Jan 10, 2011

At first, they passed entirely beneath her notice. Taylor was still sorting through the insects she could feel with her power, and thinking up uses for them. Bringing them in through her window to where she could look at them was her usual pattern. That there were a few that weren't responding to her control went missed as she focused on the ones that were flying or crawling to her.

It was Monday, though, and with everyone else back at school, she could not justify staying inside. She had wanted to avoid the pitying gaze of the neighbors over the weekend after coming home from the hospital, from having what had amounted to a psychotic break, and the scornful gazes of the other children in the neighborhood. Now she had screwed her courage up and headed out onto the streets, hunting for more interesting and useful insects.

She did not feel up to facing the library just yet, but it was in the back of her mind. Her dad's work at the Dockworkers Association had been bringing in less, and money was too tight to have room for a computer and a monthly network fee. The library would give her a chance to research more interesting bugs, and especially which of the useful ones could be found locally.

When her eyes passed over the the otherwise normal seeming bumblebee, she felt an odd stutter. She tried to bring it down to her, pausing where she was walking on the sidewalk, but it did not even slow as it passed into a fenced yard, beyond her reach.

She reached out, trying to feel for it, and discovered that she could sense it, could tell where it was, but she could not influence its movements at all. After the first week, as she had fought back the intense press of sensory stimuli from far too many tiny minds, she had not tried much to actually see through her insects' eyes or use their other senses.

She tried now, struggling to focus on just that one bee. She stumbled forward.

"Watch where you're going," a voice mumbled, and she was brought back to the here and now. Standing on the sidewalk was probably not the best time to be playing with her new power. She did not want to lose the odd bee, but when she reached out for it again, she could not locate it within her range. She was up to almost a block now, in terms of the distance within which she could feel and control all the bugs.

It was more than just insects; more even than just bugs, as she had determined from a check of a dictionary that 'bugs' applied generally only to small insects, and in a more technical way just to a subset of insects. Her power ignored that distinction, giving her control of worms, of millipedes and centipedes and importantly to her, of spiders. It was these she was particularly in search of, due to a half-remembered television program about spider silk and its potential. It was one of the reasons she wanted to get to the library, to determine which spider had the best silk, at least of the ones that were nearby.

Now she wanted one of those bees. She did not have any particular use in mind, as yet. She just wanted to know what was different about them. Why did it not respond to her? Were there more like it? Was it just those bees? Or were there whole groups of bugs she could not control?

She knew it was not all bees, as she had felt and controlled both honeybees and bumblebees in her swarm previously.

She encountered no more of the odd bees that day, and was on the verge of considering it just a fluke, but the next day when she went out again, she spied another. She set to following it, letting her sense of its location guide her while she paid better attention to her surroundings this time. She ended up in a local park, one that held a number of bittersweet memories for her, between memories of Emma, her erstwhile friend and more recent tormentor, and of her beautiful mother, Annette.

The most bittersweet facet of the park was the former presence there of one of the so-called Fountains of Life, the fountains that had started appearing nearly ten years before, that had healing waters. If it had still been there when the crash occurred, she might not have lost her mother. She did not know why it had vanished, but there were rumors that it had been due to the PRT, the Parahuman Response Team. She was not sure if she believed the rumor, but she was bitter about the absence of the healing waters that could have, should have saved her mother.

The bee finally lit on a flower in the park, and she hurried towards, eager not to miss her chance. The usual fear or disgust response common to young girls when faced with creepy insects was not something Taylor Hebert had felt at all since her trigger, since that darkest moment of her life, when she had gained her power. She could hardly even remember what it had been like to be frightened or disturbed by insects.

This one would not be in her control, but it was no longer in her to fear it. She slowed when it lifted again, but thankfully it settled onto another nearby flower, and she moved closer, having to restrain her temptation to bend over and sneak up on it. She did not want to attract any attention to what she was doing, after all.

She half expected to get stung, but when her hand closed on the bumblebee, it crumbled into nothingness in her grasp. She felt her fingers close over it, she had not missed, she was certain of that - but they kept closing, they were never stopped by its body, and when she opened her hand, there was nothing there, not even dust.

Was this the power of some other parahuman? Had she exposed herself? She looked around, but saw no-one paying any attention to her, and quickly moved away.

---

Jan 12, 2011

Her first capture of one of the strange bees started with a test. She knew that it either had whoever had created it observing her and destructing the bee remotely, or an automatic process. If it was automatic, it could not be from any contact, as it had landed on two flowers without disintegrating. Nor could it be from contact with living things, as the flowers were alive. It might be mammals or animals, though, and this she could test.

Landing on the bee with one of her midges was tricky, but manageable. She was leaning up against a fence on her street, the same one the bee two days before had disappeared behind. Now that she knew she could not put her own hands on it, she was going to try using her power as a parahuman. Good practice for later on, when she made her debut as a cape, as a parahuman hero.

She was tracking another bee, she was not sure if it was the same one or not, that she had spotted going in to the yard. Telling if it had vanished when her midge touched it was not so easy, since based on the way the previous one had disappeared under her fingers, there would have been no change in speed of the midge on making contact. That was alright, as she simply had to wait a bit.

When the midge suddenly rose into the air without her controlling it, she felt a small surge of triumph. The bee had not vanished, and that meant she could capture it!

A dragonfly buzzed past, sailing into the yard. It soon returned with a fat bumblebee grasped beneath it. Its flight was oddly erratic, though, more so than the weight of the bee could account for. It was not sufficiently out of line as to be uncontrollable, though. She headed for the house, the dragonfly zipping along behind her in a series of zigzag patterns. When it paused in the air, she noted, it was consistently being dragged back towards the yard where it had captured the bee.

It did not follow her into the door of her house, instead heading up to hover outside of her window. When the window sash was lifted a bit later and the screen pried up and lifted a bit, it flew into her room. She replaced the screen and lowered the sash again, considering the dragonfly and its cargo. It still seemed to be experiencing an anomalous pull to the fenced in yard, even though she could see that the bee's wings were unable to properly flutter.

She walked over and sat at her desk, followed by the dragonfly, which tried to set down on the surface, but had to keep buzzing its wings to pull the bee back into position. Taylor looked around the desk for something she could use to keep it still, and finally settled for sliding two schoolbooks to either side of it, pressing it gently between them.

"Definitely not natural," she said softly, as the dragonfly took off and she quickly placed another book on top of its right wing, pinning it in place. She pulled open her drawer, and pulled out the craft knife she had slipped in there the day before, along with a magnifying glass. It had taken a bit of hunting to find the glass, a relic from her earlier childhood.

She had sat holding it for several minutes after she found, remembering happier days, when there was still shipping in Brockton Bay, before the union strike and the scuttling of ships in the harbor had shut the docks down, visiting the park with her mom and dad, and hunting down bugs to examine with the glass. Today, she was all business, focused on the bug, and did not even pause as she moved the glass so that she could see the bee.

Even up close, it looked normal. So, it was not some mechanical, Tinker-made robot. At least, she did not think so. She could see the individual hairs sticking out on its fuzzy thorax, and the even tinier hairs on the intricate legs, and it felt like an insect to her power. It just did not respond to her.

She held the glass in one hand, and lifted the craft knife in the other. She took a deep breath. She could do this, she had already fed some of her bugs to the spiders she had collected, it was no different killing one herself. Right?

She lined up the knife above the tiny gap between the head and thorax, somewhat relieved that the fat little bumblebee did not react or try to get away, and stabbed down. The knife penetrated, but hit something hard inside. She pushed, and the head came off, tearing something out of the body at the same time, glittering in the light, a black spike out of the back of its head.

"Is that Tinkertech?" she wondered, tapping it with the small knife blade. She had to set down the magnifying glass and grab a pencil to pry the head and the glittery black thing apart. When it finally came out completely, she saw what looked like an oddly spiky crystal. Under the magnifying glass, she saw flat planes and sharp edges, but some of the spiky bits split and split again, looking almost hair thin at the ends.

It did not seem to be moving at all, so she lifted the books away. The two halves of the bee remained still as well, so whatever it was, she had apparently disabled it. Well, assuming there was not a homing device in it. She carefully pushed it away from the rest of the bee, then gently touched the bee's severed head with the tip of her finger, waiting to see which piece would disappear. Nothing happened.

She was more hesitant to touch the crystal, not merely for the fear of it vanishing, but also because it was so spiky, and the fineness of the hairs at the ends of the split spikes made her think of cactus spines. She held it down with the knife tip, then pressed against the extensions with her pencil, testing their flexibility. They did bend, but not much, and she was worried that pressing hard enough to break them off might leave her with splinters the next time she cleaned her desk.

Worse yet, if this was a Tinker tech thing, or some other cape's power manifestation, and it controlled insects, what if it could grow into her, take her over like something from an Earth Aleph horror movie?

She wanted to go hunt for a box to contain it in before she tried anything, but she did not want to leave it only to discover it could in fact move on its own and was just waiting for her to not be watching. So she cheated instead, and brought over a cockroach to hold on to it.

As she went in search of a box, trying to decide between a small metal change box or a plastic food container, she held that cockroach in her mind, waiting for it to either feel movement, or to leave her control if it turned out the spiky crystal could take control of something else.

---

Jan 15, 2011

Taylor had two notebooks now, one with her record of all the torments and bullying she had experience at the hands of the Trio, her former friend Emma, Emma's new BFF Sophia, and their hanger-on Madison, and a new one with her ideas regarding her powers, costume designs, fighting methods, the notes she had made about the various villains in Brockton Bay she might have to face, and the heroes she might work beside. This second notebook had a new section now for ideas about her competitor, the cape that was controlling these bumblebees.

Her swarm-sense, her ability to feel and know and control the insects around her, was getting a continual workout as she sorted the insects she could feel, hunting for the remote control bugs. She was a little concerned that if her opponent could tell where they disappeared, they would be able to find her, so when she detected one, she had ignored them unless they were on the same side of her range as the one she had first taken.

She felt a little regret for the owners of the house with the high fence where she captured most of them, that she might be causing them to be targeted, though, so she had also visited the park a couple of times, and gone on a longer walk the day before. In total, she had now collected seven of the controlled bugs. They had all been bumblebees, with the same color patterns.

The first crystal she had gotten had turned water black when she washed it, but had still been black after the washing, though the glitter effect was stronger. When she shined a light through it, it cast little rainbows all around the room. Smashing it into a powder with a hammer might have been overkill in terms of preventing any possible back-tracking or signalling device in it, but when there had been no news reports of attacks by parahumans that night, and no-one had come to the house hunting her, she had relaxed a little bit.

Now she was in the basement. Her stupid spiders had eaten each other when she had taken her walk the previous day and left them on their own for too long, reducing their numbers, so she had decided to move everything to the basement to give them more room, and to reduce the chances that Danny would come across them. She still had not told her dad that she had become a parahuman, and she was not really sure when she would.

One little pile of dust, and six washed black stones. Under the magnifying glass, they looked identical, but there was something strange about the smashed one. She had washed it again after smashing, and while some of the bits were still smoky, there were grains in there that caught the light like they had fire in them.

The dust and pieces were in a plastic container, where she had carefully poured them; the rest were in a metal gift box with a dented bottom from where she had hammered the first stone. The black water was in a second plastic container, along with the thin handkerchief that she had used as a filter to get the bits of stone out after washing them. It too was stained black. She had not dared just pour it out yet, as she did not know what the black was, and because there might still be crystal bits, small enough that they had made it through the cloth, floating in the water, and she had wanted to see if they would collect or grow in the container. That container was tightly sealed.

One of her larger black widow spiders crawled over the edge of the metal container, and carefully tugged the six whole stones around and lined them up, nudging them back and forth with her needle-like black legs until they were all positioned identically. Taylor leaned over, not reacting at all when the spider caught on to her dangling hair and scurried up into her curls. She was focused on her magnifying glass, comparing the stones.

She had hoped to learn something from them, but so far, they held an utterly boring sameness. Only bumblebees, the stone was always in the same place in the bee, and even under the glass, she could not find any distinctions between them. They did not appear to do anything to insects that came into contact with them, nor had the stones disappeared when she touched the powder and dust of the crushed stone. She had still not worked up the nerve to touch the spiky undamaged stones, but she suspected that there was something critical about the stones being in the bee. When the two were unlinked, neither bit was apparently active at all.

Well, unless of course they were sending a homing signal and the cape in question was not actually in Brockton Bay and had to come from farther afield to deal with it. She was a little tense about that possibility, but she had her insects to warn her, hopefully.

She swept five of them to the sides of the container, and pulled out her next tool, a pair of tweezers. She carefully grasped the main body of the stone in the tweezers, pressing down a bit to hold it firmly against the metal bottom, then used her knife to snap off the extensions one at a time, until she had a mostly convex stone, and a bunch of pointed shards. She scraped around the stone with the knife edge, sweeping the shards away.

Lifting the stone out with the tweezers, she held her breath to keep from blowing it away, and dropped it into her outstretched palm. She was anticipating it vanishing and watching with eager eyes to see how it happened, but it landed solidly on her palm and lay there.

Setting the tweezers down, she carefully picked up the stone with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand. She pressed it against the edge of the metal tin and drew it down. It etched a scratch into the paint, the metal shining through. She looked about for a bit of glass, and finding only her magnifying glass available, she pressed it against the outer edge. It carved a fine scratch into the surface. "Harder than glass," she murmured. "Still breakable, though."

Taylor was not sure what use these things could be yet, but then, it had taken a while for her to come up with usable tactics for her bug control powers as well. They were doing something out there, though, and she was determined to find out what.

As to how? She had a plan for that.

---

Jan 16, 2011

Taylor glared at the innocuous hole in the ground. She had found another of the infested bees and painstakingly kept it in range, following it until it finally landed somewhere other than a flower. She was hot, tired, and ready for this to be over. But the ants she had sent into the hole had instantly vanished from her control. As had the cricket, fly, and spider she had sent in after them.

Were they dying? Or stepping through some warped space or tinker-tech gateway?

She knelt down, allowing the little orb-weaver spider that had climbed to the top of a blade of grass near her to climb onto her hand. It looked a lot like one of her black widows, except for being brown on the thorax and legs, and having an intricate, glossy black and white pattern on its abdomen. She had it weave a noose then slip it over a fly's neck. The orb weaver's grip on her hand was too tiny to feel, yet strong enough that it was able to lower the fly down on a long strand of silk it wove.

She dipped the leashed fly into the opening, then drew the line back. It lifted up as though it had ended at the opening, as if clipped by an invisible knife. She looked around, then quickly got to her feet when she saw someone had come into view on the path. She brought a butterfly over so she would have something to appear to be watching until the jogger passed on out of view, then glared down again.

Looking about, she trotted over to grab the nearest stick she could find off the ground, then went back and gingerly poked it in the hole. Pulling it back, she found it had a glossy smooth, perfectly flat face on it now. Everything that had entered the hole had simply vanished. Even as she glared at it, a bee flew out of it. A dragonfly captured it, and it went into her bag with the four others she had collected while following the one she had chosen as her target.

She had brought the little art knife with her, and was tempted to try it and see if something that was totally inorganic would be destroyed as well, since obviously the ground was not being sucked in to it. Actually, that was a thought. She dug the stick into the ground near the hole, pushing dirt into it. The hole remained, perfectly circular. So it was destroying the dirt. "Clever bastard," she complained of the unknown tinker.

