She knew this world operated a little differently to Runeterra, but if space itself operated differently, then how the hell did her Teleportation spells work flawlessly?
Was it because this distortion was specifically made by a power, created by so called Entities that Cauldron had informed her of through simple proxy? It was possible, she supposed…
The wheezing and babbling died down behind her, and she tore her eyes away, putting her curiosity about the bizarre phenomena aside, to meet the haunted, tearful eyes of the woman.
The girl was limp, but the woman seemed responsive.
"T-t-thank you-" The woman squeaked out in a high pitched, choked sob, then broke down into wailing sobs, hugging her unresponsive child, curling around her with all her limbs and rocking back and forth in place.
She didn't know what to say or do in response to that, so she simply sat next to them, cross-legged, staring at the main road that led into the town, waiting for her minion to arrive with all the general creature comforts his car had been able to load.
It might not be much, but a sip of juice for the girl and a blanket to cover the mother might make this all the least, tiniest bit less horrid.
What a stupid thought.
Decency still demanded it, of course.
So for now, she simply sat with them, waiting for her summoner spells to come back, trying to figure out how this would all end.
"What year did this happen?" She asked, eventually, after many minutes of shuddering silence.
"N-nineteen ninety two." The woman croaked in a broken whisper, still rocking back and forth, shaking like a leaf.
Jesus fucking christ. Nineteen years of torment.
The tiny child beside her was technically older than Taylor, or at least her main body. Almost twice as old if she was around ten.
She sighed, at least somewhat pleased that this was the end of their torment. It was hard to be upbeat and happy about saving people when you knew full well they'd already gone through hell and back far before you arrived, and that the only road forward was a tough road of recovery.
"W-what y-year is it?" The woman asked, fearful.
"Twenty eleven." She gently provided in Shen's soothing timbre.
Silence, then a broken 'ha'.
"I t-thought… I thought we were in- in the-there for- for eighty years, maybe ninety." The woman said, her voice peaking and shifting on the border of mania, tribbling with laughter which quickly bubbled over into a disturbing, pained, 'heeahahee' sort of noise of pure hysteria, like the sobbing cackle of a hyena.
She turned to the woman, hopefully to try and somehow calm her.
The woman's eyes fluttered before she slumped over her child, suddenly going silent and limp.
Did she just pass out?
She jumped up and got closer, something about how sudden that was firing off alarms in her head.
Pulling the woman's shoulder back, she came face to face with the girl's catatonic stare, and quickly peeled the girl out of the woman's arms to put her down a couple feet away. Then she turned to the mother, and pulled her head up, pulling an eyelid up.
Her eyes were jerking and moving like she was in deep sleep, or having some kind of episode.
She hesitated, unsure of what to do.
The option was taken out of her hands when the woman's other eye snapped open, and they focused on her.
An overwhelming sense of calm flooded her senses, like nothing was wrong with the world and nothing would be wrong with the world no matter what happened.
She slowly blinked at the woman and her serene eyes.
Oh this… oh wow. This felt nice.
It felt wonderful.
Just… peace. There was nothing to be worried about, nothing affected anything, everything was just alright.
She breathed easier than she had in aeons, a faint smile twitching its way onto her lips.
"Mom?" The girl behind her croaked, and the woman twisted to look past her, opening her arms.
Taylor moved to the side, a tiny, background note of confusion bubbling in her head.
Nice as this was… what caused her to feel so calm? She wanted more of it. Forever.
As the duo reunited, she realized that they were also, all of a sudden, far too calm for the situation, and the background note of confusion frothed, a sticky thing in her head that prodded the calm of her mind.
At the very least, being overwhelmingly calm allowed her to think things logically, so she slowly analysed the situation, what she knew about this, and what she knew about herself, and came to a simple, albeit unexpected conclusion.
The woman just Triggered with a Master power.
And she was affected almost instantly.
Usually, she had the self-discipline to switch Legends the moment she noticed her emotions shifting in unexpected ways, but that was when she was on high alarm. She hadn't been expecting anything like that here .
That would be a problem, in the future.
With a low hum, she turned to the woman, ready to switch Legends, no matter how much she wanted to sink into this feeling, this endless warm blanket in a world locked in a blizzard.
"Ma'am." She forced out, her very soul protesting.
She wanted to stay like this. It was the calm and peace of death, of feeling one's soul drift away from one's body, but instead of it being a microinstant, a single moment in time when worldly concerns faded away entirely, gone in the void and only in her memories, it was just… there. Constant.
The peace of the afterlife, with the stimulus of life.
She'd only ever felt so free when she was dying. This was heaven.
But she had… she had guidelines in her mind. Procedures to follow.
No matter how much she liked this, she had duties to attend to.
The stranger didn't turn her head.
"Yes?" Eventually the woman replied, hugging her child.
She took a deep breath, slow and calm, pleasant.
"You have parahuman powers now. You just got them, and used them on me." She said, voice monotone.
A slight pause, then a slow nod as she brushed her daughter's hair, inspecting her fingertips.
"I see." The woman hummed, almost whimsically.
"Could… could you turn this off? Please. It should come naturally. I… need to… do things." She noted slowly, each word feeling ten times harder to speak than the last.
Don't take this away from me. I deserve to rest. It's been so long. Didn't you want to die by the tenth Legend? Didn't you beg for it all to stop by the fifteenth? What happened to that? Don't you remember begging to die by the twentieth? This is everything you wanted, centuries ago, a month ago. It's here. You can relax, rest.
Her mind swam, a thick, frothy swamp.
Her will wavered as her thoughts wandered, self-directed blame, frustrations, a thousand versions of herself telling her to stop.
She could not. She had duties.
But she wanted to rest. She wanted to put down her swords and spears, her scrolls and spells, toss them aside and lay down in the river's gentle stream. She wanted to let herself be carried away in its soothing waters, to let her eyes drift shut, so desperately it almost hurt.
She was tired of it all, in a soul-deep way that no mind nor body could comprehend, not even her own. It was sheer grit that kept her going, kept her willing to drag herself through the burning coals.
You can just switch Legends, you know. You don't need her to drop the effect. You know that. But you can also just rest, another thought whispered, and she felt the world fade, her thoughts dragging her down a familiar pit.
She had- she had a mission here. She had a world to save. And she had to do it. She had to. It was… she had to do it.
Maybe if she saved this place, then just maybe the guilt of failing to save Runeterra, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, through a hundred sets of eyes, would all just finally leave that dark, compressed little crack in her mind where she'd shoved the emotion into, ignored but not forgotten, never, and vanish, set her free.
