented uneasily as they headed back. His companion nodded agreement.

"Oh, fuck, yes. The man's right. Luck saved a shitload of lives just from that damned self destruct, never mind all the other crap we'll be digging up for the next year or more."

Captain Henries looked around at the walls and corridors, then glanced at Roy. "What's the city going to do with this place once all the evidence is gathered and it's been cleared out? Seems to me you've got yourselves a free Endbringer shelter if nothing else. He equipped the damn place with more gear than I'd have believed. Got to be worth something to someone."

"At the moment I honestly have no idea," Roy admitted. "We haven't really put a lot of thought into it yet, in light of everything else connected with this whole mess. Sooner or later we'll have to work that out though. You're right, it'll end up being city property if only due to unpaid back taxes and fines for illegal construction." He shrugged as the other man nodded. "It'll keep. We have more important problems to deal with first."

"Fair enough. I was just curious. Seems like a waste to just leave it to rot." After a moment he grinned, then added, "You could sell it to some super-hero group. 'For sale, former super-villain lair, one careless owner, minor wasp infestation. Guaranteed explosive free.'"

They shared a glance then started laughing, as they pushed the stairwell door open and went upstairs. A little humor was just what was needed right now, Roy mused as he chuckled, considering just how rare that was going to be as the full extent of the current mess came to light.

And it all tied into the Winslow thing, the Brockton General investigations, and all the other incredibly annoying problems that had leapt at them from nowhere since Christmas.

Living in interesting times, as the old saying had it. Too interesting, in his view, but he, like the rest of them, was stuck with it and could only do his best to handle whatever happened. It was the way of the world, after all. And at least only one person, who no one at all would miss, had died in the process, so it could have been so much worse.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Lisa watched her team-mates, and if she was truthful with herself, friends now, stare at the cards she'd handed each of them. "What the fuck?" Brian queried as he examined the plastic card, then the printed statement that accompanied it. "Where… How… What…" His voice seemed to run out of steam, then he swallowed and tried again. "Where…?"

"Did the money come from?" she filled in for him, not even needing her power. He nodded dumbly.

"Let's call it a… severance bonus.. from the boss," she laughed. "He was very generous."

"Did he know he was being very generous?" Alec asked with a strange hybrid of suspicion and amusement.

"Well… He didn't actually complain about it," Lisa replied completely accurately, trying not to giggle like a crazy person.

Brian gave her a flat look. "Four million dollars each? The boss paid us off with sixteen million fucking dollars?"

"Nice of him, wasn't it?" she said with a broad grin. "It's completely above board as far as anyone is concerned. Taxes paid and everything. And we don't have to do any more crimes if we don't want to."

"Can we do crimes if we do want to?" Alec queried, his eyes glinting. Brian put his hand over his face and squeezed gently, sighing.

"Sure, if you really want," Lisa allowed, kicking back in the sofa and putting her feet up. "Nothing wrong with a little light thievery and corporate espionage, for example. Most companies probably deserve it."

"Don't encourage him to be an anarchist, Lisa," Brian moaned. "He's bad enough already."

"I need you to help me getting somewhere for the dogs," Rachel said suddenly, turning to Lisa. "You understand that crap."

Lisa nodded, smiling less madly. The other girl looked hopeful and for once, surprisingly cheerful. "That's what the money is for, Rachel. We can do what we want. No more working for an asshole."

Brian, who had been staring at the documents he was holding again, suddenly froze, then lowered the paperwork and fixed her with a hard look. "Was it Coil?"

"Was what Coil?" she asked innocently.

"The fucking boss. Was it Coil? Were we working for that lunatic?"

She shrugged. "Not willingly on my part. But yeah, the boss was Coil. He won't bother us again though."

"No, since the fucker is dead," the boy growled. "Did you do that?"

"Me?" Lisa put her hand on her chest with a grin. "Would I kill Coil?" He opened his mouth but she continued, "No, I didn't kill him. It's exactly what it said on PHO. It turned out he was kind of allergic to wasps, and he found out the hard way how fast that sort of thing can kill you dead. Very sad."

"Were you there?" Brian glowered at her somewhat suspiciously.

"I was... in the general area, yeah."

"Oh, for god's sake," he moaned, putting his head in his hands. "I hope to fuck you covered your tracks."

"Trust me, Brian, other than three mercenaries who got paid a fuck of a lot of money to keep their mouths shut, no one has a clue I was anywhere near that bastard when he snuffed it." Lisa shook her head. "We came to an arrangement, and they're going to quietly retire somewhere a long way away from Brockton Bay. And those guys won't talk, believe me. If only because if they did their friends would find out about it and they wouldn't be pleased to put it mildly. The cops won't find anything to charge those specific guys with other than being a minion, and that's hardly more than a fine these days. I made sure of that."

She felt quite pleased with herself, and it helped that the mercs in question were nothing like as vicious as many of the others were. Their crimes, while numerous, were not so serious she or Vespa had reservations about letting them slip through the fingers of the authorities, unlike some of the others. She'd have had to make alternative arrangements if it had been certain different possibilities, which she'd have done for her own protection and that of the others but wouldn't have enjoyed. And the three men were well aware they wouldn't get the other half of their money until they left the city and didn't come back, so that was further impetus to stick to the plan. Her own power was certain it would work as designed.

"I sure hope you're right about that," Brian grumbled. "Now what, though? What about Aisha? And this idiot?" He jerked a thumb at Alec who was currently browsing the web looking for the largest TV possible, while grinning to himself in a rather odd manner. "Rachel's got her dogs, you've got… whatever the fuck you do when you're not irritating me, but I've got responsibilities. It's the only reason I was doing all this in the first place. And he's a menace I don't want to let loose on the public."

"Don't put yourself down, Brian, you're a perfectly respectable criminal," Alec quipped, not looking away from the screen. Brian whapped him on the back of the head. "Ow."

"You earned that."

"I know. Can I have another? You're so good at the physical stuff!" Alec leaned back, resting his head on Brian's shoulder and smiling at him in a creepy way.

"Oh, Jesus." Brian dropped the paperwork on the floor and put his head in his hands.

"I feel rejected! Led on and abandoned! I thought we had something, Brian! Be honest, is there someone else?" Alec flopped over the much larger boy and made him yelp, while Lisa was trying not to fall over laughing and even Rachel seemed to be hiding a smile.

"Get off me you crazy bastard," Brian growled, pushing Alec to the floor.

"Was it good for you too?" Alec rolled over and propped his chin on his hands, fluttering his eyelids at Brian, who slumped and seemed to be wishing he was somewhere else. Anywhere else.

"I hate all of you," he muttered under his breath.

"No you don't," Lisa told him. "At worst we annoy you. It's what we're here for!" She grinned as he looked sideways at her, his eyes narrowed. "See? That look right there! It proves my point."

He just closed his eyes and sighed like the weight of the world was on his shoulders.

"Don't worry about Aisha, Brian," she went on. "I've got a plan."

"Oh, god."

"Is it a cunning one?" Alec queried with apparent interest.

"Oh, yes. So cunning it could run for mayor."

"Oh, god…"

"Does it involve crime? Because I could just go for a little crime right now." Alec thought, then shook his head. "No. Pizza. I mean pizza. Not crime. That's later."

"We could steal pizza," Rachel put in, making everyone, even Brian, stare at her. She flushed slightly. "I like pizza," the girl added in a low voice, looking away.

"We'll get pizza, Rachel," Lisa assured her. "I'll pay. But no, it doesn't involve pizza or crime."

"Meh. Not interested then." Alec rolled onto his back and stretched. "Sounds boring anyway."

"No, it's cunning, I tell you." Lisa smirked at Brian who was now eyeing her like he was expecting the worst. "The first step is getting you a real job."

"He's rich, he doesn't need a job," Alec pointed out. "Rich people don't work, they just parasitize the proletariat."

"And now he's a communist as well as an anarchist," Brian sighed, making Alec grin and Lisa snort. "Although for once he almost has a point. The wrong point, but a point."

"The job is step one. Respectability, that's the key," Lisa told him cheerfully. "We need to get you seen as a safe and responsible person. So job, a nice apartment, stability… All the things the various agencies want. Come on, it'll be fun."

"You're not the one getting a job," he protested.

"I'm not the one with a delinquent sister," she retorted. He grumbled but accepted the point.

"Now, what sort of job, that's the question," she mused out loud, tapping her fingers on her chin as she inspected him.

"Ooh! I know a strip club that would love him," Alec suggested brightly, causing Brian to groan again. Over his protestations, the other three started coming up with more and more outrageous ideas of what sort of job Brian was suited for, even Rachel chipping in occasionally and looking like she was enjoying herself in a somewhat deadpan manner. Lisa felt rather contented. Her friends had more than enough money to do whatever they wanted, she genuinely did have a plan on how to help Brian get custody of his irritating but amusing sister, and she was feeling that things were definitely looking up compared to what they'd been a few days ago. Not to mention she had a lot more than four million dollars carefully secreted away for a rainy day, even after laundering Calvert's money, paying off the mercenaries, and splitting the take with Vespa…

And there was also the data on the drives she'd taken too, which could well end up being more than worth it in the long run. But that was for later. Right now, she had a Brian to wind up, and pizza to get.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"What have you found out?" Max Anders demanded, looking around at his people. He particularly glared at Stormtiger and Alabaster, who had to his certain knowledge been conspiring together even after his warnings, and were probably going to cause trouble he'd have to deal with. Both looked back blankly although he was sure they were well aware of what he knew about their activities. And just as sure that they'd keep doing them anyway. He might have to arrange to have something done about them soon. Possibly an example should be made…

"Very little of any substance," James replied a little nervously, flinching when Kaiser snapped his attention to the man. "We're almost blind in most of the places we need details from, and this ruckus with that asshole Coil has caused even more problems. Even the few people sympathetic to our cause we still had on the inside are running silent, and I'm pretty certain at least half of them got grabbed in the last few days. It's hard to be sure, but the cops and everyone else are going through everything like an avalanche. It was bad enough following the whole mess with Brockton General but this most recent issue has turned the heat up to eleven."

"Yeah," Victor added with a nod of agreement, making Max turn his attention to the other man. "I barely made it out the last time I tried to get in contact with someone I knew at the PRT. I was about thirty seconds ahead of a whole squad of troopers with no sense of humor at all who snatched him right out of the bar and shoved him into an APC. All I got was a redacted report about the hornet, the one for lower security levels. Not much above the crap they give the Wards, although it's got a little more actual information in it."

"I managed to get part of the scientific report on the thing too, but nowhere near all of it. I showed it to our own scientists and they thought it was a joke at first," James put in. Max looked at him this time, listening carefully. "When they figured out it was real they looked like they were trying not to pass out. Then spent half an hour explaining almost hysterically why nearly everything in it was impossible in at least a dozen different ways, even taking powers into account." He shook his head in a sort of bemused wonder. "I learned a lot more about fluorine chemistry than I ever wanted to hear, and to be honest if even a small amount of what they said was right, I don't want to get within a mile of that fucking thing."

"That's more or less what the PRT report I saw said," Victor remarked, looking worried. Max transferred his gaze back to the skill thief. "It didn't give ratings that were more than speculative, probably since even the PRT doesn't really have a damned clue about what the thing is or what it's capable of, but it summed up to 'Do not approach, do not threaten, and for fuck's sake do not attack the Giant Hornet of Death.' He shrugged even as Max raised his eyebrows. "Honest. It wasn't quite in those words, but probably only because it was an official report. Reading between the lines the authors sure wanted to write that."

"I see." Max was concerned, as well as angry, but also very confused. Which seemed to be a common theme where the so-called HOUS was involved. "No indications of where it came from or where it went?"

"No. Nothing. Best guess is somewhere in the Docks but we already knew that. No one's seen it since Hookwolf bit the dust. Fucking thing evaporated into thin air as far as anyone knows. Some reports of weird noises in the really beat up parts of that end of the city, but there are always reports of weird noises there. They go back decades. It's a fucking strange place at the best of times. So no way to know if they're connected to the hornet or not. Probably not in my opinion but honestly I'm mostly guessing."

"It may well have left the city," James commented.

"I hope it did," Victor answered with a look at him. "That thing is more trouble than I want to think about."

"We need to find it and kill it," Stormtiger growled, sounding like he was ready to jump up and try that on the spot. Max fixed him with a glare that did very little. "It killed one of our own. We need to avenge Brad."

"No fucking insect can take on the Empire and get away with it," Alabaster added helpfully.

Max sighed quietly, wondering if true belief in this sort of ideology rotted the brain, or whether a rotted brain was a precondition to holding the belief. They certainly seemed to correlate pretty damn strongly in his experience. Useful for his goals, sure, but fucking hell it could be hard riding herd on these fuckwits when they got the white supremacist bit between their teeth and ran for it…

"Victor just told us that no one even knows where it is," he said with deliberate patience, watching the two problem children of his little group. "So how, pray tell, do you plan on finding it and registering your disapproval? And even if you do find it, how do you expect to survive the encounter?"

"Yeah, even you're going to find it unpleasant," James pointed out to Alabaster, the younger man looking truculent at Max's words. "Trust me, if the science guys are right, and they were certainly worried enough for me to believe them, that thing's venom would literally make you explode, and burn, and suffer more pain than you can possibly imagine, all at the same time. Might want to consider that."

"I can handle it," the excessively white man replied carelessly. "I've had worse."

"I don't think you have," James murmured, eyeing his compatriot with a somewhat analytical gaze.

"We can take that thing out," Stormtiger persisted. "How hard can it be? It's a bug. We've got armor-piercing rocket launchers for fuck's sake! Those things will kill a tank! No giant bug is going to stand up to that. We find the thing, and blow it out of the sky from two hundred yards away. Simple."

Max massaged his temples with his forefingers, wondering what the hell these two assholes had taken. Did idiocy come in a nasal spray these days, or did you still need to drink it? "Firstly, do not touch my rocket launchers without my express permission," he snarled after a few seconds of vainly trying to find his calm place. "I went to a lot of trouble to get those weapons without anyone finding out, and I have plans for them. Plans that don't include either of you fools shooting them off like fourth of July fireworks, probably missing what you're aiming at anyway, and… I don't know, blowing up a busload of nuns or something knowing you two. Leave the rocket launchers alone!"

He glared at them until both lowered their eyes and nodded, although he wasn't even slightly convinced either meant it. But that would have to do for now. Resolving silently to make sure the guards on the special equipment armory were doubled, he moved on. "Secondly, while I am fully on board with eliminating the thing, we're not going to go running around raising hell while the FBI, the PRT, the BBPD, and for all I know the fucking CIA are all over the city like white on rice. We wait until they finish sticking their noses into everything and leave, got me? We do not need to attract too much attention from the wrong places right now. Especially after Eidolon got wiped out, because my guess is the Protectorate is probably looking for an excuse to throw their weight around and prove they're more than just the Triumvirate. Or Duovirate or whatever the fuck it is now. Do not cause them to think we're that excuse!"

This time he cast his gaze around the entire table, making sure every single one of his people were aware of how serious he was. Legend might have stepped down for now, but he had little doubt the man was still a serious threat given a good reason, and he might well be quite happy to have a reason to take out his grief on a suitable target. And Alexandria… That woman was a force unto herself at times. Some of the things he'd heard about her activities sometimes made him wonder which side of the hero/villain divide she truly was, if even a few of them were true.

No. It was not a good time to stick your head above the parapet. Way too many eyes watching, and way too many guns in the hands of people he couldn't control or predict. He hadn't got to where he was by being stupid, after all. One picked the time and location of one's battles if one had any choice at all in the matter…

The twins, one on either side of him, seemed to be listening, Crusader was nodding, Othala was paying attention too, and even Rune was obviously thinking while giving Alabaster and Stormtiger a somewhat pensive look. The girl had been in an odd mood since the news of Brad's death had first come to them, and he didn't know why. Nor did he particularly care as long as she followed orders, which she seemed to do.

"And thirdly," he went on after a long enough pause to drive home how serious he was, during which no one made a sound, "We have no idea where the hornet is. I don't know why I have to keep repeating that. 'Maybe somewhere in the docks' is hardly enough to go on even if the fucking thing is there. What are you planning on doing? Charging about shouting 'Come out and play, Miss Giant Hornet!' or something equally stupid?" His sarcasm wasn't even slightly hidden and both Stormtiger and Alabaster looked highly irritated, but neither seemed to quite have the inclination to retort although they obviously wanted to. "Just keep your eyes and ears open, and maybe we'll learn something useful, but right now we don't have the information or the freedom to act we'll need to deal with the damn thing. That goes for everyone." He looked around the table again. "Any information you find, bring it to me first. Rumors, sightings, anything. Do not try to handle it yourself if by some chance you see that thing. Bring me the information!"

Slamming his fist on the table and making Rune and Othala jump at the bang, he repeated more forcefully. "Bring me the information first if you find anything at all. I will decide what to do with it, not you. Any of you. Everyone very clear on that, or do I need to get more... vehement?" His eyes passed slowly over those of his subordinates. Even Alabaster looked somewhat cowed. Satisfied that at least for now they'd probably not become loose cannons, he nodded. "Good. We'll leave that subject as closed until further notice. Now…" He turned to James. "What other fallout can we expect from Coil's monumental stupidity?"

The other man sighed heavily, then began talking, while everyone listened. Although Max noticed a little later with great albeit mostly hidden irritation that the pair of idiots weren't paying attention and were probably still trying to work out the most spectacularly stupid method of committing suicide possible.

You just couldn't get the help these days, he thought with annoyance, mentally tripling the guard on the special armory…

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

'That should do it,' Taylor thought with satisfaction, inspecting her work carefully. She'd used some of the random rubble lying around the old warehouse to fill in the gap in the wall just under the roof where she'd been coming and going through until her discovery of the tunnels, using drider silk to glue it in place and reinforce the whole repair job. From the outside it just looked like a damaged spot, but it was probably stronger than the rest of the wall. It had occurred to her that she could cover the entire inside with silk but that would be a lot of work and probably more trouble that it was worth. Even so she'd also patched the roof in several places, and made sure that none of the doors could be opened from the outside without taking half the wall with them. Her silk was dramatically stronger than the chain her dad had first given her, she knew that, so it seemed a sensible precaution.

The building was solidly enough built that even if someone did try to break through the wall, it would be quite a lot of effort, and considering where the warehouse was, it seemed highly unlikely that anyone would even bother. There were easier places to get scrap metal from closer to the populated areas of the city, after all, and few homeless people came this far into the ruined zone these days. And, of course, her range was now fully unlocked, meaning anything within a sphere nearly a mile and a half in diameter was within her purview, so it wasn't like much of anything could sneak up on her anyway.

It had turned out to be oddly anticlimactic to finally remove all the limiters on her ability when she'd decided she'd gotten to the point it wouldn't cause problems. Slightly nervously she'd let her power have its own way, the thing at the back of her head seeming surprised for a moment, then worried for a second, before it metaphorically shrugged and did what it had given up trying to do a couple of weeks ago. All that happened was that her range jumped that last two hundred yards or so outwards and then… just worked exactly the same only over a marginally greater volume.

Taylor had half-expected something odd, but in the end it was just that simple. She'd experimented for a while looking for anything else different but concluded what she got was pretty much what she saw. The range itself seemed slightly vague at the edges, wavering a little in and out by a few feet seemingly at random, and she'd examined this phenomenon for a bit, wondering once more if the 'limit' was actually a limit or just an arbitrary boundary her power had plucked out of thin air.

This seemed to be something of a theme, and it hadn't stopped her making it bend to her desires rather than whatever it had as some built in stopping point yet… She saw no reason that wouldn't be the case here either, but testing that aspect of it could wait for a while. She had other experiments to try first. Her own power seemed slightly apprehensive as she thought this and she laughed a little. "Don't worry, this won't hurt," she whispered to it as she descended to the floor again, landing on all eight feet with a series of slight clicks. "Just trust me."

There was a sensation of somewhat nervous anticipation combined with mild alien amusement and rather less mild confusion, which was a mix she was very used to these days. It was rather comforting, really. Like having a smart pet that really wanted to play but had no idea what was going on, yet still kept enjoying itself regardless.

Looking around she rubbed her hands together with the sound of chitin on chitin, smiling with glee. "I love this," she mumbled, moving to her main test area which now had several improvised tables set up, made out of random scrap she'd bent into shape and fixed solidly together with more silk. Two were rough benches, the tops only planks of wood that was only slightly smoothed, the other pair were much closer to an actual table as she'd located some sheets of steel that had been quite amenable to being squashed flat with the application of a lot of pressure. Making a mental note to get some real folding tables at some point, as while making all her own furniture was kind of fun, the aesthetics left something to be desired, she picked up her notes and flipped through the pages.

She'd filled more than two dozen notebooks by this point, with a mix of drawings, calculations, observations, suppositions, ideas for experiments, and general notes. It was quite a library she was building she thought as she looked over her list of things to test today. One that would probably severely puzzle most people even if they could understand half of it. Taylor had been forced to resort to the shorthand her mom had taught her years ago for quickly taking notes in class, and something she hadn't really used all that much in Winslow. There hadn't been much point in the end, since her notes got stolen anyway, so why bother putting in the effort? Even if the shorthand might have caused the thieves some trouble, she'd been so depressed she hadn't had the energy to fuck with them.

Rather regretting not doing so anyway just to screw their plans up, Taylor shrugged to herself. It was in the past and no longer relevant at all. Here and now, sometimes the ideas came so thick and fast she had trouble getting them all down on paper even with the speed she could write these days, and the shorthand had been an obvious solution. But it had required modification to convey a lot of concepts she'd have found nearly impossible to explain to anyone else without significant time and effort. Luckily her memory was seriously firing on all cylinders these days, thanks to the neural enhancements from her internal modifications and the addition of lots of interesting arthropodal upgrades. She was more than satisfied with the results and always looking for something new and interesting to add to the mix, or other ways to combine things she'd already picked up.

Like the improved armor, the fantastically versatile bioluminescence, and all the other useful tricks she'd learned over the last couple of months.

Stopping on one page, she studied the notes there, nodding slowly to herself. It was something she had to test sooner or later, definitely. As were some of the other things here. She'd been deliberately avoiding them for a while because she wanted to get her control ability to its limits first, and deal with some of the other ideas she'd had, but perhaps it was time?

"What do you think?" she asked Vespa, who was sitting on her shoulder. The hornet extension of her mind didn't have much of an opinion of her own, of course. She still felt a little guilty about that, although she knew logically there wasn't much of a reason to do so. Vespa was only one insect, one with a limited lifespan like most insects, and no mind to speak of in human terms. Although, at the back of her head, she had a suspicion that the limited lifespan part might be quite a lot less limited now than it had been… There was no easy way to be sure but Taylor had an idea that along with the massive increase in size, nearly tripling in length, the hornet might have a number of other fairly dramatic changes. Time would tell, of course.

There were all sorts of ramifications to the whole fusing process she was still working on, and probably would be for quite a while.

At least Vespa seemed to have stabilized at her current size now, as did most of the other creatures she'd merged with when she unmerged to check on them. Jumpy was only a little larger than she'd been the last time she'd investigated a week ago and the growth appeared to have basically stopped. Impy hadn't grown at all since the last time. And her firespider had also topped out. The crabs were still slightly increasing in size as were some of the others things, like the limpets, but they were quite a bit more recent, so she felt reasonably sure they'd all end up stopping whatever process was making them get larger quite soon. It seemed to last about six weeks or so as best she could determine.

Her own strength and other enhancements, on the other hand, was still going up slowly and steadily. At this point she wasn't sure if it was directly connected to whatever made the other creatures grow, or something different.

There were so many things about her powers that were still a mystery, she thought with a small smile, including to her actual powers as far as she could determine. Once again she wondered if she'd somehow broken them… It didn't really matter as she was more than satisfied with the result and so was whatever it was that lived in the back of her head, but that didn't stop her having many questions. With luck maybe one day she'd get answers. For now, she'd just enjoy the results and keep bending things to see what happened.

"OK. Yeah, let's try this first and see what happens." With a nod, she put the notebook down and turned to her Master power. Selecting a few of the relevant arthropods nearby, she got them heading towards the tables with effortless ease. While they climbed the legs and arrayed themselves on top, she made more notes on a different pad, even as she was considering how plausible it would be to work out some way to use one of her creatures to type on a keyboard… Perhaps by enlarging another spider or two, they could work a laptop?

Taylor wrote a few lines on a different page, then flipped back. Yet another experiment. There seemed to be an infinite number of things to put on the list…

"All right, let's see…" She inspected the bugs set out in front of her, patiently waiting. "You. Step forward, volunteer."

Smiling as the wolf spider she'd chosen marched forward a few steps, she flew Vesta down to stand next to it. "Right, then… Will this work, I wonder?" she murmured, putting one front leg of the hornet body on the spider's abdomen and watching closely even as she prodded her Changer ability. It seemed confused and she pushed harder. "Come on… You know you want to. Stop being difficult."

The sensation of a barrier grew stronger, causing her to glare at something that strictly speaking wasn't really there, but was real enough inside her own head. "We've talked about this," she chided it. "And you know what's going to happen whether you want it to or not, so why not just cooperate for once?"

The other part of her power was watching with interest and bafflement, appearing resigned. She pushed even harder and there was a sudden sense of something snapping into a new configuration, causing her mind to twitch sideways then back. "There we go. That wasn't hard, was it?" she happily commented. "And wow, by the way."

She'd more or less expected this to work, even in the face of the thing in her head's skepticism. It was staring now, she could feel it. "Told you it would work," she chuckled, as they both examined the results of her test.

The much, much larger flying hornet with eight legs that was now filling a considerable part of the table wasn't quite as large as her super-hornet form but it wasn't that far off. Perhaps two thirds the length from stinger to mandibles. The abdomen was a hybrid between that of the spider and Vespa's original one, and there were eight rather than six legs, of course. "Seriously cool," she commented, moving her newly enlarged second body around to peer up at her drider form. "I wonder…"

A moment later the Vespa spider-hornet said, "Yes! It works!"

"I said it was cool didn't I?" she replied through her original mouth.

"Yeah, you did. You're right. As usual."

"Thank you. Thank you very much."

"And so modest too."