Worms and burrowing bugs rose at her command, coming towards the hole from every side, disturbing and aerating the ground, and she paid attention to where they vanished, and where they did not. She found a blockage there beneath the ground, but her insects could not lift it. In fact, as they disturbed the ground beneath it, the infuriating object sank further. She did not dare try to reach in after it. Explaining the bullying to Danny had been hard enough, she did not want to imagine her dad's reaction to her coming home with a finger missing. Not that he would get angry at her; he got angry easily, but it had never been directed at her. But she would be throwing his inability to keep her safe in his face again, and she definitely did not want that.

She had something now that she could potentially bring to the attention of the authorities. Anything poked in that hole would vanish, or possibly cease to be. But she did not have any actual evidence of malfeasance yet, no proof that it was a villainous tinker, and not just somebody who had created artificial pollinators to take over if the bees died out or something.

She also had no explanation for how she could have found it that would not involve revealing her own status as a cape, and she was not ready for that, either. Her cape costume was far from done, and she did not want to go to the Wards with such a silly, useless seeming power, not until she could prove it was worth their time.

She could come back with a shovel, but if she was seen, how would she explain digging holes in a public park? If she had been able to control bigger creatures, rats or moles or something, she might have been able to push it up, but the worms and other bugs she had were too weak to push themselves in and lift it and the ground above even in a swarm.

So she camped it, instead, collecting every infuriating little bee that came out of it, until no more had left for over an hour, before finally heading home to get a late lunch.

She was relieved to come into the house, avoiding the rotten first step and ignoring the cat that was watching her from the street, and find a note from Danny saying he was going back to the Docks but would be home in time to make supper. That left her free to go to the basement and check on her projects.

The spiders had produced some respectable patches of woven silk cloth this time, now that they were separated enough that their territorial instincts were not getting in the way, and thankfully, she had apparently found the right triggers to get them to produce dry silk, without the glue that had made her first attempts unpleasantly tacky. She would need both sorts, of course. The capture-web silk cloth was an integral part of her plans for making chitin composite armor plates, but the basic body-stocking would definitely need to be glue free, or she would never be able to get into it, much less out of it. A single panel of the glue soaked silk, she had found, was nearly as bad as plastic cling wrap for crinkling and sticking to itself.

She set her pouch on the bench. Twelve more infested bees. Twelve more shards of crystal she still did not have a good use for, but something would come to her, she was sure. Processing them was basically down to a science now, thankfully. One after another, they were pulled out, held by the wings by her larger beetles, injected with spider venom, then torn apart, in a little assembly line of death, leaving a pile of twelve crystals. She pulled over the metal box, and popped the top off.

Seventeen whole crystals, one large spike-less crystal, and a mess of dust and spikes and randomly sized crystals. She stared at them, trying to think of something useful to do with them. They shattered on a hard impact, so there was no point in trying to use them as armor, or knuckle-dusters to make her strikes harder, or claw-tips for cutting. They did nothing when applied to other insects. Even if they were composed of some gemstone and not a common crystal like quartz, they were smoky and full of black dust, so no chance of selling them and getting funds to make her costume faster.

Only one thing was coming to mind, and it seemed silly. It would save a bit of money, though. She looked at the old goggles she was planning on harvesting lenses from. They were not in the best of shape, the smoky lenses had fine scratches on them that would impair her vision.

Construction paper, fine grit of stones hard enough to scratch glass, spider glue, yes, she could do it, and save the money she would otherwise have to spend on sandpaper.

She set one of the unmarred stones aside to save, and set to smashing the others, then ran them through her cloth filter system to wash them. She had spilled most of the bits into the top of the metal tin to start shaking to assort them by size, when she noticed an odd glow.

---

Jan 16, 2011

Taylor stopped, staring at the single undamaged stone, which had an internal glow now shining from the heart of it, her own heart in her throat, waiting for it to explode, or for an approaching cape to smash through the wall or ceiling. She felt her pulse even as her consciousness expanded outwards, pressing for every last dreg of information she could drag from the entire block's worth of insects around her, as she slowly set the tin down and backed away from the desk.

Her eyes fell on the cardboard boxes that held her black widows. They were too close, if the explosion was even as bad as a hand grenade they would be destroyed. She moved forward again to pull them away, then stilled. Her insects had not sensed anything anomalous approaching. She leaned over, staring into the metal tin. The stone was still glowing, but nothing else seemed to be happening at all.

Maybe it was not a trap, not a defensive mechanism she had triggered?

Rather than poking it herself, she let one of the spiders crawl into the tin and prod it, after she had moved to the far end of the room. Nothing happened.

"Damn Tinkers," she groused. "Come on! If you're going to light up like that, the least you could do is actually do something when I poke you. Grow bigger, form armor, weapons, something!"

A flash of brighter light from inside the tin cut her off, and her breath caught in her throat again. There was movement there, movement she had not caused. She could not see in the tin from across the room, just into the very top bit, but it seemed as if it was suddenly full. She had the spider climb out of the tin, and she released an involuntary sigh of wonder. First a single leg rose out of the tin, and pressed against the edge, then another. The swollen spider squeezed itself up and out of what was now a confining space for it. It's carapace gleamed blackly in the weak light of the incandescent ceiling lights, but its eyes shone red, and there was a red light beneath it. The top of the legs and the thorax and upper abdomen were blacker still, a thicker and rougher surface that noticeably rose from the otherwise smooth surface.

"Holy shit," Taylor whispered. The beautiful spider was still hers, still in her control, but there was something more. Not only was it larger, the size of a largish tarantula, but for the first time, she was really seeing through the eyes of one of her insects, she could see herself! She hurried across the room, leaning over and cooing at her beautiful creation, running a finger over the rough back. There were more than the usual eight eyes, as well, she saw, including new eyes that gazed backwards, and the central pair had something inside that moved and changed the direction of the gaze, something she did not think her normal spiders had.

Ignorant or uncaring of any risks to herself, she caught the massive spider up in her hand, placing its engorged chelicerae with their hypodermic fangs, linked to venom glands containing a substance that might be as much changed as the spider itself, within easy stabbing distance of her flesh, and only then noticed that the stone was missing. "Is it in you?" she whispered to it, "It is, isn't it? You merged with it somehow, but you are still mine, not his." She stroked the thorax between the eye spots, and breathed in sharply in surprise when the spider made a humming sound by rubbing its mouthparts together rapidly. "Oh, that is so cute!"

"I shall name you," she paused for a moment in thought, then looked at the extra eyes, "Shelob!" The spider climbed up her arm and onto her head, while she rubbed her finger around the inside of the box. No sign of the stone that had been there, glowing. Seeing now the same view out of multiple eyes was less disorienting than seeing herself looking at herself had been, but she was certain she would grow used to seeing multiple views simultaneously. It was simply too useful to abandon.

After confirming that the stone was completely gone, she took the largest unbroken piece, the one she had chipped the spikes off of, and set it on the dragonfly. "Come on," she whispered, "make it bigger, make it stronger." Nothing happened.

"Make it bigger," she commanded loudly. Nothing stubbornly continued to happen.

"Oh well." She picked up the stone and put it back in the tin, then settled back at the desk and began sorting the stones by size, using the lid of the tin.

She would put a bit in it, then holding it at a very slight angle, vibrate her hand, letting the differential movement of the larger and smaller bits separate them. Tilting it up on edge so that everything slid down to the lip while staying relatively spread allowed her to use her finger to rub the dust out into a pile, then repeat the process, until all the dust was out, then do the same to draw out the smaller stones, until all she had left were the larger ones.

It took several passes, and she lost some of the dust to the air, but she soon had enough separated to try making her differently gritted sandpapers. She cut several sheets of construction paper into squares using her art knife. Shelob jumped from her head to the desk, her body bouncing on her long legs like a truck on its shocks, then came forward and lay down a thin spray of glue on the paper. It took the large spider a surprisingly short time to have the square of paper uniformly glistening with glue. A cockroach scuttled forward, sacrificing itself to feed the large spider. Shelob's fangs stabbed into it, spraying digestive acids into the body, skipping the paralyzing poison as unneeded, while Taylor spread the small stones as evenly across the paper as she could manage.

A thin, whispy smoke rose from the cockroach's body, and Taylor saw through the spider's eye as the cockroach crumpled inward as the spider sucked up the almost instantly juiced insides. "Better not let you bite anyone," Taylor commented, noting with pleasure the enhanced speed and effectiveness of the spider's fluids. "I wonder how strong your silk is?"

She set the massive spider to laying down a square of woven silk back in its cardboard box, after she had removed its prior efforts, then headed back up to clean up for dinner.

Back To School

Jan 18, 2011

"Are you sure you're up for it?" Danny asked for the third time. Her grace period was over, and in spite of nothing having been done about her tormentors, due to a lack of evidence, and an absence of eyewitnesses even though she knew the events had been seen, she was headed back to Winslow. They could not afford private schooling, and while Arcadia would have been by far her preferred option, as it was the school the Wards, the junior members of the Protectorate, attended, it had a waiting list that made it a non-option.

If her mother, Annette, had still been alive, then home-schooling might have been an option, but in a one parent family it just was not viable.

"Yes, Dad. I can't give them the satisfaction. I'm sure it will be better now." Her smile was brittle, and she knew he saw through it. She just hoped he would not comment on it. His inability to cause any real change in her situation would just make him angrier, and it would not help anything.

She gave him a quick hug, and headed out the door. Before she was halfway down the street, another bumblebee was taken down by her dragonfly and dumped in her pouch.

"I'll have to make extra-sure the Trio can't catch me today," Taylor sighed mentally, "the last thing I need is to get in trouble for letting bees loose in the school."

She could not pass up the chance to get them, though. Whatever it was the unknown Tinker used in his bees, it had an awesome synergy with her powers and until and unless he showed up and prevented her, she was going to make the most of it. Shelob was awesome, and so cute, and she could not wait until she had an upgraded dragonfly for aerial reconnaissance, and...

She stopped in her tracks, eyes widening, and an uncontrollable grin spreading on her face. She had just taken the step that put the cardboard boxes in their basement out of her range. She had felt all her little black widows wink out, knowing that they were now free to their own devices, with her only able to hope they would stay on task and not consume each other.

That was not what was important, though. She took another step, and then another, her grin broadening. She picked up speed again, walking briskly, as in her basement, Shelob danced a little jig. She could still feel the altered spider, still see through its eyes, still control its movements, even while all the rest were now out of reach.

---

It felt restricting, going in to the school and leaving her swarm behind. There were flies enough about, though, for her to mark the Trio, if she could find them. So she lingered at the end of the hall from the entrance, watching for them to come in. She tagged Emma and was looking for Madison, when she was shoved roughly forward.

"Watch where you're standing." Sophia swept past from behind her, and Taylor suppressed the sudden, violent urge to cover her in biting insects. Sophia had vanished into the crowd before she got control enough to remember that she was supposed to be tagging them.

Realizing that she was running out of time, Taylor headed for her first class, getting lucky and spotting Madison and tagging her on the way.

She was distracted in her classes, her work continuing to suffer. Before, her grades had been falling from the Trio's interference, their destruction of her work, constant distractions, and general sabotage. Now her concentration was divided even more, between watching for interference, monitoring her swarm-sense for Emma and Madison's locations, sorting the swarm around the school for the best insects to bring home with her, and watching over her black widows through Shelob's eyes.

Tagging two of the Trio was enough for her to catch them coming towards the bathroom she had retreated to when lunchtime came, and she slipped out ahead of them, after using her bugs to lock one of the stalls.

She made it out of the school without them managing to corner her again, and even better, she managed to tag Sophia before she left. Insects to use for tagging people went on her list for possible uses of the stones, if it worked when she applied them to other creatures. Being able to tag them and know where they were beyond her limited range would be excellent.

As soon as she was out of sight of the school, a dragonfly flew by and released a bumblebee just in time for it to slip into her pouch as she opened it. Two more such meetings occurred on the way to the park, where she loitered for a while, gathering more. By the time she got home and sat down to do her homework, she had seven more bumblebees to process.

Much as she wanted a remotely viewable tagger, or an aerial reconnaissance drone, she knew her first deliberate conversion, assuming that she had guessed correctly about what caused the first glowing stone, would be a digger.

She plowed through her homework as quickly as she could manage, then slipped downstairs and processed the bumblebees. Shelob crawled up the workbench to watch, and Taylor went to stroke her as soon as she had all the bees in the dis-assembly line. It was hard to tell for sure, since Shelob was a spider and their apparent size was so dependent on their leg position, but she rather thought Shelob might have gotten bigger.

She did not recall having seen anything through Shelob's vision that would indicate a shedding, and poking about did not turn up a large, empty exoskeleton. She did find a tape measure, and made a note on a piece of the construction paper she had brought down to make sandpaper, that Shelob's current body length was three and an eighth inches.

Four destroyed stones later, and none of the others were glowing at all. Taylor paused, confused, then realized the problem. Shelob was the one glowing, the red had gotten brighter beneath her abdomen, in her eyes, and on measuring, Taylor found her a full four inches in the body. Transferring Shelob across the room, she tried again with the remaining two stones. The last stone still showed no visible glow, but she decided to try it anyway.

The digging insect she had picked up from the park was an odd sort of insect with short rear limbs and fat serrated forelimbs. She put the stone on the insect using the tweezers. "Just grow big and strong," she said, "Come on, grow!"

There was a dimmer flash, and the insect went from one inch long to four and a half. "Yes! You will do just fine, I'm sure." She did not get any sense of vision from it, but then, as a burrowing insect, it might well have had an atrophied sense of vision to begin with. But it definitely looked big and strong, hopefully enough so to get whatever Tinker device was storing or creating or portaling those bees up and out of the ground without risking her fingers.

---

Jan 19, 2011

Taylor bent down briefly, just long enough to let the bug slip from her sleeve and onto the ground, then walked away. She took a seat on a park bench a short distance away, after checking the surface for gum or other junk, and tried to look like she was just enjoying the park. Thankfully, though a little snow had fallen that day, it had not been below freezing all day, and the sun had dried the bench.

Ants swarmed around her digger bug, a mobile warning net to keep the blind bug from accidentally entering the hole from which none of her insects had returned. Worms churned the earth in a path to the bottom of the unknown object at the bottom of the hole, then the enlarged digger set its serrated spade-like appendages into the ground and cut through the grass roots. It quickly vanished into the ground, the surface churning for a minute under the feet of her ants before it settled as it made it deeper.

The bug rose up beneath the object and began pressing against it from below, and she had to suppress a cheer when the object shifted and started to rise. She followed its progress, each tortuous inch, leaning forward unconsciously in her seat, her hands clenching the cool bench. She panicked when the digger felt the object tilting above it, and leapt from her bench before jerking to a halt, her hand outstretched. She could not grab for it, she might lose her hand, but she could just see it tilting, could imagine it vanishing the dirt before it and falling over, then destroying the ground beneath it as it fell endlessly.

"No," she breathed, frantically trying to think of something to do, as her bug tried to balance the object and keep it from tilting any more than it had.

"Miss, are you alright?" She spun in surprise.