She had failed one world. She couldn't bear to fail another.
It was the only way she could hope to redeem herself. To wash away the guilt, the marrow-deep shame of surviving when nobody else did, when so many better, more worthy people than her did not.
She had a mission to tend to.
She had to swap. Now.
But she didn't want to.
What's stopping you from letting go? Lisa won't be that upset. She's only known you for a month. Can you even cry for her if she dies? You can't say for sure, can you? You stopped crying after Katarina died. You stopped withering after Yasuo. This is a shallow, short-lived friendship. You've lost much worse. Lovers, children. Your world, the people you breathed for. This is nothing. You can just let go. She'll be fine. Besides, this world doesn't matter, does it? Just another space rock, one of incomprehensibly many. A single ant of countless many, burning under the magnifying glass.
You can rest, the little whisper in her thoughts spoke, like the call of a siren.
She took a deep, stuttering breath, hands quivering, eyes clenched shut.
Her will was wavering, slipping and flipping, a leaf in the wind.
The woman took her time to slowly nod.
Before her mind could catch up to the motion and what it meant, it happened.
Quickly, the calm rushed out of her like a flood, and her eyes snapped open as she stiffened, standing in place, staring in horrified disbelief.
After a quick, deep breath, she cleared her throat, hands shaking.
The desert stretching on before her turned into a sterile, padded floor, and at her side, a beeping intercom, a straightjacket chafing at her elbows, the wrong wrong wrong dimensions of an armoured door-
She blinked, and it was gone, her heart lodged in her throat as she forced herself to gulp.
She was hyperventilating.
Immediately slipping into meditative breathing, she closed her eyes again, focusing on what mattered, what she knew.
She had a job to do, even if that brief stint of Mastering had brought forth a tsunami of forcibly suppressed ideas and memories and emotions that she'd managed to bury for a reason.
Months, MONTHS of work, just erased, crushed-
Her anger was rising.
She had to focus.
Her emotions didn't matter right now. Gray Boy victims. Focus on that.
With a long, agitated breath, she opened her eyes to the same scene as before.
Right… the operation. She could… she could shove those thoughts into their grave later, the shovel was still there.
Right now she had to re-focus.
What were the logistical implications of this Trigger event?
Well, they got more complicated, naturally, because something she hadn't considered just came up.
How many of the people trapped in the bubbles were capable of triggering? There had to be something like a hundred people spread throughout this small town. Statistically, the chance was very low, but there was bound to be another one or two of them.
With the woman artificially calming herself and her daughter, it became rather easy to guide them to the next sphere and sit them somewhere far away so she could repeat her feat, so she simply did that, and repeated her earlier actions with the second bubble. Approach, position, then Flash in.
There were three people in the second bubble. One man who seemed to be around fifty, a chubby young girl, and a late teen, all in varying states of stabbed or shot nearly to death.
The least injured was the teen, from what she could tell at a glance.
She Flashed in, immediately Healed the old man and the girl, and threw them out with a rough throw, assisted by runic body fortification, a blood-red aura exuding from her. Another quick reach, and the boy rolled to a stop next to the… now unconscious duo.
He promptly followed them in unconsciousness.
That was roughly when she realized she was either extremely unlucky, or something weird was going on, because it was rather obvious what was going on here. They all just triggered.
She was only in disbelief for a second before the lanky teen burst into flames, and she had to accept the facts and back away to not get singed, dragging the other two with her, away from the teenage pyre.
This also raised another problem.
If all of them triggered at the same time, from the same thing… weren't they Cluster Triggers? Lisa had explained something about those, but her memory was rather fuzzy. The main thing she remembered which had stood out to her was that people involved in such Triggers usually had something like a bunch of weak, unrelated powers, and seemed to have some likelihood of either wanting to kill each other, or being obsessed with each other. She wasn't even sure about the last part, but Lisa had mentioned something about a 'kiss or kill phenomenon'.
She snuck a glance to the mother and her child, a sick possibility worming its way into her head.
She hoped the child did not have powers, because if she did… there was going to be a very strange, very vile problem for the duo.
With a shake of her head, she focused on the main, and closest problem.
For some reason, somehow, the rate of Parahuman triggers coming out of Gray Boy's bubbles was ridiculously high.
Four out of five people? That couldn't be a coincidence. Statistically, having the brain tumour required to be a parahuman was very low. This was physically not possible, but it was in front of her all the same, uncaring to the conventions of parahuman knowledge.
Or maybe the corona pollentia, or whatever it was called, somehow formed during their stint in the bubbles? Maybe it wasn't a completely pure time loop, or at least a pure molecule loop?
The only one who might not have powers was the little girl, regardless.
The wrist her hand was holding was starting to feel… weirdly alive, the skin shuffling against her palm like a wriggling worm, and she cringed, letting the girl's arm go.
Damn it, this was supposed to be simple.
A thought rose as the flaming boy stirred.
There was a woman behind her that was… suspiciously perfectly suited to help her in her mission. A calming Master power, that she stumbled onto right as she entered a mission where she was in way over her head due to unexpected multi-triggers?
It was genuinely just far too convenient, too… simple.
Immediately, her mind went to the Simurgh. There were a million butterfly flaps that could have led to this, somehow. For what purpose? How was she connected? What plot and result?
And just like that, any chance of her using the very obvious Simurgh plant fizzled out to suspicious embers, replaced by a tight feeling in her chest, and the familiar rattle of paranoia.
The teenager covered in flames woke up a mere two seconds later, and as he jerked awake with a gasp, she readied herself for the worst.
Instead of screaming, thankfully, he let out a stuttering, high pitched squeal of glee in the back of his throat, and immediately took two fistfuls of dust and dirt in his hands, immediately rubbing them on his face, whole body quivering with hysterical giggles as he palmed at the floor, looked around, patted everything down as if he physically could barely believe it was real.
"Ha-aha heheha ha it's- I'm free, I'm FREE! I'M FREE!" He shouted, laughing, scrambling upright and turning to her with wide, manic eyes, an ear to ear grin on his face.
Not the reaction she expected, honestly.
His arms extended as if for a hug as he quickly stepped forward, still looking at her like she was capital G, God.
She stepped back, raising an open palm in front of her, and after a moment of panting in excitement, he took the memo and paused, glancing down at his hands.
"Heaaha, p-powers, holy FUCK I HAVE POWERS!! I'M FUCKING FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" He screamed with guttural glee towards the sky, flexing his entire body until he shook like a leaf, the fire flaring out around him like a pyre as he broke down into ecstatic giggles, his clothes fraying into ashes and scattering in the wind.