"I am, yes."

"I thought you were."

Taylor giggled through two mouths, waving two pairs of antennae happily. This had real possibilities…

"Great. Now, the next question is how far can I push it?" she mused as she picked up the notebook and started writing.

"No idea. Why not try it and see?"

"Worth a shot."

"Yeah. Dad's going to freak again."

"Oh, yes. So very much."

Highly amused at her new trick, she started picking out other creatures to see what the results would be.

Rather remarkable, as it turned out.

And her power was, yet again, mightily baffled and completely incredulous yet still fascinated by what she was managing to pull off by dint of not accepting no for an answer...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Stopping dead, he stared in horror at the horrifically much too large hornet that climbed out of a manhole and waved at him. "Hi!" it said. "Sorry, don't mind us, we were just passing through."

Frozen in shock, he watched as a second much too fucking big hornet, with slightly different coloration, also emerged from underground, a long way from where he'd decided he'd never set foot again. This one said, "Nice night for this time of year, isn't it?" as it put the manhole cover, which weighed at least a hundred pounds, back into place. Moving it in its front legs as easily as if it was made of styrofoam.

Both of the insects lifted off with a deep hum, then flew away towards the hills to the north. He watched them go, unable to say a word, until they were out of sight.

"No. Fuck this. I am out of here." Turning, he hastened on his way. He had plans to make and staying anywhere near where fucking Asian hornets the size of large dogs were breeding underground were not part of them.

"I don't care if they are Asian, there are limits," he muttered as he walked as fast as he could without breaking into a run. "There could be thousands of them down there…" Finding himself sweating despite the chill air, he walked faster still, giving every manhole cover and drain he passed a wide berth.

The whole time he could almost swear he could hear deep underground a deep hum and a rustling sound, like insects moving past each other…

"Fucking Brockton Bay," he moaned as he kept looking around, waiting for the horror to burst forth. It was inevitable and he wanted no part of it.

It might be time to get very, very drunk again, though.

Chapter Text

Waving as she spotted a familiar face, Missy watched Amy wave back, then say something to her sister, both the older girls then walking over and entering the burger place she was in. Sitting at a window table Missy had been enjoying her Saturday morning without any specific responsibilities. The weather was really sunny, a nice change from the solid two days of rain earlier in the week, and quite warm for early March, her parents were being oddly reasonable at the moment, which seemed to suggest their therapy was actually working, and she herself was also benefiting from her sessions with the therapist. Overall she was in a good mood and feeling more at peace with herself than she had done since some time before the Hookwolf Incident.

Not something she'd ever forget for many reasons, but the outcome had been surprisingly positive. Not only was the city down a murderous Nazi, which was only ever going to be a good thing in her opinion, but she'd had quite a few of the PRT troopers comment in passing that she'd proven that she was definitely more than capable of taking on an opponent few would have fared so well against. At least of two of these times in the hearing of Sophia, she was almost certain quite deliberately, which had made the older Ward look incredibly irritated and storm off muttering to herself. Something Missy found absolutely hilarious, and by the looks on the faces of the people who'd also been present, including the Deputy Director, that feeling was shared by others. Not that anyone would be so crass as to laugh or anything, but there had been distinct smirks in a few cases…

So yeah, she had reasons to be fairly cheerful at the moment. Even the Director had merely given her a look for a few seconds when she'd gone in that Monday after being discharged from hospital, a look that conveyed quite a few things, some of which Missy wasn't entirely sure she understood, then just got on with the meeting. Apparently that incredibly weird… whatever the fuck it had been… with Amy and the Director at the hospital really had been the end of that particular issue.

Though she had a very good idea that if she fucked up again, things would be quite different… And had no intention at all of doing so. She was young, she wasn't an idiot. Despite what some might claim after her in-hindsight very ill-advised wish to get some real action. Having succeeded beyond her wildest nightmares, she had no wish whatsoever to repeat the feat. There might not be a helpfully friendly horror bug nearby, after all.

Wondering where the hornet had gone, since there had been no verifiable sightings of it to her knowledge since that night, although there were a lot of rumors on PHO which was par for the course where odd things were concerned, she slid to the side on the bench seat as Amy approached, the brunette girl smiling and taking the unspoken invitation to sit there. Vicky sat opposite them and grinned at Missy.

"How are you today? All over your minor illness?"

"Yep. Nothing at all wrong with me now, other than being hungry," Missy replied happily, picking up her burger and taking a big bite from it. Chewing, she swallowed, then added, "I only just got here and I'm starving."

"I kind of worked that out," Vicky giggled. "That thing is nearly as big as you are." Missy took another bite, then put the burger down and reached for some fries.

"It's really good," she confided. "I haven't had a good burger for… well, probably about two weeks."

Vicky looked over at the menu board behind the counter in a speculative manner. "I didn't have much breakfast," she pondered out loud, making Amy sigh slightly. "Ames? Want anything?"

"Oh, why not," Amy replied after following her gaze. "The third pounder cheeseburger with bacon, and a banana milkshake."

"You know that they nearly stopped making the third pounder burgers because people thought it was smaller than a quarter pounder?" Missy commented with a somewhat baffled expression, both girls looking at her. "Because three is smaller than four, apparently. People are… not bright sometimes."

"Yeah, I read about that and couldn't stop laughing for about ten minutes," Vicky snorted. "But then I've met people and they're idiots."

"Indeed they are," Amy nodded wisely. "People are the worst. I try to avoid them." Her voice was entirely deadpan but her eyes were twinkling.

"Probably for the best," Missy agreed soberly. "Down with people."

"A position we can all get behind!" Vicky giggled again, then jumped to her feet. "Back in a bit."

"Watch out for the people! I think there are some over there." Missy called as the blonde left, before she started laughing as well. Amy leaned back in the seat and looked at her with a small smile on her face.

"You seem in a good mood," her friend observed, seeming pleased. "No lingering problems?"

Picking up her drink with one hand, Missy held out the other without a word, Amy touching it with two fingers. After a moment she nodded. "Excellent. Right where you should be. And the therapy?"

"Is helping, yes. More than I'd ever have expected," Missy replied having swallowed a mouthful of soda. "Thank you so much for setting all that up. I owe you a massive favor just for that, never mind everything else." Her voice was low enough that no one past their table could overhear, even absent the noise from the other customers, but Amy had no trouble.

"No, you don't owe me anything, Missy," Amy replied in a similarly low voice. "Helping a friend doesn't come with strings attached. I'm just happy it has helped. She knows her stuff."

"Yeah, she does, definitely."

Missy sipped her soda again, then offered Amy the fries, which the other girl accepted a few of with a nod of thanks. They sat in companionable silence for a couple of minutes, until Missy glanced at the older girl, to see her looking towards the doors where more people had entered. Her attention was apparently on a tall leggy brunette with long either black or as near as makes no difference curly hair halfway down her back, accompanied by a substantially shorter girl who looked like she was of Asian heritage. The taller girl was wearing a nice jacket, black jeans, what looked like work boots more than anything else although they fitted the style well, and round glasses on her face. Her friend was dressed in what appeared to be rather more expensive clothes but in a subdued style, her own hair straight and down to her shoulders.

Both were talking and laughing together, clearly friends, and took their place in the queue a few people behind where Vicky had nearly reached the counter. Missy studied the pair, wondering why Amy was looking at them with a slightly quizzical expression. "Friends of yours?" she asked, leaning closer to be heard over the background noise.

With a slight jolt Amy seemed to realize she was staring and turned her head to look at Missy, appearing mildly embarrassed. "No, but I could swear I know that tall girl from somewhere, and it was bothering me. I can't remember quite…" She trailed off, sneaking a glance at the girl again, who was pointing to something on the menu while talking to her friend. "Damn it, I know I've seen her before. I hate it when I recognize a face and can't put a name to it."

"She's really tall," Missy commented with mild awe. The girl couldn't have been more than sixteen but she wasn't far off six feet in height, well over a foot more than Missy herself was. And while she was very slender, it was obviously a wiry sort of slender, with hidden strength, not just skinny and emaciated. Missy had seen enough of the female PRT troopers in the gym to recognize the signs of someone who was much stronger than appearances would suggest. Perhaps she was a runner or swimmer? It was that sort of effect.

The girl glanced around the restaurant and happened to look directly at them for a moment, then her eyes moved on, but Amy suddenly nodded. "Aha. I know. I have seen her before. At the hospital. She was…" Her friend stopped talking for a moment, her triumphant expression turning into a somewhat embarrassed one as she looked at Missy who raised her eyebrows. "Um… Medical privacy. Let's just say I helped her and leave it there. It wasn't nice."

"Accident?"

"Not quite, but let's go with that. She wasn't nearly as healthy looking though. That's why I didn't figure it out immediately. Looks like she's recovered well. Good. No one deserved to go through what she did."

Missy was very curious by this point, sneaking another look at the tall girl, but knew Amy would never violate her patient's privacy with any real information. Certainly going on how the girl appeared she was as healthy as a horse now. Not surprising considering how good Amy was.

She noticed Vicky was coming back with a tray, weaving her way adroitly through the crowd, which seemed fairly enthusiastic all in all. The nice weather and the first real hint of proper spring had brought a lot of people out, and the boardwalk was thronged with tourists, many of whom seemed to have expanded out from that area to this slightly more distant one.

The lack of Hookwolf, and the way that the E88 seemed to have decided to walk very carefully at the moment presumably as a result of what happened, probably helped that sort of thing she assumed. Along with how Lung's lot had been oddly quiet too recently. No one seemed to have a clue why and she knew it was worrying the PRT quite a lot, because the last time the rage dragon had gone dark for a while things got far too exciting when he finally emerged and started throwing his weight around. Hopefully the quiet at the moment wasn't the sort that immediately preceded a storm…

In all honestly she'd prefer a time of quiet and relative peace for the foreseeable future, if the fates would be so kind. She'd had more than enough of excitement from a Parahuman standpoint recently.

It might also have something to do with the shitshow surrounding Coil's death, she mused, watching Vicky put the tray down then hand her sister her order before sitting and unwrapping her own burger. The Director was definitely in a bit of a mood as a result of everything surrounding that little chaotic gift to the city, apparently torn between being darkly pleased the idiot was dead, highly amused at how he died, very annoyed at how the city administration had managed to sideline her organization with the cooperation of both the Governor's office and the FBI, and just irritated in general at all the extra work involved in clearing up the mess. It was probably a good thing the Empire was keeping their heads down because in the mindset Director Piggot was emitting like an aura she'd probably personally and gleefully shoot Kaiser in the balls with the biggest gun she could lay hands on if things kicked off.

She was in that sort of a mood. Perhaps he realized that.

No one wanted to get in the way of the Director when she was stomping around like she'd been sent to kill Scion. Not even a super-villain.

Missy was rather impressed with the sheer air of malevolence the older woman could radiate and profoundly glad it wasn't aimed at her. She'd rather face Hookwolf again…

"Wow, this is really good," Vicky commented having taken a bite out of her burger. "Even better than Fugly's."

"Yeah, it's pretty decent," Amy agreed, after swallowing. "I was hungrier than I thought I was."

"Salt and grease does tend to make you think that," her sister laughed. The tall girl and her shorter friend walked past carrying trays and sat down a few tables away, Missy noticed as she looked up. Amy followed them with her eyes, which her sister picked up on. "You know them, Ames?" Vicky asked curiously, looking in that direction too for a moment.

"Only in passing. Case at the hospital a couple of months ago," Amy replied, sticking her straw into her soda and taking a long drag on it. "It took me a moment to place her face. Don't know her other than that, but it was bugging me."

"Oh. OK. Wow, she's got legs for days." Vicky grinned as Amy chuckled. "Unlike some short people not that far away."

"Hey!" Both Amy and Missy exclaimed indignantly then exchanged a look and started giggling. Vicky shook her head with a chuckle.

"Got two at the same time. Go, me."

"You in a cheerful mood is annoying," Amy grumbled, although Missy could tell she was also quite cheerful. She just had a reputation to maintain, the younger girl thought with a small smile to herself. Panacea was dark and snarky, everyone knew that. Happy and snarky Amy Dallon wasn't nearly as well known.

The snark was a constant, regardless of mood, though.

She was pleased to see that the visible tiredness her friend had shown the first time Missy had broken down in her arms in the hospital after that awful night seemed to have faded appreciably. It looked like therapy was helping Amy as much as it was her, which was only good. Missy worried about Amy sometimes. She'd looked ready to drop more than once during her visits, and the girl didn't want to see that happen.

But it appeared that this possibility was receding which could only be good.

"Hey, you know that Laotsunn guy on PHO?" Vicky commented a bit later during which all three of them made serious inroads into their meals. Missy looked back at her from where she'd been watching the people wandering around outside, Amy also turning to her sister.

"The guy who practically drank himself to death live on the forum?" Amy queried, raising an eyebrow. "Which is a good trick, to be honest."

"Yeah, that guy. He didn't post again for four days and when he came back he claimed to have the worst hangover in the world. Considering how many typos he made I could believe it," Vicky giggled. "But anyway, he posted again on the HOUS thread… I think about two, maybe three days ago? Before all the rain, definitely." She thought for a second then nodded as the other two waited. "Yeah, it was Monday night, I think. Or was it Sunday? Might have been Sat…"

"Get on with it, Vicky. The exact date isn't important," Amy sighed fondly. Missy grinned at the tone, sensing that these two often had this sort of mild argument. Vicky stuck her tongue out at her sister for a second, then laughed.

"Anyway… He posted a while back and he claimed the HOUS lived underground. And get this." She leaned over the table, the other two leaning in as well. "He said there were two of them. Then he got really drunk again as far as I could tell. That guy has a problem."

"Two HOUSs?" Amy blinked a few times. "Did he have proof?"

"Nope. Not a thing, just a bit of a terrified rant about how they came from beneath, and even if they were polite he didn't want anything to do with them. Then he told this long rambling story about some village in Japan that had an AGH problem and vanished overnight, got angry with Void Cowboy when that idiot claimed it was a plot by the lizards he's always going on about, told him he should be very grateful he didn't have time to come and find him, told one of the mods to fuck himself when he got asked to be civil, and then ate a three day threadban. Cowboy said something stupid and got five days, of course, but you know that guy…" She shrugged as the other pair nodded in sync. Everyone on PHO knew about Void Cowboy and his endless conspiracy theories, only exceeded by his almost impressive ability to generally say the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time then act confused that anyone found it irritating.

Very odd guy, Void Cowboy, Missy thought with a shake of her head. Even on the internet he stood out as a bit weird.

"I think he was already pretty drunk when he started posting," Vicky continued with a sort of a confused smile on her face. "Some of the things he said were off the wall even for PHO. Claimed you could hear the humming coming from underground if you were really really quiet. Of course everyone told him photos or it didn't happen, which didn't help. Poor guy. I think he's got issues."

"Alcohol abuse does bad things to you," Amy remarked. "He'd better cut down on the drinking or he's going to regret it."

"Think he was telling the truth?" Missy asked curiously. She made a mental note to find the point in the now-huge thread covering the giant hornet, which she'd lost track of since there were so many people posting so many bizarre theories on it she'd found it hard to keep up.

"I have no real idea," the older blonde replied, turning to look directly at her. "I guess it might be true? Weird shit happens a lot more than you'd think, especially around here."

"I can pretty much guarantee there isn't a huge HOUS hive under the city," Amy put in with a somewhat fascinated but also skeptical expression. Both the others looked at her, waiting for her to continue, which she did after taking another bite of her burger and swallowing. "Hornets, especially that species, are carnivorous. Normal AGHs eat bees, for example, as well as anything else they can catch. Something big enough to lift Vista is big enough to probably eat Vista." She grinned as they exchanged worried looks, Missy herself feeling somewhat concerned now. "If there were even hundreds of them lurking down below the streets, there wouldn't be a dog, cat, or raccoon left in the city, and we'd possibly be wondering why so many people were vanishing… One I can believe, two is… maybe possible? I don't know, since we have no idea where it came from in the first place or where it went. But hundreds? Or even dozens? Nah. What would they eat?"

"Yeah, that's a good point," her sister agreed, as Missy nodded slowly. It made sense. "Mind you, I looked it up and they do nest underground in their native habitat. Or at least the normal ones do. So that part kind of checks out."

Leaning closer, Missy suggested with a small and somewhat evil grin, "Perhaps they haven't built the nest yet. They're just getting started."

Amy and Vicky stared at her, then each other.

In a low intense voice, Missy continued, "Maybe we'll be wondering where all the dogs and cats went in a couple of months. And raccoons. And pigeons. And other dumb animals. Like Nazis. Or Merchants." She grinned more widely and Amy started laughing, while Vicky, who had been looking somewhat nervously thoughtful, sighed heavily.

"Stop trying to scare me, Missy. One HOUS is more than enough."

Laughing, the younger girl finished her last few fries, then leaned back and grinned again. "Had you going for a moment though."

"Thanks so much for the nightmares," Vicky grumbled. "At least it's not giant spiders. I'm not sure I could handle even the thought of that."

Amy looked rather amused, glancing at Missy, then the pair of them started listing various arthropods that a giant version of might be an interesting alternative to a hornet, in an attempt to make Vicky look even more horrified. It kept them amused for quite some time, even though it became clear pretty rapidly that Vicky was only playing along because she also thought it was funny.

Missy was finding today to be well worth the effort and was very happy she'd made a friend in Amy Dallon and her sister too for that matter.

Although she was still wondering where the HOUS had vanished to so thoroughly. And whether there really was another one. Probably not, PHO was full of idiots who made stuff up, but you never knew.

Perhaps she'd find out at some point. If nothing else she wanted to thank the hornet properly.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Trying not to laugh or show any signs of how funny the conversation a few tables away was, Taylor finished her burger then ate the last couple of fries. "This was a good idea, Lucy," she said, feeling very satisfied. The half-Chinese girl was definitely a friend now, and they'd met again at Mike's shop earlier that morning when Taylor had gone in after another trip to the library. During which she'd been watching what was going on in Coil's former lair with interest. Apparently the BBPD teams had finished digging out all the explosives, and between them, the FBI, the PRT, and several other agencies, had basically strip-mined the entire place looking for evidence. From the conversations she'd monitored a lot of people in all sorts of places had been implicated in far more crimes than seemed plausible, and it also tied into the whole thing with Brockton General. Whether Calvert had been behind that, or merely taken advantage of it, she didn't know, but he'd certainly been involved in it up to his eyebrows.

It was funny, she thought, how connected all the various problems in the city and even the state seemed to be. A huge number of them ultimately seemed to lead back to a surprisingly small number of people, who had an influence far beyond the obvious. Often a malicious one, annoyingly. But that did seem to be how this sort of thing functioned. Her dad agreed when she'd mentioned her thoughts and discoveries and pointed out that people with power tended almost invariably to use it to make their own lives better, for whatever value of the word they had, at the expense of everyone who didn't have power. It was vanishingly rare for those with power to use it unselfishly, which was obvious if you merely looked around at the homeless, the addicts, the people who barely scraped by, then compared it with people up on Lord's Hill, like the Anders of the world.

He wasn't keen on people like that. Leaving aside him feeling that Max Anders was a slimy bastard to begin with, along with so many of his peers. Many of whom seemed to be steadily finding out that when the pigeons came home to roost, they brought significant misfortune with them…

Unfortunately, he'd also added with a sigh, the people with vast fortunes somehow often seemed to be able to pull victory from the jaws of defeat at the last moment, never quite suffering the consequences they so richly deserved. He wasn't at all convinced that the really well off people implicated in the various scandals would truly face repercussions that would put a stop to their actions for good. At best, many of them would just have a momentary setback then happily go on causing others to pay the price. It was, as he put it, how the world worked. It wasn't fair, but that was life.

It wasn't the first time she'd heard much the same from him, or her mother either. Her parents had discussed the problems with society quite freely, from well before she was old enough to really make any sense of it, and answered a lot of questions she'd come up with over the years in ways that she could understand. Taylor was under no illusions as to how the powerful gained and held their power. A quite different sort of power than those granted to Parahumans, and in many ways more subtle and pernicious.

Her mom had made that point at length more than once, she thought with a small smile. Between her mom being something of a committed feminist, and her dad being very much a union man, it was a wonder she wasn't out there trying to take down the System…

But she worked in more subtle ways, she pondered, feeling amused. So subtle she didn't realize she was doing anything, in fact! Merely by being abused for eighteen months and betrayed by her best friend she'd triggered a massive legal shakeup that was state-wide now, and would take down at least some of the problems plaguing society. Now that was subtle.

Taylor was having trouble not giggling at this point from her own thoughts.

And accidentally offing Coil had only added to the chaos, in ways she hadn't expected and probably wouldn't discover for months if ever. Apparently she had some impressive skills at interfering with the plans of the powerful and dark forces behind the scenes without even knowing it. It made her wonder what she could do if she actually tried.

She wasn't actually planning on pulling on the political strings of the city, though. It had been a complete accident in both cases. Taylor had way more than enough things to work on with her own projects and her schooling to bother with poking her nose into things she didn't understand and had very little real interest in at this point in her life, although that said she did have a few ideas that came out of her joint actions with Tattletale one memorable day a little while ago. It would take a lot of thought and waiting for the right moment, though, so it was on the back burner for now.

"You look like you're having deep thoughts, Taylor," Lucy commented, grinning at her.

"Very deep. Far below the surface, these thoughts are," Taylor replied, smiling back. "Absolutely subterranean in fact. No light, no sound, just dark depths."

"Very poetic."

"I try." Taylor buffed her fingernails on her shirt, then examined them as Lucy giggled. "I am, of course, excellent at such things."

"As would be expected of an adventurer so experienced as yourself, Miss Hebert."

"Why, thank you, Miss Cheung. A great compliment from a similarly experienced adventurer. We should collaborate on another mission against the forces of darkness and ineptitude soon, so we can prove to all just how far above the commonplace rabble we are." Taylor put on a supercilious expression, which was matched by Lucy, who nodded thoughtfully.

"You may have a point, indeed. It has been some time since we last soundly thrashed an unworthy opponent. One would not wish one's skills to deteriorate through lack of practice, would one?"

"No, one would most definitely not. Soundly reasoned, my most valued colleague, soundly reasoned."

They met each other's eyes and neither could keep up the silliness for any longer. Lucy broke first, then Taylor followed, both collapsing in laughter. "Oh, god, speaking like a Victorian novel is harder than you'd think," Lucy gasped as she lay back in the chair heaving with hilarity. "Why do we keep doing this?"

"It's funny as hell?" Taylor suggested, wiping her eye and grinning widely.

"Good point." Still giggling intermittently, Lucy sat up again and reached for her soda, looking disappointed when she picked it up to find it was nearly empty. Finishing it off, she put the empty cup down again and shook her head. "I'm glad I met you, Taylor. You're a lot of fun."

"Yeah, same here," Taylor agreed. "I needed a friend after what happened at Winslow."

The other girl looked at her for a few seconds. "You've never really said exactly what that was," she began, rather cautiously. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really," Taylor admitted with a wince. "But… friends share things, right?" She remembered how that had bitten her before with Emma and wondered at her own words even as she said them. On the other hand Lucy was not Emma, and maybe her dad was right. Perhaps she did need some form of peer socialization. At least human peers. She had lots and lots and lots of much smaller peers, inside the mile and a half diameter sphere she was currently monitoring with part of her mind.

Another mugger, nearly half a mile away, found himself sneezing uncontrollably as a small fly went right up his left nostril and buzzed vigorously. His putative victim walked on without even noticing while the man pawed at his face…

That was nearly two dozen small crimes averted just while she'd been wandering around with Lucy, she thought with inner glee and considerable satisfaction. It was the little victories that really counted, and she was pretty sure that a lot of people were going to have a much better day thanks to random accidental insect encounters of the much too close kind. Not the criminals, of course, but they knew what they were doing, and had presumably accepted the risk. Probably not while thinking that a spider might end up somewhere ticklish, though.

That guy did a remarkably good break-dance routine as he frantically flopped around trying to reach the bit of the back it's the hardest to reach. So good he had half a dozen pedestrians gathered around watching and rating his performance out of ten.

Feeling both that she was doing something useful with her powers that didn't involve major property damage, and that if she was going to take a risk on making a real friend again, Lucy was a good place to start, Taylor sighed a little. "I had a friend. Emma. We knew each other from the time we were babies," she started, staring at the table and speaking in a low monotone, while suppressing the emotions that flared a little with a combination of absolutely iron will and the support of millions of arthropods all around her, somehow finding that all those tiny lives helped absorb what would have been hard to deal with otherwise. She'd been doing her damnedest not to think about Winslow or the three banes of her life ever since she escaped the fucking place, and on the whole had done in her view a very good job of that. Her power, which she could feel watching with both interest and a sort of alien mild concern, had helped immeasurably, but a lot of it was down to knowing she would never have to put up with such an event again.

And knowing that if someone tried to force that sort of crap on her, she now had so many ways to push back much, much harder than anyone would expect.

She spoke quietly for nearly twenty minutes, concisely reciting the whole tale ending up with her in hospital, although obviously she didn't mention the whole powers thing. Taylor wasn't certain she was going to be telling anyone other than her dad about that any time soon, if ever, and while she liked Lucy a lot she didn't know her well enough yet to risk her real secrets. Halfway through she made a brief trip to get more soda, as her mouth was going dry, and got one for Lucy too.

Her friend was staring at her in complete horror when she finished. "Oh, my god, Taylor. That's… horrible."

"It sure wasn't fun," Taylor agreed, still looking at the table and toying with her now-empty drink cup. Lucy got up and came around to her side, then hugged her. "Thanks," she added almost in a whisper. Despite her deliberate emotional control, retelling the whole thing to someone like that had been hard. Possibly it would be easier if she had to do it again, possibly not, but she hadn't enjoyed it at all.

"Those absolute… bitches," Lucy growled, sitting next to her this time once she released the taller girl. "Why would anyone do that to anyone? What did they get out of it?"