"Uh, no, I'm fine," she dissembled, feeling her face flush with frustrated embarrassment as she took in the cute brown-haired boy showing concern for her. Obviously not a Winslow student, or he would have recognized and avoided her, she was sure.

"You sure? You looked like you saw something terrible."

Her digger had recovered the balance on the object, though it was on its side now and probably carving a wide trench through the ground as the digger pushed up. Other insects were rapidly backfilling as the digger struggled upwards, giving it a solid base to ease back and rest against before pushing again.

"I, um, I just remembered something I had forgotten to do. I'm fine, really."

"I'm sorry, I'm being rude. I'm David. I'm pretty sure I've seen you here before."

He paused and as she responded with her name, feeling the flush begin to fade from her face, she wondered. "Is he flirting with me?" She brushed her hair back self-consciously, trying to draw attention to her curls, which she felt were her best feature, and away from her lack of a figure. Unable to resist, she dropped her eyes in a quick scan. Nice, looked like a runner or track athlete, slim, well muscled. Not as built as she would like, but not weak or weedy. Probably already had a girlfriend, she was just imagining he was showing interest in her.

"It was nice to meet you, Taylor," he said with a bright smile. "See you around again some time!" She watched as he jogged off, her eyes falling, and she felt a pang of mild disappointment that he was wearing loose jogging pants instead of tight jeans. She waited for him to pass out of sight before turning around slowly. No-one was paying too much attention.

She moved quickly to the hole, and found her digger holding a large nearly fist size black stone, sharp-faced like a gemstone, but much blacker than the bits she was getting out of the bumblebees. A curious meow drew her attention momentarily to a black cat sitting watching imperiously from the bench where she had been sitting a short time before. Just enjoying where she had warmed the seat, probably.

A flood of ants swirled up and around the stone, but to her surprise, they did not vanish anywhere, even when they crawled over the top of it. "Well, that makes things easier," she mused, and quickly knelt, gathering up the stone and the digger into her pouch, before standing and brushing off her knees. She went and sat beside the cat, noting with a little surprise that it had no fleas, while her worms and smaller diggers churned the earth, erasing the evidence of the hole. Soon it was but a bare patch in the grass.

Her Shelob-vision attracted her attention as she walked back home, as it had suddenly become filled with white. When she tried to get Shelob to rise up and look around, she met a curious resistance. Feeling concerned, she reached out to the spider, trying to sense what was going on. "Oh! Oh, ooh, er, that's not good." She picked up the pace, intent on getting home as soon as possible. Shelob must have been bred before Taylor had chosen her to be enhanced, for she was busily laying a clutch of eggs.

It had suddenly become urgent that she find a lair other than her home's basement. In no possible way was she ready for Danny to find an egg sac several inches across. He would panic and probably try to squash it. Or worse, if he was around and she was not when they hatched, what if they weren't under her control at the time? If they matched their mother's scale, even babies might be able to inject a lethal dose of venom. This was her fault, of course. Black widow spiders did not normally breed when it was this cold, she had pushed them to breed to bump up her numbers, and then not checked for whether the one she chose had been bred before trying the stones.

She had not even thought to consider whether her enlarged insects or spiders could have children. If their changes bred true, she might be in trouble with the PRT if they ever found out. According to PHO, the Parahumans Online Forum she trawled in search of information on local heroes and villains, creating independently replicating creations was one of the prohibitions they enforced rather stringently.

The sensation of Shelob laying the eggs had been rather stronger than she had anticipated when she had focused on the spider, and she was a bit perturbed that she now knew what it felt like to squeeze eggs out of her abdomen, but that paled against the idea that she might need to have Shelob eat her own babies.

Snow began to fall again before she reached home, whitening her own vision as well.

---

Jan 20, 2011

Taylor sighed in satisfaction as she patted the dirt into the cracked window potting unit. She had tested this first with buckets in her basement while she was hunting for a lair. She had briefly considered trying to use the large stone her mole cricket had dug up for her to convert an insect, but Shelob's egg sac, now nestled in a broken and patched terrarium, had convinced her it was not a good plan to take a chance on it. Instead, she had played around with it until she figured out that it activated its insect vanishing properties when placed a few inches down in a layer of soil.

A broom with a broken handle worked to make a nice hole, and she dropped her third beehive stone into its new home. Almost immediately a fat little bumblebee buzzed out of the hole in the dirt, only to be snatched by a waiting dragonfly and taken to Shelob for processing. The dragonfly had been her third insect conversion, and it had been a great help in finding her new lair.

She looked around with a proprietary grin at the small, comfortable space, while rubbing her hands together briskly. It had once been a potting and yard management shed, including a small engine repair area. None of the equipment had been left, having been long since scavenged, but the benches were still there, and while it had no windows, it did have a ventilation hat on the roof, a ridgeline vent system that made a perfect entrance and exit for her swarm.

It had needed a little work to bend up the metal on one side to make a capacious enough opening for Lockheed, her eye-in-the-sky dragonfly, but there had been a wooden ladder left behind. It was missing a few rungs, but she had managed to fashion makeshift replacement rungs from pieces of tool handles. There had been several replacement handles left behind, waiting for a tool to need them. The tools they would have gone to were long gone, of course, but she guessed the handles had not been valuable enough. At any rate, she had been grateful that anything had been left, and had done her best to put it to good use, and now Lockheed had a safe way to get in and out, that was still too small for most people to fit through.

There was also a concrete pit, probably a grease pit, she thought, in the center of the floor beneath a drain that opened and would fit a normal man, making it more than big enough to fit her. She supposed it was to let it be cleaned out. More importantly, while the grease pit itself was a disgusting mess, there was a sewer access there, to allow water to run off. It did not help the stagnant water in the pit itself, but she supposed it allowed for run-off when the pit overflowed. It was not near large enough for her to pass through, much less use as an actual access to the sewers, but it gave her insects access, and meant she could bring her swarms home invisibly, as long as she kept close enough to roads where the sewer system passed.

It was a dirty mess of a hovel, but the structure was sound, made of metal walls with wooden supports, and it was hers. Her swarm had slain the rats that had nested there, and they were set to be food for her various clutches. The pit, with its stagnant water and long settled grease, had been an apt breeding ground for mosquitoes, giving her a steady supply of the little blood suckers.

Satisfied that her three hives were producing--she had gone hunting once she learned how they could be reactivated, and found and stealthily acquired two more--she went to look at her suit in the making. Shelob by herself could outproduce her entire black widow swarm at the moment, though she took a fair bit more feeding, and she was very happy with the quality and strength of the silk she was getting. Not a body-suit's worth, yet, but she had enough maybe for a head-stocking made, she thought.

She also had three glowing stones waiting. She had not dared to make a new creature after Lockheed and her mole cricket Mac, not until she had gotten out of the house. There was too much of a risk that Danny might find them.

Now, it was time to really push the envelope. If this worked, she might be able to start being a hero ages before she had expected. She thought she had a handle on what the bee-making cape was up to, now. He was obviously using those bees to collect whatever energy it was that made the stones glow and caused such interesting changes, and now his systems were working for her. The only question was whether they had really responded to her words, her intentions, her vision, or if induced gigantism was their only actual effect.

She had a backup plan, if this did not work. She still had the goggles with the dark lenses, and her homemade sandpaper. Seeing what the stones had done, however, had given her a hope. The spider that crawled on to the bench at her approach was tiny, and far from the sleek killing potential of her black widows. It did have the distinction, however, of having a mask already.

It was a spiny-backed orb weaver, a mere centimeter across and harmless to humans, but up close it looked wicked, with a red and black back surrounded by sharp black spines that looked rather like a demon mask, below which its thorax and limbs dangled. She set the first stone next to the spider. "No time like the present," she muttered.

"Test one, no verbalization, visualization only," she said, writing in her notebook, then focused on the spider and the stone, picturing what she wanted in her head, willing the stone to flash, and the spider to change.

Nothing happened.

"Test two, visualization and one word command," she wrote, and focused again. "Change!" she ordered, and blinked as a flash sent spots dancing across her vision.

She grinned as she picked up the demonic red mask and held it to her face, and the spider's legs gripped her head. Its now massive chelicerae dangled directly in front of her mouth, and she played them across her lips, confirming that she would be able to use them to pass food into her mouth without removing her mask. Two legs were clasped just above her ears, two just below behind her jaw. The other four dangled down in front. The placement did mean the mask-spider would be useless for web-spinning while worn, as it could not reach its own spinnerets to manipulate the webbing, and the shield back completely concealed her eyes, rendering her genuinely blind except for a tiny bit of peripheral vision that only showed her the light filtering in from above.

Since she could see through the spider's own eyes, this was not a hardship, and her visualization had worked in curving the spider's abdomen so it cupped her face and gave her nose room to breathe. She had more ideas in that respect, of creating an organic respirator or even a rebreather for swimming, but making a viable and awesomely fantastic mask was enough for one night.

She felt like she was floating on air the whole way home.

---

Jan 21, 2011

Taylor stared in dismay at the computer screen in the library. It had confirmed what she thought about black widow spider silk, and that the best silk was from the Darwin's Bark spider, but that it was from Madagascar, and not at all something she was likely to get her hands on any time soon. That had been expected though, nothing to get overly concerned about.

It had given her a list of interesting bugs to look for, from oil beetles that secreted a fluid that could cause blisters on human skin, to aphids that could effectively convert plant matter into insect food, to the curious looking assassin bugs that could produce a very painful bite to a human without any venom or toxins. Black carpenter ants could both bite, and spray formic acid, while eastern velvet ants had a sting strong enough that it was rumored to kill cattle!

That was not what her last search had been about, however. She had thought her spiders were weaving cloth, she had called it weaving, thought of it as weaving, been ready to start trying to sew it. It was not weaving. They were laying down silk strands in one direction, then coming back in the other with a second layer. As best she could tell, this would actually be called felting, if even that much.

To be woven, the strands in one direction would have to have the strand in the other direction pass alternately above and below them, while the next strand passed below and above those same strands. Looking at the diagrams online, she was hard-pressed to imagine a way to accomplish an actual weave, even with one spider for each of the strands that had to move back and forth. What could the spiders stand on to do the weaving?

She supposed they could have a very short extension beyond the current weft pass, and have half of them climb down onto the fabric being made while the others stayed ahead, let the wefting spider pass, then all crawl to the top and let the other half climb down. It would be something like the manual weaving she had watched her mother do on an apple pie's crust. But they would have to never exchange places, never miss. It was a far more complicated dance than she had imagined when she had set individual spiders each laying down their own mat and bonding intersections with their glue.

Once she had a mental image of how it could be done, though, she dove into the texts on weaves. She found a link to knitting, and checked on it to see if it might be an alternative, but found that it would be even more complicated, and basically demanded a rod to run the loops onto. Plain weaves were like the pie, a simple alternating pattern. Twill weaves crossed over two, under one, or a similar uneven pattern, and then ticked over one step in the pattern with each weft line. Satin weaves were like a massively overdone twill, where the weft would float over a big chunk of warp threads before going under one, but otherwise doing the same tick over by one with each step.

She made some quick notes about the patterns and her ideas, to make sure she did not forget them. She already had a list of interesting bugs to look for, along with her ideas for the uses of the stones. She still did not know what the stones were, or what the glow in them was.

She had done a search on PHO for any capes that had been bee focused, and there had been a couple, but they were more stylistically related than actually tied to bees by their powers. Nothing that sounded like it could account for the bumblebees with stones in them.

Gathering her stuff, she headed home. The sun was shining, though it was colder than it had been the day before when it had snowed. While she walked, she considered her ideas for the stones and her suit. One of her mental images had been enlarged wasps grasping her fingers, with their stingers at the tips of her fingers like claws or talons. Except these talons would be able to sting, maybe even to inject something with a particular effect, a knockout mix for example, or something that produced temporary paralyzation.

That idea got scrapped on the walk home, when she pictured actually being in a fight with it. Scratching seemed fine, she could picture stabbing someone with the stinger, but when she envisioned punching someone, well... exploded wasp guts all over her hands seemed the likely outcome there. A gauntlet more like a beetle carapace or a spiny spider abdomen would be better.

Of course, there was no reason she could not create wasps that would have those stings, if that was even something the stones could manage, and have them swarm someone. No reason they had to be in her armor. Self protection was probably a better pattern there anyway.

A way to carry some of her insects in her armor might be good, though, especially if she could produce something in the armor that could feed them, keep them ready to go.

She had to make a decision what to do with her next stone, and she was torn between going ahead and completing more of her costume, as her spiny shield spider helmet had proven she could do, and alternately making something that would be more valuable down the line, like a large beetle that regularly shed its carapace to give her a steady supply of parts for her armor.

Aside from these options, she wanted to try enhancing one of her existing enhanced bugs a second time, to see if she could get more out of them than just an increase in size. She also wanted to see if the stones could be used to combine insects, or more broadly, to combine insects and arachnids. Giving Shelob wings could enhance her usefulness.

She set all of these thoughts aside, though, when she got home.

"Hey, Dad, I'm home," she said as she stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

He smiled at her, but she could see the brittleness in it. "Did you find everything you were looking for at the library? Any trouble walking home?" Finding out that she had been bullied for a year without having told him about it had hurt him, hurt their relationship, and she had no idea what to do to make it better.

"Yeah, it was good," she said shortly. "Uh... I've got to put up my stuff, I'll be right back down for dinner, okay?"

"Sure, go ahead." He watched her go, and she felt like a heel, but what could she say? Keeping secrets from him was going to hurt him more if he ever found out, but it would only make his feelings of helplessness worse if he had to think about her going out and fighting crime, being in danger, with him unable to help.

Powers. That was a thought. Were those stones doing something like causing people to gain powers? Was Shelob basically a cape spider, a super-spider now? More to the point, could she cause cape like powers in her creatures? She thought of the powers in the city she knew of, and which might go well with her critters. A Tinker power would probably be useless, but a Blaster like Purity, the E88 cape, or Legend of the Protectorate could be interesting. She imagined Shelob sending beams of power out of her black eyes and giggled.

---

Jan 21, 2011

When her alarm buzzed, Taylor rose and dressed as quietly as she could, then slipped out of her room. She crept down the stairs close to the wall, where there would be less chance of creaking, then slipped out the door. Her hand drifted to her pocket, feeling the cylindrical form of the pepper spray Danny had given her when she had brought up the idea of going running. She had not started yet, but she had decided it was going to be necessary. Couldn't go out and about caping with a pudgy belly making her look ridiculous.

She had not been able to get to her lair yet that day, due to going to the library after school, and rather than the ideas that had been percolating earlier that day, she was trying to think of ways to avoid having to decide between gathering knowledge and building up her strengths.

Getting a computer installed at the lair would solve part of the problem, but only if she could have internet access installed as well. That would involve someone knowing her new address, which was technically not hers at all. She was just a squatter in an abandoned building at the moment. Not the best situation to be putting in official records.

Shelob was excellent, cute and just awesome at letting her keep her black widows from cannibalizing each other while they were out of her range. But Shelob could not work on her projects, aside from weaving. And even weaving, or, well, felting, she could only do solo, she could not manage the other spiders, just scare them back into their boxes.