Unfortunate Manton limit, for him.
She stared at him, eyeing the stirring Parahumans to her sides.
This… this would be a lot more difficult and complicated than she anticipated.
"I CAN FEEL! I CAN FEEL STUFF! I CAN MOVE!" The boy screamed, jumping up and down, waving his arms around.
…
Maybe she should go grab one of Heartbreaker's clones to force people to be calm, at least until she could get the PRT here.
Something told her that immediately violating people's minds after two decades of torment might be in that range of 'morally questionable', however.
… She should probably call Lisa. She just didn't quite trust her moral judgements at the moment.
The chubby teenage girl to her right slowly shifted, stumbling upright, ignoring her completely to stare at the boy.
Without explanation or reasoning, the girl lunged forward with a wordless sound of pure rage, something between a scream and a battlecry.
Taylor switched to Evelynn, shapeshifted into Shen's appearance, and used her feelers, kept invisible, to keep the girl away from the still-shellshocked, flaming teen, wrapping them around her or just physically pushing her back, as gently as she could manage.
She didn't want to flatten what… looked like a fourteen year old?
"YOU FUCKER! I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU!" The girl screeched, damn near frothing at the mouth, bucking in her grip, flailing at the invisible things pulling her back, managing to hit them a couple times.
Taylor quickly felt a headache coming on, as her tentacle suddenly started glowing an eye-searing, neon pink, forcing her to dissipate it then reform it to get rid of whatever effect that was.
The girl's flailing slaps against her tentacle actually started to… kinda hurt. Just a little.
Minor brute power that built up over time? Maybe?
Cluster Triggers were going to be such a pain.
Hopefully, not her pain. She'd be handing this off to the PRT soon.
"Heeyeyeyeey whoah whoah whoah, the fuahahack did I do?!" The boy defended himself, confused, but still grinning and laughing with every word, eyes wide.
The older man to her left stirred, and his emotions flooded the area, the bittersweet taste of overwhelming relief washing over her tongue like a tide as he curled into a ball, ignoring all of them to hug himself, quietly euphoric, taking a moment to just breathe and silently weep in relief.
The girl's strikes were starting to subtly ache at this point, and her screaming continued as the boy stared at her, disturbingly happy and unperturbed.
Damn it.
She could use the super duper obvious Simurgh plant to calm the girl down…
Or abuse the arguably best 'legend' at her disposal.
She grabbed the girl firmly, jerked her close enough for their eyes to meet, and the moment they did, she pushed a simple, gentle fuzz into her mind, a flare of gold.
The girl quickly went limp with a strange mumble, eyes glazed over, the quiet so sudden it almost gave her ears whiplash.
She had no idea how exactly Cluster Triggers worked, if this was that whole 'kiss or kill' thing that Lisa had offhandedly mentioned or if there was some background between these two.
Regardless, this was going to be much harder than anticipated.
She turned to the flummoxed teen.
"Can I trust you to remain relatively calm?" She asked, calmly but firmly.
He giggled, then spread his arms out to the sky, his fire flaring again.
"I'M FREE, MAN! WHAT DO YOU MEA-A-A-AAAAN?!" He shouted, his voice breaking as he pounded on his chest like a gorilla, before letting out a loud 'whooooo' sound that she was sure half the desert heard.
There might be some kind of sound-power involved here, because ow. That was loud.
He let out a victory roar mixed with a belly laugh, then turned his eyes back to her, fists at the side of his head, gesticulating widely with enthusiasm. "THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY FUCKING LIFE, MAN! FUCK I WANNA HUG YOU! YOU'RE A FUCKING CHAMP! I WANNA FUCK YOU!" He shouted, grinning as he pointed at her with all the severity of a drill instructor, bouncing on his feet, pretty much. "NOT IN A GAY WAY!" He clarified, then burst out into laughter, wiping at his eyes and spinning, pointing two middle fingers at the sky. "FUCK YOU, GOD, I MADE IT, FUCK YOUUUUUUUUU!"
…
Well… at least he wasn't suicidal?
It took the better part of twenty minutes for the teen to calm down enough to let down on his whoops and hollers, and reality to start kicking in, after which, she was subjected to a questionnaire, a literal tide of questions from the teen, ranging from the year, the date, the world's reaction, what happened to that 'gray little faggot', which was a comment which almost gave her mental whiplash until she remembered that he was basically just taken out of a time bubble twenty years in the past, and he likely did not know what was socially acceptable anymore.
She just left that alone, frankly. Not her job.
Then he started rambling to her about himself, his most likely now-dead dog, how his name was Jake and he hated it because it was so 'default', and various other things, pouring his heart out at her feet, scrambling to show his gratitude in any way he could.
His questions looped around to her, and she answered… some of them. Who she was, who she was with.
He was a little bummed out that she wasn't a hero but a 'rogue' with some organization or another, but didn't show it.
Additionally, he very pointedly did not ask about his family, his face entering a strange, grinning rictus when she asked if he was curious, to which no reply came.
He was, understandably, rather… deranged, at least right now. Scrambling from topic to topic completely unrelated, overexcited, while a twisting mix of emotions exuded from him like the world's most incongruent, uncomfortable cocktail.
He had way too much energy and was far too uncaring of his still-open injuries. Likely a small Brute package in the mix?
He almost reminded her of Jinx, just… somehow less manic, and infinitely less destructive.
As she got ready for the next bubble, she dragged them all along, and he figured out how to turn off the fire, for the most part.
The unnamed old man dragged the girl along with them, the teen gently prodded the mother and the girl, and slowly, they formed a caterpillar of victims that sure enough, reached the third bubble.
A single resident, this time. A middle aged mechanic from what she could tell, with a knife sticking out of his back, trying to crawl away on an endless loop.
She debated handling all of this alone, but eventually put the idea aside. It was tempting to 'hog the glory to herself', as it were, but at the end of the day it would be by far and large, far better for the PRT to handle the majority of this.
She simply did not have the infrastructure to move or contain or assist hundreds of capes, nor the support necessary to keep them from turning into a tide of mentally ruined problems for society. The PRT… arguably did, and it could do so in a way that let them live their own lives and try to connect back to their families and the like. And the PRT might even have a shred of dignity and accept that her being willing to hand over a tremendous amount of capes to them means she might not be a genocidal warlord.
Additionally… having hundreds of hero-hopefuls with a tremendous, unrepayable debt of gratitude to Nexus, nestled into the PRT and the public eye? She could swing the generations of capes around to view Nexus differently.