Shrugging, Taylor shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea even now," she admitted helplessly. "I spent more than a year trying to work it out, trying to figure out what set Emma off, why Sophia was so ready to basically torture me… Madison was easier to understand, she's a born follower who just clung onto whoever was the top dog for status or whatever, but the other two… I honestly don't know. Sophia was, is, a bully. I mean, I knew that almost immediately. She did horrible things to other people too, I know that, but she reserved the most attention for me for some fucked up reason. But even in those terms, what she did was way past bullying and well into assault or even attempted murder. As for Emma…"

The girl sighed, propping her head on one hand and drawing little frowny faces on the table in the water left over from the condensation on their sodas with her finger. "I trusted her with my life. She was family to me, and I thought I was to her. Then one day she just… changed. I came home from summer camp after Mom died and it was like she'd been replaced with a stranger. I even wondered if it was some sort of Master thing but why would any villain do something so completely… trivial? Neither of us was anyone special. I finally decided she'd had a mental breakdown or something like that and the girl I knew basically died while I was away." Raising her eyes she looked sideways at the sympathetic gaze from Lucy, who was listening intently.

"I'll probably never find out why she changed, but I came to terms with that quite a while ago. And since Winslow's closed, probably for good, I doubt I'll ever have to deal with any of them again. At least at school. I suppose I might bump into them in the street but as far as I'm concerned they're strangers to me now."

"And the school did nothing to stop this?" Lucy looked like she couldn't believe what she'd heard.

With a dark chuckle, Taylor shook her head. "If anything they were complicit in a lot of it. Sure never took me seriously when I complained, so in the end I gave up. No proof, they said. I mean, I had a lot of evidence, emails on the school computer system, notes I made at the time, that sort of thing. I should probably have gone to the cops or something and just bypassed the school completely but looking back I was so depressed I could barely function. Which isn't surprising, all things considered. If the hospital administration hadn't decided they'd had enough for all I know I'd be back there with them trying even harder to kill me. They might have succeeded the next time." She shrugged again as Lucy looked stunned, then furious.

"Dad and I were talking about suing them after I got out of hospital, but the hospital jumping in with much heavier boots than we could come up with kind of bypassed that. And considering how much shit has come to light since, the people at Winslow are completely fucked. Can't say I'll ever find that anything other than funny as hell. Especially as it was their fault I ended up in hospital to begin with since they couldn't do their jobs right, and because of that all this happened. If they'd just been slightly less evil and incompetent they'd probably still be getting away with whatever it was they were doing." She smiled slightly. "I got more revenge than I thought I'd ever manage, completely accidentally."

Lucy laughed for a moment. "Yeah, guess you did. Not on those three little shits though."

"No, but you can't have everything. I won't have to go to school with any of them again which is a reward of it's own, though. Right now I still don't know if I'll actually end up back at high school at all, and the home schooling thing is working out well, so I'm not missing much."

"Having friends around?" Lucy suggested with a small smile.

"That… is a point my dad made, yeah," she conceded. "But right now I've only really got one friend and I see her pretty regularly so it's not bad."

"Oh? Who is she? Do I know her?" Lucy raised one eyebrow quizzically, making Taylor grin.

"You'd like her. She's nuts about lizards."

"Ah. A girl of good taste."

"Insects are better."

"Ah. A girl of poor taste. And incorrect opinions."

Taylor snickered a little at the dry tone, making Lucy look amused. "Arthropods forever!" she insisted.

"Lizards rule!"

"We should get some t shirts made. I want a spider on mine. You can have a lizard if you want. We've got the slogans already, the images should be easy after that."

Putting her arm around Taylor's shoulders, Lucy giggled. "All adventurers should have suitable slogans. I approve."

"Well, of course you do, I would hardly allow someone who did not approve of my glorious wit to remain in my company, would I?" Taylor put a hand on her chest and sniffed. "I, my dear compatriot, have standards."

Both of them laughed, Taylor feeling much more cheerful and almost lighter after having unburdened herself to the girl she felt really was becoming a good friend, and Lucy seemed happy that Taylor was happier.

Of course, the good mood was always destined to be ruined, she thought a moment later as a presence she'd been tracking and hoping would avoid this area started heading more or less straight towards the burger place.

Fucking Sophia Hess. Why did she have to be hungry right now? And why here?

The girl had entered her Zone of Arthropod Observation a few minutes ago, from the direction of the PRT building which was about a quarter of a mile further away than her power currently reached. She wasn't in costume, presumably either on the way home or off duty for some other reason, but Taylor had instantly picked up on her the second she crossed the border of the ZAO. Her power was so natural to her these days it would be hard to not notice something like the person who was probably the closest thing to an actual enemy she had, or ever wanted, even three quarters of a mile away.

Wondering if she should quickly make excuses for why they had to leave, after a second's thought Taylor decided that hell no, she wasn't going to get chased away by the bitch. That was way too reminiscent of Winslow, and she was completely done with allowing that period of her life to dictate her actions. She had every right to sit here with a friend and if Sophia did start anything she was quite prepared to break her nose for her regardless of the fallout. Her dad would probably sigh a lot, but she also felt he'd not really be all that surprised or upset.

His own life had involved more than a few times when someone had to be physically remonstrated with after all, she knew that full well. As had her mom's on occasion, due to her old hobby before they married. From what her dad said, in fact, her mom had punched more people in the face during various street excitements than he had in bar fights. It was apparently something he found rather impressive and Taylor had a sneaking suspicion, attractive about her mom. Not that she was going there, of course. Some things were best not thought about…

And perhaps Sophia wasn't even… no. Damn it. She'd altered course slightly two hundred feet away and was on a direct heading for the door. Glancing to the side Taylor spotted a face with her own eyes rather than through insect senses, one far too familiar to her, walking rapidly in the direction of the burger restaurant.

It didn't look like Sophia had spotted her in return, and she looked away again in a casual manner. An awful lot of bugs were still monitoring the incoming girl though. And a couple of dozen fruit flies were now concealed on her person, mapping her limbs and body position to an accuracy that was, when Taylor consciously thought about it, kind of impressive. It was like a wire-frame motion capture model straight out of the videos she'd watched online in her mind, although at the same time completely different in a way she'd have found almost impossible to properly explain. The words just didn't really exist for what she sensed these days.

Shoving the door open Sophia stomped in, muttering under her breath when she nearly ran into an older boy who was leaving with a couple of friends. All three of them gave her odd looks before exiting, but she ignored them completely as she headed for the counter. Swearing quietly at the length of the queue, she waited at the back of the line with ill grace. Apparently she was in a fouler mood than the last time Taylor had the misfortune to encounter her. Considering that time was when the little shit pushed her into her own locker…

She had to force her emotions down very hard indeed for a moment. Her inner hornet was buzzing angrily, and on the back of her neck under her hair, inside her hood, she was hyper-aware of Vespa just sitting there. She wondered for a brief couple of seconds just how potent the much-enlarged hornet's venom was now… It wasn't something she'd thought to test yet.

Probably not the hell brew she had in her super-hornet form, but she was pretty sure it was a lot worse than it had been. And the amount available was a substantially larger too.

Firmly pushing the momentary happy thought of a valid test target away, she just kept talking quietly to Lucy about their plans for the next hour or so, while simultaneously watching Sophia grumble viciously to herself, everyone else in the burger place go about their business, and many thousands of other people throughout most of the commercial core of the city as they lived their lives. Absently interfering with two more muggers, a snatch and grab thief in a perfume store on the next block, an attempted carjacking two streets over, and someone who seemed to have vile intentions towards a young woman in her mid-twenties who had just left a restaurant, she waited.

It was possible nothing would happen.

On the other hand it was Sophia Hess, and she was in a shitty mood even for her, so what were the odds of that?

Based purely on her experience, low at best.

And such proved, inevitably, to be the case not five minutes later.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Hearing Missy sigh heavily from next to her, Amy looked at the younger girl, who was peering at the people waiting at the counter, then followed her eyes. The number of people in the burger joint had increased considerably in the last few minutes, two separate groups of teenagers with half a dozen in each group having come in one after the other in quick succession, all in good moods and very talkative. As a result the background noise level had increased quite a lot, but everyone seemed to be taking the longer wait for service in good spirits. She recognized a few faces from Arcadia, two girls she vaguely knew, one boy she thought was on the football team, and another who she'd seen in the library several times but never done more than exchange nods with.

Missy, however, wasn't looking at any of them. She was watching a black girl a year or so younger than Amy, who had a ferocious scowl on her face and radiated impatient annoyance like a nearly visible cloud of bad tempered shadow. Appropriate, considering who she was.

"Oh, hell," Missy said, barely audible over the chatter. "And it was such a nice day up until now."

Vicky overheard this, looking puzzled, then craning her neck to look over her shoulder. Her eyes searched the crowd before fixing on the obviously angrier-than-usual Sophia Hess. "Oh," the blonde said in recognition, turning back to face them. "Her."

"Yeah. Her."

All three knew Sophia and what she was like. Amy had healed the bitch more times than she cared to recall, usually following some incident where Sophia got in over her head, assumed she was that little bit better than she actually was, and didn't duck fast enough. She'd learned her true identity only a month after gaining her own powers, having been called in by the PRT to heal their newest Ward who had just done something spectacularly idiotic. A pattern than had continued despite Director Piggot, according to her own sources in the organization, reading Sophia the riot act several times. She'd heard both from the other Wards and from a number of PRT troopers she knew that the girl was neither liked nor respected, although all of them admitted that if she followed orders she was actually very effective. Unfortunately she had a distinct habit of just flat out ignoring orders she didn't agree with and nothing the Director did seemed able to change that.

Amy had no idea why the girl was still a Ward for that matter. You'd have thought that the number of incidents she'd been involved in where innocents got caught in the crossfire, or where she blatantly didn't do either what she'd been told to or did do what she'd been told not to would have meant she'd have ended up somewhere where her proclivities could be curbed. Considering the rumors going around that she'd been at least indirectly responsible for two deaths, and multiple serious injuries, before she became a Ward in the first place, and a number of the latter since while running around off the books, Amy found the whole thing very strange.

Missy had done one stupid thing from, in a sense, good intentions, nearly died as a result, and got a personal visit from the Director who had in her own way expressed a fervent desire that such a thing not happen again. She'd gotten away with it, but Amy was certain that repeat offenses would quickly result in Bad Things. Missy knew it too, and was more than smart enough to not slip again. Sophia on the other hand; she kept doing worse, repeatedly, somehow didn't end up absolutely screwed as a result, and in Amy's opinion was not as smart as Missy was. Not to mention was extremely aggressive and combative to put it mildly.
Neither Dallon sister liked Sophia Hess, it was fair to say. Vicky had also learned her identity shortly after Amy did through pure accidental circumstances, and had a very low opinion of both Ward and civilian IDs. Sophia herself returned the contempt with ease, both of them having gotten into more than one insult-hurling argument in the past. Started by Sophia, of course, who seemed unable to let any opportunity to get a dig in go regardless of how wise that would be.

If she'd attended Arcadia, Amy suspected wryly, there would have been trouble. Luckily she didn't, having been at Winslow to the best of her knowledge, and now presumably home-schooled like the rest of the students from there did while the administration dealt with the still-ongoing fallout of the whole mess. Or possibly the PRT was arranging schooling themselves? She neither knew nor particularly cared where Sophia was concerned.

She was somewhat concerned about how tense Missy had become at the sight of the older Ward, though. "Maybe she won't see you," she commented in a low voice as her friend kept her eyes on Sophia but didn't look directly at her, as if she was worried Hess would feel the gaze.

"Hah. I should be so lucky," Missy grumbled. "She's been absolutely awful since Winslow closed, even for her. Sometimes I wish…" She trailed off, her right hand clenching into a fist, before relaxing slowly. Worried, Amy and Vicky exchanged glances. The latter pushed the huge bag of fries she'd acquired a few minutes ago forward. All three of them had spent the last half hour talking and decided they were hungry again, as a result having sent the blonde for more food and drinks.

"Have some fries and don't think about the crazy girl," Vicky advised with a small smile. "Don't let her get to you."

"Easy for you to say, you don't see her nearly every day."

"Good thing too or I'd have unscrewed her head for her by now," Vicky replied cheerfully, winking at Missy, who couldn't help giggling at the comment. She took a handful of fries and started grazing on them, Amy and Vicky doing the same. None of them directly looked at Sophia lest their souls get sucked out of their bodies by the air of suppressed anger and frustration, but they kept her in their peripheral vision like one would an angry wasp.

Deliberately changing the subject, Missy forced cheer into her voice and started discussing a TV show that was currently getting good ratings. Relieved that her friend wasn't falling into the trap of worrying about her annoying co-worker, Amy exchanged a look with Vicky, who smiled a little at her, before pointing out a plot hole which made Missy pause, think, and rebut it. Enjoying herself thoroughly and glad she'd agreed to this morning out, Amy just listened with a smile.

The sound of a familiar voice arguing in the queue made all three of them pause and look over a couple of minutes later. "Will you please stop pushing?" a young man complained from just in front of Sophia, who was glowering at him. "They're going as fast as they can, they're absolutely slammed. Complaining about it and shoving me won't get you a burger faster."

"Just shut up and get on with it," Sophia snarled, pointing to the gap between him and the next person in the line they were in, one of three for each of the tills. "He moved, you move too, that's how it works."

"I was going to until you shoved me and started arguing!" the young man, who was probably about nineteen, said with a certain amount of irritation. He took a very obvious step forward, closing the gap. "There. Satisfied?" His voice wasn't lacking sarcasm either, making Amy grin a little. "Or would you like me to climb on his shoulders so you can get two feet closer?"

Sophia's face darkened even through her skin tone, and he smirked at her. "Oh, look, there's a gap right here. You should move up."

"Don't get clever with me," she growled as she moved forward. Her mood, which had been bad when she came in, looked even worse now, and when he shrugged and turned away dismissively, Amy could see she restrained the urge to hit him. One hand rose just a little before she caught herself. But her expression was furious.

The line moved again as she watched, the one beside it moving more as three people in a group got their orders all at once, and Sophia noticed. Apparently deciding she wanted the shorter queue, she took a step sideways, then audibly snarled when the boy in front of her did the same thing about a second faster, leading to her standing behind him again. He didn't look at her but Amy could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was suppressing a laugh, and several people around them who had been watching with amusement didn't bother with the suppression at all. This didn't improve Sophia's outlook even a little, but there didn't seem to be much she could do except mutter under her breath. Which she had been doing all along so no change there…

Amy shook her head a little. "She's very impatient," she commented calmly, turning her head to see Missy also watching and looking like she was trying not to laugh out loud.

"A bit, yeah," Missy replied in the same tone, making Vicky grin. "Perhaps one day she'll grow up enough to change."

A shout of rage made them look back to see the original line had shortened by two people at once, and again Sophia had decided to change position, yet again being a fraction too slow. "You bastard!" she yelled at the young man, who was grinning at her over his shoulder. Amy shook her head. Yeah, he was kind of provoking Hess, but she'd started it, and was exactly the sort of individual who tended to bring out the worst in people. If only in self defense.

"You snooze, you lose," he replied with a smirk. "Oh, look, that one's shorter now." He nodded at the third line, Sophia turning her head to see it was now the shortest, only immediately then seeing half a dozen other people who'd just entered join it even as she started to head that way. They all looked somewhat puzzled when a number of those who'd been watching the entertainment started laughing. Sophia, on the other hand, nearly went purple.

"You…" Her hand came up, curled into a fist, while the guy in front of her watched, visibly tensed and ready to defend himself. As he was over six feet tall and looked like a football player, Amy had a pretty good idea that without using her powers Sophia might not like the result she got if she did take a swing. Apparently she realized this and after breathing heavily for a few seconds, deliberately lowered her hand, forced it out of a fist, and put it into her pocket. "I don't like you," she said more quietly, barely audible to Amy and the others over the background noise.

"I think I can handle the disappointment," he replied, chuckling, before turning back to the front. As two more people moved off, he took another couple of steps, reaching the counter, then placed his order. By the looks of it going as slowly as possible just to annoy the girl behind him. Sophia fumed but said nothing.

Amy and her sister and friend exchanged glances, all of them finding the whole thing funnier than it should be, because of who it was happening to. "Am I a bad person for finding that hilarious?" Vicky queried with a smile. Missy giggled and shook her head.

"It was hilarious because it was hilarious, and fuck Sophia anyway," the younger girl replied, keeping her voice down. "She looks like she wants to kill someone."

"Does she ever not look like that?" Amy asked dryly.

"Only after she's killed someone," Vicky put in with a tiny dark grin, making both the others laugh again. It was possibly even true which made it all the funnier in a very black manner, Amy mused. Glancing over to the counter she saw Sophia had finally reached the till and was ordering her food in the tone of voice of someone who would prefer to shout than talk. She was still visibly furious and kept shooting the older boy evil glances as he walked away chuckling to himself and passed them, sitting down with some friends who were all giggling as well having watched the little drama play out.

Missy hunched down in her seat as Sophia's gaze passed over them but she didn't appear to notice either the younger girl or the Dallons. Waiting impatiently for her order to be filled, Sophia snatched the tray from the girl behind the counter, turned away without a word of thanks, and stomped off. As she passed Amy and the other two she looked behind them at the boy who'd defied her will with a deeply aggrieved expression, muttering, "I hope you choke on that burger you fucker."

"What a bitch," Missy said very quietly, so quietly it was almost inaudible. Even as Amy and Vicky nodded agreement, it turned out that Sophia had remarkably good hearing, because she stopped dead in her tracks about three steps past them, turned, and opened her mouth, her expression furious.

"What did you fucking say to me?" she demanded before she'd even finished turning, then froze when she saw who was at the table. "You." Her eyes fixed on Missy, who sat up defiantly and glared back.

"Yeah. Me. How's it hanging, Sophia? Enjoying the nice day?" Missy waved at the window sarcastically. "Having fun, meeting friends, all that sort of thing?"

Sophia ground her teeth together and looked like she was debating dropping the tray and lunging at Missy, but Vicky cracking her knuckles loudly enough to make people nearby flinch and look around at the sound seemed to make her reconsider. "None of your fucking business, squirt. Keep your opinions to yourself before someone hurts you." It was quite clear who 'someone' might be, Amy thought with irritation. She knew that Missy and Sophia really didn't get along at all well, from things Missy herself had told her never mind other comments from her co-workers, but by the looks of it the dislike went a lot deeper than just dislike.

Taking a breath, Sophia turned away. "Little assholes like you should know when to be quiet," she muttered, making Missy growl, and Amy put a hand on her arm in support and also to stop her jumping to her feet. She could see how both got under the other's skin and it wouldn't take much to have this turn nasty, in her opinion. Best to avoid that.

"Let it drop," she advised, leaning close enough that her lips were only inches from Missy's ear "She's not worth it."

The younger girl nodded, but still didn't look happy. They watched Sophia move on, looking for a free table, then spotting one on the other side of the tall girl and her Asian friend who'd come in earlier and had been talking quietly at their own table ever since, having long since finished their food and a little earlier gotten more soda, which was also now gone. As she headed towards it, she apparently only then noticed the pair, neither of whom were looking at her. Again she stopped dead, this time a nasty smile forming on her lips and making Amy concerned, and wonder why. There was the vaguest suspicion forming at the back of her mind, for no reason she could put a finger on…

"Hebert? Huh. I thought you were dead," Sophia said in a jeering sort of way, sounding like she was much happier suddenly. She moved closer and looked down at the tall girl. "Kind of hoped for that, actually. Considering how fucked up you were when they took you away… Emma said she'd heard you didn't make it. The smell was a lot better after they cleaned out your locker. God knows what sort of crap you kept in it."

She was talking more than loudly enough for people nearby to hear, and several heads turned to watch and listen. Apparently either not noticing, not caring, or both, Sophia lifted a foot and deliberately kicked the tall girl's leg, making her chair shift. Amy watched in disbelief, as this was so blatant it was ridiculous. "Guess she got it wrong. I'll be sure to tell her you're still around stinking up the place. Maybe she'll come and visit. I might do the same. I've been pretty bored since Winslow got closed down. Putting you in your place was one of the highlights of the day."

The level of conversation in the restaurant was dropping as more and more people stopped talking and turned to see what the hell was going on. Sophia's voice, full of cruel amusement to a level that Amy was thinking seemed to fit a positively psychopathic outlook, was easily audible to everyone now. She was so focused on the other girl she paid no attention at all to the audience she was gaining. Amazingly, her target seemed to be icy calm and not reacting at all to the abuse, which from the sound of it wasn't a one-off thing. That little suspicion at the back of Amy's mind was growing.

Taylor, that was it. Taylor Hebert. She remembered the name now.

Sophia half-kicked, half pushed the other girl again, apparently trying to provoke a reaction. Taylor didn't move a muscle until her companion, who had been watching with a look of shock that had turned into anger, started to get up. Then she snapped out a hand and put it on her friend's shoulder, shaking her head once as the other girl looked at her. Her friend settled back again but she looked extremely angry.

"What do you want, Sophia?" Taylor asked in a voice that was eerily and completely calm.

"I want prey like you not to exist, Hebert," Sophia hissed, putting her tray down on their table then leaned forward over it, her hands on either side and her face far too close to the other girl's. "You were a pain in my ass for nearly two years."

"I was a pain in your ass?" Taylor echoed, somehow emphasizing the words without raising her voice or changing the tone at all, which was an impressive trick. She was still staring straight ahead and not moving. "I seem to recall it was you, Emma, and Madison who spend eighteen solid months making my life hell. How is that being a pain in your ass? Did you sprain it shoving me into my own locker once you filled it with toxic waste?"

Oh, shit. That set off alarm bells in Amy's mind, as she recalled exactly what the girl had been like when she'd been admitted to the hospital. By the time she had been called in to heal her, she'd been cleaned up, but the staff had mentioned something about confinement in a small space and infection hazards. She hadn't got the details at the time as in some ways it wasn't relevant and considering how tired she'd been, she hadn't followed up on it. But what had just been said did shed some light on just why the hospital administration had taken the whole thing so seriously, especially as it was yet another example of a pattern they'd seen far too much of out of Winslow for several years. So called 'pranks' and 'hazing' had caused more injuries than flat-out gang related incidents, of which there had also been a statistically implausible number. Winslow had about ten times the rate of that sort of thing than all three other high schools in Brockton Bay combined, she knew that for a fact.

Although she was pretty damned sure from what she recalled of the incident in question, and from what she'd just heard, that it hadn't been any form of prank in this case. It was at least assault, if not something much more serious. And the way Sophia looked almost triumphant at the Hebert girl's words made it very obvious that she wasn't denying the accusation.

"What, you didn't enjoy that?" Sophia said with a twisted grin. "We did. Hoped you'd finally get the message too."

Very slowly and evenly, as if it was on a motor, Taylor's head turned to fix her gaze on Sophia's. "The message?"

"You are scum," Sophia said, leaning close. "You are beneath contempt. People like you are not worthy to be around people like me. Or Emma. Survivors, not prey like you." She lifted her hand and jabbed at Taylor's face with her index finger, looking almost like she was about to hit her. Amy blinked in shock when the girl next to Taylor grabbed the finger so fast her own hand was just a blur and yanked sideways hard, causing Sophia, taken entirely unawares, to lose her balance and fall flat on the table, squashing her meal under her. She yelped in shock as she slammed onto the surface and in one smooth move Taylor stood, spun sideways on one foot, and managed to avoid the spatter.

It took mere moments and was so neatly done it was like it was rehearsed. By the time anyone could react both Taylor and her friend were standing, and Sophia was swearing violently while pushing herself back up, food and soda dripping down her front. Missy snickered, her eyes wide with both mirth and awe, while Vicky was grinning widely. As were quite a few other people who'd witnessed the whole thing, including the manager of the restaurant who'd been on his way over to intervene and was now watching with a weird kind of smile half-hidden under an air of please don't smash up the place. He had a phone in his hand, but wasn't paying any attention to it at the moment.

"You fucking little ABB shit!" Sophia howled after a stunned moment of staring down at herself. She lunged at the other girl who was several inches shorter than her, but to Amy's eyes moved like someone with some serious martial arts knowledge when she sidestepped the incoming furious Hess. Sliding across the table in a shower of food and trays, Sophia vanished off the far side while Taylor and her friend adroitly avoided everything and ended up standing next to the table on opposite sides. The crash of Sophia landing on the floor and vanishing under a chair echoed through the now completely silent burger place as everyone gaped in either shock or interest, and Amy could see a few phones out videoing the whole thing. She sighed faintly. This was going to get complicated when the Director, who she knew was nowhere near Sophia's biggest fan, saw it.

"I'm sorry about the mess, sir," Taylor said to the manager, taking a few steps away from the table and turning to him, while a stream of invective rose from the floor under the next one where Sophia was untangling herself. Amy wondered if she was sufficiently stupid to out herself by using her power, and whether they should intervene. She glanced at her sister, who shrugged, and Missy, who did the same, while looking both fascinated and highly amused in a rather malicious manner.

"She started it, miss, I saw that much," he replied, shaking his head. His eyes widened a moment later and he ducked, shouting, "Jesus!"

Sophia had rolled to her feet, showing she was also pretty athletic, as one would expect from a Ward, not that anyone here other than Amy and her sister and friend should know that, grabbed a chair, and flung it as hard as she could at Taylor's head from behind. Amy, and everyone else, looked on in amazement as the girl half-turned at the man's shout and neatly grabbed one leg of the chair in her hand, stopping it mid-flight, before giving Sophia a look of contempt.

"Fuck me, that was smooth," Vicky commented in admiration.

"I'm going to fuck you up, Hebert," Sophia snarled, snatching up the nearest tray and hefting it like she wished it was a knife. "You and your little Asian friend."

"Hey."

Everyone watched as the Asian girl, who had been standing watching and wore an expression of serious displeasure with Sophia, reached out and tapped her on the shoulder. Sophia turned her head.

Then spun in a complete circle and dropped to the ground again as the girl did the most impressive high kick from a standing position Amy had ever seen outside a movie, her right foot catching Sophia on the point of the chin and imparting enough force that Amy seriously wondered for a moment if she'd just watched Hess get her neck snapped for her. "Don't hurt my friends, and don't say I'm anything to do with the fucking ABB you complete bitch," she snapped at the groaning figure on the ground, who was apparently still alive although not happy about it.

"Holy shit," Missy breathed. "Who is that?"