Lockheed and Shelob gave her two different views on her lair while she was not there, but Lockheed was too large now to effectively grasp the bumblebees in his claws, and Shelob not maneuverable enough, so they were only being caught when they bumbled into the webs Shelob had laid for them. Of course, that was not such a great problem, as she thought the ones that went out and about were bringing back whatever energy made the stones glow, but while that might aid her long-term plans, it did not help her get ready to go out as a hero.

Of all the powers of the Wards and Protectorate and even the villains in the city, the one she most wanted to give to one of her bugs now was her own. If Shelob could use her power, without it taking the spider out of her control, if Taylor could basically use it through her, then she could get so much more accomplished without needing to be there, from getting the weaving going properly, to...

She stopped in her tracks, then pulled closer to one of the buildings, into the shadows. A septet of fast moving cockroaches in perfect synchrony turned out to be the inhabitants of the bed of a truck that took the corner just ahead of her and swept past. "Without needing to go out at night until I'm ready, would be nice," Taylor muttered, wondering if she might not have done better to wait until the next day.

Finding out that all her weaving work had been for naught at the library that day had badly pricked her pride, and stirred her anxieties. She wanted to be a hero, she wanted to prove Emma and Sophia wrong about her. She was not weak, not worthless, but she could not take it out of them with her powers, that would only get her in trouble for using her powers on civilians. If she could get a reputation as a hero, though, that would be something she could hold in her heart when they threw her failings in her face, and maintain her composure, and make sure she never gave Annette a reason not to be proud of her daughter.

She hurried on when the truck was out of sight, Lockheed taking off from the lair and sweeping the streets down towards her, letting her run with more confidence that she was not going to turn a corner and meet a gang.

Slipping in through the regular door - she had not even tried the rolling garage-style door yet, she held the knob turned as she shut it gently behind her. She let out a long slow breath. Safe.

She stayed there for a minute, her breath coming in panting gasps that only highlighted the need for exercise and practice before she started patrolling the streets. Straightening, she moved over to the bench, and looked at the stones there. Sighing, she moved them all aside, then pulled out a batch of seven and smashed all but one, setting the now glowing stone onto a shelf behind the bench, and repeating the process until she had five glowing stones. She poured out of the metal tin the two unused ones from the day before.

Stealing those hives was definitely proving its worth in spades, but did she have enough? Was it even possible to impart actual powers, not just making her insects bigger? She did not really have any legitimate reason to think so, except that Shelob was sort of armored, above and beyond her normal exoskeleton, which matched what she had blurted out at the time, she thought.

At any rate, there was only one way to find out. But what was she going to try for?

"Well," Taylor said, trying to think it out aloud, "what would really be best is if I could be in two places at once. To work with my power, it probably still needs to be a bug somehow, but it needs hands, it needs to share or extend or channel my power, or have its own power to control bugs." She thought a bit more, then breathing hard, her right hand curling into a fist and opening back continually, she separated out five of the stones.

She would have liked to use a tarantula, so as to start larger and have less growing needed, but she had yet to find any, and according to her searches that afternoon, they probably did not come this far north. So the spider that crawled onto the desk instead was tiny, smaller even than her black widows, an unbearably cute, female, black and white furred jumping spider. She had read that the jumping spiders were amongst the cleverest of spiders, the least programmed. They were hunters, not ambush predators, but more than that, they did things like invading other spider's nests and playing the strings like a guitar, emulating a wounded fly or even pretending to be another of the prey species of spider of the opposite gender, to lure them in.

Without warning, not letting herself think twice about it, she slammed her opened right hand down onto the five stones, feeling them dig into her palm, the long spines piercing her through. She shrieked at the pain, but turned her hand over, letting the little spider climb onto it into the middle of the stones, crawling through her blood as it pooled into the center of her hand.

She had not even tried combining insects and arachnids yet, and now she was going for mammal and arachnid, but it would just be so much more helpful if the new creation had hands. She focused through the pain for a minute to get clear in her head the idea that only the blood she had shed would be used - she did not want to end up part spider herself.

The little black spider looked up at her from where it was now floating on a pool of blood, its furry front legs waving at her, as she said "Be remade!"

Arachnae

Jan 21, 2011

The flash was blinding, and a searing pain lanced through her arm as it bent down. All her eyes were affected, Shelob's lidless black orbs burning with pain, Lockheed's thousand images splintered into lancing white agony. Even the nearly blind mole cricket Mac was feeling pain, while Masque was shuddering and twitching.

She looked up at herself where had pressed her hands against her eyes, smearing one of them with blood and felt an innocent sadness at her pain. "Better be," she buzzed through her chelicerae, patting herself on the knee, as comfortingly as she could. It was not helping enough. She tilted her head back, gazing up.

She was so tall. How to comfort herself when she was so high up? She thought for a moment, her brain fizzing uncomfortably, then her legs flew into motion, as she flowed easily across the spider boxes and other obstacles to the wall, and up the wall, and across the underside of one of the beams. Almost, but not quite enough, the building was a bit too tall. She glued her line to the beam, and eased herself down, ignoring the question of whether a line of spider silk could hold her forty pound body. Of course it could, it was her line, right?

She dangled upside down in front of herself, and carefully grasped each of her soft fleshy hands in two of her small but strong chitin clad hands and drew them gently away from her fleshy face. Her winged swooping self, Lockheed, that was his name, brought her sister Shelob's pressed mat and she used it to clean the blood and tears from her now wide-eyed fleshy face.

Taylor stared at herself staring at herself, like looking into a pair of bathroom mirrors reflecting each other into a green infinity. Her new spider-self was the size of a pre-teen on the verge of puberty, hanging upside down in front of her from a nearly centimetre thick cable of spider silk that looked like it had been braided. Covered in black and white fur, she had a spider-like abdomen, but instead of a cephalothorax, she had a thorax with her eight legs, rising into a chitinous but human shaped torso with four chitin armored arms ending in perfect little hands - armor covered, but with four fingers and a thumb, perfectly usable.

And her face, oh, she was just adorable, with huge solid black eyes, two large ones almost where a human's would be but twice the apparent size, two more smaller ones where a human's temples would be, two at the top where her head sloped back, and two that were fully on the sides of her head. She had no nose nor ears, and chelicerae instead of a mouth, but all her appendages were furred in black and white or silver, instead of sleekly black like Masque or Shelob. Her fine hair was too short for braiding or curls like Taylor's, but it was such pretty shades and patterns it did not seem to matter. She looked like something out of a Japanese anime, or maybe even something from an omake, the little animations that sometimes ran before or after, with super-deformed chibi characters running back and forth. She was like a chibi-Taylor.

There was another feeling there, though, something welling up in her beyond the mere fact of her achievement. More than having hands that could work here while she was gone, little Arachnae had something she had thought she had lost long ago. Though the size of a seven or eight year old human if you ignored the abdomen, she felt no more than four or five, and far more importantly, she felt innocent.

It was not as though she was a separate person, very much not, she was Taylor just as Taylor was Taylor, but she was Taylor with an innocent mind, with an innocent heart, a Taylor who had never known harsh words or hateful actions, a Taylor she had thought long dead and buried, who believed with all her heart, er, hearts, that Taylor was a good person. She was a Taylor, a good Taylor who found her harder self and her hard decisions a little scary.

"Arachnae. Your name will be Arachnae." She stepped forward, hugging her ridiculously cute upside down self, ignoring her own muffled protests, before her other arms folded around her squishy body. Some of her eyes were watering, but most of her eyes were dry. There was a harder hard spot in her chest that was a little uncomfortable against her cheek, and pulling back a bit, she saw that the crystals had formed a single diamond shaped crystal in the center of her torso-plate. She chittered with pride, making it flare with red light, showing off to herself, before she realized the time.

Time to head home, and see if she really could manifest her power fully through both of her selves. She stopped her Scary-self from leaving, though, when she had a brilliant idea. She could not quite reach where it was, could not call on it through the stone, but the idea of it was there, the image, and it fit with one of the things she had been hoping to figure out a way to do, so she called Lockheed down to herself, and while her fleshy, Scary-self watched, she tweaked and fiddled, until a new link to the Book appeared in Lockheed, then she sent him at the wall.

Lockheed sailed through it, wings droning, passing into the wall as if it were insubstantial, and she urged herself to head through after him. Taylor stepped up to the wall, then reached out, and tentatively stepped forward, and found herself on her street, stepping out of a tall fence, as Lockheed scanned the street from above her. That was not insubstantiality, that was more like teleportation! And awesome! But it was late, and she did not want to be seen.

As she hurried to her house where her bed awaited her, she also wove a broader web, a hammock in which she could rest, while at her command, insects for a block around her lair bestirred themselves to do her bidding.

---

Jan 22, 2011

Taylor had not set her alarm, since it was Saturday and she did not have to deal with school. Having been out the night before, she slept late.

At the same time, Taylor had a different body with differing requirements. Spiders can be quiescent while still monitoring their web for the slightest vibration. While she was based on a jumping spider, not an orb weaver or other ambush predator, Good-self, or Arachnae as Scary-self called her, was in all the bugs in her territory, each of which had different degrees of somnolence at different times, and as such, she had possessed some degree of awareness for the entire night.

She had let exactly half of the bees that came out of the three hives fly free, capturing all the others and consuming them and the stones within them. Some of the power she fed to Shelob, to make her larger and more capable of jumping--Good-self was a fan of the advantages of leaping for predation--as well as giving her an eye for Lockheed's otherwise unseeable holes. They were not really holes, but folds, she knew, but it was easier to think of them as being holes, just like a nice comfy lair-hole where one might drag a snack back and wrap them up to have later.

Her roaming spiders and wasps had found a plentiful harvest of rats and mice which now festooned the lair in a collection of cocoons, at least those that had not already been used to feed her widows. Her wasps and other strong flyers had found an abandoned lot with tall grasses and worked free seeds which they had brought closer and placed in caches here and there in her territory to attract more mice and rats to move in on the largess. Termites and pill-bugs had given a tithe to her larder as well, and she had discovered that she could send hunters out of her range if given strong instructions, and thus gathered a goodly supply of pill-bugs or wood-lice to seed a rotting pile of lumber, there to build a larger population to tithe to her.

Water bugs were diving in the grease trap below her, bringing up grease to feed her cockroaches and ants. Other bugs were delving the sewer system, exploring it to the edges of her range, and setting up webbing systems to ensnare passing rats and mice long enough for a lethal sting to be administered.

She had noticed that she had much less difficulty seeing and sensing through her insects and bugs now that she shared in their forms. She was a bit saddened that some of what she saw and experienced disturbed the rest of her Scary-self, but she found she was able to somewhat compensate for this by shifting her tiredness around, letting some of her more clever little selves support her Scary-self's processing.

During her Good-self's aware periods, between her somnolences, she worked on how to let her widows weave more effectively. She started with a find of one of her wasps at the edge of her range, causing her to move and squeeze into one corner of the building to get close enough. She captured a queen bee and brought her and her entire coterie to the lair. One of the long round sticks was webbed and then hung from the rafters, and the bees built their new nest around it. She had to spend a while uncomfortably pressed against the corner to have the range, but she was able to use wasps, hornets, and the bees, and Lockheed, to detach the beehive and tumble it into one of Lockheed's holes.

She was a bit annoyed at that, as the moment Lockheed made his hole, she realized she could feel all the insects for a block around the opening. It had not been obvious the first time, as Scary-Taylor had gone through and then of course she could feel everything on both ends. Now there was no Taylor on the other end, and she could feel it all, which meant she had not needed to wedge herself in the prickly, splintery corner at all.

His holes did not last forever, but it was long enough to collect more widows via wasp-air, and bring them through, while the bees were busily rebuilding. They consumed their old nest, to get the wax to build the new one, transferring the honey across. She knew her Scary-self's dimensions, of course, and she soon had a beeswax dressmaker's dummy hanging from the rafter. Where the wood met the floor, termites built a mud mound, anchoring it in place.

She thought about having the wasps paper over the dummy, but realized that it would make it unusable to the bees. She had them start another hive, but it would take several weeks to gather enough fresh materials to build another full hive.

While the bees were busy, the cockroaches had cleared and cleaned a large square of the floor, and black widows had begun a satin weave upon it, using Taylor's earlier idea of treating it like an apple pie to be topped. Thousands of lines had been laid in a long square, a double-handful of lines at a time, by the spiders, as she had too few to use one spider per line and use the spiders to weave it as they went. Once the entire sheet had been laid, including the consumption of the failed lines where a spider ran out of silk and had to swap out with a fresh one, and go replenish by consuming Taylor's own webbing, a line of glued silk was laid crossways at one end.

Shelob stepped in to lay the cross lines, and thousands of ants poured in, dragging every seventh line back across the others, until they touched only at the first cross line. Shelob laid her weft line, and the ants swarmed back across, restoring the seventh lines, and then grabbing the next line over, and dragging it back. In this way, much of the night passed, and a great swath of true satin-weave silk grew on the floor.

As morning came, back in the Hebert household, a spider the size of a small cat stepped through into Taylor's room, and dragged a pad of paper and a pen through a fold into the lair, where Good-self daintily made a note for Scary-Taylor to buy and bring them a few jars of honey and some beeswax candles. That would speed things up quite nicely, and not be too expensive. Shelob dragged them back through, returning the items to Taylor's desk even as Taylor was yawning and stretching, waking up to a wash of memories of all she had done the night before.

---

Jan 22, 2011

Taylor stumbled downstairs, still groggily going over all the strange images floating through her mind. Danny had clearly been up and about some time before, but he had left a breakfast plate for her to warm up. Adding bread to the toaster was easy, and as she sat down to enjoy her breakfast, Taylor considered what she wanted to do that day.

Going to the lair was not particularly necessary at the moment, though it would be very easy with Lockheed's new power. She had to pause and marvel at that in the middle of adding a bit of salt to her re-warmed eggs. Not only did it turn out that she could give powers, at least some, but she had managed to make Arachnae into someone that could give powers.

Probably she could only alter and give powers to insects and arachnids and other bugs, but still, that had so much potential for her swarm! She had to stop and refocus on the here and now when her next bite of eggs tasted like bug guts. It had not been unpleasant though, as the taste had been filtered through a being made to eat them. Still, she preferred eggs to taste like eggs. It did lead her to wonder about a termite egg omelette.

A sleek black leg appeared in the middle of the air on the table, pushing out her notebook. She accepted it as Shelob withdrew, and flipped it open. Arachnae's handwriting was angular and precise, reminding her a lot of the twitchy motion of spiders. She wondered if it was actually possible for arthropod muscle patterns to work at human scale, or if something wonky was going on inside Arachnae to make it work.

She considered the idea. Honey and candles were certainly much more reachably in-budget than a professionally made cape costume or mask when she had looked at them online. She wondered if there would be a market for her living masks?

So, she did not need to worry about her lair, she could see that Arachnae had progress on her costume well in hand. That freed her to worry about herself, which meant starting running to tone her form for cape-work, and the stones. She wanted to find more hive stones, to make sure she had a steady supply for Arachnae and her projects, but she also still wanted to find out more about the Tinker she believed to be behind them. What was he up to? What was his goal, his purpose with Brockton Bay? She felt fairly sure that no-one would have noticed his bees, since from the outside they looked, behaved, and physically were normal bees.