It would be one thing to know of Nexus's deeds, it would be another to know your father and very existence is only present because a Nexus cape released them from some power-prison a couple decades back.
She might extend an invite to some, to just join, people like Jake, who seemed to feel painfully indebted to her and seemed strangely disconnected from family or… reality, really, but largely, she'd let the PRT take them.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of her minion's car rumbling down the street, and she glanced at it for a moment before continuing on with her small, shuffling group, Jake's chatter still filling her ears.
Her minion's sedan warily came to a halt fifty feet away within moments, and with a quick, muttered 'excuse me' to Jake's ramblings, she jogged her way towards him as he fiddled with levers and glared suspiciously at the group through his windshield.
She ducked down into the window.
"Okay, first of all. Change of plans. I'll need you to actively be on medic duty. I can't afford to heal all of them to an acceptable level. Any excess bleeding, hurried stitches, you need to focus on keeping everyone functional. Secondly, I need you to be ready to call the local PRT main department once we're done gathering them, we'll be needing them. How many victims were recorded here, exactly?" She asked, realising she hadn't even thought to ask.
"Eighty seven from Gray Boy." The man replied.
More than she expected, more than she'd like.
"Alright. Take some pictures while everything is… handleable."
He blinked at her before hurriedly nodding, and swinging his door open to hurry over to his trunk.
She'd like to say it was more dramatic, more heroic, full of teary hugs and exclamations of gratitude and glitter and rainbows around her as she posed against the sunset, a scene fit for heroics.
But it just wasn't.
Well, to be fair, there was a decent bit of that as some people tumbled out of gaining their powers and lunged at her, sobbing in gratitude and breaking down from sheer relief, which…
Frankly, it felt amazing.
Like someone was putting cracks on the frost coating her heart and just peeling it away one piece at a time.
It turned the people from a faceless crowd of victims to real, tangible people, it made the entire rescue feel more real. She was making the world a better place, even if just by a little.
Of course, she still mostly focused on keeping everyone at an arm's length and calm, because an amped up crowd could very quickly get out of control and she was quickly amassing a giant following of arguably volatile capes that she had no real control over aside from hoping they followed along or mind-blasting them into a fugue for an hour or two.
After the first demonstration of doing that, there were a lot of wary looks, so she had to give a whole explanation of how it worked and how it was only temporary to assuage any mob forming to kill the Master who had just saved them.
Very unlikely, but still possible.
And so, the third bubble became the third, and fourth, and fifth, and tenth, so on and so forth, and surprisingly, nothing too explosive happened.
She had to shove fuzz into a couple people's minds, because one Mover cape woke up and decided to try and sprint off into the desert without a second word, which would very likely kill him from simple dehydration, and there were a few other instances of people seemingly hating one another for no real reason which she had to quell, but… aside from that?
Surprisingly orderly. Most people just collapsed in relief or were quietly curling up into traumatized balls on the floor.
She could guess a mix of wariness, relief, and gratitude, as well as all of them knowing she had a strange orb that could just take away their powers for the most part, was what kept things the way they were. Only a couple people were momentary problems. The background paranoia of the Simurgh's involvement never left, but the first woman she rescued seemed unbothered by them all, and quietly followed after a while, so she mostly put it aside.
Things progressed with… a lot of stress, but little violence.
There was a tremendous amount of screaming, whether happy or maddened or angry or pained, a lot of people who were borderline catatonic, but at one point, the energy of the crowd settled into a dim, hushed cluster of people that were simply ecstatic to no longer live in perpetual agony.
Something like small sub-groups even started to form, which she idly noted, people with the same kind of outlook grouping together. Quiet ones huddled together at the edge, the happy, grateful people hung close to her, talking to each other and her about what they wanted to do now that they were free, talking about their loved ones, while the more catatonic people had to be dragged around by herself and the more patient, empathetic folk around.
A benefit of this being a relatively small town was that almost everyone knew each other to some extent or another, and they were from a… different age, really. A more trusting time.
So tensions just… didn't get high enough for anything serious to happen.
The outliers mostly seemed to modulate themselves to the crowd as well, calming down.
Thankfully, the prevalent emotion of the crowd was a wary, bittersweet relief.
They followed her like the sheep of a shepherd without much prompting from her, which was a slight plus. One person pushing another, so on and so forth.
Minimal victim-wrangling on her end.
She was running her soldier absolutely ragged with him giving out from the supplies they'd brought and trying to stitch up whatever Heal couldn't be wasted on, but he didn't complain, thankfully, dutifully doing emergency aid to keep people functional and calm until the authorities got here, interspersed with hurried pictures of the whole affair while trudging along with the group in his car, stopping with them to pull out minor creature comforts for whatever new person they acquired.
She disliked the pictures, honestly, especially since at some point he suggested blatantly showing Nexus's emblem just to make it clear they were the ones who did this which felt… weirdly staged to her. But she complied all the same, using Evelynn to shapeshift into Shen and add the emblem on her back in bright red.
To her great misfortune, the trend of everyone she pulled out of the bubbles immediately experiencing a Trigger event continued, and she had to keep the group of rescues and about-to-be-rescues rather far away from each other as a result, after someone had Triggered close enough to knock out like ten different people, one of whom cracked their head open from collapsing.
She had completely forgotten that Trigger events tended to knock surrounding parahumans out, in her defence, and these people hardly knew that, of course.
It was dreadfully slow compared to how she had envisioned it, but at the very least, it was very organised, which was not her expectation at all considering how hurried this plan had been and the complications that followed.
The plan had literally just been her, sending out five people on a roadtrip to find her Gray Boy sites on a hasty, unplanned whim, done a couple weeks ago. It should have been far more chaotic.
Her opinion of her personal luck continued to be conflicted, thus.
She finished with the first site in a shockingly slow, seven entire hours.
Slow and steady at least ensured that aside from mountains of awkward hugs and snot in her clothes, and a decent chunk of forcing some people to relax with Evelynn's demon powers, there were no major fights or brawls that broke out, which would have been disastrous.
The pictures were taken, the people were rounded up, and all in all, it was one PM by the time she and her minion could pause, breathe a sigh or relief, and take a momentary breather, everything and everyone organised… to some extent.
They started this at six in the morning.
At this pace, she could only likely be able to get one, maybe two other locations of Gray Boy's done before going back to Nexus to check in on things.
Next run, she'd have this far more organised, and more well-resourced.