"Someone who definitely knows martial arts," Vicky replied, not taking her eyes away from the drama. "Kung fu for sure, probably something else too." Amy's sister was quite the aficionado of martial arts movies and while not being a martial artist herself, not really needing it with her powers, knew enough that she was probably correct, Amy thought with a glance at her. Returning her attention to the more interesting part of the room, she was in time to see Sophia struggling to get to her feet. Both the girls she'd had a go at were standing at a safe distance, the manager and everyone else clearly not sure what the hell was going on and what they should do about it, although he looked like he was now on the verge of calling the cops.

"You… little… cunt," Sophia grunted, breathing heavily and heaving herself up using the table next to her as an aid. "I'm going… to… kill… you." She touched her chin, winced, and spat blood to the side, which splattered on another table and made the two girls sitting at it exclaim in disgust and leap out of the way. "No one does that to me."

Apparently her jaw wasn't broken, Amy mused as she watched, although she was pretty certain even from here that the other girl had probably got several teeth loosened and definitely had bitten her tongue severely, based on how her words were somewhat distorted. The blood leaking down one side of her face tended to support the diagnosis.

"I just did you psycho," Taylor's friend retorted. "I'll do it again if you don't go away."

In reply Sophia put her hand in her pocket and when it emerged again it had a switchblade in it, which clicked and sprouted several inches of razor sharp steel. Sophia had apparently both entirely lost her mind from anger and totally forgotten the witnesses all of whom stared in shock. Everyone nearby scrambled over the tables to get out of range of the crazy girl.

"You won't get the chance, bitch," Sophia snarled, lunging at the girl, who danced out of the way with ease. As she came within arm's length of Taylor, Amy saw the tall girl roll her eyes, reach out with one hand, grab Sophia's outstretched wrist, then completely deliberately and almost casually slam the palm of her other hand directly into her elbow with enough force that it promptly bent the wrong way. The whole sequence was over in no more than a second or so.

The wet crunch of Sophia's elbow sustaining a compound fracture made every single person in the entire place wince. Except Amy, who just sighed, although partly in admiration over how accurately the blow had been delivered, Taylor who still looked as calm as if she was reading a book, and her friend who grinned after a surprised moment.

And of course Sophia, who froze in total shock and disbelief, then as Taylor let go and stepped back, collapsed with a shriek of agony.

"I think you'd better call the cops now, sir," Taylor said to the manager as she kicked the switchblade out of reach of the writhing Sophia, who was making quite a scene as she clutched at herself and screamed in pain, sweating visibly. Blood from her mouth was going all over the place, which just added to the overall effect. The knife skittered away under a table, the guy sitting at that one lifting his feet out of the way rapidly.

He nodded a little numbly and hastily dialed, while Taylor and her friend moved out of the way and stood watching. The witnesses kept looking between Sophia, them, and each other, hardly anyone appearing to know what had happened and what they should do. Amy could see that the cops were going to have plenty of evidence to prove the sequence of events though, based on the number of phones that were out and recording.

"She's going to pop a gasket for sure," Missy commented almost happily, very quietly and for Amy and her sister's ears alone. Clearly referring to Director Piggot, and Amy was certain she was entirely correct. She nodded soberly, wondering if she should fix Sophia, or allow her own considerable dislike for the girl to overrule her usual instincts.

"That was cold as fuck," Vicky said in admiration, examining the Hebert girl with interest. "No emotion, just crunch. I wouldn't want her angry at me."

"Was she even angry?" Missy asked, glancing at Amy's sister. "She looked more like she was bored of the entire thing."

"I have a feeling this isn't the first time Sophia's met her," Amy remarked.

"No. You think?" Vicky's sarcasm was worth of Amy herself, making her grin.

"I mean I have a pretty good idea that their history is probably why that Taylor girl ended up in hospital. What we heard more or less confirmed that. So…" She shrugged. "I think Sophia is going to have some awkward questions to answer, and Miss Hebert over there is fully justified in being a little… enthusiastic… in her response."

"Well, Sophia did pull a knife on her friend," Missy pointed out, her eyes still wide and her voice expression a certain amount of disbelief. Amy shared it, she'd never have expected Sophia to be so far gone in rage to do something like that in public with so many witnesses. In private, on one of her little away missions? Yeah, that tracked with rumors she'd heard, but this was… really fucking stupid.

"After her friend kicked her ass like something out of one of those old Jackie Chan movies," Vicky giggled. "That was amazing."

"I thought the chair catch was as good," Amy commented. "It looked like she'd practiced a dozen times it was so smooth."

"Good reflexes and she obviously works out." Vicky nodded at her own suggestion. "That elbow snap though… fucking brutal."

"Serves the bitch right," Missy grumbled. "About time she found out that actions have consequences…"

The other two nodded agreement. After a moment, Amy sighed. "Fuck it, that noise is getting irritating," she said with irritation. "I guess I'd better do something about it." She stood up as her sister and friend watched.

"Can't you leave her a little longer?" Missy requested with a tiny evil grin. "Just to make sure the lesson sticks."

Amy grinned back, but shook her head. "I'd be derelict in my healer duty if I didn't take her pain away, unfortunately."

"Aww. You're going to heal her elbow?" Missy looked disappointed in a somewhat bloodthirsty manner.

"I didn't say that, did I?" Amy winked at her, then walked over to where the manager was just finishing up on the phone to the cops. "Hi. I'm Panacea," she said to the man who looked at her quizzically. "I thought I should probably do something about that." She pointed down at the whimpering Sophia.

"Help yourself," he replied with a sigh. "And it was going so well today. We haven't had a fight in here for over a month and this stupid little idiot decided to pick on someone she couldn't handle… God, teenagers are a pain in the ass sometimes." He grumbled to himself, stepping back to watch and getting out of her way.

Inwardly amused yet outwardly remaining professional, Amy knelt down next to the writhing Sophia who fixed tear-filled eyes on her. "Good morning, Miss. I'm Panacea. Do I have your permission to…"

"Just fucking fix me you cow so I can kick their asses," Sophia snarled through her pain and gritted teeth, holding her elbow with her other hand.

"From where I was sitting they're not the ones who have to worry about their asses getting kicked," Amy replied evenly, her voice low. "And considering I'm the one about to heal you, perhaps being polite might be an idea. Just saying."

"Shut the fuck up and heal me, bitch," Sophia grated, bloody mouth fixed in a grimace.

Amy looked at her for some seconds. Then she reached out and touched her neck with two fingers. Sophia promptly went limp and lost interest in the situation. "I'm a bitch, but you sure don't get to tell me that to my face," Amy informed the unconscious girl with a very sharp grin. "So shut up."

Mindful of the witnesses, she didn't add anything else, but just checked Sophia's damage. Her elbow was a mess, for sure, having a fairly impressive displaced fracture that without her ability would need surgery to correct. She also had seven loose teeth, two on the top and the rest on the bottom, a nasty laceration to her tongue and another on the inside of her cheek, and a hairline fracture of the mandible in two places. The Asian girl had a pretty good kick, she thought with mild admiration. A little more power and Sophia probably wouldn't have got up again. She wondered if the other girl knew that and had pulled her blow, or just wasn't quite strong enough to kick Sophia's head off.

From what she'd seen, she bet on the first. The girl seemed to know her stuff and clearly was no novice.

Debating with herself for a few seconds, she healed the mandibular fractures, the lacerations, and the teeth, and after a moment, fixed the worst of the elbow damage. But she didn't fully heal it. The remaining damage would heal up naturally given a couple of months but Sophia wouldn't be using that arm for some time.

In her view, that was good enough in this case. Sophia would have to learn, as Missy had commented, that actions had consequences. Perhaps six to eight weeks in a sling would drive the lesson home…

Probably not, this was Sophia Hess, someone Amy had never thought was all that quick on the uptake, but you never knew. As far as she was concerned, she'd done all she was prepared to do. Turning the other girl back on but not doing anything about the headache she was undoubtedly feeling from the kick in the face, because that was a brain thing and she didn't do brains, everyone knew that, she stood up again. Sophia opened her eyes, blinked a few times, then focused on her face. "There you go."

Sitting up, Sophia moved her right arm then froze, her face paling. "FUCK!" she shouted at the top of her lungs, grabbing at her elbow. "It's still broken!"

"Is it?" Amy looked surprised. "How odd. Possibly I made a mistake because someone was so rude to me. It happens."

Carol was going to yell at her, she knew that full well, but the expression on Sophia's face was more that worth it…

"Fix me properly you cunt!"

"Oh, look at the time. Can't hang around chatting all day. Places to be, people to heal, you know how it goes. Don't put to much strain on that arm and I'm sure it'll heal right up good as new. Eventually." Amy smirked darkly at Sophia, who gaped at her, then narrowed her eyes in rage. Turning to the manager who was watching while looking like he didn't want to laugh but was perilously close to that, she nodded. "Sorry to get in the way."

"Oh, no problem at all, Panacea," he assured her. "Thank you for helping out."

"My pleasure."

With one last look at Sophia who was sitting on the floor, covered in food and blood, with an expression of totally impotent rage spread over her face, she turned away. "Get back here and fix me, Dallon!" Sophia yelled in fury.

Amy completely ignored both her and the various cameras pointed her way, although she nodded when the boy who'd been in front of Sophia in the line at the beginning gave her a respectful grin and a thumb's up. He and his friends looked impressed and just a tiny bit scared. Exactly as they should, she thought.

Sitting down next to Missy, she smiled at the look on her friend's face. "Even I have off days," she commented idly. "No one's perfect."

"Of course not. No one could expect you to always fix everything," Missy replied calmly although her eyes were sparkling.

"Mom is going to explode," Vicky said in a low but amused voice, leaning over the table. Amy shrugged.

"Nothing new there, and no one can demand I use my powers. I mean, they can, but they're my powers, so I can tell them no. I think it might be time for me to explain that to her."

Her sister winced a little, but after a moment nodded. "Yeah, maybe it is."

Missy looked between them but didn't seem to want to ask the questions she clearly had. As she was about to say something else, sirens became audible, making everyone turn to look out the windows. Two BBPD cruisers and a BBFD EMT unit were approaching down the street, shortly pulling up outside and making the pedestrians watch, a small crowd gathering. Moments later four cops and and the paramedics came in, the manager meeting them at the door and pointing at Sophia who was still swearing to herself and looking ready to murder the two girls who had put her down so effectively. He then indicated those two as well, spending a few moments explaining, while the cops nodded and one took notes.

Once he'd finished, the whole group approached, the two paramedics moving past to kneel next to Sophia. Amy recognized both of them as she'd met pretty much all the various medical emergency people in the city at one point or another in the last year or so. Sophia wasn't being particularly cooperative, of course, but they persisted and shortly were engaged in splinting her arm.

Two of the cops went to talk to Hebert and her friend, the other two began moving around taking witness statements. They seemed to be being shown a lot of videos too, Amy noticed, lots of the teenagers in the place apparently eager to show off what they'd captured on their phones. There certainly wasn't going to be any doubt of the sequence of events, that much was for sure. She watched with the other two for a moment, then looked at Vicky and Missy. Her sister met her eyes then by mutual agreement both got up and walked over to where the two cops were being told what had happened from both Taylor's and her friend's viewpoint.

She and Vicky listened as the tall girl concisely explained, without any variations from what Amy had seen as far as she could tell, exactly what had led to Sophia being on the floor with a broken arm. Taylor pointed at the table the knife had gone under, prompting one of the cops to go over, bend down, then come back up holding the switchblade in between gloved fingers.

"Checks out," he called back. "Right where she said it was."

Coming back he was examining the knife, before he put it on a nearby table and took a couple of photos. After that it went into an evidence bag which he sealed and signed. Sophia watched this past the paramedic putting a sling on her with a look of sudden realization that she might just be in severe trouble, a look verging on panic. Amy wondered if she'd be stupid enough to try to escape, and turned to look at Missy, who was already on her phone, her eyes also on Sophia. She had a fairly good idea who she was calling.

Oh, yes. Sophia was in serious shit. Entirely due to her own actions.

It would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly stupid.

As Taylor finished explaining, Amy stepped forward. "Excuse me?" she said, causing both cops to look at her, then almost as one do a double-take and exchange glances. "I'm…"

"Panacea," the older of the pair said before she did. "We know who you are." He chuckled as she smiled a little. "You saved my brother's leg two months ago. Thanks for that, while I think about it."

"You're welcome," she replied. "I just wanted to say that my sister and I, and a friend, saw the entire thing. What Miss Hebert just told you is completely correct. From what we saw, she and her friend both acted in self defense."

The cops exchanged another glance, the one with the notebook writing in it some more. "That backs up what Miss Hebert and Miss Cheung claim, and what the manager said," the first one replied. "You healed the suspect?"

"Mostly," Amy replied. She looked at Sophia who glared back defiantly. "She wasn't very cooperative or friendly and for some reason I found myself unable to fully heal her. Very odd, but it happens sometimes." When she looked back both cops were almost grinning. She shrugged lightly. "Even powers aren't perfect, after all."

"So I understand," the first cop replied calmly. "How unfortunate for her."

"Yeah. Probably got at least two months of healing the hard way to do," Amy agreed mildly. The corner of his mouth twitched a little. Taylor and her friend were watching her with a sort of dry amusement.

It took another twenty minutes for the cops to finish up, but eventually Sophia was led off handcuffed to one of them by her good arm, still wearing the furious expression that had been a constant since she'd arrived, and having given both Taylor and her friend a dark glance that promised horrible things. Amy suspected that once the Director laid hands on her she'd be much too busy to seek revenge, and had a sneaking idea that if she did, she might well find out that neither was an easy target. Armsmaster probably had some method to contain her so it was likely she'd find herself in PRT custody eventually. Whether this marked the end of her Ward career Amy didn't know but she'd be highly surprised if it didn't. And very disappointed.

"All right," the original cop she'd spoken to said to Taylor and the other girl, handing them each a document. "A copy of the incident report for you both. From all the evidence this was, as Panacea said, a simple case of self defense, so it's unlikely that either of you will have any trouble coming your way. But make sure your parents get that, and have them call if they have questions." He looked at them as both nodded. "Try to stay out of trouble, yeah? And good work."

"Thanks," Taylor's friend, who Amy had to find out the name of because even in her head calling her 'Taylor's friend' was starting to sound odd, replied. He saluted them both with a finger to his brow then turned and walked off, his partner following carrying the knife in its bag. The restaurant had at least partly emptied out as most of the people present during the scuffle had left by now, and the manager and two of the staff were mopping the floor and setting all the tables and chairs to rights.

"Thank you for stepping forward like that," Taylor said, looking at Amy. "I think it helped."

"No problem. I know her, and like I said I saw the whole thing. So did my sister," Amy replied, indicating Vicky who was leaning on a table next to her. "She's a bitch, but I never thought she'd be stupid enough to pull a knife on someone like that."

Taylor sighed. "I've known her for nearly two years and honestly? That bit didn't actually surprise me all that much. She's not exactly stupid but she's severely fucked up in the head and really doesn't think things through very well."

Vicky snorted. "Yeah, you might put it like that. Crazy bitch was always going to end up doing something that ended badly. Mind you, I never thought she'd pick the middle of a burger place to throw down on someone for no reason other than being her." She grinned at Taylor and the other girl. "That was really impressive to watch. You know martial arts?" She looked inquisitively at the Asian girl, who nodded, smiling. Amy was sure she went to Arcadia but she wasn't someone she knew at all or shared any classes with, even though she vaguely recognized her from the cafeteria.

"I've been learning since I was very young," the girl replied. "I've won a few awards in tournaments, nothing special, but I do practice a lot."

"That kick was amazing."

"Thanks. My instructor always said I was unusually flexible." The girl held out her hand. "Lucy Cheung." Vicky shook it. "This is my friend Taylor Hebert. Winslow survivor, so be nice." She laughed as Taylor sighed a little, although while wearing a smile.

"Cheung… Hang on. I recognize that name. Aren't you the one with the iguana?" Vicky queried after looking thoughtful, making Amy remember where she'd heard the name too. Lucy put her hand on her face and groaned while Taylor started giggling.

"Yes. That's me. The lizard girl," Lucy sighed, making Taylor giggle more, and Vicky grin. "Does everyone know about that?"

"Yep. Trust me, it's everyone." Vicky looked highly amused. "Word gets around."

"And you are rather proud of him, you have to admit, Lucy," Taylor added, smiling. Lucy looked at her friend, then shrugged.

"Yeah, fair enough. I guess you've got a point. Mind you, your the one with the scorpion."

"Hey, leave Impy alone, she did nothing to you," Taylor protested while Amy exchanged a glance with Vicky.

"Impy?" Amy asked, confused.

"Her Emperor scorpion. She has a weird taste in pets," Lucy replied.

"Says the lizard girl."

"Hey, lizards are cool! And cute!"

"They're fun, sure, but they don't have enough legs."

"You're very strange."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"The word 'hundred' comes from the old Norse word 'hundrath' which actually means a hundred and twenty."

Amy, Vicky, and Taylor stared at Lucy. "I… did not know that," the latter finally admitted, making Lucy grin triumphantly.

"Task complete."

Leaning closer to Amy, Vicky said, not taking her eyes from either of the other two, "I think they're both very strange."

Amy started laughing helplessly, and somehow during her recovery, all four of them joined Missy at her table, where she started asking a lot of questions. During this, a story emerged that had both Dallon sisters and Missy simultaneously deciding that the Director needed to know what they'd learned…

By the time Lucy and Taylor left, waving at the remaining three, Amy at least was feeling that someone needed to do something about the problem presented by Sophia Hess.

And also feeling that restraining herself to only breaking Sophia's elbow and not her head was a level of self control Amy wasn't sure she'd have managed under the circumstances.

She watched the two girls walk away through the window, shook her head slightly, and turned to the other two. "I think we should probably pay a visit to the PRT building," she said in a very low voice, leaning close. "Because she needs to know what we just heard." Both the others nodded agreement.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Emily watched her door close behind the Dallon sisters and Missy Biron, before looking down at the notebook on her desk. She tapped her pen on it thoughtfully, then turned to her computer and quickly brought up a report on the screen. Reading the first page, she made a couple more notes. Finally she picked up her phone.

"I don't care how you do it, bring me Sophia Hess," she said when the other end answered. "As soon as possible, please. And track down her case worker. We need to talk. Now." Tapping the hang up icon, she carefully put the phone on the desk next to her notebook with deliberate calm and leaned back in her chair, pondering all the different ways she had to express her disappointment and make it stick.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

When she finally got to bed that night, Taylor reflected on the way the day hadn't gone how she'd expected in some key aspects. It had been fun meeting with Lucy, and opening up to her about her time at Winslow felt like it was the right decision. The whole thing with Sophia was far less enjoyable, although she couldn't suppress a certain satisfaction with how much better it had made her feel to break the bitch's elbow like that. She wondered if that made her a bad person, but her dad, having listened to the whole story and read the police document, in the end had only sighed faintly and told her that in her place he'd have snapped the little shit's neck. Taylor wasn't certain he didn't mean it, and wasn't going to ask.

But he hadn't been angry, which was good. In fact he'd hugged her then they'd bought Chinese food and spent some time talking about quite a few things, both of them finding the evening a rewarding one. Their relationship was definitely healing up well. She'd intended to do more experimentation today but in the end had not managed to get around to that, deciding to put it off until the next day. Today had been enough for her and she wasn't in the right mood to really get into playing with powers as much fun as that was.

Meeting Amy and Vicky Dallon like that had also been interesting, as was talking to Vista's civilian alter-ego. Missy seemed like a nice and intelligent girl, and Taylor had been pleased to see she appeared to have recovered from her ordeal well.

She'd recognized the younger girl the moment she'd come into range, of course, well before they'd reached the burger place. The senses of all the insects near Missy had made that inevitable. But she wasn't going to mention it to anyone, as it wasn't really any of her business, just like all the other things she was constantly sensing all around her. Even now she had literally thousands of people in her awareness, going about their lives in complete ignorance of the fact that she could watch each one of them, their pets, their houses, and everything else inside her range, all at the same time to any level of detail she could be bothered to work with. As the spring flowered the resolution of her senses just kept getting higher too. Already the ant colonies were stirring into life, expanding her power's range down further and adding vast quantities of little helpers to it, while wasp nests were starting to become more active everywhere. The year was turning very mild faster than usual and the end result was very much to her benefit.

She had some ideas about how to capitalize on the underground tunnels that she'd been mapping that would make the seasons much less of an issue as time moved on, but that would take some careful planning to end up where she thought she could take it. And before she could really even start she still had some fundamental work to do, in a number of areas she was building up to. Quite a lot of that would probably happen very soon though, if her current round of experiments worked how she expected it probably would from the initial efforts.

So even leaving the schoolwork, which she was well ahead on, out of the equation she had plenty to keep her busy going forward. And a friendship to cultivate too. Lucy was fun and they did seem to keep getting into interesting situations, through no fault of their own.

She fell asleep wondering if her friend was interested in urban exploration.

Chapter Text

The silence in the room was profound, only broken by the faint sounds of people shifting place slightly, the ventilation fans in the air ducts, and occasional taps caused by a finger on a touchscreen. It was so quiet that the buzzing of a fly bouncing around near a light in the ceiling could clearly be heard, although everyone ignored it.

They were far more engaged in their own thoughts, and watching as Director Piggot read the report on her tablet. When she finished, she put it down gently, then raised her eyes, scanning the various people assembled around the conference table.

"How could this have been allowed to happen?" she queried in a voice that was deliberately calm, but contained elements that made a number of them wince. "And how was it that none of this came to light literally months ago?"

Quite a lot of uneasy glances were exchanged, before Trent Johnson, the senior PRT ENE legal representative present, apparently decided to take one for the team. "It appears to be a potent mix of corruption, stupidity, incompetence, and pure accident, Director," he said somewhat reluctantly. She leaned back in her chair, her eyes fixed on him, and her hands folded in front of her.

"Go on," she invited with a certain growl to her voice. "Enlighten me as to how Miss Hess managed to bypass every single check we're supposed to have in place to stop this exact sort of scenario happening."

He took a breath, then looked at the notes he had in front of him, before wincing a little and raising his eyes to hers. She was somewhat impressed that his gaze was steady. "A large part of it can be laid at the feet of Thomas Calvert, I regret to say."

"That does not surprise me, but continue."

He did. "During his tenure here, predating your appointment to Director, he appears to have been establishing a significant network of individuals he could, via one method or another, exert pressure on to tilt events to his liking. We still don't know exactly what his long term goal was, but he was certainly working towards an outcome that would likely have gained him your position, or possibly that of the Mayor. The previous Director's illness which led to him stepping down and therefore you taking this posting was, as far as we can currently discover, at least partly his doing." Johnson shook his head a little. "We're not entirely sure how he arranged it as records are missing, staff have been reassigned or retired, and so on, but it seems that a number of medical checkups had their results altered, leading to the wrong medication being prescribed for an originally fairly benign cardiac issue. Medication that actually exacerbated that issue to the point of cardiac failure after several years."

"Which didn't kill Olmert, but forced him to step down on medical grounds," she filled in as he paused, making him nod.

"Exactly. It's quite likely that Calvert was actually hoping for Director Olmert to die, but the two heart attacks he suffered were severe enough to fulfill the same goal. It's obvious from the evidence the BBPD have dug up that Calvert had no qualms at all about assassinating anyone who was in his way, but he was subtle in the previous Director's case, subtle enough that no one realized until we laid hands on the new evidence. Probably because if foul play had been suspected the amount of interest that would immediately fall on the ENE division would risk uncovering his plans." The lawyer shrugged. "There's plenty of evidence that he was much more direct with other lower-profile obstructions to his goals. At least a dozen murders the BBPD are sure of, and likely two to three times that they suspect were either on his orders or via his manipulations. Not including such things which ultimately were due to him interfering with the gangs. There are indications that he spent years playing all sides against each other, feeding information to the gangs, the BBPD, us, and half a dozen other places, all for the purposes of advancing whatever it was he was working towards."

"We are fairly sure he's responsible at least indirectly for a minimum of forty excess deaths among the PRT staff in the city over the last eight years, and the true total could considerably exceed that," Armsmaster put in from the other end of the table, looking very angry although you'd never know it from his even voice. "It's more difficult to tally up the equivalent effect on the civilian population, and various Parahumans, villain, heroic, or otherwise, but there's no doubt he engineered a remarkable number of poor outcomes. Including, I'm almost certain, the death of Fleur."

Emily winced. If New Wave found out about that… They were unlikely to take it well. At least the fucking man was dead, so the city probably wouldn't have to worry about a family of significantly dangerous Parahumans going out looking for vengeance.

Although she had a nasty feeling that if it wasn't handled properly, it could come back to bite the PRT in general. Yet another problem to work on. She wasn't foolish enough to believe the evidence would never come to the attention of New Wave. If Armsmaster had it, it presumably came from studying Calvert's records, and the cops and FBI had got to those first. Which meant that they probably knew, or would when they put the pieces together. Sighing, she pushed that problem to one side as it wasn't important right at the moment but made a mental note to come back to it as a matter of priority, before someone else beat her to it.

"Armsmaster is correct, Director. Calvert's fingerprints are all over a horrific number of past gang operations, once you can recognize the pattern and cross reference it with the information found in his bunker," Johnson commented. "My department considers him quite possibly responsible one way or another for up to perhaps fifty to fifty-five percent of all criminal actions in the city for certainly the last five years, and plausibly up to nine or ten. We would be facing a much less problematic and more stable situation without him. Hopefully with him gone a new equilibrium can be reached, although I suspect it will be rather chaotic until things settle down."

"One man was behind half the total of all crimes in the entire city?" Dauntless's voice was incredulous. "How?"

"To be clear he didn't usually commit such acts himself, Dauntless," Johnson replied, glancing his way. "With fairly rare exceptions, everything else was a result of careful manipulation of information, people, events, and a whole host of parameters only made possible by his Parahuman abilities. That's one of the big problems with Thinkers in general; their effectiveness can be much greater than one would expect even with fairly minor powers according to the normal classifications. As Calvert was so deeply embedded into the PRT and therefore had almost unrestricted access for close to a decade to some highly sensitive information, and a network of spies, informants, and patsies all over the city, he was far more effective and dangerous than he might otherwise have been even taking that into account. Hence the end result. Luckily he wasn't quite as good as he might have been and didn't clean up his operations as well as he probably believed he did, although it was more than sufficient to evade detection for far longer than it should have done."