Decided, she raided her allowance stash and headed out for a late morning run. She noticed as she ran that she was getting much better reception on the visions from her insects. They made more sense to her, and if she grouped a collection together in the right way, she could see through their eyes a reasonable view of a room. Spiders were the most compatible, and the tiny jumping spiders did not need numbers to give her a view. It was low-resolution, like something seen through a screen door, or in a web image that had been zoomed in too far, but it was enough to get the sense of a scene and movement within it.

Dragonflies weren't quite as good. They really needed to be stacked, with the exception of Lockheed with his larger eyes, but multiple dragonflies moving in sync would be terribly obvious. If they landed somewhere, though, she could get actually a better static view, at higher resolution, than she could from the jumping spiders.

Not everything was so improved. Ants and termites were visually useless - ants could detect light and movement, but not at any great distance. She could stack them in the hundreds and still only have a very low resolution view of something quite close up. Termites were mostly blind, except for the flying caste, and even they had fairly poor sight.

Flies were a good medium, though, especially the smaller ones. They could only see a short distance, but it was more like a yard or two, instead of inches to a foot with the ants, and they had better resolution. They did not focus, but she could sort of focus them by moving them back and forth, and they stacked well in her mental view. Better yet, they could believably fly near people's faces without arousing suspicion, letting her identify people by sight remotely now.

She slowed as her breathing grew heavy and her legs tired, and began looking for a grocery store. Finding one and walking in, she realized with a start that she had run far enough to be in the docks area. Several of the young men in the aisles had sleeve art that suggested the Azn Bad Boys to her. She tried to avoid their attention and grabbed a hand basket. She found the honey, putting three jars in her basket, then went looking for the candles.

She was just reaching the end of one of the aisles when she heard a sharply worded command. Peeking around the edge, she saw one of the toughs standing at the counter, demanding something from the clerk. She could not see any guns, and she had not understood the words. Was this just a gruff individual being testy? Or was the ABB moving in on the docks, demanding protection money?

The toughs were out the door before she made up her mind, and she still did not know if it had been a hold-up, a protection racket, or just a punk being rude. As she walked up to pay for the honey, resigned to having to look elsewhere for actual beeswax candles, she considered the issue. As far as she knew, the Docks were currently claimed by the Merchants, the sleazy drug-pushing gang. If the ABB were trying to move in, there might be a turf-war brewing.

Her lair was not in the Docks, but she had a proprietary feeling for the area anyway, because it was where her dad worked, and many of his friends, that she knew and liked, worked or lived.

Unable to use Lockheed out in the open during the day, she used local flies to sweep the nearby alley before she slipped into it and stepped through a hole opened by Lockheed from within the lair, handing off her honey bottles to Arachnae and then giving her other self a hug.

Though she knew Arachnae was not a separate person, she still felt a distinction there, almost as if this was the Taylor of age four or five she was hugging, as if she were Annette, her mother, hugging her younger self.

Lockheed opened another hole, this one to the park she had found the first hive in, and several flies went through to scout for her, bringing home to her the realization she had already had as Arachnae, that his portals or whatever they were extended her power's range while they were open.

Through the flies and the dragonflies that were already in the park, she found a safe spot between some trees and bushes to step out into. Arachnae reached through after her, putting Mac, her mole cricket digger, into her hand. "Thanks," she said softly to herself, having almost forgotten to bring him.

She quickly located another one of the bees, but this time, she noticed yet another difference. Arachnae had not really paid attention to them, except to capture and consume half of them. To her, as she was focused on them to find and locate them, there was something new, something different about them. Their minds were no longer opaque to her.

They still were not within the realm of her automatic control, but she could sort of feel, well, slots, sort of, and knobs, and sliders. One of the slots gave her the feeling of a location, and she tried to use it to guide her. It led her back to where she had dug up the first hive. Her carefully resettled dirt was disturbed; there was a new hole here. A new hive. She stood stock still, looking all around her through her insect eyes, searching for anyone who might be paying attention. If the Tinker had been here, had discovered the hive missing and replaced it, he might be watching it, watching for her!

---

Jan 22, 2011

She saw no-one paying particular attention to her. A couple walking along the path, a kid playing with a dog while a woman, either a mother or older sister, watched from a bench. No-one that seemed to be keeping an eye on the hive, or paying her any mind. She huffed, and dropped Mac to the ground, preparing the way for him as before. If this was a trap, they had no way to guess she had an instant escape hatch, though she would need to reach the trees first. Then again, why wait? She turned and walked slowly away as Mac dug down.

"Going to have to make a Tosh for him," she mused as she passed the first stand of trees to lean against a larger pin oak. Two diggers would be better able to maintain the balance on the hive stones. Mac pushed the stone up and through the hole to lay in the grass. A sleek black leg slid into view from nothingness, and scraped the stone out of view before vanishing itself.

Mac slid back down below the hive, and Taylor waited. She pulled away from the tree a bit, and settled down to the ground next to it, drawing her feet in under her, then leaned forward, her insects ensuring that there was no-one watching, and reached into nothingness and pulled out her pillow, slipping it behind her head and resting against it.

High in the oak above her, bereft of leaves, spiders began weaving on multiple levels, little webs here and there, creating a sunshade for her without making too large a web in any one spot. The sun had melted the snow the day before, so the ground was dry and comfortable, and though the grass in the park was a poorly brown and a bit crackly, here in the trees the ground had been carpeted with leaves that had since rotted away, but had suppressed the grass, and while here and there were growths of mossy ground cover and fungus, there were none where she had chosen to sit.

Other insects slipped in as she moved about, and pulled away the small stones and twigs that might bother her if she turned or rolled and landed on them.

In spite of her apparent preoccupation, Taylor was fully aware of the insects in her sphere, and was watching closely for any signs of anyone who might either be the Tinker, or someone working for him, either checking on or replacing the stone.

---

One of the honey jars had been opened already, and poured out into a potting tray that had been left behind as worthless, where the bees swarmed it, collecting the honey to store in their hive. While she did not have replacement wax for them, Good-self did have wasps and hornets that made paper nests, and plenty of rotting wood in the yard to supply their needs. Wasps and bees swarmed about in thick clouds, as the dressmaking dummy nest was first papered over with three layers, supports built for it from the ground up, and then the inner nest was once again eaten and shifted to the new nesting location.

The temperature of the lair had risen many degrees since they moved in, as the massed insects' movements and activity, combined with their own body-heat, and the sealing of all the various gaps with daubed mud, termite mound, wasp paper, and thick layers of silk, depending on which of her bugs got to it first, except of course for the larger roofline opening, had contributed to a hothouse effect.

The difference was enough for Good-self to notice that Lockheed's tunnels did not allow air to cross, for some reason. Nor, of course, did light, else they would not be invisible holes, but blocking photons and not matter made more sense than blocking air, which of course, was matter. A selective barrier? It had not been any part of her ideas or intentions, she had just had the idea that there was a distance-stepping method available that she could tie in to him, and she had done it.

The large square sheet of spider silk had been finished, and she scuttled over to it, and lifting it from the floor, felt the surface, and examined it. Its feel did not match her memories of satin, but the appearance did, and she supposed the difference might be simply that she felt through fine hairs, not subcutaneous pressure sensors, while her only memory of touching satin was of course from Scary-self.

When Scary-self discovered the hive stone had returned, and became worried about the Tinker finding her, Good-self had a little panic attack of her own, and scurried about trying to come up with something to help.

She could not be seen, nor could Shelob or Lockheed, unless Scary-self's life was seriously endangered, for to be seen would invite scrutiny that would endanger her children. She glanced at the egg sac that was being jealously guarded by Shelob. Whenever she was not actively moving Shelob to use her, as Scary-self had just begun to do, causing her to reach out through one of Lockheed's holes, she would run back to her egg sac to hover over it.

She moved over to Shelob, and picked up the hive stone. Though she was tempted to try to eat it, her cute fangs tapping with anticipation, she took it and planted it instead, tamping a hole and dropping it in, then snacking on a few more of the captured bumblebees instead.

She used Lockheed to open several tunnels to the tree above her other self, to weave sunshades to keep her from burning while she waited, even as lower down, his tunnels formed to accept the more interesting bugs that had moved in to the park since her last visit. This included a few mated female yellow-jackets--the males would have died off with the onset of cold weather--some awesome little beetles that had flashy metallic wings and thorax, a few loner carpenter bees, and most fun of all, a Hercules beetle, an awesome two plus inch long horned beetle.

She shared in Taylor's jolt of shock and savage glee when after nearly an hour of sitting and waiting, a new stone appeared above Mac, with no-one in sight, and no other activity in the area.

---

Jan 22, 2011

Taylor sat up straight when she felt Mac sensing the reappearance of the hive stone. No-one had done it, she was sure of that. When she was paying attention, and had spread her bugs through the dirt, she could feel footsteps above. She had tested this under the playing child, confirming that she could follow him from beneath, matching it to what she could see above. She knew, therefore, that it had not been an invisible person placing the stone, unless they were also weightless.

So, what else could it be? There was nothing in the dirt there that could have done it, no other stones or machines, nothing but dirt and bugs and roots. Maybe it was teleported in from a distance? How many of these things could this Tinker have? If they were being made, what were they being made from or of?

---

Remembering the sensations she had been able to feel, in her Good-self she reached out and captured one of the rising bumblebees and felt again of it. A slot with a place or location in it, a couple of slider sort of things, almost like numeric values, a bunch of knobs, some more slots... she mentally grasped one of the knobs and turned it, and started in surprise when the bee spun in her hand. She grabbed all the knobs, holding them still, and opened her hand. The bee stayed still.

She let the knobs go, and it rose and flew before she snagged it out of the air again. She poked and prodded until she worked out how to sort of let mental fingers brush against the knobs without turning them, then moved her hand back and forth, feeling the knobs spinning. She held them still, and moved her hand... tried to move her hand. It was as though the bee were glued to a wall or nailed down. Loosening her grip a bit, she found could move her hand back and forth until the bee hit one edge of her hand or the other, then it just stopped.

While she played with the bee, her Scary-self had experienced a brain-wave of her own, and had taken off at a run for the nearest corner gas station. She purchased a map of Brockton Bay, then left at a more moderate pace. Settling back near her tree, she unfolded, adjusted, and refolded the map until she found the park she was in, Jenny McMurtry Memorial Park. Now for the test of her insectile proprioception. She had been sure that she would find a strong use for being able to just know where her insects were relative to herself.

A fly lit on the paper at one corner of the park, at the same time as a dragonfly settled on the ground in the corresponding spot in the actual park. She repeated the steps for the other corners, then sent a dragonfly to land next to the hive hole. Closing her eyes, she tried to land a fly between the other flies in the same relative position as the dragonfly was to the other dragonflies. A pen was tugged off her desk by a black claw, then nudged into her hand, and without looking, her hand moved to where the fly was and made a small X on the map.

She opened her eyes, and confirmed that the fly was in about the right spot on the map. "Looks close enough. Have to find a few more to be really sure."

She picked up the map, collected herself and her things, and headed off, feeling out through her swarm-sense for another of the bees to mark.

In her lair, Good-self had moved on to trying to probe the hive stones, but found that whatever it was about their insect control that was letting them feel something in the bumblebees, it did not extend to the hives. She could not feel any slots, knobs, sliders, or other effects in it.

She tried to get Lockheed to place a hole below the hive Scary-self had just left alone, only to discover that apparently he could not place a hole in a place they had not seen. Mac's nearly non-existent sight either did not suffice, or it was simply because she had not actually looked through his eyes when he was there, being satisfied with knowing where he was.

Lockheed opened a portal at the surface next to the hive, and Good-self slipped over to it, waiting while Mac pushed it up, then reached one of her slender furry legs through and knocked the stone through to her side of the portal, then let Mac wander through after, a little bit irritated at herself for forgetting him while she went off to look for more.

Scary-self slipped in through another of Lockheed's tunnels a moment later, staying just long enough to lay out the map on the bench before heading back. A little reluctantly, Good-self unfolded it and let flies settle on it to match the dragonflies that Scary-self was placing. She leaned over a marked a little X under one of them, then turned back to her own puzzles.

The sliders in the bees did not seem to do much of anything, but when she messed about with one of the slots, she had felt something pass from the bee to the hive, something that she almost thought she could have intercepted. She had tried again, but nothing had been passed the second time, so she had let that bee go, and now she was waiting for another one.

When the hives produced another bee, she was ready, her black and white hand flashing out and snatching the bee from the air. Following her instincts, she held it up to her chelicerae, waving them as if eating, then activated the slot. She felt a boost, and noted that the stone in her chest had glowed for a moment. She pushed at it, watching it flare with light. So, that was a remote way of drawing in whatever energy or glow they were collecting.

She chittered happily, then whistled in frustration through her spiracles, and went back to make another mark on the map.

---

Jan 22, 2011

Scary-self was back home with Angry-man, so Good-self... so, Arachnae, was trying to avoid noticing what Sc... what Taylor was noticing, and to keep from accidentally infecting her other self's speech with her own idioms. She did not want to see Danny's reaction to being called Angry-man, no matter how true it was.

She knew she had a good supply of bee-stuff available, and she was trying to decide what to use some of it on. She was tempted to make a sister-daughter-self, but she knew she should practice and get better at it first.

A wasp, then. They were the next most useful bug, after spiders and dragonflies, and maybe even before dragonflies once they started heroing. A bit bigger, not too much, maybe two or three inches, to let it have a good supply of venom. She brought a cicada-killer wasp to herself, already one of the largest of wasps, with quite a painful sting for all they rarely stung humans. Drawing up the bee-stuff, she began carefully molding her intentions and the wasp, growing and tweaking it.

She could feel as she did it that the bee-stuff would cover for some of her failings, but that it would be better and use less if she was more careful. So she paid attention to things like making sure its spiracle-trachea system could manage oxygenating its tissues, borrowing some branching design from her own system where the bee stuff had already covered for Taylor's failings.

When she had a three inch long wasp in her hands, she dove into its venom system. Its volume had increased faster than its surface area, so she had a bit more room inside to work in a trio of glands where there had been only one before. Its primary venom would remain the painful cicada-killer, the second would be pure adrenaline, the same substance in an epi-pen, which Taylor had been considering the expense of. What to do with the third?

She briefly considered trying to make it produce healing water, but found that she could somehow sense that it would take many, many times more bee-stuff than she had. That was still a massive revelation, though. That it was possible at all just meant she would have to husband her supplies until she could manage it, and she would be able to heal as well as harm. Lacking the capacity to do that yet, she considered a numbing agent, and finding it within reach, set it as the third option.

She drew out the pathways of the venom, making it a two chambered process, where venom could be dosed into a chamber before being injected, so that she could vary the dose being administered. Glancing over at Shelob, she tweaked it to be sterile. She could adjust that later on, once they had made a decision.

So far, this was all just variations on what they had already done - get bigger, change the shape a bit, and so on. Taylor had also been considering whether they could induce cape-style powers, though. She had managed to do something like that with Lockheed; but was it a one-off? It had come to her without her really planning or understanding it, the knowledge that she could do it had just been there in her mind.

Could she do something more deliberate, more planned? She stroked the wasp in her hands, and it buzzed its wings in response. As Taylor had done, she ran through the local capes in her mind. Armsmaster was a legendary Tinker, and Kid Win was also a Tinker, and she excluded them from the start. A wasp was not really suited to trying to create and use mechanical devices.