Jake was still glued to her side like a leech, from start to finish, his ramblings ranging from incredibly heavy and personal to idle observations of his time in the bubbles. Like how he had spent a while watching a lizard settle on the brick walls of his pillar long enough for him to get attached to it, long enough for it to die of old age, and then slowly erode into dust before his eyes, the weather patterns he could see on the edge of his vision, and other such meaningless rants.
She also spent that breather getting to know the woman who she first rescued.
Her name was Margot Tanner. An appropriately… midwestern name? She wasn't too familiar with this culture, truth be told. The girl's name was Alice Tanner.
Getting anything more out of her felt like pulling teeth, since overwhelming calm took out any kind of alarm or urgency from anything, including things like replying to questions. Pushing her didn't seem to impact how long she'd stare at nothing before eventually getting to replying to her.
Since Margot's Master power was unfortunately still a rather large question mark, she had her guard up around the woman, just in case, but nothing really happened, and eventually, she was drawn to the terse, frustrated voice of her minion as he spoke into his phone.
She approached, brow raised, sidestepping dozens of people strewn about the road they'd ended up on, everyone either staring at the sky, picking at the crusted blood on their clothes, or holding staring contests while gently toying with their powers.
From a simple headcount and a few questions that took ages to get answers to, she had seventy three capes here. Give or take a couple who were too catatonic to even reply or… do anything.
She'd question how the hell Gray Boy's power worked later, because that was statistically impossible.
For now, she approached her minion as he snapped at the phone.
"Connect me to someone who will, then! I have the coordinates, this isn't a damn joke."
Ah. She understood the issue.
Without explanation nor a request, she ripped his phone out of his hand, and switched to Jarvan.
If nothing else, the voice alone would convince someone that they were indeed talking to a cape instead of some gruff old man with schizophrenia.
"Hello?" She asked, projecting her voice into a rumbling boom.
"I- hello? Who am I talking to?" The woman on the other end asked, confused, and Taylor idly wondered why every single call taker in the PRT was a woman.
It was just odd. Maybe it was more soothing to hear a feminine voice when panicking?
Yeah that made sense.
She pushed the thought aside.
"Executioner, designated by the PRT about two weeks ago." She boomed in an arrogant rumble. "Now, can you take this seriously for a moment, or should I drop by for a personal visit?" She drawled menacingly. "We have civilians in need here." She added, unamused.
"No sir! No sir. Give me one moment, I'll connect you to the director!" The woman hurriedly rushed out, and she blinked in surprise as the call started a strange beeping rhythm.
For a secretary, she believed her with shocking swiftness… Wait, a secretary could connect straight to the Director? Just like that?
Arizona certainly did things differently to what she was used to in Brockton.
It took two entire minutes for the beeping to be cut off by a click.
"Hello?" A male voice asked, rushed.
"Greetings. Local regional Director, I assume?" She asked, keeping her voice in its signature timber.
"Yes, you are right. Elijah Evans. And you are…?" He asked, cautious but confused.
Did the woman not tell him anything?
"Executioner, here in your fine state on behalf of Nexus." She introduced herself, and her ears caught the faintest sound of a sharp inhale.
"Ah. And what does Nexus want to talk about, exactly?" He asked, tense, but polite.
"It's rather complicated." She started, and loudly cracked her jaw. "We are currently attempting to extract as many individuals as possible from Gray Boy's time loops. Our efforts have been a success, and thus, we'd be more than happy to let you take care of the rest, however a problem has arisen, mostly for you. Almost everyone we pulled out, has immediately triggered. We have roughly seventy capes here, just freed after almost two decades, many of them Cluster Triggers, and we have many people we've had to temporarily calm down using a Mastering power that runs on a timer. Which means you should really get over here as fast as you can. One of our underlings can rattle off the coordinates for you."
A long, long silence.
"I'm not going to be able to mobilize my entire roster of resources to you without the tiniest shred of evidence, even if I wanted to, I'm afraid. Do you have any proof?" Evans asked.
"We'll send you pictures if you have any kind of device or method that can receive them."
"That will do." Evans replied, evenly. A deep, deep breath, and an equally long, slow sigh followed. "What is the number of individuals you claim to have freed?" He slowly asked.
"Eighty six. I believe roughly seventy plus some change have powers. Don't ask me how that's possible, I am not a researcher." She shut down that line of dialogue before it could begin, and the Director let out a firm grunt, keys clacking loudly on his end.
"General overview of their powers?" He asked, all business, determined.
Good, that's exactly what she liked to hear.
"No real clue. Almost half of these people are certainly some kind of cluster trigger. Not even they know what they can do. Bring everyone you can, and do it fast, I'm not going to wait for your bureaucratic feet-dragging, I have other places to be. You have three hours before I leave them here on their own."
She wanted to give a shorter deadline, but this town was literally in the middle of nowhere. It would be incredibly unrealistic to get here in less than that time.
"Understood. Will you go to another location to repeat your efforts?" He asked quickly.
"Yes. Feel free to give a heads-up to your fellow directors. Our destinations will be the top five attacks of Gray Boy's in terms of victims that were stuck in loops. We plan to end this first batch tonight, so mobilise people if you want to make everyone's job easier, and the victims safer. We're going to move ahead regardless of delays on your ends."
"I'll certainly do my best." Evans said diplomatically.
"Please do. And remember who this benefits, realistically. You get the heads-up to hopefully getting these people into the Protectorate and immediate therapy before they entertain the notion of villainy. Might grease the wheels of the other Directors." She suggested.
"Hnm. If nothing else, that will certainly get them moving." Evans said, in a tired tone that spoke of a history of personal complaints, or perhaps a nihilistic sort of amusement? It was hard to tell through a phone.
She raised a brow.
This one… this one she could work with. She'd been expecting someone far more insane and combative. Like the ones in Brockton.
"Evans, was it?"
"Yes?"
"Keep your position. You're the least painfully idiotic Director we've dealt with so far." She noted, with a hint of respect in her tone.
"Well, then I'm glad, because I saw what you did to the most 'idiotic'." Evans noted with an amused lilt of dark humour. "You said you had the coordinates?" He then said, voice back to urgent business.
"One sec." She rushed out, and put the phone back to her minion's ear.
"Coordinates." She demanded, and he blinked at her for a moment, before digging a piece of paper out of his jacket and starting to recite them to the phone.
She took a step back, and observed the chaotically calm crowd around her.
Some part of her told her she should tell them more about who she was and why, give some speech perhaps, so they knew who to be grateful to, who did this.
But, well… word got around fast, and people were eager to talk, after everything they've been through. Not a single soul was here who hadn't at least heard the word 'Nexus'.