Returning his attention to Emily as Dauntless nodded thoughtfully, he continued, "Calvert wasn't the only one bribing or threatening people in many positions throughout the city administration, the state government, our organization, and a host of others, of course. But he was by far the most prolific. The various gangs and a number of external actors also worked on the same basis although their contributions were relatively minor for the most part, but even so it all added to the problem. And the previous city administration was, ah… let's call it porous. At best. Anything was available for a price, to anyone with the money and the knowledge of where to put it. Again, a depressingly large amount of that is indirectly attributable to Calvert, as he not only engineered the appointment of easily corrupted individuals into key roles, but also in some cases managed to get people he couldn't buy off or threaten removed from those roles. By simply having them assassinated in at least five cases."

Emily felt, once more, that it was a shame that dear old Thomas had managed to escape what she, and probably an awful lot of other people, would have enjoyed doing to the man. She'd have made enough to retire on if she'd sold time in five minute chunks and rented out baseball bats…

How one man could have caused so much chaos was insane.

"And of course once a culture of bribery and special favors gets established, it's devilishly hard to stamp it out, especially if it's running for years," Johnson went on having taken a sip of water from the glass at his elbow. "And those providing such favors tend to start offering them to anyone who can pay the price, not just the first one to kick things off. If it's not caught early and dealt with, it spreads like a weed. It becomes just business as usual. And that appears to be what happened here. He certainly wasn't the only person running schemes like this, of course. The city has always had a problem with corruption, as has anywhere you care to think about, since it tends to be endemic no matter how much one would wish otherwise. But he was by a large margin the most prolific instigator of corruption, via a network of agents we still haven't fully tracked down, and had an enormous budget."

"So he dumped so much money into bribery and manipulation he set the stage for everyone else to benefit from it." She sighed as he nodded. "Fucking Calvert. And how much of that was deliberate too?"

"Unclear, I'm afraid, and it will probably remain so without a living Calvert to question," he responded. "I would imagine that at least some of it was planned, but probably not the bulk of it. All his agents freelancing for anyone who had some spare cash wouldn't necessarily help him, if only because their clients might be working at cross-purposes to him, and the more people who knew about it the more chances there were for someone in a position to stop it to find out. But once he'd got it running, it took on a life of its own and I doubt he fully realized just what a monster he created. At least until it was far too late."

He shrugged, before taking another drink. Putting the glass down he carried on, "The investigation begun by Brockton General's administration was the point it all started to unravel. As far as we can so far determine, a number of people involved with Winslow High School have for a number of years been merrily embezzling some quite remarkable sums from the budget, aided by at least two members of the school board, and several other people in the city administration, the state government, and even the state police. It runs into several million dollars at an absolute minimum and from what I've been able to find out may well be upwards of twenty to thirty million. It was an ambitious scheme that by rights should have been detected quite easily, but with accomplices in a position to cover up the hole in the finances at multiple levels, it wasn't. Some of this was down, again, to Calvert's influence, albeit inadvertently. He may well not even have known about it, but his agents turned out to be quite open to competing offers from different people for the same information or services at the same time. In essence, being paid several times for losing a single document, for example."

She nodded, understanding the scale of the problem. By the looks of it so did everyone else. "Mayor Christner was working on reducing the endemic corruption, I know that much. Did it have any effect on all this?"

"Quite a large one, yes. Calvert's documents show he was putting in considerable effort to undo what the Mayor was achieving, with limited success in some cases. It put quite a crimp in his plans in a number of areas, which he wasn't pleased about. The Mayor is fairly unyielding when it comes to the public trust and was responsible for a surprising number of Calvert's patsies being detected and removed, but there were too many of them to fully clean house. And of course he had no idea that there was so much in the way of money and other resources arrayed against him, so he was fighting something of a losing battle. Even so, his campaigns did have a significant effect on Calvert's operation and undoubtedly caused the man a lot of annoyance."

"Good. Roy is a pain in the ass, but if he irritated Calvert, I'll shake his hand for that," Emily grunted, then waved for him to continue, which he did.

"The corrupt regime at Winslow predates Sophia Hess attending the school, of course, but those running it instantly realized they could leverage the enrollment of a Ward to their own gain. Mostly because of the fairly generous stipend such arrangements come with although it's likely that having a Ward on the premises was considered some form of insurance against the gangs causing trouble which might interfere with their own schemes," he said. "Most of the funds that were allocated to the school for such things as security upgrades and the like simply vanished into their pockets, while all the paperwork was fraudulently arranged to indicate it had been used for exactly what it was intended for."

"Which shouldn't have been possible if Hess's caseworker and at least one other person who was supposed to audit the school regularly had done their jobs," Emily snarled.

"Correct. Which is why they cut a deal with both people." He sighed and shook his head. "There are supposed to be checks on this sort of thing and unexpected payments should have been flagged up, but a combination of Calvert's previous manipulations having resulted in several of the checks being completely neutered, Winslow's schemers having far too much practice in this sort of thing, and pure bad luck in a couple of cases, meant that it slipped through the cracks. Everyone involved went to considerable effort to make sure the usual reports were filed, all of them showing everything was working correctly and all of them completely false. It was a whole chain of things any one of which failing would have made the whole house of cards collapse, but unfortunately as a result far too much historical corruption, they got away with it."

Looking down at his notes, he flipped a couple of pages, then looked up again and resumed, "Miss Hess, unfortunately, is apparently more disturbed than we realized. Once she was enrolled at the school she seems to jumped headlong into becoming as vicious a bully as she could possibly manage, her relationship with Miss Barnes having apparently exacerbated the whole situation for reasons I don't know. The pair of them ran roughshod over half the school, while the administration went out of their way to pretend nothing was happening because it might threaten their little retirement scheme. Up to the point of covering up serious physical attacks, theft, verbal assault, and a whole host of other issues. From the information I have available so far this is a pattern the school has been involved with for years before Miss Hess enrolled, but she happily took advantage of it and they appear to have found that entirely acceptable. Brockton General has records of an appalling number of serious injuries coming from Winslow, far outweighing the sum total of such events from every other school in the city in both number and severity. We have a Ward as a direct result of one such event a while ago, of course."

"Assault to the level it can cause a Trigger event should not be part of the school experience," Armsmaster commented with a growl in his voice. "Especially when it was apparently a murder attempt."

"Agreed. Yet it happened, Brockton General reported it correctly, the report went into the system, and… nothing at all happened." Johnson shook his head. "Again, corruption and malfeasance played their roles, and the school successfully covered up yet another injurious medical event." He flipped meaningfully through a stack of paper next to him, dozens of sheets making a riffling noise as everyone watched. "This happened far, far more times than should have been possible. Miss Hess was responsible for at least a dozen of these reports. Culminating in the final one, the one that was the tipping point."

"The so called prank in the locker," Emily said.

"Indeed. Murder attempt might well be a better description, but at a minimum it was assault and depraved indifference," he agreed soberly. "That girl could easily have died. Without Panacea's intervention, from what the medical staff who read the record tell me, she would at least have suffered life-changing injuries, probable sepsis, and death was quite plausible. Luckily she got to hospital in time for them to stabilize her and allow Panacea to heal her fully, but another hour…? We'd be looking at a manslaughter charge at a minimum. Of course the school claimed there was no proof of who filled her locker with the medical waste, nor of who shut her into it, and even went so far as to claim it was entirely self-inflicted. Clearly impossible if only because Miss Hebert was in the locker facing the back wall and couldn't possibly have both closed the door and locked it behind her even if she had put the medical waste into the thing. Which, since it appears to have been done during the winter break, seems to be highly unlikely."

Looking at his documents again, he added, "The school also tried to bribe the girl's father to drop the complaint in exchange for paying her medical bills, but apparently didn't realize that he is not someone who appreciates bribery, is someone who is extremely protective of his daughter, and that Panacea had already healed her anyway at that point. Then they seem to have tried to make the records go away, which they've apparently done successfully before, but this time their person on the inside got caught. Which sufficiently irked the hospital administration, who were already highly upset about how many serious medical emergencies were coming from Winslow and subsequently disappearing without trace that they completely bypassed the normal route and took their concerns directly to someone much higher up the food chain. While also hiring a very good PI firm to investigate the whole situation extremely thoroughly. Which ultimately kicked off the massive legal mess that's embroiled the city and the state for over two months now, resulted in one enormous lawsuit and multiple lesser ones, and completely upset Calvert's applecart."

He spread his hands a little helplessly and remarked, "As incredible as it sounds, everything we've seen is connected, one way or another, to, through, or because of Thomas Calvert. He didn't create the Winslow embezzlement problem, or the dozens of other cases of corruption all over so many different organizations and places, but due to his own scheming he's massively worsened all of them, weakened the underpinnings of the entire city, probably the state, exacerbated the gang problem, caused tens if not hundreds of deaths, and may well have initiated any number of undesirable situations we might not see the end of for years. It's almost impressive in just about the worst way imaginable."

There was a long pause as everyone mulled over his words. He drank some more water then put the glass down with a click and folded his hands on his notepad. "So to circle back to your original question, Director, after that rather long winded explanation, ultimately Sophia Hess was able to do what she did directly or indirectly due to Thomas Calvert undermining those very checks and balances that should have prevented it. We simply didn't know that we didn't know what she was truly like or capable of. Despite warnings from her fellow Wards, for example Vista, who have said for some time that she was a loose cannon. Many of the reports that should have resulted in a much more thorough review of her actions simply didn't make it through the system at all. The proof we needed to revoke her parole vanished, leaving enough ambiguity in the official records that we legally couldn't do what we should have been able to and bench her at least a year ago, if not remove her as a Ward entirely."

"Until Saturday." Emily rubbed her forehead tiredly. It was all too plausible. The bureaucracy the PRT ran on was complex at best, and a total nightmare much of the time, even before you had external groups like those pernicious Youth Guard idiots sticking their noses in. Luckily they had little real official power, but they were a damned nuisance for the most part even if some of then genuinely meant well. Unfortunately they were mostly also completely out of touch of the realities of wrangling underage Parahumans and generally made things much worse if they got involved. Not even the Wards liked most of them.

So the idea that because of that asshole Calvert a system that was barely functional in many ways a lot of the time had become completely non-functional in some specific areas made far too much sense. She well knew from her time as a trooper just how much trouble a corrupt supply sergeant could cause if they got carried away, even long after they got found out and dealt with. Calvert running round causing wholesale deliberate, or even accidental, sabotage of everything he could lay hands on was never going to end well. It was a miracle that something worse hadn't happened, really.

They'd be rooting this shit out for years. Johnson was entirely correct there.

Damn that fucking man. She should have shot him immediately after Ellisburg…

"Yes, indeed. Miss Hess deciding to upgrade her bullying tactics to attempted murder in front of about fifty witnesses was not the most sane thing she could have chosen to do," Johnson replied dryly. "Apparently her judgment is even worse than I imagined from her dossier. In both her actions and her choice of target."

"Those two girls certainly cleaned her clock pretty effectively," Assault commented with a grin. "That high kick was amazing! The kid has some impressive skills."

"Miss Cheung is an accomplished martial artist, from the information I gathered," Armsmaster said approvingly. "She is highly competent in at least two styles of Kung Fu, Changquan and Wing Chun, what is termed an external style and an internal style respectively. High competitive ranked in both. She also holds a black belt in Karate. I believe she's been training since the age of approximately six, and takes it seriously. As can be seen from the videos. Sophia Hess is a competent fighter but leans far too heavily on her power, and the use of weapons. At close range, taken by surprise, she is far less effective than she should be. Miss Cheung simply acted faster than Hess could react and she paid the price."

"Her situational awareness tends to be rather poor when she's angry," Miss Militia put in, speaking for the first time having been listening closely with a rather resigned expression in her eyes. "She's been warned about it many times. But if she gets worked up she often target fixates on a specific opponent and basically ignores anything or anyone else, which has won her some fairly unpleasant injuries in the past. From what I saw she was so invested in trying to hit Miss Hebert with the chair she forgot there was someone else right behind her. It's not the first time that happened."

"Does she make a habit of throwing chairs at people?" Assault asked innocently, receiving a hard look in return.

"You know full well what I mean," the woman grumbled. "Be serious for once."

"I was more impressed by the elbow break," Velocity put in with a slight grimace. "That took a pretty strong stomach to pull off. And a fair bit of strength."

"It's not as hard as you might think to cause an injury like that if you hit someone just right," Emily noted. "You need to know how to strike and where of course, but if you do, you don't need all that much force. Still, it was a very solid move. I wonder where she learned to do it?"

"Miss Hebert grew up in the docks," Johnson replied, picking a page off another stack of documents near him, glancing at it, then sliding it across to Emily who retrieved it to scan. "Her father works for the Dock Workers Association, and her mother was a professor at BBU until she passed away. As well as having had some… interesting… experiences in college." Emily read one paragraph and recognized a name with a frown. "I would be completely unsurprised to learn that Miss Hebert has been taught some quite effective street fighting techniques by her father, her mother, or both. Or acquaintances of either. Being able to take care of yourself in that part of the city is a survival tactic, of course."

"Why would she let Hess and Barnes bully her to the point she got hospitalized if she could fight back like that?" Emily asked, handing the document back. She had her own opinion but was interested in his.

He shrugged. "I can't say for certain, obviously, but perhaps she believed that escalating the violence would only make things worse? She was quite likely correct if so. Or she might have been brought up to avoid conflict when possible, which does tend to fit the evidence. I would also imagine that having a former friend of hers, which seems to be what Miss Barnes was at one point, turn so viciously on her as she was starting at a new school might well have caused so much cognitive dissonance she didn't know how to react, and by the time things got to the point that she should have fought back, she was so depressed by events she couldn't find the energy to."

Shaking his head, he added, "I can think of many reasons, all of which might be wrong. But I also think that after having been out of school for over two months led her to reevaluate her outlook and when Miss Hess decided to try to resume hostilities, she simply had had enough. You'll note she was obviously avoiding any real reaction other than staying out of the way right up to the point Hess pulled a knife on her friend, and even then she struck precisely once, in a way perfectly calculated to remove the threat immediately with the minimum damage. It was clear self-defense, of herself and her friend, and she just disabled her attacker, made sure the weapon was out of reach then let events play out. Told the manager to call the cops, cooperated with them when they arrived, did everything I'd have advised her to do to the letter. Quite impressive for a teenager."

"Hmm. Plausible, I agree." Emily nodded slowly as she thought over his words, then looked around at everyone else to see if anyone had any other input. At the moment the answer seemed to be no. "We'll come back to that. Right now, the question really is, why the hell did Sophia Hess go so completely unhinged in public like that? Even for her that was… unexpected."

Miss Militia sighed heavily, making everyone look at her. "We've had her in custody for twenty four hours at this point, which took some effort as the BBPD were not keen on releasing her to us. And they definitely know she's a Parahuman, of course. That much was unavoidable. She's been assessed by the medical staff, and the psychologist. Medically she's highly stressed, in considerable pain from the fractured elbow although that's been treated and is stable, and even with quite a high dose of painkillers she's still absolutely furious with essentially everything. Considering how much morphine they pumped into her, that's slightly impressive."

She shrugged somewhat helplessly. "That girl is the angriest person I've ever met on a good day. Since Winslow closed, she hasn't had any good days. I'm pretty sure she knew, even if only subconsciously, that sooner or later evidence was going to come to light which was going to cause her a major problem and she's been wondering when the ax would fall, which added to the stress. I know that Aegis has complained that she's been even harder to work with since then and so has Gallant. Who warned me she was about to blow a week ago, but she simply wouldn't talk about it, so there wasn't much we could do."

The woman paused, apparently considering her words, then continued, "The incident with Vista and Hookwolf made things worse, somehow. Sophia was… resentful, possibly? I honestly don't know what was really going through her mind. But she very much didn't like how Vista was getting a lot of respect from the PRT staff, and the other Wards. Words were exchanged a few times from what I was told, and the two of them were avoiding each other for the last week. As best as I can work out, on Saturday she went off duty in an absolutely foul mood even for her, found herself frustrated at the burger restaurant due to the length of the lines from what Vista reported, which made that mood worse… And then she spotted Miss Hebert and simply forgot where she was and that behavior that she could get away with in school due to all the reasons Mr Johnson mentioned wasn't going to be ignored in public."

"It fits the available evidence," Armsmaster agreed. "If she'd become conditioned to being able to behave as she wished with the aid of the school staff, if only by their lack of repercussions, she may well have just assumed she could get away with the same sort of thing anywhere. Seeing Miss Hebert triggered a pattern of behavior she'd learned worked. Right up until it very spectacularly didn't."

"That girl is not sane, you know," Assault commented in an unusually serious manner, causing everyone to switch their attention to him. "I mean, all Parahumans are a little off, it's pretty much the definition, and if we're honest with ourselves we'll admit to it." His smile was somewhat twisted and Emily felt a weird momentary sort of respect she immediately tried to suppress. "Sophia Hess is way past that. I have no idea if she was nuts before she triggered, but I'm damn sure she's fucked up in the head now. Some of the things I've heard her say…" He shook his head slowly. "She does not have a particularly firm grasp on reality in some fairly serious ways. Her mindset is… well, I wouldn't turn my back on her if she was pissed with me, let's put it like that."

"That, unfortunately, does match quite closely to what the psychologist reported, in rather more clinical terms," Miss Militia reluctantly said. "She is extremely revenge-motivated, almost certainly suffers from intermittent explosive disorder, and has some form of superiority complex which feeds off that. Her personal philosophy of life is both strong and deluded, he said. Some form of nihilistic predator versus prey ideas that don't hold up to analysis, but as soon as you try to talk about it, she either screams at you or just ignores you. In his view she's a danger to anyone she dislikes, which at this point is almost everyone. Exacerbated by her powers, of course. He warned that it was important that she didn't escape because if she did he was convinced she'd immediately try to go after anyone she believed had wronged her."

"And with her specific power set and training she could be remarkably dangerous," Emily groaned. "Wonderful. Armsmaster, are you sure your countermeasures can keep her contained?"

"I am, Director, yes." He nodded. "Miss Hess isn't going anywhere until we allow it. If she attempts to use her powers, the taser collar will knock her unconscious immediately. And relatively safely. Although I doubt she'd particularly enjoy the experience."

"And having her dominant arm badly broken is definitely going to slow her down if the worst happens," Dauntless pointed out, making the Tinker both look somewhat insulted at the implication his tech could fail, and like he reluctantly agreed with a valid point.

"I'm tempted to have her sedated until we can work out what to do with her," Emily mused out loud. "If she does try to escape, that's still on the cards. We really can't afford to have her get loose and cause even more trouble than she's done already. That little idiot couldn't have made it worse for herself if she'd planned it. And now I have to tell the Chief Director that on the one hand I was entirely right and the girl's a fucking liability, and on the other we want her out of here immediately. Which won't go down well, that much I'm certain of. On either point." She massaged her forehead again, wishing she had some decent painkillers right about now. She'd had a headache nearly constantly ever since the whole city had gone nuts and this was only adding to it.

"What do you think the Chief Director will want done with her?" her deputy asked.

"I honestly don't care as long as I never have to deal with her again, Renick," she replied, glancing at him. "In my view she should be in big girl prison for attempted murder, and if the cops are right about some of the things they've been suggesting might well have her behind them, possibly actual murder too. We still don't know where she got that fucking knife from, but it's far too similar to one of the types a lot of the gang members tend to like for my comfort. Which implies she probably picked it up on one of her off the book excursions and kept the damn thing, possibly as a trophy. I can't help wondering if the person she took it from was still kicking afterwards…"

"You think she'd have killed a gang member for a knife?" he queried, looking disturbed.

"For a cheap crappy switchblade? No. For being a gang member and in her way, unfortunately yes." Emily shook her head as he winced. "That's why we got her in the first place, after all. She came far too close to killing other gang members with those damn hunting bolts at least twice and it was pure luck that she didn't have a body count as a result. If she's been going out and carrying on that little hobby, which we know she has a few times, and it's anyone's guess how many times we don't know about, possibly she didn't get lucky. Rolling her victim for anything useful wouldn't be much of a step past that."

"Shit. Yeah, I take your point. I wish I didn't have to, but…"

Again, the room fell silent as they all tried to absorb the situation. Emily glanced at her watch, then sighed very faintly. They still had a lot to go through even after the whole Shadow Stalker mess was discussed and all the fallout from it too. Speaking of which, that brought her to the next point.

"Going back to the two girls she went after… Hebert and Cheung. Taylor Hebert was hospitalized by the little idiot and her accomplices in a highly unpleasant and traumatic manner. I'm wondering if there are… repercussions… from that which fall into our remit."

"You believe she might have Triggered, Director?" Armsmaster queried, causing her to nod and shrug at the same time.

"Her experience does seem plausible as a Trigger event, from what I read about it. It was fairly horrific by anyone's standards."

"I agree, however in counterpoint there is no actual evidence of Parahuman abilities I can immediately point to," he replied.

"Her performance in that… I hesitate to call it a fight… that smackdown, was possibly a little too good. Wouldn't you agree?" She looked at him, then at the others.

"She might just have really good reflexes," Renick pointed out. "She's damn tall for a girl that age, long arms, lots of leverage, and obviously just from looking at her is in good condition and works out. Having watched the videos from several angles, you can see she was well aware of Hess behind her. I'd think reflections in the windows, maybe? As well as from her own glasses. I knew a kid in school years back who was almost impossible to sneak up on from behind because he could see you coming in the reflections in the corners of his glasses. And he was a paranoid little bastard, probably because people kept trying to sneak up on him."

He smiled briefly as Assault chuckled. "The manager shouted, she turned, and was fast enough to grab the chair as it got close. Good reflexes, definitely, and some good luck too, but nothing there I'd instantly say was outside normal human performance levels. At the top end, sure, but still within them."

This was entirely valid in Emily's view, but she wanted to hear other opinions. Looking around she waited, sure someone would say something, and wasn't disappointed.

"On the other hand she's only, what, fifteen or sixteen? How much training in Chair Fu can she have had at that age?" Assault asked, although Emily got the distinct impression he was arguing for the sake of it. As usual.

"Perhaps she's naturally gifted that way?" Renick replied with a small grin. "Look at her friend. Armsmaster said she's been training in multiple martial arts since she was six. Perhaps Miss Hebert has some form of training herself that helped her pull that off. She learned that palm strike to Hess's elbow from somewhere after all."

"Or just read a book on anatomy and has a good imagination," Miss Militia put in, looking mildly amused.

"Well, sure, that might be true. We don't know. But I've been in some of the bars in the docks, and I guarantee that people throw chairs at each other there sometimes just for fun. Maybe her dad taught her how to deal with that sort of thing." Mike chuckled as her eyes crinkled in amusement.

"Ultimately we don't have enough evidence to make a decision one way or another," Armsmaster remarked. "It's of course possible she Triggered as a result of the locker assault. But it's also just as possible she didn't. Her performance in the attack was very calm and collected, and precise too, which might indicate some form of combat Thinker power combined with a something like a Brute 1 rating, but on the other hand it might just be a calm person going out of her way not to overreact and taking the necessary steps to defend herself and her friend. Nothing in my analysis of the videos definitively points at a Parahuman ability or abilities. At best we can currently say it's possible but completely unproven."

"If you're looking for a Parahuman power in those videos, I'd be looking at that Cheung girl," Assault said with a grin. "That kick was almost impossible. How flexible is that girl? She got her foot level with her face from a standing start, hard enough to nearly lift Hess off her feet. I've never seen anything like that outside a film."

"Or a martial arts competition. Or a ballet performance," his wife pointed out with a sigh.

"I don't go to a lot of ballet performances, Puppy," he replied happily. "Or martial arts competitions, although maybe I should?"

"There is even less evidence for Miss Cheung to be a Parahuman," Armsmaster said calmly. "Although I will admit her performance was exceptional. It's still well within the parameters of a highly trained and practiced expert in martial arts, which she is."

"And Miss Hebert?" Emily persisted, not so much because she really though the girl had to be a Parahuman, but because she wanted to hear his reasoning.

"We have no information that she has trained in martial arts, and not that much information on either of them at all as they've never come to our attention before, but as Mr Johnson suggested, it's entirely plausible that she has received practical training in less formal fighting techniques from her family and friends. Absent more evidence that's probably the only viable conclusion, I'm afraid. Possible, but unlikely."

"So you don't believe that at present we have any reason to believe she's a Parahuman."

"No, Director. If further evidence comes to light we can reassess that, of course, but at the moment I think there is nothing more we need to do regarding either girl."

"If at any point it does turn out that Miss Hebert is a Parahuman, Director," Johnson said after a moment, sounding somewhat concerned, "There may well be an issue if you were considering the Wards."

Emily had a feeling she knew exactly what he was going to say, but asked anyway. "Which is?"

"If and when she found out that Sophia Hess, the girl that almost literally tortured her, assaulted her severely enough to hospitalize her, then assaulted her again in public and apparently was willing to commit murder, was a Ward, I expect she would be less than impressed with us. Especially if we were not immediately up front with her about it. Concealing the facts only to have them come out at a future date would be highly likely to result in an extreme, and to be honest, justified loss of trust. And the likelihood that the facts would come out sooner or later is near a hundred percent. If at any point she does come forward as a Parahuman and if she wishes to join the Wards, I highly recommend that you are completely honest and up front with her about exactly what happened, and accept whatever decision she comes to as a result. I feel that to do otherwise would be inviting potential trouble down the line we could ill afford." He looked evenly at her for a moment, until she nodded. "The point may well be moot anyway as we have no evidence other than entirely circumstantial and very weak suppositions that she is a Parahuman anyway, as Armsmaster explained, but please bear it in mind just in case."

"You've made your point," she replied after a moment or two of thought. "We'll see how things work out, but for now we can let it rest. We've got more than enough trouble already without borrowing more anyway."

"True enough, unfortunately."