Vista did something with spaces, making them bigger or smaller, but that was similar enough to Lockheed's ability that she would not be sure it was not just a variant. She needed something different enough to be sure it was a general ability. Gallant did something with emotions, which was again a very poor fit for insects. The closest they really came to having emotions was hive or personal defense instincts and behaviors, or mating behaviors.

Aegis had something that made him very durable, but PHO had been cadgey and contradictory about what it was. Shadow Stalker did something with shadows, turned into them or walked through them or something. Walking through them was again too close to what Lockheed did, but turning into them?

She felt for whether she could give the wasp an ability to turn into shadow and back. Once again, it felt possible, but at an expense of bee-stuff that was all out of proportion, far more than they could get with their current collection methods in any reasonable timeframe.

A twinge of unpleasant emotion from Sc... grr, from Taylor, told her that dinner was over and done and Taylor had finally fallen asleep. Her dreams were turning unpleasant, and it was bothering Good-self. She shifted and stretched, pleased at the note that she could drop the confining proper terms and use what felt right to her mind. Another blast of negative emotion, of fear, of being cramped, trapped, hit her, and her feet buzzed out a staccato note against the floor as she ran in place, wanting to get out, get away.

Irritated and acting on a sudden realization of what she could do, she shoved Scary-self's dream focus into Lockheed, and sent him out to fly in the night sky. That would get rid of this confined feeling, and leave her room to concentrate. Indeed, she felt a surge of ecstatic joy, that faded into quiet wondering awe and pleasure, and she looked back down at her wasp.

Other capes, Miss Militia could create any weapon, not a good fit for an insect. Triumph shouted, lion's roar or something like that, wasps did not have lungs or an ability to shout. Assault did something unclear with kinetic energy, she did not understand it well enough to even try and phrase it as a power she could grant. Battery, some kind of charging and speed boost. Speed she could do something with, but how would that impact the ability to fly? If the wasp's wings were torn off as soon as it tried to move super-fast, that would be miserable.

She thought of Lung, the leader of the Azn Bad Boys gang, who turned into a dragon-like thing with metal plates and fire. How the metal thing would work she could not imagine; heavy metal was not compatible with flying on insect wings. Fire was tricky, but if immunity to flames came with it, it might be workable.

Could she grant an ability to produce and be immune to heat and fire? Yes, but again too expensive.

A remembered image from Taylor's imagination drifted through her head, and she irritably tried to see if she could grant laser eyes.

---

Jan 22, 2011

Seriously? Laser eyes she could do, but not flames? Not only could she do them, but as far as she was able to tell, laser eyes seemed ridiculously cheap.

Unwilling to risk her wasp on it, since she found it difficult to credit that it was even possible, much less useful, she gave it a hug and a pat and let it fly off to rest on the rafters, sending several cockroaches up to feed themselves to it.

She considered giving the laser eyes to the cockroaches, but decided to start smaller first, to hopefully limit the impact in case it proved problematic. A common housefly flew over. It had maybe twelve days left to live, she judged. She did not bother trying to make it grow or improve it in other ways, she just pushed the laser eyes at it, trying to grant that power to it. It took barely a second, and she felt that it had worked, though it looked no different.

"Why was that so easy?" she vocalized. Lacking proper vocal chords and practice both, a listener would not have understood it as words as all, just slightly modulated buzzing from her chelicerae rubbing against each other. "Oh, right," she murmured a moment later. "Because it's in the Book."

The fly did nothing notable, and its eyes were not glowing. She looked where it was facing, and saw nothing there either. Squeezing her abdomen to cause air to exit quickly from her spiracles was the closest she could come to a sigh, or she would have certainly sighed. She reached out, feeling the fly with Taylor's power, and her legs rang out a clacking thrum against the floor in her excitement. She could feel slots and knobs and sliders in the fly now!

The first slot, when filled with the concept of 'On,' produced a red dot against the wall where the fly was pointed, as if a sniper were lined up, ready to shoot. It jittered about as the fly twitched and moved.

---

The smelly tight confines of the locker, the mocking laughter from outside, the nightmarish feeling that Shelob and Arachnae were just the result of her going crazy faded to insignificance when the lights of Brockton Bay spread out beneath her, stars and clouds above, and the light of a waning but still more than half full moon. What was that called? A gibbon moon? Something like that. She rolled onto her back to look up at it, then rolled again and pulled up, soaring into the sky.

"Flying dreams are the best!" she cried out, as she angled down and dove towards downtown. She had to pull up a bit when her speed made her wings hurt, so she was not quite able to dive-bomb the streets like she had half-wanted. For a dream, it was amazingly responsive. A slight tilt and shift in control, and she smoothly slid several hundred feet to the left to avoid a radio tower. Downtown came up and she passed swiftly between buildings, then, pushing the dream, she took a nighty degree turn at speed.

"Yes!" she shouted, at the sheer ease of it. No slow arcing turn, forget turning on a dime, she could felt like she could turn on a needlepoint!

A red glow attracted her attention, zipping down between buildings, and she took off after it, rapidly catching up. "Kid Win!" He was flying on what looked like a flying skateboard, lit up from beneath by a red glow. His armor was red and gold, his eyes hidden by glowing red lenses, and she wondered if her yellow lenses would have looked like that. Now she had Masque, of course, so she would not be using them, which was a little sad. Maybe she could have multiple masks?

A young lady was gripping on to buckles on the back of his armor, balancing on the board behind him, her hair flowing in the breeze where his was shorter and only ruffled by the wind. Brown and straight, but wind whipped, she had a mask, and something around her neck on a chain, making a bulge at the top of her chest inside an otherwise skin-tight blue and white bodysuit. Now, who was that?

Oh, right, "And Target Practice, awesome!" She zoomed behind them, grinning when she saw the girl look up and behind to see where the buzz was coming from. "I wonder where they are going?"

She started out of her reverie and enjoyment when Target Practice threw something at a nearby building, and she felt a sudden sharp pain. "Dreams aren't supposed to hurt? Not a dream, not a dream!" A hole opened in front of them and they shot through, appearing over Winslow High, where she lifted up and pulled away, heading away from downtown towards the docks.

"Not a dream, not a dream, what's going on? Lockheed, I'm in Lockheed..." A nightmare, she had been having a nightmare. As Taylor came awake in her bed, still flying with Lockheed, memories filtered in, and she understood what Arachnae had done for her. She smiled softly as she drifted back to sleep. "Frickin' laser beams."

"Not safe to test in the lair," she murmured sleepily to Arachnae, or Good-self as the innocent little darling kept calling herself. She flew out to the bay, settling on to one of the still-floating, trapped vessels. Ships had been scuttled seaward, in a line, blocking the bay, but the ships trapped within had been abandoned. Many still floated, that had been well anchored, others had been dragged or sent by waves or wind to the shore, or crashed against the scuttled vessels worsening the barrier.

A phalanx of twenty laser eyed houseflies flew through Lockheed's opening to where she waited on the ship, only half aware that she was exerting her power here, far from where she physically was, as she delved in to them, feeling the slots and knobs and sliders. She faced the flies away from her, towards the wheelhouse, and pressed into the first slot, activating all twenty lasers at once. Twenty red dots appeared on the wall. There was little visible between the flies and the wall, but everynow and then a droplet of spray from the waves against the ship would pass through a beam, refracting and revealing it.

A fly twitched back and forth, and one of the dots broadened into a line. She giggled, the sound coming through oddly accented in Lockheed's buzzing, and reached deeper into the flies. The twenty dots stretched and warped, some becoming circles, others squares, then several began attempting to form letters. The letters shifted and warped as the flies repositioned, slowly coming together to form a red 'LOCKHEED' floating in the air.

Other letters floated around, then digits, as she practiced. The night wore on as she dreamily moved from block capitals to small letters and then cursive, accomplished by having multiple flies all tracing out the same word, each a little bit behind the one before it, creating a continually updated lingering image.

Mantle of Hero

Jan 23, 2011

Taylor was not aware, but Arachnae was also lightly touching Lockheed, continually causing him to refresh holes between Taylor's room and the boat, extending her reach to it, as well as between the lair and the boat, letting her reach it as well.

She sent through another twenty flies, a little perturbed at her Scary-self's silly wasting of good testing opportunities. She could have practiced making pictures with them here in the lair, that was safe enough. What was dangerous, or at least, she certainly hoped it would be, was playing with the other settings available.

It would be really disappointing if it turned out that laser eyes were really nothing more than laser pointers, though Scary-self was pulling something surprisingly useful out of even that. It would certainly go a long way to explaining why it was so ridiculously easy to add laser eyes to things, in the Book or not.

She pushed at the slot, turning one of her flies on, her new wasp slipping through the hole to use its better eyesight to let her see the dot, since the flies could not see it. With Taylor using the wheelhouse, she was having to use the deck a bit further away. She grasped at the first knob, and carefully, slowing, turned it. The light faded away. She turned it back the other way, and instead of brightening once she passed where it had been, it started changing color. Smoothly, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, becoming oranger, then brightening to yellow. She continued turning and it slid through the spectrum until it passed purple and faded away. Was it gone? Or was it ultraviolet? If she kept turning, would she get x-rays? Radio waves in the other direction?

She rolled it back to blue, and grabbed the next knob. Once again, turning it in one direction faded it, the dot becoming fainter and harder to see. The other direction made it brighter and brighter, until the blue was washed away by the red glow coming from the metal beneath it, and she turned it back down to avoid making Lockheed uncomfortable.

Her flies took off as one, zipping over the vessel's edge as the wasp settled on a cleat to watch. They all lit up at once, looking in a circle down at the water. The knobs were just conceptual things, could she sort of... she pushed the concept of twelve full spins higher at them, and water flashed to steam, creating a rising column of thickening mist, glowing red with visible lines of red, and one blue line, passing through it and the boiling water. She quickly dialed them back down, then rolled the color knob to red, and past it until they had totally faded from sight. She threw the power knob up again, and another, larger column of mist arose, the sound of boiling and thrashing water echoing loudly in the still air.

She rolled it back, and retreated, drawing the flies and wasp back to her, though she noted that Scary-self had picked up on her determination of the color knob, and was drawing color pictures in lines with her twenty flies.

Back in the lair, Good-self promptly spread the flies about and gently upped the power, turning them into gentle heat lamps for her insects, warming them against the cold, and allowing the bees to stop clumping so tightly for warmth, and to spread out again.

---

Taylor struggled back to awareness, her dreams curiously lingering and persistent. It was only after she finally fully awakened that she had awareness enough to pull back from Lockheed, and let the flies and dragonfly return to Arachnae. "Thanks," she whispered. There was something a little scary in there where she remembered seeing Kid Win, and, had she buzzed him? Had they seen Lockheed? Were they going to be looking for a bug-using cape now?

She shivered. The heat was on, clearly, but struggling. She wandered to the window and looked out. There had not been any rain or snow, but the grass that had survived looked frosted, lined with gleaming ice where the morning dew had frozen in a thin layer, barely noticeable but for the way it caught the light, glittering and gleaming here and there.

A short time later, after a warm shower and dressing in warm clothing, and carrying an extra sweater and gloves for later, Taylor headed downstairs. She dumped the clothes on the couch and peered into the kitchen. Danny was still there, she was a little surprised to see, and he had a breakfast ready for her. She smiled widely at him, still full of the wonder of last night's dream-flight, and there was an element of surprise and relief in his answering smile. He must have been afraid she had nightmares again.

"Good morning, kiddo! You look bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Big plans for the day?" He had a newspaper lying next to him, and she suspected that in the absence of her smile, he had probably been frowning at it. He always seemed to find something in the paper to frown at, not that she was any better. Brockton Bay was not the easiest place to live, these days, and while she did resent his lack of attention to her some days, she knew that he felt it more keenly than most, because as the union rep, he heard and knew of the experiences of so many other dockworkers going through hard times.

She shook her head as she sat and pulled the plate towards her, leaning forward to take a deep breath. "Smells good," she commented. "I might visit the library again, maybe do a short run. It feels cold though."

"Oh, definitely," Danny said with a chuckle, "it got down to five degrees last night. Not supposed to get above thirty, so if you go out, remember to dress warmly, and wear your gloves. No coming home with frostbite." That drained the happiness level a bit, she saw, and she guessed, correctly, that he was thinking of someone who had gotten frostbitten. Probably either one of the dockworkers, or more likely, one of their children.

"You'll be alright if I head over to the docks?" he asked. It was an all too common question, and she acquiesced as usual. His focus might make her attempts to become a cape a little easier, but it still grated. She shoved her feelings of irritation and inadequacy down deep, and made an effort to stay cheery.

"Yeah, I'll be fine, Dad. You go ahead." And one of these days, I'll make it better, she vowed to herself. I'll find a way to let you make a real difference.

She ate slowly, even as Danny puttered about and then headed out, letting in a blast of frigid air. She was enjoying the food, and the thought that went into making it for her, trying to push away the bitterness from his leaving right after. He had waited for her to wake up and come down, after all. That meant something, that was important.

Shelob scuttled up the bench legs and over to the map, acting as her eyes as she examined the marks they had made the day before. A flurry of shiny beetles settled on to the map, one on each X, to make them stand out and be more visible and obvious. There was a pattern there, she was sure. It was not block by block, nor was it a simple grid, but there was a pattern emerging. If it was what she thought it might be then there were still gaps.

That gave her an easy way to check one of her theories, though. She could go to where she believed a gap to be, and see if it had a hive.

---

Jan 23, 2011

Taylor stood outside the library, leaning up against a pole, wearing a jacket and sweater over her shirt, waiting impatiently for the doors to be opened. She was out of her usual comfort zone, as the library closest to her was not open on Sunday. The downtown library, a larger but older building, was open on Sundays, but to her frustration, it opened an hour later than she had expected. Luckily, her late awakening put her not far from that time, but waiting for it was miserably cold.

It did not help one bit that her other self was warm and toasty, or that the way she was being warmed was available to her as well. Pulling laser flies through to warm her up with infrared would merely make her stand out as unusual, not something she wanted to do in her civilian clothes.

Finally, the sound of the lock being jiggled caught her ear, and she turned to see the doors opened a bit before being allowed to close again. She hurried up and in, presenting her card at the desk and heading further into the warmth. Finding an open computer was easy, but she took a minute to find one of the computers with the half-wall privacy booth, where she finally got to take off the jacket and set it down.

Tugging off her gloves, she rubbed her hands together for a minute before prodding the keyboard, causing the computer to wake up. She skipped PHO, much as she was interested in knowing if Kid Win or Target Practice had posted anything about Lockheed. There was nothing she could search on for that which would not point a finger at her as involved if someone was monitoring for it. And considering what Tinkers could do, she suspected someone almost certainly would be.

She delved instead into clothing patterns and sewing techniques. The dressmaking dummy at the lair was complete, and a body-stocking sort of thing being woven on to it. She needed to find out how to make leggings, though, and how to join the segments, and how to make something she could actually put on and take off.

She stared for long minutes at a diagram of how a sewing machine worked before she finally managed to work out in her head what it was doing. She could basically do that, she thought, by having a spider under a piece of cloth, extruding a line. When a threaded needle came down through the cloth the spider would have to grab the thread. The needle would rise back through the cloth, and the spider would basically do a round of jump rope, passing the loop all the way around it self then letting it be drawn tight, with the spider's silk now passing through it.