She also had the pictures as backup. The news stations wouldn't be able to dodge this topic, it was too big and too 'happy' to ignore. The pictures or her involvement might be ignored or not published on TV, but… as long as it got out that Nexus did all this, it would go from website to website, and they'd still get millions of people to question if Nexus was really all that bad.
Good enough for the practical part of her brain.
Her thoughts were cut off by her minion shoving the phone in her face, and she grabbed it, putting it to her ear.
"Executioner?" Evans asked.
"Yes?" She asked.
"I'm aware that vocal handshakes and unspoken rules might be rather flimsy, considering the incidents in Brockton Bay, but we can ensure that no violence or conflict will arise from our side. We're not sending anyone to fight, just help. On that note, I'd like some kind of confirmation that no violence will be directed towards anyone I send over to help. It'll be a tad difficult to get anyone to go to that town in the middle of nowhere to face you without any knowledge of what you will do."
A… reasonable thought, considering her and the PRT's rather frayed relationship.
"I have no interest in starting a fight or hurting any of your men. I'll be here just to keep everyone in line until you can restrain them, and that's it. Is that all you wanted to ask?" She asked, evenly.
"Yes, actually. I have this recorded in case anyone puts up a fuss. At the very least, you don't have a reputation of going back on your word, so far. Anything else that arises, call again, it'll get forwarded to me directly." Evans said curtly.
"Got it. See you in a few hours. Break some traffic laws if you have to."
With that, she closed the call, and sat on the car's hood, crossing her arms to stare out at the sun, her lips stubbornly tugging themselves into a slight smile.
The transfer of the victims from her hands to the PRT went…
Not great, not terrible.
She had everyone settle down inside a hollowed out building on the edge of town that they claimed once was a post office, letting people stew in their nostalgia about the ghost town that was once their home, safely out of the blazing heat, while her minion and a few of the more stable victims loitered around the entrance, her wandering around them to re-apply the mental haze of Evelynn to some of the violent ones, and answer questions.
They had so many damn questions.
It felt nice to answer some of them, to help, but at a certain point it got so tiring she relegated question duties to her minion.
At the two and a half hour mark, long after all the water she'd brought for the victims had run out and people were getting antsy, she spotted the convoy of black trucks rumbling down the road in a dust cloud, followed by two flying figures, and walked herself over to the entrance of the city, switching from Shen to Jarvan once out of sight of the victims, and standing in the middle of the road, leaning on her lance, shoulders drooped with boredom.
The following exchanges were mercifully curt.
The two fliers came out to meet her, her mind discarding their names and outfits the moment she learned them, and once confirmation about some things was given, including the fact that they would not pursue her minion at threat of breaking their tentative truce here, she simply stepped aside, and let the convoy rush into the city.
She was absolutely not a fan of how the PRT handled things, frankly, because the situation kept waffling between a rescue and an active crime scene, seemingly, with the PRT agents sometimes helping people into cars and ambulances, and at others, when dealing with more combative and disturbed people, or Jake, for example, simply trying to do anything and everything to get them into restraints that looked more like torture implements without outright tackling them.
The amount of heroes that poured out of the trucks was… kind of staggering to see.
There had to be like fifty heroes milling around, trying to keep the peace and de-escalate whenever tensions flared.
The full-force mobilisation brought her evaluation of Evans just a little bit higher.
By the half-hour mark, things had calmed down significantly, and the site looked far more like a proper rescue site than a potential battlefield.
As a few of the more… veteran-looking heroes who seemed to be in charge of the rest started to move towards her, she decided that this was now time to go on to the second site, and simply vanished without a whisper using Evelynn, eventually finding some space behind a distant rock to use Shen's teleportation technique on the second minion.
The second site was far more central, unfortunately.
Mostly because it was in an active, albeit small city somewhere in… Ohio? She was not sure.
By the time her second minion led her to the exact location, the whole place was surrounded by PRT vans and heroes in a wide perimeter.
The attack site was like a separate branch of the small city altogether, visibly separated by decay, memorials, and fences, and unlike the first site, it was difficult to find the bubbles, even as she flew overhead and kept her ears open.
There were tons of the bubbles out in the open, fully enclosed in concrete hexagonal boxes with wooden plaques on them, denoting victims and such, but the place was a dead, decaying, concrete jungle, surprisingly dense for how sparsely populated it had to have been.
Which meant that she only found half of the reported victims by the time she was done scouting, and with a scowl on her face, resorted to working with the PRT to find the rest, since they had to be inside the buildings themselves, and it would take too long to find them all by herself.
She wasn't exactly opposed to working with the PRT but it tended to add a lot of exhausting social manoeuvring of power dynamics and status to the whole thing that she did not appreciate with how tired she already was.
Flickering into existence a few feet from one of the PRT trucks and politely but firmly asking for someone in charge led to her working with a man who reminded her of Armsmaster, oddly enough, but far less deranged and far more human.
She didn't think she'd see him again, but 'Clamp' was a greying Brute who was delightfully professional and quick. He didn't ask annoying questions, and when she told him to stick back and away until she was done, he didn't complain or fight her on it, nor did he ask how exactly she freed the victims, didn't even attempt to gain any information about it.
Just did his job, led her to and fro, and kept the younger and more inquisitive heroes from pissing her off too much, mostly communicating in grunts and hums.
She liked him.
The entire convoy of agents following her and her minion around also made things a lot easier for her, to her pleasant surprise. She just had to calm people down a little bit initially, if necessary, and the agents and officers around took care of the rest. No crowds to handle.
By the end of it, she had to admit that the PRT had actually helped her quite a bit here.
She even left early, after only three hours of work.
She liked this dynamic, truth be told.
The PRT was reactive, they contained and secured areas, and handled the aftermath of whatever mess happened. It never fixed things.
She could fix things. Nexus could. And if the PRT could handle the cleanup, then they'd be helping them and the people so much more.
It might even evolve into a mutual partnership, one day. Depending on how she went about things.
Neither of her minions were pursued to her knowledge, and so, she left to the third location.
It was in the absolute middle of nowhere somewhere in the northwest, and it was only after she had finished setting people free and gathering them that a staggeringly small force of ambulances and PRT cars rolled into the village. Just barely enough to cram them all in and drive them back to civilization.
She wasn't sure why the response was so anaemic, but it was enough for her to move on to the next spot.
The fourth location was in a town nestled between tall hills, somewhere along the Mexican border, and the PRT response was literally nonexistent. The only people that came were police officers, and ambulances.