The list of things that needed doing never seemed to shrink, she thought with irritation as she made some notes about the Hess problem, what to do about New Wave in light of the information she'd heard, and several other things that came up from the meeting so far. When she was done, she put her pen down and looked up. "OK. Moving on. Where the hell is Lung?"

Everyone looked at each other. It was a good question, and one that had been puzzling them all for some time now...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Half a mile away and nearly eighty feet underground Taylor explored the subterranean river she'd finally located, proving her dad correct, while also pondering what she'd overheard in the PRT building. It had some interesting implications. And warned her that she had to be more careful not to let anyone see her do anything that couldn't be explained without bringing powers into it.

She had no intention of joining the Wards or anyone else. Her powers weren't something she wanted to use to go around fighting everyone, although she had no qualms about prodding here and there to help people without them noticing. Mostly she wanted to learn what she could do and have fun while doing it, even though she was still curious to find out what other people would think about her drider form…

Perhaps the chance would arise to find out. For now, she had a far larger than expected underground waterway to investigate, and more experiments to run.

Glowing bright green she scuttled on, while making copious notes. Her dad would find all this fascinating, she was sure. And, just perhaps, Lucy might too?

Chapter Text

Looking around in satisfaction, Taylor nodded happily. She'd spent several hours cleaning the entire warehouse floor, pushing all the debris into one corner and stacking it up inside some drider-web baskets she'd entertained herself figuring out how to make a few days ago. They held several cubic yards of material each and seemed more than strong enough to be loaded with tons of scrap and carried around without the slightest hint of breaking. It had made the whole exercise fairly straightforward if time-consuming. And now she had a large expanse of empty concrete with nothing getting in the way other than her tables and experimental stands along one long edge, and she'd also finished repairing the roof once the recent heavy rain had shown a few spots she'd missed. The warehouse was as dry as it was ever going to get, pretty secure absent some really serious effort, and surprisingly warm due to the thick brick walls.

The tunnel entrance had also been fully cleared out, so she could go up and down the stairs without any obstructions, which was much more convenient. She was debating working out some sort of door for it, as the one that had apparently once been there had long since vanished, only the rusty stumps of hinges left embedded in the brickwork. For now she'd improvised by webbing several massive lumps of cast iron something-or-other together to form a barricade that was probably on the order of three or four tons in weight, and large enough that she could cover the place where the narrow stairs emerged from the floor. With it on top of the hole nothing larger than a cat was going to get in or out through that opening, but she could easily move it herself when required.

So as a place to work undisturbed her warehouse was pretty close to perfect. And sufficiently isolated that she hardly ever had visitors closer than several hundred yards, and that was quite rare. The homeless guy that time had stayed in the place he'd found for two days, then left again and she hadn't sensed him since then. That was the last time anyone had come anywhere near that close to her knowledge.

She wondered where he'd gone and hoped he was OK. And that the cash she'd left had helped.

It upset her to know there were so many people in the city that were homeless and living on the street, but it was a difficult problem to solve even if anyone honestly wanted to. Which, sadly, an awful lot of people not in such dire straights apparently didn't from what her dad said, and her mom had as well in the past. She knew that the dock workers and quite a few people in the general docks area helped out when they could, but many of them didn't have a lot left over either.

But she did have some ideas that might bear fruit in that direction eventually. It was something she was still thinking about.

Sighing faintly, she turned to regard her workspace. She'd made use of some of the ex-Calvert's confiscated funds, although very cautiously as she wasn't entirely trusting of whoever it was that Tattletale had found to launder the money. The girl herself, who was right now with her team in their hideout right on the edge of Taylor's range, was probably reasonably trustworthy she thought. They'd spent some time talking while the blonde was vacuuming Coil's money out of every account she could locate, and setting up all the other things that needed to be arranged before she escaped out the tunnel Taylor had told her about. It had been pretty impressive watching how she persuaded the two mercenaries outside the door to basically switch sides, although the rather terrifying amount of money she'd offered them had certainly helped a lot.

Even so it had been down to the other girl's Thinker-aided rapid talking that had done the trick in the end. She'd also seemed completely sure that neither of the men would betray her, and Taylor hoped she was right. But so far nothing had apparently gone wrong with the plan they'd worked out, and from her occasional trips to monitor various people around the city, it didn't seem likely that it would. Both the mercenaries who'd been paid off seemed content to wait for their trial, which was very likely to result in a stiff fine at worst, then just keep to the bargain and vanish. Along with several million dollars each, more than enough to live on comfortably for the rest of their lives.

So that potential hurdle seemed to have been cleared. And having split the funds two ways after clearing it through a whole series of moves Taylor still didn't quite follow, it had ended up with some organization run by someone called the Number Man, who was apparently the go-to person for completely untraceable financial services. It sounded very dodgy to Taylor, but her new acquaintance swore blind that the services provided for the rather steep fee were totally reliable and trustworthy. She claimed that even heroic organizations used the facilities provided by this mysterious person, since it gave a level of anonymity that the normal banking system completely lacked, important if you happened to have a secret identity. Even the tax people seemed to have no problem with it which sounded weird, but it looked like as long as they got their cut, they didn't care in the slightest where you got your money from or how.

Which admittedly did match some things her dad had said in the past about how the world had changed since Parahumans first turned up. It was still kind of strange even so. Whatever, the end result was a discreet ATM card along with a set of details of how to access the accounts set up through various means, statements of taxes paid, balances, and everything else you'd expect from a perfectly normal bank account.

The sum in those accounts was rather unnerving. More money than she could currently think of means to actually spend, in fact. Not without going out and buying a couple of airliners or something…

It had made her dad nearly faint when she'd shown it all to him and explained what had happened. After which he'd laughed rather oddly, spent some time explaining why it would make him a lot happier if she'd avoid upsetting the political balance of the city on a whim if possible, then congratulate her on a job well done. If only accidentally.

Certainly they had no real money worries any more, although he'd pointed out they'd need to be very careful not to let anyone see them spending a lot of money they couldn't explain the source of, regardless of how well-hidden the tracks were. Which she'd fully agreed with, being more than able to work out for herself all the wrong sorts of attention being careless would attract.

So in the end she'd flown around a few isolated ATMs as Vespa and acquired a fair bit of cash, making sure not to withdraw too much at any one of them and spreading it out over a few days. She'd also ensured that the cameras on the machines had been accidentally obscured by bugs of one sort or another. If anyone checked they might find the coincidence odd, but it would probably be hard to pin down what exactly had happened or who was behind it. Possibly she was being a little over-paranoid but why take silly chances? Half of the money had gone to her dad for household expenses and the like, including upgrading their terrible internet to something a little more modern, which had been done yesterday. The rest she kept for her own use.

And in front of her were the purchases she'd made, including a reasonably nice laptop similar to, but higher spec than, the one she'd seen in the used computer store a few weeks back. She'd also bought some good quality folding tables, several more very cheap phones, two of which she'd given to her dad as well, lots more notebooks, and various other useful things. He'd taken her into the city and back in his truck to retrieve the tables as they were awkward to manage single-handed even if the weight meant nothing to her now, but the rest she'd picked up herself.

Reaching out she opened the laptop and turned it on. As she did so, half a dozen far too large to be normal spiders jumped from her shoulders onto the table, their abdomens glowing different colors. Taylor was very fond of bioluminescence and was still experimenting with it quite regularly, and adding it to quite a lot of the hybrids she'd been fiddling with.

These spiders were some ten inches across the legs, and mixed black widows, wolf spiders, jumping spiders which she really liked, paper wasps mostly for the flight, crabs for the low temperature tolerance, and limpets for the incredibly boosted exoskeleton strength which she was still steadily improving. They were tough enough that you could probably run them over with a bulldozer and only mildly inconvenience the creatures.

They were also definitely a lot brighter than spiders normally were. She still wasn't entirely sure how she'd achieved that, but the things were smart enough that they were clearly watching her with as much interest as she watched them, while there was something not that far off an actual, if rather basic, mind in there somewhere. She could feel it.

And they could feel her, but didn't seem to have any issues at all with her controlling them. As far as she could tell they actually found it comforting somehow. Which was yet another thing her power was staring at, but it should be used to that now.

Like all her other creatures these had enlarged far more than they should have been able to while merged with her, and she'd also noted with interest that merging multiple species together even without combining them with her also made the resulting creature gradually enlarge over time, although more slowly and apparently to a smaller degree. These ones were probably as large as they were going to get from what she could sense. She had a lot of notes on ideas to see if she could dial the size up and down on purpose but it was yet another thing she hadn't so far got around to. There were a lot of those and the list didn't seem to be getting any shorter as time went on. Which was good in a sense as it meant she had plenty of work to keep herself busy with.

Taylor was interested to see if the hybrid traits would breed true, but that would take some time to discover. She didn't have any plans to breed them in vast quantities either, as that might cause… minor problems… but she could certainly find uses for a fair number. They were more than strong enough to be useful all over the place, had incredibly good senses, and were large enough to interact with human-scale things fairly easily. Such as the laptop keyboard.

She moved one of the glowspiders in front of the keyboard and stretched out its front four legs. Another one put a leg on the touch pad and two more on the buttons. A little practice showed that they could operate both without any problems, but she ended up adding two more spiders on keyboard duty, each covering part of it, which rapidly let her manipulate the keys with absurd ease and very high speed. Synchronizing all the legs was trivial, to the point that she didn't even consciously think about what she was doing. She had to adjust the keyboard settings to let her type as fast as her spiders were capable of, but it worked, which pleased her a lot.

Satisfied she had a good method to take notes faster than writing them down by hand, she nodded happily. "OK, guys, let's get on with it," she told her spiders, the ones not operating the computer turning to look at her with apparent interest. "I really have to come up with names for you lot too," she mused, examining them. That would take a little thought…

Spider one through six seemed a touch silly, she though as she unmerged from Vespa II, who was nearly as big as the original Vespa now and had just about finished her growth phase. The hornet sat on her hand and looked at her, while she looked back. "I guess you're going to want to make a nest fairly soon," she commented to the insect. It was perhaps a month away from when they'd naturally begin laying eggs, although by now she knew enough about how her arthropods worked that she was sure she could either speed that up or delay it, but right now she had other plans in mind.

It was time for her to try something she'd been thinking hard about from pretty much the moment she'd found out what her powers could do, and what she could make them do by dint of not taking no for an answer.

That original deep link with Vespa had been completely accidental, and had baffled her own power to the point it still didn't seem to have the faintest idea what had actually happened. She'd held off on trying to replicate the feat for several reasons. One was she was still a little reluctant to take the agency of a living thing away like that, even an insect. It was, on the face of it, a rather silly reservation to have; insects generally had short lives and people randomly killed them without a thought, and there wasn't all that much actual mind in there anyway. But… Taylor had a much, much deeper insight into arthropod life than probably anyone and she couldn't help feeling a little guilty when she thought about it.

On the other hand, she'd completely subsumed a significant number of creatures by merging them into both herself, Vespa I, and Vespa II. Wasn't that basically the same thing only more so?

Perhaps. It still felt different to her, though. She could unmerge them without any issue and they were basically completely unharmed, albeit somewhat enhanced, which if anything you might consider a good thing if you were so inclined. Admittedly a lot of people wouldn't be so inclined, not being entirely happy about wasps the size of your hand or spiders that could fist fight a cat, but a lot of people were weird like that. The point was they still had their minds, or what could very loosely be termed that. Especially in the case of things like limpets or worms which were about as close to organic machines as she'd so far come across. They were mostly hardwired instincts and quite basic functions, from what she could tell.

Crabs, spiders, hornets… they were a step up. Still nothing close to anything most people would call intelligent, even very loosely, with a few exceptions like jumping spiders, but they were much more than just a few neurons running a biological robot. Taylor couldn't explain it properly to anyone, even her dad, although she'd tried. Without being able to do what she could, it was almost impossible to understand.

Her glowspiders were a huge step up in mental ability, vastly outstripping even the brightest jumping spider, even as she didn't know quite how she'd managed the trick. It would take more experimentation. The more she played around with doing this sort of thing the more she was coming to understand the fundamental underpinnings of how she did what she was doing, and how arthropods and all the other creatures actually worked. It was already at the point that she could not only mix aspects of other creatures under her purview into a single creature with ease, but she was starting to be able to extrapolate from one or other aspect into something entirely new. Her early experiments with bioluminescence had set the stage for this sort of thing, which had let her come up with the armored exoskeleton, and the better eyes, among other things. Those had mostly been built on preexisting substructures she'd modified extensively, but the latest exoskeleton, the one she used for the glowspiders, had been redesigned completely from scratch.

In retrospect some of the changes she'd made to their brains to increase the processing speed, which had worked remarkably well, might also explain the increase in processing power, although that hadn't been directly the goal. She made some notes on the computer as she thought this, still studying the hornet on her hand. That could be investigated more later. Right now, she had another goal in mind.

"I have to repeat what I did," she told Vespa II, lifting her hand to look directly into the hornet's eyes, her own antennae dipping to touch it. "I have no idea how to undo it, and the only thing I can think of is to do it again and watch what happens. It might give me the clue I need to figure out how, or if, it can be reversed. So for what it's worth, I'm sorry about this. I promise I'll be gentle."

It made her feel better about the whole thing even as she thought in a sense it was completely ridiculous.

They might only be bugs, but they were still alive, and they were, in a sense, friends of hers. She didn't want to see them hurt unnecessarily. It was, she supposed as she examined the hornet, like people who had pet pigs, yet still ate bacon. Suppressing the slight sensation of guilt she still had, she concentrated, trying to replicate the feeling she'd had in her bedroom that time over two months ago. Reaching out with her power, she felt her connection with Vespa I, then the one she had with her second hornet, looking for how they differed. At the back of her mind her power was watching closely, feeling fascinated and slightly bemused, as if it wasn't sure any of this would or even could work. Despite the ample proof she'd given it time and time again.

Taylor didn't give up, and no superpower that belonged to her was going to tell her what she could and could not do with it. Not if it didn't want her quite annoyed with it.

So far that seemed to have done the job, she thought with an inner grin in one part of her awareness, which seemed these days to have far, far more parts to it than it used to…

'Right, then… I think I need to do this…' Pushing harder, she forced her power's connection to the hornet into new pathways, feeling the usual sort of resistance that meant it wasn't convinced this was how anything was supposed to work. As she was doing that, bearing down harder and harder in her mind, she was simultaneously watching from outside so to speak, observing part of herself with another part of herself. She wasn't quite sure how she could do that, but she could, and the exact mechanism wasn't nearly as important as the fact it worked.

Even if her power really didn't have the vaguest idea how either and seemed mildly horrified that it did.

She really had to find out how other Parahumans made their powers do what they wanted one day, she thought with yet another part of her mind that wasn't currently occupied. That part made some notes with the spiders, as it had been doing the entire time, so she could go back and check later. She was quite curious whether she was doing it correctly, but whatever, she got the results she wanted even if she had to threaten the thing at the back of her head sometimes before it gave in.

Which, admittedly, was happening a lot less these days. She nearly had it housebroken.

The mental resistance grew, but she persisted, pushing in just the right way that whatever it was that was blocking her desires from coming into existence shivered and started to creak. This was how it normally went, and all she had to do was suddenly push there like this and…

The familiar mental snap of her ability throwing its hands in the air and giving up came, causing her to smile.

And suddenly she had the same connection to Vespa II as she had to Vespa I.

It worked. Not only that, she saw what she'd done, and how. Kind of.

Comparing the connections, she saw that the one to her original hornet were of the same type but of a different level. Again, it was very hard to put into English. But the end result was that while both deep connections, which she decided to put down as a level two connection versus the level one which was the basic control and sensing level she used with everything else, functioned in the same essential way, the original one was somehow… more complex. A level two and a half, perhaps. Undoing the level two was possible, she could see how, and proved it by promptly reversing the process. It took some effort and she had to smack her power quite hard in a couple of places to get it to unstick, but it worked in the end. As did redoing it.

But the first deep connection to Vespa I? That was much more recalcitrant for some reason she didn't quite understand. After a fair amount of time and effort she finally decided that, in essence, she'd accidentally 'locked' the connection when she'd made it, and now she couldn't quite work out how to unlock it. Taylor was sure it was possible but it would take a lot of thought and some more experimentation.

But overall she was very pleased with her results. Making and breaking the level two connection to Vespa II didn't seem to cause the hornet any problems at all, and having yet another body to work with when she connected like that felt as natural as her first hornet had. And still did, to the point it would probable feel weird if she wasn't connected to Vespa I.

Rereading the notes she'd spider-typed during her experiment she nodded a little to herself. One last test to make. Reconnecting to the hornet, she flew it down the tunnel, and headed away from the warehouse back to the agri store. Her original hornet connection seemed to have made her power decided she really did have two bodies in two different places at the same time, she'd concluded after a lot of thought. It explained why she seemed to be able to use her power through either body with the same range in each case, regardless of how far apart they were. Some tests with both super-hornets outside the city hadn't so far found a maximum range to that link, although so far she'd only moved them a little more than fifty miles apart.

Even so, just like during her initial tests, there had been no change to the link in the slightest, so it seemed quite plausible now that there was no upper limit as such. Which was both extremely odd and very useful indeed, with some fascinating implications. Implications which would require more than just Vespa.

And to her delight, Vespa II worked just the same. It didn't take long to leave the tunnel near her house, and she could feel hundreds of thousands of familiar bugs inside a mile and a half diameter sphere centered on the hornet. Somehow she was able to individually identify each and every one of them, most of them ones she'd been sensing through for weeks now. Flying higher, she orbited her neighborhood, looking down on all the buildings and streets and parks from a few hundred yards up. Cars moved around, people were walking here and there, or in their yards cleaning up after the winter, the sun was shining through the clouds and showing spring was well on the way…

Yeah. This had real promise indeed.

Grinning to herself, she looked at the other insects she had in her library, which was quite substantial by now. She still lacked some creatures she really wanted, because it was too early in the year yet to acquire most of them. Mantises, dragonflies, some species of ant, quite a few beetle variations; all of those would be available quite soon. She had some dragonfly larvae at home in a tank already, having retrieved them from a pond in a local park. She was waiting for these to develop into adults, and was planning on taking another few trips into the countryside when it warmed up a little more looking for the rest and anything else that seemed useful. And there were all the exotics at Mike's story to investigate too once she ran out of locally sourced lifeforms of interest.

Which would take a while, because there were an awful lot of them, especially when you started looking at the marine environment.

And she'd hardly even begun to look at nematodes, and barnacles, and all the other little beasties her power seemed fine with. Leaving aside the things she was sure it should be fine with but for some reason wasn't quite. Yet. It would learn…

Whether it liked it or not. Although, that said, it mostly did seem to like it, it just found the whole thing weird beyond belief and kept complaining that none of this should be possible. So she had to show it how.

Overall it was a hell of a lot of fun, though, and she had no regrets at all. Getting powers hadn't been fun, but the end result was pretty much worth it. Although snapping Sophia's arm like a twig had certainly cheered her up and made her think that the scales were probably a lot closer to balanced now despite the powers outcome.

However none of that was really important. She had other more immediate things to concern herself with than a bully that with luck she'd never have to see again, considering how upset the PRT seemed to be with the little bitch. Right now, she had science to do.

As she started bringing Vespa II back, she was also making notes on other aspects of this whole process to investigate, while thinking about how to go about that. One thing that she wondered about was, now that she could make and break a level two link successfully, could she make the link and still have the creature thus linked go about its business more or less normally? Or would she have to do everything manually, so to speak?

With Vespa she was operating the hornet as if it was the body she was born with, which was much easier than by rights it should have been, but there were some benefits she could see to having the linked insect remain autonomous for the most part. If she could set things up so that she had a creature that acted as another node for her power but was otherwise just going about life normally, it would reduce the number of things she needed to personally involve herself with. Even though her multitasking ability appeared to be functionally limitless, she still didn't necessarily want to be driving lots of random creatures around to that level if she didn't have to. Certain things they needed to do she wasn't totally keen on experiencing up close and personal, even though her less intimate linkages would already allow that if she wished for everything inside her range. On the whole she'd so far tended to mostly just sense through them, not micromanage them, which at the moment a level two link seemed to enforce. When linked to something else at that depth, that creature was her in almost every way that mattered. Was that in fact necessary?

It took her nearly three hours of hard work and more tries than she wanted to think about but in the end, rather unexpectedly, she found a way to modify the link which proved that no, it wasn't necessary. Not completely, anyway.

She was still linked to Vespa II in a very deep way, but she found that by slightly… twisting… the linkage in a direction that strictly speaking had too many dimensions to fit into what she'd thought was real, she could somehow change the process so the hornet's own brain was doing mostly normal hornet things. Gradually releasing her control, she smiled when the insect started moving about in a way that showed it was functioning as if it was simply a common domestic unnaturally enlarged Asian Giant Hornet.

Taylor experimented for a while, finding the right mix of gentle control that let her guide the hornet the same way she did all the other creatures in range. She moved it to her hand and peered at it, smiling as the insect looked back apparently curiously. "Thank you for your patience and cooperation," she told the huge hornet. "You've helped me a lot. I'll make sure I find a good spot for your nest when the time comes."

Merging with the insect, she thought for a while. Then she started making a list of suitable creatures to use as relay nodes for her ability. They needed to be discreet, capable of looking after themselves, but also not too dangerous just in case any of them ever came into contact with people. It was unlikely as she was planning on keeping them underground well out of the way, and she'd sense anyone coming anywhere near long before they could cause trouble, but better safe that sorry.

In the end she decided that the only practical solution was to make something suitable. None of the normal bugs were quite right for the job. She looked thoughtfully at her glowspiders, wondering if they might be what she needed, but in the end she shook her head. Something new then. Similar, because spiders were pretty versatile, but they'd also need extra features.

The solution, as she was coming to believe was often the case, turned out to be crabs. More or less.

She started with a callinectes sapidus, or Atlantic blue crab, one of the more common species in the bay. It made a good base for her project as it was a fairly tough little animal with surprisingly good eyesight, which was one of the things she'd made use of in her study of low light compound eyes. Adding in some jumping spider for even better eyes and high strength legs, bioluminescent organs just because it might come in handy, a touch of crayfish for fresh water tolerance, a little wolf spider because that seemed to make them faster, the limpet-based super-exoskeleton, some starfish for the resilience and regeneration she'd been investigating recently…

By the time she finished she was looking at something rather like a spider with crab claws, and a body shape that let it close its legs into the abdomen to the point it had the appearance of a rock, dark blue-black in color. At full extent the legs covered roughly a foot, and each of them terminated in small grasping claws as well, which were surprisingly dexterous. And of course it could glow in the dark in a whole rainbow of colors, from barely detectable to too bright to look at for a while.

It also had quite impressive fangs and a venom that could probably take down an elephant, but that seemed to be almost unavoidable with her power, which apparently couldn't resist adding lethal options into everything. At least she was able to ensure the venom wasn't capable of exploding, or irradiating anything. Fluorine was nowhere involved as far as she could tell, which was something of a relief. That stuff was kind of dangerous.

But it met her requirements perfectly. It could live in both fresh and salt water without any difficulty at all, would happily subsist off rats or cockroaches or anything like that, had a very efficient metabolism which meant it wouldn't need to eat all that much anyway, and was bright enough to avoid people. Not really bright in absolute terms but for an arthropod it was reasonably smart, although not up to her glowspiders.

She played with the thing for a while, seeing how strong it was, which was ridiculously so, and how fast, which was horrifyingly so. The thing could cross from one end of the warehouse to the other in a couple of seconds at a sprint, which meant it was going better than thirty miles an hour. And it could jump at least twenty feet without even trying. Amusing herself using it to pick up increasingly heavy things she finally decided it was perfect. Dropping the old oil drum with a crash she made it zip back to her and skid to a halt, all eight eyestalks peering in all directions including up at her. It gave the mental impression of being like an eager if rather dim dog, so she folded her legs and sank to the floor, reaching out to stroke its carapace.

"Yes, you're very cute," she assured it. The crabspider wiggled its eyestalks in a happy sort of way. "Now, don't worry, this won't hurt." It only took her a moment to make a level two link to it, which caused her to smile widely. If anything it was easier than with Vespa II, possibly because she'd designed her new friend from scratch to this exact end. "See? OK, all we have to do is make a few more siblings, and you guys can go out into the world and seek your fortune. Or at least run around under the city and enjoy life while helping me keep an eye on things."

Within an hour she had a dozen of the crabspiders all scuttling about exploring the warehouse. Looking at them she felt a sense of achievement. It was a good start, and would let her do some things she'd been planning for a while now. Such as fully explore the tunnels, which she'd made quite a lot of headway on already, but couldn't spend all her time on since she had a lot of other tasks to deal with. Her school work was on the whole fairly simple to deal with, and with the glowspiders helping, she could probably increase her reading capacity enormously which was one of the main reasons she'd made them, but there were all manner of other things to do as well as poke around underground.

That said, poking around underground was enormous fun, and kept producing useful results, so she had no intention of stopping. Not to mention that she was finding that the network of caves and tunnels and rivers and all the other things down there was far more expansive than she'd ever expected, or her dad's maps showed. Those were just the easy to access parts… She still needed to fully investigate the huge underground lake, for example, and try to figure out where the old boat had come from. And the river running deep under the city on the far side of Calvert's bunker was much longer than her dad had realized, with hundreds of offshoots and tributaries, all of which needed a thorough exploration.

She'd definitely do it in person in the long run, but scouting it out with her new friends was a good approach to begin with.

So, yes, she had more than enough to keep her occupied and some help wouldn't go amiss.

"Right, listen up, troops," she ordered, all her crabspiders coming to attention in two neat rows in front of her. "Your mission, should you accept it, which you will of course, is to spread out through the tunnels and extend the influence of your leader, that's me, far and wide. Is everyone clear on that?"

Twelve claws lifted into the air and clicked.

Taylor grinned. This was fun. "OK. Go forth and… well, don't multiply, that's only going to cause trouble, but just go forth, I guess. Stay out of reach of humans, they'll try to stomp on you and that'll just get embarrassing, because they might break a foot or something, then just wander around and see what there is to see." She was basically amusing herself at this point since she was pretty much talking to herself. If her dad could see this he'd probably be laughing his ass off.