The challenge there, for sewing using spiders, was the lack of a needle to push through the cloth. A spider's foot was already well adapted to grabbing and releasing thread, so maybe the spider could poke its thread through with its foot, let the bottom spider grab it and twirl, then tug it tight?

Back in the lair, Arachnae ran a quick test with a small piece of their original felted cloth and a pair of black widows, confirming that indeed, it did work. It was slow, though, due to the stretchy nature of the thread, and the need to be gentle but persistent so as to pull it tight without breaking it.

Taylor dove back in, looking at how to sew joints, then moved on to searching for clothing patterns. She would have liked to have printed half of what she was reading, but she did not want to push her allowance until she had obtained the beeswax Arachnae had asked of her.

Satisfied that she had what she was looking for so far, she packed up and redressed for the cold, heading out. It had warmed up, but it was still below freezing.

Walking briskly, she focused on the map at the lair, and the spot she had guessed might have a hive she had missed. Through her insects, she located an unoccupied alley and made for it. There she had Lockheed open a path close to her target, and used the access that gave her to the insects there to find a safe place for him to make a second path to, then stepped through.

In seconds, she was away from downtown and close to her target. Without even approaching it, she determined she was right when her worms found the object, and one sacrificed itself to enter the space above it, vanishing from her control.

Another mark went on her map, confirming her theory. They were not gridded, but they were regular, and they appeared to be placed at regular but growing intervals, as if they were being generated radially from a central point. Ants lined up on the map in the lair, head to abdomen, marking sight lines along the inward spokes, and she headed for the intersection point.

"Oh, come on," Taylor groaned at the sight of a long junkyard. It was a bad part of town to begin with, covered in gang tags along the long ragged fence-line, and the junkyard looked to cover a space three blocks long. She walked to the far end of the yard, then used her insects to find a clear spot and then Lockheed to get inside.

She crept between stacks of old, salt-rusted vehicles, finding herself surprised they bothered with junkyards. None of these looked worth even scavenging from. Between regular freezes, salted roads, and the salt air from the sea, there was hardly an unrusted bit of metal in sight.

It felt almost like she was in a computer game, as she watched the map in her mind, the little gold-metallic bug representing her creeping around, getting closer to the crossing point of the ant-lines. Unfortunately, there did not seem to be a way to actually reach that spot through the maze of lines of cars piled together, and trying to climb them looked to be a quick way to die.

She reached out to the insects, and found a heavy cockroach population. Taking the nearest ones, she sent them flooding between the vehicles, through spaces far too small for her, to the center area that somehow seemed to have gotten blocked off. They entered an open area, and once they had flown around a bit and confirmed it was large enough for her to fit, she stepped through a Lockheed opening into the confined space. It nearly triggered a flashback, with the stacks of cars towering overhead, but she pushed the fright into the cockroaches instead, sending them scattering but leaving her clearheaded.

---

Jan 23, 2011

Taylor collapsed to her knees, eyes overflowing with tears. She recognized what she was standing on, what she was looking it. How long had she looked up to heroes like Alexandria, Hero, Eidolon, Legend and Armsmaster? How long had she wanted to be like them, wanted so desperately to find what was here in front of her, what she had found only after gaining powers the hard way?

Heromakers they were called, these legendary sites, by the few of his Chosen that had been willing to speak of how they gained their powers. It was rumored that Arthur himself had been one of his chosen. Certainly, they fit the motif of the Sword in the Stone - an altar of sorts, with a weapon or device on it that could only be lifted by one who was worthy.

While she had ostensibly searched the parks for Fountains of Life, she had for a long time dreamed of coming upon a Heromaker. She would have so much preferred to gain powers that way over how she had. The way she had obtained her power over insects had been horrible, and it was not a surprise that so many that gained their powers without being Chosen became villains. As far as she knew, there were a few of the Chosen that had retired, but she had never heard of one who had become a villain.

She reached out and put her hand on the sword-hilt that was sticking out of the altar--this was a literal Sword in the Stone altar here--but she could not bring herself to pull up. For so long she had fought against people trying to break her self-respect, to grind her into the dirt. She did not know if she could handle it if Heromaker rejected her as well, but she had also never heard of any Chosen who had also triggered. She did not know if it was impossible for both to happen, but...

Taylor froze, a chill creeping up her spine. The mysterious Tinker, the one she thought was using bugs, that she was trying to find and uncover... was Heromaker!? Suddenly furiously angry at the injustice that was her find, her nemesis that she and only she could find and bring to justice, being actually the obviously benevolent creator of heroes. She tore the sword out of the alter and slammed it down at an angle, battering the altar with it again and again, screaming and sobbing.

Exhausted and hearing voices approaching, Taylor collapsed, and rolled limply through a Lockheed portal to curl into a ball in her lair, drained and miserable.

---

Good-self scurried over when Scary-self fell through and curled up. The connection closed as she widened her stance, lowering her body closer to her other self, and stroked her curls. Drawing back, she tugged the long naked blade out of her other's hands, to keep her from injuring herself on it, and examined it.

It was a long blade, that looked like it should be much heavier than it actually was. Shiny silver in color, it had raised letters on the length of the blade, and Good-self considered them unhappily. "Stupid name," she buzzed incomprehensibly.

She looked at the concrete floor of the lair and chittered unhappily at the long score the sword had left in it, and the curl of concrete it had dug out when she lifted it and the point dug in. "Stupid sword," she complained, "stop cutting everything." She placed it on the bench carefully, trying to balance it as she laid it out so that the edge did not contact the bench.

She went back to Scary-self and pulled and tugged her over, helped by the pushing of a thick swarm of insects, and rolled her up into Good-self's own hammock she had made from her silk.

She reopened a connection to the altar, so she could reach the insects in the junkyard. It did not sound like the people behind the voices had found a way in to where Scary-self had been. After the cockroaches confirmed that there were no humans present, she squeezed through. This was her chance to get out for a bit, since Scary-self was in the lair to keep the other bugs in line.

She gazed up at the blue sky in wonder, feeling the deep chill in the air, then looked down at the altar, poking at it. She could not feel it with Scary-self's power. With her own senses, it just seemed like hard stones.

Remembering what Scary-self had done with the hives, she reached into the ground. This was the center of a junkyard, though. Nothing had grown here in a long time. There were no worms in the dry dead soil, nothing that could tell her what, if anything, lay beneath the stone altar.

Reluctantly, she withdrew to the lair, and waited for Scary-self to recover.

Eventually, Taylor stirred and sat up. She looked around in confusion for a minute, before quickly pulling off her now far too hot jacket, and skinning out of her sweater. Flying bugs swarmed around her, stirring the air and generating a slightly cooler breeze across her overheated skin.

"Arachnae, thank you," she said, rolling off of the web and on to her feet, then wobbling uncertainly around the silk-covered dressmaker's dummy to find her more innocent self and hug her tightly. "I just lost it, I guess. Stupid Heromaker, hiding all my life until I didn't need it anymore. Not that it would have... What the hell is that?"

"You brought it with you," Arachnae communicated verbally and mentally. The mental words colored the audible sounds, making them almost intelligible.

"I... I was Chosen? I... I'm a Hero... I'm actually worthy?" Taylor stumbled to the bench, her breath coming in short sharp gasps as she stared in disbelief. "Wait... what the hell is this? Zaravida Starfall? Who the devil made that up? What happened to names like Excalibur?"

Arachnae waved her hands in the air to indicate her lack of knowledge. Taylor stroked the sword, then grasped the hilt, still half-expecting it would refuse to rise. She had heard that the Chosen's weapons would do that sometimes, if someone else tried to lift them. It lifted easily, faster than she expected as it was much lighter than it looked.

"No way! Really?" She held the sword in both hands, and swished it experimentally through the air, then her smile drooped. "Damn. Guess now I have to find someone to teach me to use a sword."

---

Jan 23, 2011

Good-self shivered as she heard words that Scary-self did not react to, that Scary-self could not hear.

"Mantle of Hero accepted. Shield of Family commencing."

She smiled at Scary-self when Scary-self looked at her with a questioning expression. "Test sword?" she buzzed, offering a portal back to the boat in the harbor. Scary-self considered for a moment, before Masque trundled awkwardly over to the edge of the bench where Scary-self could grab her and and hold her up to latch on to her face. Good-self rubbed her fangs contentedly as Scary-self stepped through to the boat. Scary-self was not so scary when she looked like them.

Now she could hunt for the voice.

"Three... error... Two Vital Links found. Following."

She tried to listen through her bugs to find the voice, but only Shelob, Mac, and Lockheed could hear it at all. She was surprised that her wasp could not, even though she had altered it, and the rest of the bugs heard nothing unusual at all.

"Link end located. Establishing protection."

She looked around, lifting random things to peer under them, sending in swarms of insects to check the crevices and around the outside of the building. She sent a batch of cockroaches down the sewer pipe, in case the sound was rising from there.

"Link end missing. Correcting."

Every one of the altered insects glowed red momentarily, including the stone on her chest-plate.

---

Taylor stepped through the invisible opening on to the boat. She glanced up, and saw the sun still high, but on its way down. She took a step, testing her balance, but found that the roll of waves was very mild. The boat was sizable, but more importantly, the long line of scuttled vessels dampened the ocean's influence, tempering the waves here in the harbor beyond even the shelter being in a bay would normally provide.

Satisfied that she was not about to tip over the side if she tried walking, Taylor took a minute to examine her surroundings, looking for any activity on the nearby boats. They had long since been abandoned, of course, but that did not mean that some cape or other might have had the same idea she did and be out here testing a power or tool, or using one of the boats as a lair.

They had not been abandoned by insect life, she found, and that let her quickly satisfy herself that she was alone out here, at least up to a block or so in each direction.

She looked about for something to hew at with her new sword. She dismissed the rusty metal crab or lobster traps, but found a weathered wooden pallet a more tempting target. She heaved it up one handed to lean against the gunwale, stepped back, and swung her sword lightly in to it.

Her sword thunked against the wood, not cutting in at all. "Too weak," she muttered, and hauled back and slammed it home again. The board cracked, but the blade did not slice into the wood at all.

"That's bullshit," she muttered, bringing the blade up to where she could see it more clearly. It was a very fine edge on the blade, and clearly should have cut smoothly into the wood, though she suspected not very far. Moving closer to the pallet, she held the blade up near it, as if to shave off a long slice, and watched the edge of the blade round over as it neared the wood, becoming a rounded blunt face where a keen edge had been. She pulled it away again, and it sharpened before her eyes.

"Come on," she groused it, "I just wanted to try it out. Cut something already!" She slammed it into the wood again angrily, and fell over when the blade sheared through the pallet, and sliced into the decking. She caught herself with one arm against the deck, narrowly avoiding slamming face first into the wood. Her sword was jolted out of her hand, stuck in the wooden decking where it had slid in with no resistance then become wedged as the blade got thicker.

She struggled to her feet, and grabbed the hilt, tugging it free. The pallet had slices clean through several of the slats, but had stayed upright on the gunwale, probably because the blade had passed so easily through that it had not pulled much on it. Experimentally, she held the blade near the wood again. It did not change. She set it close, and easily shaved off a long curl of wood.

"Stop cutting," she said softly, curiously, and moved the edge closer to the wood. It rounded off, becoming blunt again. "Freaky. So, what else can you do?"

Immediately, she reeled as an array of options impressed themselves into her mind. She leaned involuntarily against the gunwale, struggling to process the rapid influx.

Then she stared at her sword. What kind of a Tinker was Heromaker? Or was there no Tinker at all, and the legends of Excalibur were true? The sword thinned and the edge rounded away, leaving only the sharp point behind, as it became a rapier with an elaborate basket-hilt right out of a childhood fairy tale. So, the shapeshifting part was real enough.

Was it really possible that it was everything else it claimed as well? She returned it to the previous form, noting that the silly name had persisted through both transformations, though it had been small enough to be unnoticeable in the rapier form. She faced across the small vessel's deck, looking at the opposite gunwale, and thrust the sword at it. The end extended across the distance in an instant, then retracted, leaving a neat hole behind.

"If he could do all this, why did he not use it himself? Why only make others into heroes? Or... oh, maybe he is still around, and he is one of the first Chosen, pretending to be Chosen when he is really the Heromaker?" She could well imagine that if there was a cape in Brockton Bay that could make a weapon this powerful and versatile, he would never get to be a hero for the floods of capes or wanna-be-capes wanting weapons from him.

She was tempted to ignore getting training to use a sword. If she could reshape it, she could just use it as a stick. She tried to reshape it into a baseball bat, and found it still insisted on having a hilt and guard, but she was able to make the blade portion round off and fatten up into a reasonable looking metal bat, although Zaravida Starfall was a pretty silly looking team-name.

---

Jan 23, 2011

Floating high above North America, a fifteen foot tall figure resembling a nude woman partially concealed by numerous unpaired wings, turned towards Brockton Bay and frowned minutely. The change between subsequent video frames from a camera focused on her in a passing satellite was run through high speed analysis in a Canadian computer system, setting an alert flag.

The new vector was calculated, and fed into a set of of geographic information systems returning a collection of cities, townships, villages, and other municipalities along the new line of sight, along with a probability rating indicating the divergence of the municipalities center from the exact vector. One of the items on the list tripped a secondary trigger setting a second alert.

A short time later, the list had passed through a set of probable interest filters, receiving likelihood ratings. Two cities stood out, one with substantially higher probability.

"Armsmaster?"

---

Deftly avoiding the broken step, the tall, well-dressed woman tried the door, then slipped a key into the lock. Her eyes noted the general air of disrepair at the Hebert home and the absence of a car as she opened the door and stepped in. She stopped in the doorway, head cocked as if listening, then swung the door shut.

She glanced in each room as she passed, heading straight for the stairs. She paused for a long moment with her hand on Taylor's door. Lifting her hand, she knocked on the door, then paused a moment, her hand hovering over the handle again. She shook her head, and moved on.

In the master bedroom, she checked the bedside table, the shelves, and then the closet, where she found a shoebox and picked it up, setting it on the bed. She pulled the top off, and examined the contents. Newspaper clippings. The strike, irrelevant. The scuttling, irrelevant. One, two, three, four obituaries of dockworkers, irrelevant. Obituary for Annette Rose Hebert. She lingered here, reading and rereading it several times, before moving on. A couple of clippings of politicians promising to reopen the ferry, and restore prosperity, irrelevant. A report on a schoolgirl recovering in the hospital after being locked in a gym locker with rancid blood and... Taylor?

The sound of a gun being cocked drew her attention to the door, where a woman in a black suit was pointing a handgun at her. Time seemed to slow down as light blossomed out of the gun's barrel.

---

Taylor stepped into the lair, her thin face set and resolute. Arachnae turned as she entered, and drew closer, curious at the odd certainty in Taylor's mind. "I need to know," Taylor said, setting Zaravida Starfall, now in the form of a long knife, on the table, "what Heromaker is up to. I can't let getting what I wanted make me turn a blind eye. He is up to something with these bees."

Arachnae nodded. She too was curious. "And the voices, too," she answered.

Taylor was momentarily floored, as the memories of Arachnae hearing the strange voices surfaced for the first time in her mind. Why had she not heard these voices?