She was not sure why, but her opinion of the PRT was quickly dropping back down after Arizona and Ohio raised it.
The fifth location was actually in LA. The outskirts of it, yes, one of the Nine's most bold attacks, but still in the general area.
A little too close to the Triumvirate for comfort.
To her relief, nobody too important came to the site, and the response was more than appropriate. A couple news cameras hung around trying to get videos of it all, but the police kept things tidy.
By the time she was done with the fifth location, it was midnight, and her head was pounding like a drum, her eyes unfocusing from exhaustion every few seconds.
Using Shen's most powerful teleporting technique five times in one day, all the while switching 'legends' and runes nonstop had left her exhausted.
It was a strong headache, but far from debilitating, so without much care, she reformed herself in a distant thicket of bushes, and activated a regular Teleport to return to Brockton, ready to return and catch up on the day's progress.
Not even a quarter of a second had passed since she locked herself in place before a square portal flashed open before her, and she only had enough time to widen her eyes in surprise before a blinding flash of light tore clean through her, the cohesion of her form scattering, leaving behind her bare, mortal body.
She felt her silk suit disintegrate, the heat scorching her chest in the bare microinstant it took her to switch to Vi, Piltover's Enforcer, her hex-suit instantly activating a shield around her.
But that was all she could do.
When Teleporting with the Summoner spell, she was a sitting duck.
She could not move, she could not cast a spell, she could not do a thing except look around using her eyes, breathe, think, and switch 'legends'.
Said eyes could not see a thing beyond the blinding light that was melting them into goop, but she felt the moment her shield shattered.
The ray of light turned Vi's torso to ash in a split second, scattering in the gusting winds around her, her senses flittering past her in a momentary flash of calm, and for the third time this month, she experienced death, her consciousness jerking back to her real body, an abrupt snap to her actual body.
She felt pain overtake any and all sensation in her chest, felt the skin of her neck, chin and mouth all shrivel and sear from the heat, all in the brief, near non-existent flicker it took her to switch to Leona, the Radiant Dawn.
The searing cataclysm that was tearing through her, now harmlessly slammed into her armoured chest, and flowed into her like water into a vessel, absorbed and stored for later.
Her eyes focused through the light, divine blood simmering in fury as she squinted at the portal.
All she could see was the melting barrel of some kind of gun, or cannon. No doubt tinkertech.
It ran out of juice a single second later, and as the light guttered and turned from a beam into twisting ribbons of white plasma, the portal snapped shut, like nothing had ever happened, the bushes around her crackling with fire from the heat released, Leona shining like a star in the desert within a swirl of purple.
Two tense seconds later, the world snapped, and she was free to move again.
Shouts of alarm and surprise came from her left, and slowly, she turned to look at Lisa, incandescent with rage.
"Fuck- ow, can you turn that shit off!?" Lisa yelped, shielding her eyes as she staggered upright. "Did you kidnap the sun?!" Lisa added, half-joking, incredulous.
She tried to switch to Evelynn, out of pure habit if nothing else.
There was something there, but like wafts of smoke between her fingers, it slipped away the moment she tried to grasp onto it.
Evelynn was not in the physical world right now.
A demon could not die, not really, but they could be forced to go dormant until their essence could re-enter the physical realm. Like a popped balloon, it had to seal its holes before it could assume a shape again.
For all intents and purposes, Evelynn was as dead as Ryze. She'd likely return far faster than him, being a demon, but that could still be a month or more.
Her armoured feet sagged into the metal floor, quickly melting through it, and she hurriedly dropped Leona entirely, her boots lightning on fire immediately as agony slammed into her mind like a sledgehammer.
She stumbled forward, tearing her feet out of the melted casts on the floor, wide eyed, trying to breathe but unable to, and hung her head, staring down at her chest, trying to access the damage.
Her sternum was a gaping cavity of scorched flesh and ribs, cracked and broken into jagged peaks by the heat. A shaking hand moved to where her chest and ribs were supposed to be, brushing nothing but air and scaly, scorched scabs.
She could see her heart beating through the blackened jerky of her collapsed left lung, thin and patchy, throbbing in time with her weak attempts to breathe.
Bile and bloody froth rushed up her throat, her mind locking up in shock, a familiar sensation of biological frenzy out of her control, thoughts spinning into a whirl, and she tried to cast Heal on herself with the last logical shreds left in her.
It was still on cooldown. Maybe mere seconds away, close, but not-
Her knees buckled, and she switched to Jarvan right as her knees hit the half-molten floor, the agony immediately turning into a phantom sensation as she hurriedly gasped in air, and stared at the delicate hands tugging on her vambraces, a ringing noise mixing with Lisa's voice, turning it illegible.
She breathed for another second, mind racing, trying to process.
Survive.
Live.
She had to survive.
Her chest was a gaping hole right now. Even if she cast two Heals back to back on herself, she'd still be missing almost the entirety of her ribcage, regardless of how intact her most important bits were, like her organs.
She was okay though. She had Legends left.
She just… had to stay in Jarvan, flip back to Heal quickly, and then pick him again to wait for Heal to come back. She wouldn't even have to wake up Amy.
Her mind replayed what had happened, the ever so familiar portal, the perfect, strategic timing that let her know that even though she'd not seen a peep of Cauldron as of late, they've been watching her very carefully.
Carefully enough to cripple her main modes of mobility in a single strike.
Teleport, and Evelynn.
And that was if she was giving them the generosity of assuming they hadn't simply tried to kill her.
Her teeth grit, her shoulders shaking with fury.
Regardless of intention, they essentially landlocked her into Brockton. She couldn't Teleport with her Summoner Spells, nor with Shen's ability, since it was where the spell itself was derived from, and worked similarly, not without risking her damn life. She couldn't fly around undetected, not anymore, nor without expending a massive amount of energy.
She might be able to move around, but without getting tracked? That would be much, much harder.
Slowly, she rose, teeth gnashing audibly as she glared at the wall.
"Tay, come on, you're scaring me. The fuck happened?" Lisa rushed out, waving a hand in front of her eyes.
She glanced down at Lisa's wide, worried eyes, setting her jaw.
She'd warned them, hadn't she? Stay out her way, and she'd mostly stay out of theirs.
"Did the binder survive?" She asked, voice a low, tense growl.
Lisa blinked, then glanced past her.
"It's a bit singed, but it's fine?" Lisa asked, giving her a confused look.
She worked her jaw, thoughts racing.
She almost died, a mere minute ago. A final death, her own.
A deep, deep breath, exhaled with the warning hiss of a cobra.