All the crabspiders saluted her, turned, and dashed towards the exit to the tunnels below. Within ten seconds they'd disappeared down the stairs and were zipping along the tunnel towards places they could get into the rest of the network, one of them remaining local so she had coverage of the docks, the rest spreading out through the city. She might need more later, but for now this would probably do the job, she thought happily as she monitored their progress and steered the creatures to where she wanted them. Once they arrived, she'd set things up so they stuck around that general area, unless she needed them somewhere else.

Satisfied that things were proceeding according to plan, Taylor started packing up. It was nearly nine PM and she wanted to get back and have dinner with her dad, tell him the results of her latest work, then do some reading. Shortly she was heading home through the tunnel, her backpack full of notebooks and laptop, while the glowspiders rode on her armored exoskeleton and seemed to enjoy the experience.

By the time she got home, her awareness had spread over a large portion of the city. And a surprising number of minor criminals were finding their trade interrupted by various random insects at an awkward moment, which was far more effective than most people would think. Or probably realize.

A mugger slapping at a mosquito at a just the wrong time was surprisingly good at preventing a mugging, she'd quickly discovered. Most people seemed to twitch or flinch if a moth flew into their face, or a fly decided their ear was a good place for a really loud buzz. It didn't take all that much if you got your timing right…

As she went to sleep later that night, Taylor was wondering if there was a high score table for crimes prevented and where she'd place on it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Looking at the medical report in front of her, Emily felt yet again that Calvert had got off far too lightly. "You're certain?" she asked, raising her eyes.

Doctor Grant, the Brockton Bay Renal consultant, nodded seriously. "Yes. You have levels of three different proton pump inhibitor drugs in your system that are far too high to be safe, and have been detrimentally affecting your kidneys for, based on our tests, at least four years. None of these drugs are in your medical history, nor are any of them suitable for any medical problem you are noted as having, and the only conclusion we can come to is that someone has been arranging to have them administered to you without your knowledge. Our findings show that your kidney function would be significantly better if the drugs hadn't been involved, possibly to the point that dialysis would be unnecessary, or at worse would be required far less often. They'll have been affecting your digestive system rather noticeably as well."

"How were they administered?" she asked through gritted teeth.

"Most likely through a combination of interference with your normal medication, and possibly via the dialysis itself. We'll have to take samples of every drug you've got to check, but we can't think of any other real possibilities. Adulterating your food is possible but unless you have a personal diet that only you eat, we think it's unlikely since it would also affect other people. Which would have become fairly obvious quite some time ago, considering how many medical checkups PRT staff regularly undergo." He shook his head, looking both angry and worried. "Someone has gone to a lot of effort to induce what I can only consider a very slow murder attempt. My estimate is that you'd have likely hit a point where death was likely in approximately twelve to eighteen months at the outside. Panacea was completely correct when she told you the dialysis wasn't as effective as it should be."

"I see." Emily sighed, rereading the report conclusions. "What are my options?"

"The drugs will exit your system fairly rapidly now we've discovered the problem, but the damage they caused remains. It's too far advanced for any practical conventional treatment, with the exception of a kidney transplant, which itself presents a number of complications bearing in mind your other medical issues. I certainly wouldn't want to go on record as guaranteeing a positive outcome, I'm afraid. We do have some experimental treatments that may have some beneficial effect although it will take a significant number of tests to be sure they're appropriate in your particular case." He met her eyes directly, after glancing down at his notes. "The only other viable option is Parahuman healing."

"Panacea."

"Panacea is your best option, yes. There are others available, although all of them have certain limitations. She has almost none, and is fast, extremely effective, and knows exactly what she's doing. I would highly recommend you consider it. And before you mention it, I am aware of your reservations about Parahuman abilities, Director Piggot. The notes your PRT staff doctor forwarded are… extensive." He held up a hand as she opened her mouth. "I won't get into an argument with you about it, as it only wastes both our time. I am presenting you with the options you have. The decision which to go for, if any, is entirely up to you. All I suggest is you carefully weigh up whether a personal belief is worth your life."

Emily gazed at him with a certain amount of irritation, moderated with the knowledge that he was genuinely trying to help. That warred with her own internal feelings about Parahumans, to the point she couldn't help being somewhat annoyed. Even so, she did her best to remain calm and professional. In the end she nodded. "I will have to consider my options, doctor. Thank you for the information."

"You're welcome, Director. Please contact me immediately if you have any questions, or come to a decision. I would also suggest you need to ask some very probing questions in your own facility."

"Oh, trust me, Doctor, that is already happening." She smiled nastily. "Certain people are finding their life choices have brought them consequences they're not going to enjoy in the slightest."

"Good. Hopefully you can find out who was behind all this and see they meet with the correct punishment."

"I suspect the one behind this has already passed beyond the point I can do what should have been done years ago, but there's always the slight possibility it was someone else," she grunted as she stood. "I very much doubt it though."

"Well, in any case, please don't wait too long to work out how you want to proceed. Time is not on your side." He held his hand out, and after a moment she shook it. "I expect one way or the other we'll talk again fairly soon."

"Most likely, Doctor," she replied with a nod. On her way downstairs she passed Panacea walking the other way talking to a nurse who was with her. She met the teenager's eyes, the girl looking back in a rather too knowing manner and nodding to her. Returning the gesture she walked on, deep in thought.

Chapter Text

Everyone stared as Max choked, coughing so violently it sounded like he was trying to get rid of one of his lungs. Victor jumped up and moved to slam his superior on the back, hitting him just at the wrong moment when Max was leaning forward and heaving for breath. The thud of a hand between the shoulder-blades was echoed a moment later by a different sort of thud of Max's forehead bouncing off the boardroom table, considerably harder than he probably enjoyed.

The shock of the blows made him inhale involuntarily, try to cough at the same moment, go rather blue, then copiously projectile vomit all over the table, himself, Victor who didn't get out of the way fast enough when Max turned his head, and Fenja who shrieked and recoiled in horror. As she frantically tried to get out of range, her flailing elbow caught Stormtiger right in the ear extremely solidly, making him shout in rage and without thinking punch the woman in the face.

Which in turn made her sister jump him and knee him in the groin, then on the chin with her other knee when he folded up in agony.

It all happened in a sequence so neat it was like it was choreographed, and ended as quickly. In less than thirty seconds everyone was nursing bruises, wiping vomit off themselves with extreme distaste, and in the case of Stormtiger, entertaining themselves by curling into a ball under the table and weakly swearing. Max finally hacked up what had caused his coughing fit, the small fly twitching in the puddle of vomit. James, who had also got up and was staring in amazement, rather foolishly slammed a book on it in a fit of pique, which caused a shower of fresh puke that sprayed on everyone left other than Rune, who ducked fast enough to avoid everything and dived under the table.

The room fell silent aside from the faint obscenities in a pained voice coming from somewhere near the floor, harsh breathing from Max, and a certain amount of not quite sufficiently muffled giggling from Rune when she emerged and saw the complete wreckage of what had been a relatively professional meeting a few minutes earlier. Victor and Max both glared at her and she fell silent although by the look in her eyes she still found it hilarious.

Red faced from both fury and lack of oxygen. Max looked down at his completely ruined six thousand dollar suit, and a pair of shoes worth nearly as much which were now slightly squelchy. "Fuck," he growled, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his face with it, still somewhat short of breath. He winced as he passed it over his forehead, which was already going purple right in the middle. "You stupid bastard, Victor."

"Hey, I was trying to help," the other man retorted, looking up from where he was vainly trying to clean his own clothing. Rubbing only made it worse and the smell was unbelievable.

"If that's you trying to help god help me if you try to hurt me," Max grumbled, kicking his shoes off in distaste. He could swear he could feel something crunchy inside them and really didn't want to know what it was.

"Get maintenance up here to clean this up," he ordered, giving up on his suit. It was a lost cause. "Meeting fucking adjourned. We'll talk again tomorrow." Steaming, he stomped off, turning at the door to add, "And someone get a bug zapper or something in here. That's twice someone's nearly swallowed a fly."

"Perhaps they'll die," Rune murmured in a sing-song voice, before shrinking back as every single person in the room glared at her. "Sorry," she squeaked.

Shaking his head, Max left, grumbling about how some people had a very misplaced sense of humor.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Taylor lay on her bed absolutely howling with laughter, feeling that any day where she could fuck up a room full of Nazis with one little fly was a very good day. When she finally calmed down, she got up and went to find some lunch.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Looking at her phone with a raised eyebrow, Amy thought for a moment, then answered it. "Hello, Director Piggot," she said, making Vicky who was sitting in the chair next to her window look up at her with a somewhat surprised expression. Both of them were in Amy's room, having been talking about random things after school, which they'd just got home from. "How can I help you?"

"I have spent the last five days thinking very hard about a number of things that have come to light, Miss Dallon, at least partially due to your suggestion some weeks ago," the voice of the older woman replied, sounding both somewhat annoyed, which was pretty much normal in Amy's experience, and rather more thoughtful than usual. "As it happens, you were correct. My dialysis has not been working correctly, and in fact according to the renal consultant you recommended, my kidneys are rather more badly damaged than I realized."

Amy thought over her words with interest, and some minor concern. "Did they work out why this was the case?" she queried.

"Yes." Director Piggot sighed. "For reasons that are much too complex to go into now, it appears that someone has been very slowly poisoning me."

"Oh." Finding herself taken aback, but oddly not quite as much as she thought she should have been, Amy considered the implications. "Do you know who did it?"

"We're still working on tracing the entire chain of people who are implicated in the situation but we know who was behind it. Unfortunately I can't express my annoyance with him personally as he's well past any punishment I can bring to bear. Rest assured that everyone else will feel the full weight of my displeasure once we finish digging them out." The woman's voice was a snarl in the last couple of sentences, and Amy got the definite impression that there was a more personal connection there than she knew. "But that is not the main reason I called you."

Amy looked at Vicky, who could apparently hear enough of the other side of the conversation to have some idea what was going on, and was watching and listening with a fascinated expression.

"I assume that you have managed to overcome your dislike of Parahumans enough to want me to help you," she said more than asked. There was a long pause, then the other woman replied.

"Essentially I find myself torn between what I readily admit is prejudice, albeit from a place that I feel many would consider perfectly reasonable, and the sure knowledge that if I don't take advantage of the only chance I have, I probably have less than two years at the outside to live," Director Piggot said with reluctance, a sigh in her voice. "And to be honest I'm not yet ready to give up entirely. If only because to do so would be to allow someone I hate more than any dislike I have of Parahumans in general to have the last laugh. If there is an afterlife, I shall take great pleasure in tracking him down and making my displeasure known, but I would prefer that meeting to be some considerable time in the future, I have decided. So, with that in mind…"

She sighed again, as Amy listened, rather fascinated. "I have talked to Doctor Grant, then my medical insurance provider. You may be aware that the insurance the PRT arranges is very comprehensive, and the provider makes an absolutely obscene amount of money from us. While I intensely dislike medical insurance providers for many reasons, we are stuck with them, so I explained what I wanted to them very carefully. Then even more carefully when they objected, and in fact offered to arrange for a face to face meeting should they wish to continue to object. I pointed out I could bring several troopers with me so no one would be in the slightest doubt about how seriously I take the agreement they have with us, and oddly enough at that point their objections evaporated." She sounded viciously amused and Amy was having trouble not bursting into laughter, amid a new-found respect for the woman. She was still wondering what all this was leading up to though.

"One of the reasons I have never wished to be healed by a Parahuman is that I do not wish to be in debt to them. Call it worry about a conflict of interest, call it my prejudice flaring up, call it what you like, but that's how I see it."

"I don't see it that way, Director, but I do understand why someone like you might, I think," Amy interjected quietly.

"Oddly enough I believe you, Miss Dallon. You impress me in many ways. But the point is, I prefer not to leave debts unpaid. The minimum cost the hospital would charge the insurance company for a kidney transplant, according to Doctor Grant once he worked it out for me, is four hundred and thirty seven thousand two hundred and six dollars and nineteen cents." Amy blinked at the sum, which was higher than she'd realized this sort of thing went to. Apparently she was under-informed about just how expensive conventional medical treatment was, she thought somewhat numbly.

"I proposed to the insurance company that they pay you an even five hundred thousand dollars, and pick up the tax on it too, as while that's more than the minimum cost of the transplant, it removes the long term followup costs, hospital tests, time spent in hospital then off work during recovery, and ongoing health costs for my other ailments, which would easily exceed that sum quite rapidly. While they were initially resistant to the idea I persisted and in the end they agreed. If you agree, I am open to whatever schedule you find convenient, and I can feel that both sides owe each other nothing further. Is this acceptable to you?"

By this point Amy had entirely stopped breathing in shock and Vicky was looking stunned too, having moved closer to hear more clearly. The two sisters exchanged glances. She thought rather hysterically for a moment, not having expected how the conversation had gone at all, then finally replied, "I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable approach, Director." Her voice was somewhat bemused even to her own ears, prompting a snort of laughter from the older woman.

"Excellent. I will have an agreement couriered over to your house immediately stating exactly what I just said, so there's no doubt that this is above board. I expect your mother will probably want to see it. If she has any complaints, have her call me. And if I might make an observation, it would be in your best interests to not let your mother dictate your actions too far. I am aware of Carol Dallon's outlook on life and while we share aspects of it, I suspect we disagree on many parts as well. You are providing a service no one else can, and to be brutally honest you have a right to be fairly recompensed for it in my opinion. Certainly when it's to my benefit."

"You… make a valid point, Director," Amy replied, eventually. "Not one I expected from you, I have to admit."

"I am many things, Miss Dallon, but I am not completely without a sense of right and wrong." She sounded almost amused. "And I have seen just how hard you work at the hospital, and when you've helped us and other groups with their medical requirements. Regardless of my feelings about Parahumans in general, I recognize the amount of strain you are under and the level of control it takes to remain even nominally civil. Believe me, I also deal with people I would prefer to avoid at times, and seldom if ever get thanks for what I do. It comes with the job."

"I guess it does." Amy shrugged a little helplessly, looking at Vicky who was shaking her head in wonder. "I'll wait for your courier. And I think we can proceed as planned as soon as you're ready."

"Simply call me when you have the time, and I'll make a hole in my schedule absent a major disaster. Hopefully we won't have one of those for a while yet."

Snickering, Amy replied, "From what I've heard, crime seems to have plummeted recently for reasons no one can work out. So perhaps things are looking up?"

"We do still live in Brockton Bay, so chaos is always an option," Director Piggot sighed, although by the sound of it she was nearly smiling. "I fear that will remain a constant despite our best efforts. Thank you for your time, Miss Dallon."

"My pleasure, Director."

"Good bye." The line went dead and Amy slowly lowered the phone from her ear, staring at it in a sort of mildly awestruck and highly confused manner, until Vicky waved her hand in front of her eyes.

"Huh? What?"

"Did I just hear right, Ames?" her sister exclaimed with a stunned look on her face. "Did Director Piggot seriously offer you half a million fucking dollars to heal her?"

Flopping back on her bed, which she'd been sitting on the edge of, Amy dropped the phone and put her hands over her face, massaging her eyes. "Apparently so, yeah," she said from under her hands, still completely befuddled.

"Holy shit."

"Yeah. Holy shit."

Lowering her hands she gazed at her sister, who looked back with a weird expression. "Mom's going to lose it entirely," she said after a moment, with a sudden dark grin. Vicky collapsed in laughter next to her, which she joined in with seconds later.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Taylor smiled to herself as she scuttled towards the middle of the city, where she wanted to look at some of the things her crabspiders were finding. Amy seemed nice and the money would help her, she thought.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"Let go you fucking bastard!" Janet screamed as she kicked back at the asshole who'd grabbed her as she was jogging through the park, jumping out of a bush unexpectedly. He'd knocked the can of mace she habitually carried in one hand away, then wrenched both arms behind her back and was hauling her back behind the bush he'd emerged from, which along with other undergrowth turned out to surround a small area of clear space, new grass starting to emerge through the leaf mulch. It was well lit by the sinking sun, the day having been one of the nicest so far this year which was why she'd decided to come this way during her jog, a decision she was bitterly regretting now.

"Hold still bitch," he grunted, grasping both her wrists in one hand and slamming the other one across her mouth. She bit him as hard as she could which resulted in a yowl of pain, then a stunning blow across the back of her head. Releasing her as she fell down, he swore violently for a moment. She was just able to roll onto her back and looked up at him, seeing a medium height and very scruffy white guy wearing an old overcoat, glaring down at her and sucking his hand where she'd drawn blood. His other hand went into his pocket and came out with a small pistol which he leveled at her, making her already fast heartbeat skyrocket as she felt the blood drain from her face.

"Get them clothes off," the guy snarled, gesturing with the gun. Feeling faint, she didn't move, until he gestured more forcefully, then she very slowly reached down. This was the nightmare she'd always feared coming true in front of her.

Then, just as she was resigning herself to a fate she couldn't escape, the man yelped in pain and grabbed at his crotch. "Agh!" he screamed, his face going a funny color. His other hand slapped at his rear and the gun he apparently forgot about discharged with a horribly loud bang, making Janet scramble away quickly. Luckily for both of them the round just went into the ground and the inadvertent firing of the pistol took him unawares, causing it to jump out of his hand. He apparently didn't even notice as he was too busy slapping himself and screaming in agony. Utterly befuddled Janet stared in complete confusion, until she looked down at his feet. After a moment she giggled almost hysterically.

He was standing directly on top of a fire ant mound, which had been hidden under the leafy loam and grass. Now it was boiling with the things, which apparently took exception to being stood on, and had decided vengeance was in order. She could see several of them on his shoes and more disappearing up under his ratty old jeans, and could take a very good guess as to where they'd picked to start biting.

Her assailant certainly wasn't happy about the situation, and was flailing at himself in a deranged manner, now in the process of divesting himself of his lower garments heedless of her staring in a mix of shock and amusement. As he was so preoccupied, he didn't notice her stand up, circle around him, and retrieve the pistol, which for some reason the fire ants were giving a wide berth. They seemed entirely uninterested in her and completely focused on giving him a hard time. Inspecting the gun for a moment she found the safety and flicked it on. Putting it in her pocket, she walked back to the idiot who was now both trying to get his jeans off and move away from the ant's nest, in the process failing at both. He fell over and was instantly swarmed by more ants than seemed plausible, although most of them weren't biting.

If they did she thought absently, lining up on his crotch, he'd probably be dead.

Then she kicked him in the goolies as hard as she could possibly manage. Having played field hockey in school this was really quite hard indeed.

He went stark white and threw up all over himself without any delay at all.

Leaving him retching on the ground, still covered in annoyed ants, Janet pulled out her phone as she left, dialing 911 and feeling that justice had been served.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Deep below the city, swimming underwater down a river which was nearly wide enough for a fishing trawler and full of all sorts of weird crap dating back possibly to before the city itself had been founded, Taylor grinned to herself. This was fun, and she was finding all manner of useful information to show her dad.

And applying arthropodic behavioral modification techniques to lots and lots of deserving individuals, while wondering how many times she might have to repeat the process with some of them. Certain people were really quite slow on the uptake…

But she had plenty of ways to continue the ABMT process, so she'd keep doing it and see how things worked out. There seemed to be a nearly limitless supply of people who needed an insect or two in their lives after all. And the supply of those she had was more than up to the job.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Watching the wasp that flew through the partly open window of her apartment, wandered around through the rooms for a while, seemed to look at her briefly as it hovered in mid air, then left the way it had come, Lisa shook her head. Her power had been telling her some very, very strange things for a while now, and some of the conclusions she'd come to were both terrifying and fascinating in equal quantities.

She certainly wasn't going to tell anyone else about them though. Both because she owed a certain… possibly a person, possibly not… a favor for helping her out of a sticky situation, and because there were only two possible outcomes of doing so. One was that she wasn't believed and everyone thought she was nuts. The other was that she was believed and everyone went entirely crazy. Neither situation seemed like it was desirable, so the simplest thing to do was just to keep quiet about the apparent fact that something she didn't understand seemed to be literally everywhere in the city at the same time.

Luckily it seemed friendly and helpful, and not keen on petty criminals. Which was another reason to get out of that lifestyle, although her pride insisted that she and her friends weren't petty criminals. They were professionals.

Just retired ones now. Unless some particularly deserving target happened to become apparent.

She suspected that should this turn out to be the case at some point, she could get backup that would make Alexandria pale and leave merely by asking for it, but she wasn't going to test that theory unless she really needed to. Some things were best left alone if only for the sake of her inner peace.

Smiling slightly, the blonde turned back to the other three, returning to the discussion of what the next step in her plan to get Brian to have custody of his sister, now she'd successfully maneuvered him into employment.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Studying the latest BBPD crime figure report, Armsmaster frowned thoughtfully. Apparently Calvert's interference had caused a larger impact in more places than any of them had expected, based on how much the overall crime rate seemed to be dropping since his death. The trend was steadily downwards, across multiple categories but particularly noticeably for violent street crime. A remarkable number of relatively minor but very irritating criminals such as muggers, burglars, snatch and grab types, and others in the same general classification were being picked up by the police, far more than historically seen. Hate crime attacks were being hit even harder, as the mostly Neo-Nazi gang members appeared to have run into some severe bad fortune.

It was rather peculiar, but somehow removing Calvert from play had produced an outsize effect across the board. They'd known he was behind a shocking percentage of chaos in the city, Armsmaster suspecting that a significant amount of that entirely accidentally and probably to his own detriment, but apparently they'd underestimated just how dramatic his finger in the pie had been. Since he'd gone, and his network was largely unraveled, it seemed that the BBPD was able to make far more headway in dealing with the non-Parahuman problems than anyone had thought likely. The Mayor was probably ecstatic about it, he mused.

Making some notes to try to design a program to predict the interrelatedness of random criminal activity and overall corruption levels, he closed the report and turned to his next task, servicing his third best halberd, which had been making an unnerving faint whistling sound the last time he'd picked it up. That was never good, and he very much wanted to prevent another dimensional incursion.

Those were always a massive pain to fill in the paperwork after, so he was going to make certain it didn't happen again.

Having Dragon laugh at him made it even worse, of course…

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Standing on the shore of the underground lake, which she'd come into from the other direction than the first time after a trip of several miles through a couple of tributaries of the river under the city she'd been following, which wound all over the place through caves full of stalactites hanging from the ceiling, Taylor looked around with enormous interest. She had her own glow turned up as brightly as it would go, illuminating a large area in a virulent green, and several of her glowspiders were poking around the area giving off a nice deep blue glow which added to the ambiance rather well in her opinion. Wishing she'd thought to pick up some good underwater action cameras, she made a note to do that as soon as possible, then panned her phone around, videoing the scene. Unfortunately it wasn't sufficiently waterproof to risk using in the lake itself, so she'd have to wait to get good footage there, but this was still going to make her dad pleased.

Putting the phone away in the waterproof case she'd brought, which went back into her backpack, she walked over to inspect the ancient stone construction sticking out into the incredibly clear water of the lake. It was so clear she could see the bottom from here in her self-generated light, although she could tell from the creatures down there the water was over a hundred feet deep.

Taylor prodded the stone jetty, made of the dark basalt native to the region which had been cut into large blocks and fitted together without any obvious mortar, with one leg. "Weird," she commented to her glowspiders, which congregated around her and watched. "Looks a lot older than the city is supposed to be, doesn't it?" Lowering herself a little she peered at one of the blocks closely. "Hardly any signs of tools at all. That's impressive. I wonder how old it really is?" There was no easy way to tell from what she could see.

The construction stuck out into the water about thirty feet, reaching perhaps six feet above the water level, which from the marks on the walls was fairly static as far as she could tell. It was maybe ten feet wide and emerged from the sand and mud on the shore at a shallow angle, with a raised ridge down either side one block wide. The middle section was made of vast slabs of the same rock which probably weighed several tons each. There were holes cut into the rock down each side, she guessed for tying ropes to, and indeed one right at the end had the remains of a very, very old hemp rope, covered in mold, sticking through it.

Curious, she dug down a little where the rocks disappeared into the sand, and found that it carried on underneath for a while. She could trace it further through all the tiny copepods in the sand. By the looks of it none of this had been there when the thing was built, further suggesting great age because she had a feeling that this much sand would take a very long time to deposit considering how slow the flow of the river tributary that came into the cavern off to one side was. It seemed to feed the lake, which she now knew was at least three miles long, and probably over a quarter of a mile wide at the widest. How no one above seemed to know about the place was a bit of a mystery to her, especially as that old boat on the other side had to have come from here a long time ago. Possibly the fragments of rope she was looking at were even related to it.

On the other hand as far as she'd been able to sense there were no connections to the ground above her anywhere near this place. The only access appeared to come either from the way she'd approached this time, which was certainly human-accessible if you knew about it and didn't mind a very long walk with a huge number of places to get comprehensively lost, from that tunnel over there which led further into the hills to the north and was something she was going to have to check out soon, or the far side where you'd need either good diving skills or a power like hers. There was at least one other exit from the lake right at the limit of her range, deep underwater, where it seemed to drain into an even deeper layer of caves, but from what she could make out from nearby creatures that was a quite small hole that a human couldn't get down. Or at least not with any home of coming back…

She'd need to get closer to find out more, but that was for another day. It would probably be a good idea to make some more crabspiders to scout out the whole lake and explore any offshoot passages too, at some point soon.

Staring thoughtfully at the lake, she finally shook her head and decided it would keep. She needed more ways to record this properly, for a start. A phone just wasn't good enough. Turning, she walked over to the entrance to the other tunnel, which went up slightly, then leveled off after a hundred feet or so and wiggled around until it went out of range of her ability to sense the various arthropods and nematodes inhabiting it. The environment down here was, as she'd read was common in caves, very consistent in temperature and humidity, and supported a surprisingly rich web of life. Nothing all that large, but there were a lot of small things, almost all of them falling into her power's domain without any effort at all.

Even the lake was warmer than she'd expected, and seemed to get slightly warmer still the deeper you went. Possibly some sort of volcanic left over heat? She knew from her school work that New England had a volcanic past, although that was a very long time ago and in theory it was now long defunct. Yet there was definitely a slight upwelling of warmer water deep under the lake, coming up through cracks in the rock…

Intriguing, certainly.

This was a lifetime of study, she thought, even for a whole team of scientists. All she could do was document what she discovered and perhaps one day tell someone else about it. But she was going to have fun exploring before that.

And there were possibilities to the underground areas she'd barely touched with her crabspiders… How many things could live in the lake, for example? Or in the rivers and streams, safe from the cold of winter above them, yet still able to easily access ground level?

Oh, yes. She had ideas.

So many ideas…

Making some more notes, she put everything away, took one last look at the ancient and mysterious stone construction, the dark blocks slippery with a sheen of condensation, then called her glowspiders to her and left for the long trip home. Overall it had been a very good day, she thought as she made rapid progress, navigating the maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Late that night, from a sound sleep, her eyes blinked open. Taylor stared at the ceiling as she thought over the idea that had come to her in her dreams, then she smiled widely. "Oooh. Yes, that has possibilities… If it works."

A glowspider typed a few paragraphs into her laptop as she rolled over and went back to sleep. It could wait until morning, though.

Chapter Text

"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 see. 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.

Chapter Text

"Jesus Christ, Taylor."

"Cool, isn't it?"

"It's absolutely horrifying. I can't help thinking, yet again, that your mother and I went very wrong somewhere with raising you when I look at what you keep doing."

"Thanks, Dad. I love you too."

Taylor grinned at her father who was sitting on a folding chair he'd brought with him, glasses in one hand and the other pinching the bridge of his nose while he wore a pained expression. She'd invited him along to her warehouse through the tunnel, which she'd had a crew of glowspiders tidying up for a few days, to see what she was up to. Apparently he found it slightly weirder in person than from her stories, judging by his expression.

"And that thing can actually eat rock?" he queried once he'd recovered slightly and put his glasses back on, leaning forward to examine her latest travesty of life as he put it.

"Oh, hell, yeah. It goes through rock like it's cardboard," she replied enthusiastically, looking proudly at the end result of three days careful work and quite a lot of wrong paths. This wasn't an exact science yet, although she was learning more each time she made something from scratch. Having been inspired by a shipworm, which was actually a type of specialized clam, she'd first experimented with modifying one of them but found it didn't quite work the way she wanted. As a result she'd more or less freestyled the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. On the fifth attempt she'd found a combination of nematodes, limpets, several snails, slightly oddly three different beetles, a millipede, and yet again a wolf spider, ending up with what was lying on the floor in front of them.

She found it odd how often adding wolf spider to something improved it…

Her power was basically just sitting back and shaking its non-existent head with a bemused expression by this point, although she got the distinct impression it was furiously making notes at the same time. And seemed strangely proud of her even as it was utterly baffled as to how she kept doing this. Even as it occasionally threw in ideas which made the whole process even less plausible, which was both useful and kind of funny to her.

"Did you have to make it so big?" he asked with a certain level of disquiet in his voice. "It would be bad enough if it was a few inches long. Twelve feet or so is definitely entering the eldritch zone. And all the little legs make it worse."

She looked at him, then back at her creation, which was moving slowly around on the floor with stubby antennae waving about curiously. The thing wasn't particularly bright, not even up to her crabspiders, but it was still much more aware than any normal nematode-ish thing would be naturally. It was also very docile and non-aggressive, something she'd gone to some effort to make certain of, as she didn't want one of these things going after anything but what she aimed it at. Just in case for some reason of them ended up out of her area of control, which was highly unlikely but not impossible. Absent her instructions it would just nibble on rock with a high enough silica content, enough to keep its very strange metabolism going, and more or less hibernate most of the time.

When she poked it into action, though…

"They do seem to end up a bit big on the whole," she admitted. "And one advantage of this guy being this size is he can chomp a lot of rock. The legs are so he can move around in his own tunnels and exert enough pressure to keep his jaws on the rock, and move from place to place if he comes out of the ground for any reason."

"And the ominous red glow from inside the jaws?" her dad queried. She made the rockworm turn its head towards them and open the three-part jaw wide, the top part lifting up and the two lower sections dropping and moving to the side. Deep down inside the throat there was indeed a deep crimson glow, which pulsated regularly.

She grinned. "For effect, obviously. If you're going to make a custom beastie, you want to make it look cool too. The red against all that dark blue-black looks really neat, right?"

"It looks like something you'd send a squadron of knights against and probably not get most of them back, Taylor," he sighed, causing her to laugh for a moment. "Your sense of aesthetics is… very you."

"Yeah, it's great."

"Not quite how I meant it, but whatever."

He shook his head a little then asked, "So how many of these are you going to make?"

"I did some tests to find out how fast he could remove rock, how much he'd dig out in a specific time, and came up with an estimate of how much there is to take out to free up the ship," she replied, going over to her table and the computer, the spiders on keyboard duty already tapping away as he followed her and peered at the screen. She'd found a cutaway drawing of a ship of the class of the one at the mouth of the bay and drawn in as accurately as she could from her investigations the various outcroppings that had penetrated the keel of the ship and kept it firmly in place all these years. One spider pointed at the screen with a leg as she kept talking, making him look at it with an eyebrow up then shrug and live with it. The leg tapped the screen.

"This one here is the biggest, and it's about ten cubic yards of rock," she explained. "This other one at the front is about four, and the two at the back are maybe three to four each. It's more than I initially guessed but not all that much. Basalt is strong stuff, I guess. It's already wearing quite a bit where the ship has been grinding on it but it looks like it would take years and years to get to the point it would finally snap if it's just left alone. I was thinking that if I get rid of these four, the ship will probably roll when the outgoing tide hits it, lift off the rest of the reef, and just fall over the edge."

"That's… definitely plausible, yes," he agreed after studying the sketch she'd made for a couple of minutes. "It's going to be an enormous mass to get moving, as the hull is full of water, but once it starts moving it's not going to want to stop for the same reason. The force the tide will exert on the hull is definitely up around hundreds of thousands of tons, far more than it actually weighs, considering how much surface area there is and how fast the current gets at the mouth of the bay."

"Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of water going in and out," she agreed. "I checked, and there's actually a depth difference inside and outside the bay when the tide changes, because the water can't all get out the remaining gap fast enough."

"I know, I've seen it first hand," he replied, glancing at her. "You can get something like six feet of difference between the inside and outside on an outgoing tide. That's why the currents are so damned dangerous. Even before the wreck was there the mouth of the bay was noted for fast and treacherous currents, in fact. Since then it's insanely lethal at the wrong tide state. Quite a few ships have been seriously damaged trying it, and as far as I know five people died in the process, until everyone finally realized you have to wait for slack water. To be honest I've always wondered how the damn thing managed to stay put all these years but no one has really managed to get inside and check properly. We always assumed it got hung up on the reef somehow but we couldn't prove it. You managed to do that at least."

"Well, with a little luck it won't be there for much longer. I think I need about two dozen of these guys, and it wouldn't take more than… maybe two or three days? About that to chew up all the rock holding the thing in place."

"Huh. That fast? Impressive." He looked back at the rockworm, then at the screen. "Although it you're wanting to make it look like a natural occurrence, you probably don't want to go after the rock inside the hull. It would be better to take out part of the reef itself under the keel. Make it appear as if the entire thing finally gave way. It would also increase the depth at the mouth of the bay which would be helpful, since it gets quite a lot shallower there than it is further inside."

Taylor thought over what he'd said and slowly nodded. It made sense and she hadn't really considered it, but clearly he was right. "That'll take a little longer, but not much," she replied after some more contemplation and a few mental calculations. "I checked and the rocks there are full of cracks. Lots of things living in them. It might actually be slightly easier to carve off a big piece from underneath if I find the right spot. Hmm… Yeah, that's definitely something I need to have a good look at." She was already doing it, hundreds of crabs and copepods swarming all over the reef and down the seaward side mapping out the flaws in the rock, all relayed by the local crabspider buried in the silt a couple of hundred yards inside the bay entrance well out of the way. "Lots of cracks, actually. I think I can do that. It'll remove a pretty big piece of the reef though. Half the size of the ship at least. Will that cause any problems?"

"The local environment will be a little changed but probably not enough to worry about," he responded, going back to retrieve the chair then bringing it over and sitting on it. "It's hardly unprecedented, that sort of underwater rock fall happens quite a lot, and all the life comes back very fast. I expect you can evacuate a lot of it first, as well?"

"Oh, yeah, I can make about seventy percent of the living things on the reef go somewhere else for a while, that part is simple," she assured him. "The fish will be fine, and there's nothing else there that's rare or endangered or anything."

"OK. That's one aspect. And if the collapse is on the seaward side, the displaced water will mostly go out to sea anyway, so there shouldn't be anything much in the way of localized tsunamis to worry about."

Taylor looked at him, then at the screen. "I didn't even think about that," she commented uneasily, worried.

"It's a risk, but the amount of rock is fairly small and it's not going to move all that far, so I don't think it's likely to do anything particularly dangerous," he assured her. "You're not dropping a mountain into the bay, you're only moving a few hundred cubic yards of rock a couple of hundred feet or so. But it's something to consider even so. Waves can catch you by surprise and they can be extremely dangerous. Water's very heavy, after all. But if you set things up so the next big storm we get is the visible trigger then dig out the last parts holding things together, it's likely that the force of the water will do most of the work, as you thought. And in those conditions no one will be nearby in a boat, so you won't have to worry about that, and there's no one living nearby on the coast around the mouth of the bay these days. Not since Leviathan did for Newfoundland. Everything got washed away then and no one bothered to rebuild."

"I think I can do that, yeah," she replied with a nod. "Once I start them digging, I'll see how fast it goes and can come up with a better timeline."

He smiled at her. "It's not an OSHA-approved mining method but I won't tell them if you don't."

"Should they be wearing high-viz PPE, do you think?" she queried with an impish smile, which made him chuckle.

"I'd almost pay money to see that, but considering how you're trying to keep it on the quiet, probably best not to make them too obvious. Oh, yes, you'll also want to think about how you hide the evidence of digging in the rocks. I assume those things leave tunnels? Like drill holes?"

"Yeah, but I thought about that. Once everything has collapsed, I'll have them chew up the obvious pieces with holes in and crush them a little. Most of what will be left should be random lumps, not nice neat holes."

He thought it over and nodded slightly. "That will probably do it. I doubt anyone is going to investigate all that much, once they work out what happened, and the currents will bury most of it under silt pretty quickly too. Especially considering how much will be stirred up by a few hundred thousand tons of rock landing on it. How deep is the mud down there?"

"At least fifty feet in most places," Taylor assured him, having checked. Her dad nodded.

"That'll do it, definitely. Most of the rock will more or less disappear under that. And there will be a huge ship sitting on top of it too. You'll just need to make certain that the reef itself isn't too obviously chewed on."

"I can do that. One other thing that I thought about though… Is there anything left on the ship that's worth salvaging first?"

He looked at her, then the screen, before scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Huh. Interesting point. I'm pretty sure that anything valuable in the cargo was salvaged when the ship went down, at least the stuff on deck. The hold had a few hundred containers in it, but from what I remember of the manifest we dug up at the time, nothing in there was particularly expensive. Certainly not worth the cost to recover, which would have been immense due to where the ship is. It was covered by insurance so the owners ultimately didn't care, and as far as I know the ship status is currently down as abandoned with no one wanting to claim ownership. Like most of the other wrecks out there, in fact. The owners either dumped them here because they didn't want them any more, or claimed on the insurance if they went down accidentally. Sometimes both, I'd guess."

He shrugged as she smiled a little. "Lot of fraud in that sort of thing. Technically it probably belongs legally to the city, but I know they don't want it either, because it's in the way, and if they do claim legal title, they're then liable for damages if some idiot kills himself poking around in it. So they pretend it's not there while wishing desperately it wasn't. The gangs got a lot of the valuable stuff which was accessible, mostly either to sell as scrap, or for Tinkers to fuck around with. But a hell of a lot of it would require specialist equipment and knowledge to recover so no one bothers. I guess if there was some way to drag it all onto shore and cut it up there's at least a few million bucks worth of scrap steel out there but it would end up costing at least as much to get it as you'd get from it, so again no point even trying. Unless you can figure out some eldritch method to do that?" He looked at her with an amused expression.

Taylor shrugged a little. "Sorry. Unless I can design some sort of… huge scary kaiju monster, I guess… I can't think of any way to actually bring it back to the docks. And I think if I did people might get a little confused and worried." She snickered at the thought of what the populace would think if some giant sea monster started salvaging wrecks, her dad also laughing at her suggestion.

"Probably best not to make your own Endbringer, yeah. People would definitely notice. That hornet is bad enough. And that thing." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the rockworm. "I can check the original manifest easily enough, we've got it somewhere at the office, but I'm pretty sure that anything left on board is low value and would be completely ruined by fifteen years or so of being underwater anyway. Containers are fairly water resistant but they're sure not waterproof enough to handle years of full immersion, so they'll all be completely filled with salt water. I guarantee that almost anything in them will be useless by now. Dropping it over the edge into deep water isn't going to be much of a loss, especially compared to the good it'll do to not have the blockage there."

"Great. I was a little worried I might be making something useful much harder to get at," she replied, nodding.

"You won't be. And if it turns out there is something in one container or other we might want, I'm sure you can get at it." He glanced at the rockworm which waved its head at him in a friendly manner, shuddered a little, and sighed. "Even if you have to make bizarre life to do that."

"Yeah, I like a challenge," Taylor giggled.

"So I've noticed…"

"Hey, you want to see how he does his thing?" she queried a moment later. He looked dubiously at the rockworm then her.

"In here?"

"I can test him out on the floor. It's about a yard of concrete, then under that is lots of gravel or something as far as I can tell, and under that is the bedrock. I was planning on using these guys to dig a private tunnel to the bay anyway, which makes it easier to get them into the water without anyone seeing anything, so I might as well start it now."

He shrugged and leaned back in the chair. "Seems reasonable, yes. OK, set worm to drill mode and execute operation, at your leisure."

"Aye, Aye, Captain," she replied, saluting smartly with a grin, as he smiled. "You heard him, Mr Drill! Hop to it!"

The worm extended all its multitude of short stubby legs and straightened out, then rippled over the floor at a speed high enough that her dad raised an eyebrow, until it stopped a few feet from the far wall, on the shore facing side of the warehouse. They were about a hundred and fifty yards from the water here, and roughly forty feet higher than the maximum ever high tide, so she needed to dig down at least eighty feet to be sure to be well under the lowest water level by a comfortable margin. Knowing there were no other tunnels or anything of that nature between them and the shore having spent some effort to thoroughly check weeks ago, she set the rockworm into action. It lifted its head and front section of body then curled into a sort of horizontal question mark shape, opened the tripartite jaws, and then started rotating its head back and forth so fast it was just a blur.

"Jesus," her dad breathed, staring. The worm jabbed its head at the concrete and there was a screeching sound like chalk on a chalkboard only much louder, making even Taylor wince, and her dad clap his hands over his ears. Sparks and dust flew up and the worm rapidly started boring into the concrete, sufficiently rapidly that within a minute the head was entirely under the surface. The noise had reduced dramatically and was more of a crunching rumble at this point, and as it drilled deeper, the sound went lower in pitch.

Under five minutes in only the tail was still visible. It was getting faster as more body got into contact with the surroundings allowing it to exert more pressure. A foot or so of the worm stuck out of the ground, and vanished downwards in another handful of seconds. The hole left behind was about eight inches in diameter and a thin trail of dust was streaming from it, while the floor was gently vibrating slightly underfoot. Taylor walked over, her dad getting up to accompany her, then bent down and examined the results of her efforts. Her dad knelt next to the hole and cautiously felt the edge. "Good grief, that's incredible," he muttered. "Like a diamond core drill was used on it."

"It more or less was," Taylor told him. "I figured out something using a heavily modified organic matrix with inorganic material in it, based on the limpet tongue idea like the exoskeleton is, but my power kind of ran with it and I think the inorganic material it ended up with might actually be diamond?" She shrugged as he looked at her with his eyebrows up. "It's stupidly hard, whatever it really is. The worm can actually bore through cast iron, for that matter. That's what I was testing it on to start with." She waved at one of the scrap castings she'd pulled out of her pile of debris, which had a shiny hole the same size as the one in the floor drilled clean through it. He looked at it with some amazement then back at the floor, before peering into the hole. "And he's really strong. He can dig like that for about twenty minutes before he needs to stop and digest the stuff he's dug out. I honestly don't quite know how it even works there because that's a lot more than his actual volume, but whatever's going on, it seems to ignore little things like the inside apparently being larger than the outside. Power bullshit I guess."

"You made a Tardis that's a worm," he stated flatly, staring at her as he stood.

Taylor shrugged slightly helplessly. "He can't travel through time as far as I know but he sure makes a good go at moving through space. At least space that's got rock in it."

"How?"

"Not a clue yet. And my power doesn't know either as far as I can figure out. It took both of us by surprise when it just sort of… happened. But it works." Taylor looked at the hole in the floor. She could still feel vibrations through the tips of her drider feet, but the audible noise was basically gone by now. The worm was currently about twenty feet down and slowly curving towards the shore, now drilling through bedrock, which was marginally easier than the old reinforced concrete of the floor since there were no steel bars in it. "I'm still tweaking the design, and I can probably increase the speed a bit, but that does seem to work. In something softer he can really move. I think in clay he'd go at about a running pace."

"I can't help feeling terrified even as I'm also feeling impressed as hell," her dad commented slightly uneasily. "Your work is getting weirder by the day."

"Yeah, it's a bit strange, but it's a lot of fun."

"I suppose as long as you're happy, that's the main thing," he replied after thinking for a few seconds, and resting a hand on her shoulder. "Just try not to bring about the end of life on Earth if you can? For me?"

"I'll see what I can do, Dad," she assured him earnestly with a giggle, making him look fondly at her. "Thanks for not getting all strange about this."

He sighed faintly. "I did suggest a hobby, so I can't complain too much. I have to admit I didn't expect…" Looking around, he shook his head, then returned his eyes to hers. "...this, but you aren't hurting anyone, I don't have to worry about you getting hurt again which is a massive load off my mind, and you're learning some useful skills. Bizarre skills, but useful."

She laughed as he smiled a little. "I still think you need to get more friends, and when they finally work out what the long term scholastic situation to be I hope you'll get into Arcadia, but things could be worse I suppose."

"I've got Lucy as a friend, so that's a start, and I guess Amy, Vicky, and Missy might also count now."

"You should go out and play with your friends more, then. Get some actual human companionship rather than those things." He nodded at the half-dozen glowspiders who were all watching them in a line on the table next to her computer. One of them waved a leg at him, which amused her as she hadn't done it. The creatures were definitely pretty smart, and seemed to like her dad a lot. He wasn't quite as enthused with them but he was coming around to the idea of a spider the size of a small cat wandering around the place…

"I'm planning on it soon, yeah," Taylor agreed as they went back to the computer table. The worm was just about ready to stop, now nearly forty two feet underground and drilling an angle downwards still. Once it broke out of the bottom of the bay she could get it into position on the reef in twenty or thirty minutes at most as it swam very well, assuming she'd designed that part right, and she'd move it there overnight. The rest would follow tomorrow once she'd made them and could get there much faster as they'd just use the preexisting tunnel to the water. "I might call Lucy and see if she wants to go to a movie or something."

"Invite her back for a meal sometime," he suggested. "I'd like to meet my daughter's fellow adventurer." She'd told him about their running joke and it had made him laugh quite a lot.

"I'll probably do that," Taylor nodded. Her dad looked at his watch, then picked up his jacket which he'd put over the back of the chair and shrugged it on.

"I'm going to have to get home, I have to make some calls and type up a few emails," he said, turning to her. "I assume you'll be making nature weep for a while yet?"

Giggling, she replied, "For a bit, but I won't be much longer. I've got some more experiments to run for a couple of ideas I had the other day and didn't get around to, but after that I'm going to relax for an hour or two, then finish the school assignments so I can drop them off on Monday, and have all tomorrow free to make more worms."

"Fine, I'll see you later then. Don't get too carried away." He looked around then up. "This building isn't big enough for a life-size Cthulhu."

Taylor started laughing as he grinned at her. "I could do a miniature Great Old One if you want."

"Please don't."

"Aww…"

They shared a look of amusement, then he turned towards the stairs down to the tunnel below, where she'd moved her obstructions to allow access. Following him, she had one of the glowspiders gallop over and precede him into the underground passage. All of them had level two links now, so she could use them as relays too, which had seemed like a sensible idea even though most of the time they were fairly close to her. "I'll send this guy with you so we can make sure no one sees you come out of the agri building," she said. He nodded agreement.

"Bye, dad. See you soon."

"Have fun, Taylor," he replied as he started down the stairs, the blue glow of her spider lighting the way nicely. Casting a glance back, he grinned again. "Although I suppose I see you everywhere these days…"

Which was pretty much true, she reflected as she waved, then went back to the experimental area, while still monitoring his progress with many, many senses. He was her only dad, and she wasn't going to let anything happen to him, after all.

"OK, guys, next experiment. You, you, and you, get on the computer, you, grab my notebook, and someone find me that can of Coke stat!"

Her spiders burst into action, gently guided by her as she smiled to herself, then got to work.

Yet again, there was Science! to be done.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Armsmaster frowned slightly at the readings from the seismometer array that was scattered around the bay, intended to give early warnings of explosions large enough to be a serious hazard, the very rare earthquakes this area got, and mostly as an early warning mechanism for a potential Behemoth attack. It was all part of the main system Dragon had spend some years setting up for Endbringer detection, adding to the old SOSUS array that helped track Leviathan, and the telescope network used to keep tabs on the Simurgh. He had access to the whole thing of course, as it had been a vital component of his Endbringer prediction software idea that he and his friend had spend so much time working on.

He still felt guilty about what happened to Eidolon, even though his various talks with Dragon had helped. She was correct, it wasn't his fault any more than it was anyone's other than the man himself, but he still couldn't quite dismiss the faint regret.

At first wondering if the system was detecting movement from the underground Endbringer, he quickly brought up the rest of the tracking system, and relaxed slightly when he saw that the hugely sensitive network wasn't showing anything other than the expected noise anywhere. Then he wondered if one of the villains had done something stupid, as the readings bore a slight resemblance to what you might get as aftershocks from a fairly substantial explosion. However there was no actual explosion signal to be found when he looked back through the logs, so he dismissed that idea too. Nor was it the right seismic signature for an earthquake or other fault activity, which wasn't surprising as geologically this entire area was very stable. The few faults that did exist were small, under little stress, and for the most part essentially dormant. Not to mention very deep.

Scrolling back through the data he studied it curiously. The traces were small, only just above background level, and hard to localize other than probably coming from somewhere reasonably close to the bay. The layers of silt on the floor of the bay itself, which was thick and absorbent in most places, buried deposits of alluvial gravel, sand, and so on, and the numerous water-filled cracks and channels he suspected were down there somewhere although no one really had any actual map data to show them, distorted and reflected the vibrations. The end result was that he could detect something but not where it was coming from other than 'not that far away.' Which didn't help much as it encompassed everything within about ten miles, an area far too large to investigate. Especially over something he couldn't identify to begin with. For all he knew it was a particularly heavy truck shaking one of the bridges on the interstate just outside the city limits.

Traffic seemed like the most plausible of any explanation he could immediately think of, in fact, once he eliminated all the things he was sure of. Perhaps a bridge was becoming unstable? It had happened before, the nation's infrastructure was known to be in a shocking state as no one wanted to pay the vast sums that would be needed just to repair all the faults people knew were there, never mind all the ones that undoubtedly existed but were being carefully ignored by somewhat nervous civil engineers. And occasionally this came home to roost and something big fell over. It was a major problem which was going to have to be addressed at some point in the future but each successive administration only ended up punting the problem down the road for the next one to deal with, while everything got steadily less reliable.

He considered it inefficient in the extreme but wasn't in a position to do anything about it.

As he watched the vibrations, whatever the source was, stopped. He studied the signal, which was barely above background noise level, the breakers crashing on the Atlantic shore a few miles away nearly swamping them, for a while, then shook his head. Making some notes, he put the matter to one side for now. He'd look at the data later and see if it reoccurred, and if it did, he'd try to work out where it was coming from. Adding a couple of lines to remind him to mention the possibility that there might be a problem with a bridge or overpass to the city maintenance department when he had a free moment, he closed the file and went back to working on the current project, soon becoming so involved in it he forgot to get lunch. Again.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Taylor sighed slightly. That was close. Armsmaster was more observant than she'd realized, and apparently there were a lot more sensors around the place than she'd been aware of. She'd have to make sure the worm drilled a little more slowly to reduce the vibrations. She guessed that once it got well into the bedrock the signals were traveling a lot further than while it was in the concrete and foundations of the warehouse. From what she'd seen through the eyes of a small moth sitting on the ceiling above his screen his instruments hadn't picked the rockworm up until it was around thirty feet down. It was almost at the point it would break through into the silt now, at which point it shouldn't leave much if any traces he could detect. And the reef was probably so vibrationally noisy from the currents and the ship shifting around on top of it that as long as she did the work while the tide was flowing, hopefully no one would be able to pick up the worms at work. She'd have to keep watch and see what happened.

When it went over the edge no one would miss it, of course, but by then it wouldn't matter. And if the forecast for the end of the week to come was even remotely accurate the storm they were going to get over the next weekend would be epic enough that no one would be able to investigate even if they wanted to. It was going to be a proper north Atlantic gale from the weather reports, one that people would remember for quite a while.

For more reasons than one, she hoped, smiling to herself. The aftermath should make a lot of people very happy, unlike what sometimes happened during a big storm.

Satisfied that she had that minor problem under control, she went back to what she was working on, not that she'd really stopped. Being able to split her attention basically an infinite, or at least extremely large, number of ways at the same time was a fantastically useful part of her powers and one she was very pleased with.

And shortly she had figured out something she'd wondered about for a while now, but hadn't yet tested. Rather to her surprise it worked perfectly and left open an entire new line of interesting ideas she could see all sorts of uses for…

Her power seemed to find it rather startling too, but was quickly highly curious about the results.

The two of them had a lot of fun before she finally headed home, content that the day had gone well so far and hopeful that the next week or so would bear useful fruit.

Which was the best sort, of course.

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