"When I use the purple Teleport power, I can't defend myself. Cauldron took the chance to take out two my capes, including Evelynn. The purple chick. I have a giant hole in my chest. I'd be dead now if I hadn't summoned Jarvan. They figured out how my power works, it seems, and who's at the center of all these capes, so the ruse is up. And they almost just killed me." She snarled, and Lisa's eyes widened in geniune fear, before slowly hardening, sharp, glinting edges orbiting her pinprick pupils, the ends of her eyes sharpening into points as her brows lowered.
She glanced at Coil, silent, his stance ready in a way she couldn't quite pinpoint.
"Move all of our capes around Printer. Everyone, you and Coil included. Nobody left behind. Move Printer to the new base. Put the Retainer girls on guard duty with our men. We're turtling. Clone Purity and Oni Lee ten times each, then Kaiser and Lung, if Printer can handle that much. Get the Heartbreaker clones to handle the Mastering. Get information about the clones, and provide them to Accord. Have him make a battle plan that won't put us all in each other's way, due for tomorrow. Get all of our men with Tinkertech gear, move them in as well. Everyone else, bunker down, arm up, act as if under siege. Shoot on sight, ask no questions. Get-"
Lisa waved her hands frantically in a 'hold on' motion.
"Whoah whoah whoah, hold on, what the fuck are we even doing with that much firepower?" Lisa asked, bewildered.
Her eyes narrowed as she turned her head skywards, certain that somehow, some way, Cauldron was watching, hearing her.
"Going to war with Cauldron. But right now, what you and I are going to do, is read." She emphasized, and turned to the table, picking up the binder.
Lisa eyed her, then slowly nodded, shoulders set.
"If the National Guard interferes with our mobilisation? It's hard to move that many resources in one day without anyone noticing." Coil asked, reasonably.
Fuck the National Guard. She had bigger issues than a bunch of grunts with peashooters.
"Then send a message. Tell them to fuck off or die." She growled.
Lisa frowned.
"Is that frustration speaking, or are you serious? Have you thought about this?"
She turned to Lisa, and spread her arms, gesturing to the room around them as Coil warily watched the exchange from the side.
"Lisa, this city is ours. Nobody can even scratch us but Cauldron. The PRT is too tied down in law and procedure, it's too big, too split, and too compromised on all fronts, and they're practically just an arm of Cauldron as far as I can see, so they're a problem that gets solved when Cauldron's under our heel. If we win this 'war', we're taking everything, and all that's left is to kill the monsters. If we lose, our presence here, and on the surface, is over. And it'll all get decided tomorrow. So, yes. We either become powerful enough that the government is nothing but a nuisance, or we lose everything and it won't matter anyway."
Lisa eyed her, as if testing her resolve, examining her.
"Are you absolutely certain you want to do this? This is the equivalent of getting shot with a revolver, then pulling out a rocket launcher in response. There's no taking this back either, Sam." Lisa reminded her, their earlier discussion in the morning seeming so distant now.
She shook her head, dropping her arms.
"Never been more certain. They've always been a problem, they always will be a problem, but if they had settled for pestering us through the PRT's sabotage, I'd have grit my teeth and moved on. This was either an assassination attempt or a way to cripple me. If we don't respond, they'll just feel free to pick us apart one by one through portals and bury us under. They're done playing, and so am I." She declared, a low rumble, then raised the binder. "Write a quick statement for the website, since the Grey Boy victims are free, and I'll have people handle PR. Then we read this thing, and tomorrow, we burn Cauldron to the ground."
She breathed out, low and slow, letting her boiling blood settle into a simmer.
Lisa nodded, sharp and fast, said "Got it," then sidestepped the smoking floor around her, and started pecking at the keyboard next to her, before swerving it towards her.
She got to work, flicking in and out of Jarvan to Heal herself as she typed the statement, while Coil got to work on mobilising everyone.
Notes:
So, now I feel the need to say some things.
Firstly, this chapter is one of those where I'm very proud of, but I just have this feeling like it's not GOOD, or that other people won't like it, so when I click upload, Its with a conflicted feeling about the chapter itself.
Does that make sense?
Like, for me, this has been a great chapter, because I finally get to reveal some small, but very prominent things about Taylor that both she, and be extension, the viewers, have been ignoring for most of the story. Well, some viewers.
WHY did the first mission that Taylor undertook, so quickly, even though she'd only just BARELY managed to wrangle her sense of identity into a half-cohesive idea, have to be one so grand and nigh-impossible? Why did she hunt to save this world that she BARELY has any connection to with such tenacity and determination?
So far, those have been questions that were left mostly to surface thinking like 'it's the right thing to do with all this power'. Which, yes, it is, but that's only one layer to Taylor's motivations for diving headfirst into such a conflict, and here, I finally get to explore that tidbit through Taylor having a moment of self-realization.
Two, in fact.
Forced and not.
Another thing I'm happy about is that I finally get to address the inconsistencies and unpopular decisions that Taylor has made throughout this story. I've had many readers get frustrated and annoyed at how Taylor was like in the first part of the story, and while her decisions are not MEANT to be ones you think are great, they're supposed to serve a purpose. Character development.
Yes, this is a story about fighting and conflict and adding some new spice to the fandom, but it would be a very one-note, somewhat shallow story if the characters didn't change and grow during it, even if only in small ways. I intended one of those avenues of growth to be Taylor coming out of the asylum THINKING she is fine and a stable person, then doing very nonsensical, and antithetical things to what she had believed and said, to showcase how she just really ISN'T stable. Her characterization was not meant to be stable and cohesive because her mind isn't either of those things. In a way, that hurt the story, but I think in the long run, it will only add to it.
My goal was to make that happen slowly, over time, in the midst of the conflict. It's not a huge character arc, a huge change, nor is it anything profound and shocking, but I'm proud of it, even if it drove away quite a few of the early readers.
Another thing I'm proud of here is slowly handling the transition from Taylor being 'any means necessary, by the iron fist', to a more conflicted, thoughtful person who slowly learns to rely on people around her. Well, that's one person at the moment, so just Lisa, but yannow.
I'm not sure how well im going to manage and juggle this with the trainwreck of action that's going on, but Imma try.
Of course, she's still going to escalate to the stars and back. That's what she does best. :)
The rescue was really tough to write, so I'm not sure how well I managed it. It's tough trying to figure out how normal, entirely different people would respond to freedom after 20 years of torture.
The conversation with Lisa also isn't something im ENTIRELY happy with but im not sure why so they make me rly happy and rly motivate me. See ya hopefully soon, idk, life's