"Not getting distracted." She shook her head, running her hand through her hairs, trying to think past the weirdness of having memories arise that she had somehow not experienced, even though she was Arachnae, Arachnae was her. Apparently, having separate physical brains but the same self could create some confusion.

She pushed the confusion and distraction out into the termite colony at the base of the dressmaker's dummy, sending them scurrying about. "Diggers, need diggers, let's see." She did not have any worms, she had not collected them in her various treks. Useless for attack and defense, but they would be ideal for this.

She sighed and leaned against the bench. A tug on her pants leg brought her eyes to Mac, and she leaned over and picked him up. "Yeah, I know Mac," she said, stroking his smooth carapace. "You're great. But that's hard-packed dirt out there, pressed down by heavy weights and machinery, not soft earth loosened by worms. I don't want to lose you if the ground settles under that altar thing."

Arachnae glanced over at her still-unnamed wasp, and whistled a short sigh. Taylor was in no mood for naming things right now. The wasp buzzed its wings softly, as if to reassure her that it did not matter.

Taylor set Mac back on the workbench. "I'll just have to collect a bunch of... Wait..." She spun back to the bench, and snatched up the knife again.

"You may have been made by him, but you work for me now. That spot in the junkyard, he did that somehow, but it's going to work for me too. I can dig too." As she stepped through another of Lockheed's openings, Zaravida changed in her hand, lengthening and broadening at the tip.

She looked around the altar. Not a lot of room to work with between the stone altar and the surrounding mounds of cars, but probably enough. "Cut things," she said viciously, and stabbed the sword-turned spade into the ground. It slid in to the curled footrest and she leaned against it, but the dry, hard ground had little give, and while it had slid in easily, that only meant she was trying to move that much more dirt at a time.

She pulled it back and out slid it in twice more at right angles, then one final time, but at a forty-five degree angle to the ground, to close the square and heaved, and this time the ground gave and she was able to lift out a chunk and set it aside. She slid it down in the same spot, straight down this time, and hauled out another crumbling mass. Five more shovelfuls followed before she paused, breathing heavily.

She stretched and groaned, feeling an ache in her back already. "Digging is harder than I figured," she complained, sticking Zaravida back into the ground so she could lean against it and think for a minute. Unfortunately, miraculous earth-movement was not one of the features the sword had claimed for itself. Besides, she didn't even know if there was anything to dig for yet, or where exactly it might be. Directly under the altar was her guess, but it was only a guess.

She considered that for a moment. Was there a way to be sure, other than trying to dig it out by hand, or risking crushing Mac, or waiting interminably for ants and worms to do the work, if she brought them in from elsewhere? Maybe there was.

Zaravida reshaped in her hand again, becoming a long rapier like sword again, and she began stabbing it into the ground then extending it through the dirt, launching the tip out and drawing it back in then pulling it out to stab at another spot, trying to hit an anticipated object under the altar.

Even if she hit nothing, at least it would be loosening the packed dirt and sand. But at an angle that she thought put the tip maybe six feet below the altar, she did hit something, and it stopped Zaravida cold.

---

Jan 23, 2011

She flinched in anticipation of the pain to come, but instead heard a sound like shattering pottery followed by a plink and clattering. Her eyes popped open in surprise, her heart racing, and she saw the woman standing in the doorway still. She had a warm skin tone and long slightly-curly black hair not that dissimilar to her own, but her eyes were cold over the smoking barrel of the handgun. Between them on the ground where shards of white porcelain, or something quite similar. Had she done that? She did not think so, but...

The woman lowered her gun and turned away, slamming the door behind her. She heard muffled words, then silence. She took long slow breaths, trying to calm down. She had just been nearly killed. Again. Tears filled her eyes as she stared around the bedroom.

Moving quickly and efficiently, she repacked the shoebox and stored it in the closet. She looked outside the window for a moment to judge the time, and deciding that she might have time if she hurried, she gathered a broom and dustpan and swept up the shards, which on closer examination did indeed resemble white porcelain, and carried them downstairs. Oh, she did pause for a long minute with her hand on the doorknob, wondering if the woman in the suit was on the other side with her gun, waiting.

Not for long, though. If the woman was going to try again, she had her dead to rights and had not tried a second time, what would be the point of waiting to shoot her again? If they thought they might be able to take her off-guard, it would make more sense to set up a sniper nest somewhere and take her out when she had no opportunity to detect them. Not that she expected it would make a difference, as she still did not really believe she was responsible for the appearance of the ceramic plate that had blocked the shot.

She quickly dumped the dustpan in the kitchen trash, put away the broom and dustpan, and locking the front door from inside, went out the back, locking it behind her. She paused a moment, looking around for vantage points where a sniper might be waiting, then shook her head. There was nothing she could do about it, if someone was waiting, watching for their shot.

She sighed deeply. Still, someone had tried to kill her, best not to bring that on anyone else. She could not stay here.

---

Taylor poked and prodded, trying to get a feel for where the item was. Cockroaches started appearing as they scurried from all corners of the junkyard, between and among the piled up cars, pouring in to the open space between the altar and the stacks. Unsuited as they were to digging, they began pushing the loosened earth ahead of them, even as stronger beetles, more capable of burrowing, flew in from above.

She pulled the blade out, letting it widen back to its original form, then slid it horizontally in directly under the altar, whereupon she widened it into a large plane. This provided the altar with a broad support base, and Mac tumbled through into the space and began burrowing in, moving faster and more strongly than any of the other insects.

The swarm thickened, and the dust and dirt flew, pouring out of the steadily growing opening, pushed by thousands of tiny feet and heads. The sides of the excavation slumped off several times, but the steadily increasing swarm made short work of the spills. What they exposed was black, blacker than the shadowed dirt, but smooth and shiny, a flat plane of blackness. Thankfully, none of the insects that touched it were harmed, so she did not apparently have to worry about a vanishing or vaporizing effect from it.

She clambered into the hole, spaces opening for her feet as they came down, and reached for the gleaming blackness. Her hand came into contact with it, slid smoothly across the surface as if it were slick ice, then curled around the edge. It was thicker than she had half expected, but not beyond her hand's grasp.

She tugged, and it did not move. Excavations resumed, churning the dirt away from the sides where it was held in, revealing a rectangular prism. She pulled again. It did not move. She brushed dirt away from every side, and it hung in the air, motionless, undisturbed.

She looked up at Zaravida Starfall, acting as a support above her. If she pulled it out, would that altar tumble and crash into the black thing? Or would it hang in the air in the same way?

This was Heromaker's work, the same as the hive stones, the same as the bee stones. She had taken them, made them her own, she could do the same to this.

"You don't get to say if I get to be a hero," she said fiercely, even though her heart had been filled with the joy of being found worthy when she had realized what Zaravida was such a short time before. But she was going to be a hero anyway, even without being one of his Chosen, and she was not going to let anyone else dictate what kind of hero she would be.

"I am going to find out what you are up to."

An invisible opening formed next to the object, in the now open air, and she took Arachnae's hand as her innocence reached through, and together, they pressed their hands against the stone. Nothing happened.

She pulled Arachnae's hand away, and sliced her own palm open on her other self's chitinous web-claspers, then pressed their hands together on the stone again. They pushed, and she demanded, "You are mine now!" as Arachnae pushed her bee-stuff into it and she focused, willing it to move, demanding it to move, insisting that it move.

It fell with a heavy thunk into the dirt at the base of the pit, and she fell forward with a sudden, bone-deep exhaustion, only to be caught by her other-self's outstretched hands. Insects bore the heavy tablet thing up to her, and she grasped it, then pulled herself to her feet, and climbed slowly, achingly out of the hole. She grasped Zaravida and drew it free, reshaping it into a sword as she did. The altar tumbled into the pit, rolling forward and triggering a series of collapses in the dirt walls, partially covering it.

Sphere and Loathing

Jan 23, 2011

Armsmaster frowned beneath his visor in the dimming light. It was inefficient, not to mention unnecessarily risky to have such light patrols tonight of all nights. Colin was especially perturbed as he had received a message from Dragon warning him of the Simurgh's extra attention to this region. Was she perhaps watching the transfer of the sphere?

The models were fairly clear that shortly after it had appeared in orbit of the Earth, while it was within sight-line of the Simurgh, it had received a massive burst of delta-v as the NASA types called it. They were reasonably confident that it had been Ziz, the Simurgh, who had telekinetically swatted the thing out of the sky, even though it was outside her theorized telekinetic range.

Hero had spent countless hours trying to get into the sphere, which Colin had seen only in photographs, looking like an uncolored, shiny white soccer ball. Those hours both irked and intrigued Armsmaster. It was troublesome to think of the time he had wasted, the greatest Tinker ever spending fruitless hours when he could have been designing and improving his equipment. At the same time, he knew the delight of an intellectual challenge and he could well understand how Hero could have put so much time into it.

Anytime humanity encountered a phenomenon that was not well understood, understanding it opened new realms of abilities to mankind. It was unfortunate that study of parahuman abilities, even Tinker-tech, had so far not yielded the sort of gains that had come from so many other discoveries.

He knew even more about Dragon's efforts, when she had received the sphere from Hero, and had spent her own hours in studying it. It was she, and not Hero, for all he was accounted a better Tinker than her, who had discovered that the sphere was using material in its surroundings in rebuilding itself after undergoing attacks. That was really more a matter of her taking a more pedantic and measured approach, though, where Hero had spent more of his time subjecting it to attacks and strikes from as wide a variety of capes as he could get to try.

Now it was his turn to study the sphere, to see what could be learned, and while he was eager for the challenge, though it would take untold time away from vital projects, since Director Piggot had wrangled the Wards away from him, he had some additional time for such efforts.

Not, apparently, that this freed him of them. Miss Militia, his most capable and even tempered second-in-command at the Protectorate in Brockton Bay, had insisted that the children get the chance to meet their heroes. He thought it a bit silly; they were heroes themselves, and got to patrol with heroes all the time.

They were not all there, of course. Shadow Stalker had been more interested in patrolling than meeting heroes, even one of the original Protectorate, before it had been expanded and nationalized, and Gallant had volunteered to patrol with her. He suspected that this was more due to Gallant having met them already, possibly at one of the gala events he was sometimes called on to attend, and wanted to keep one of the others from being forced to accompany Shadow Stalker.

Vista had met Alexandria previously, but the youngest Ward was visibly excited to meet Hero. She was nothing next to Kid Win, though, who lacking her concerns over propriety and appearing adult, was practically vibrating with excitement. Considering he basically idolized Hero and had painted his suit in Hero's colors, that was not surprising even to Colin.

They were all collected around the helicopter landing pad on the Protectorate platform in the bay, waiting for the shipment to arrive, or to meet their heroes.

All the Wards straightened when Alexandria soared into view, cape and her long black hair streaming behind her. Colin nodded to her.

"I've given the town a quick fly-over. No sign of anyone preparing to intercept the shipment."

Colin nodded, turning slightly to look in the distance where the sphere should soon be visible. The tall woman who epitomized strength, flight and invulnerability to such a degree that the trio of powers had been named the Alexandria package in her honor took a moment to greet the assembled Wards. She was, he knew, better at the whole personal interaction thing. Somehow, she left the heroes she encountered simultaneously impressed with her poise and power and reaffirmed in their own determination to be heroes.

Meanwhile he had just enough empathy to realize that people tended to prefer not to spend time with him. That was generally fine with him, as spending time with people tended to get in the way of getting work done.

"Ah, here they come," he said, focusing on a distant object in the sky. In spite of his words, it was almost twenty minutes before the Sikorsky Skycrane was hovering overhead. It showed obvious signs of Tinkertech improvement. Kid Win suppressed a delighted sound next to him as Hero descended from where he had been escorting the flight, his characteristic red and gold armor gleaming, though Armsmaster noted that it was not the armor he had last seen him wearing. Hardly worth noting, really. No Tinker worthy of the name rested on their laurels. Constant tinkering and improving were, after all, the hallmark that had resulted in the label Tinker being used for those capes who seemed to gain access to technologies well in advance of current science and manufacturing capability.

The sphere was there in full view now, lit by the landing lights of the Skycrane under which it hung, and by the far more powerful lights of the platform itself. It gleamed like the finest china, a ball of seemingly delicate porcelain that had resisted the best...

"Wow! Did the Simurgh lay an egg?" Clockblocker's ridiculous comment made his frown deepen. Granted, Ziz's alabaster skin was a similar stony white, but the resemblance was not that close. The vulgar Ward had never actually seen the Simurgh up close, or even from a distance in anything but poor photographs, as Wards were not permitted to attend Endbringer attacks in most circumstances. It was a poor excuse for a tasteless comment, though. The Ward in the skin-tight white armor enlivened with spinning clocks was rather known for his poor taste, of course, and Colin resisted commenting.

Discipline was taken care of anyway, as both Aegis and Target Practice thumped him, in an odd synchrony with the touch-down of the sphere. Armsmaster, Hero, and Alexandria moved forward together to steady it and detach the chains that cupped the sphere, even as one of Dragon's remote suits came in for a landing nearby.

---

Jan 23, 2011

She exited the residential area as quickly as she could manage on foot, knowing that to linger over long could see the police called when someone decided she was a burglar. As soon as she was in a commercial area, she headed for a quiet back alley. It took a few tries to find an unoccupied one, but thankfully the occupants of the first stops were busy with their own concerns and paid her no mind. After she was sure she was along, she tried to make a ceramic plate appear, to no result. Having confirmed her expectation that she had not suddenly become a paranormal, or was at least probably not responsible for the appearance of the shield that saved her, she had now to decide where to go from here.

She had no legal identity. Her social security number, her driver's license, her bank account, all these things would have been retired, closed, or passed on after her death was officially recorded. Dying in a car accident left a body, a confirmed death, so it was not as if she had disappeared and been declared dead after being missing for seven years, and could return and claim that she had been kidnapped or something. They had her dead body in the ground, and could dig it up and prove it. She was no longer Annette Rose Hebert. No longer Danny's wife... til death do us part, after all, though from what she had seen she did not think he had managed to move on yet.

Nor was she Taylor's guardian any longer. She was still her birth mother, her biological mother, of course, and if she managed to wrangle a really solid new legal identity she might be able to sue for custody with a DNA-based maternity test. Not that she had any intentions of making things harder for Danny. That was just not in the cards.

It was also making a big assumption. She still did not really know what she was. Had the universe hiccoughed and thrown her through time? Was she from a different parallel world like Aleph and Bet? Her memories said she was from Bet, and that this was Bet, but either or both could be wrong, and would need verification. Maybe she was really a Tinker's creation, an android so sophisticated it thought it was human? She could possibly test that with a knife later, if she was willing to take a risk, and deal with a possible infection. Maybe she was a clone, or a manifestation of some other parahuman's power, like Glaistig Uaine's ghosts.

She would need to find a phone and call Diana, her friend from college and fellow follower of the super villainess Lustrum, and to her knowledge, the only one of that set who was in Brockton Bay. Assuming that she was still here, given how out of date her information was, Diana would give her a place to stay while she arranged an identity and found work.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a nearby gunshot, and she whirled to face the direction of the sound, anticipating a heavy impact from what had sounded like a subsonic .45 round. There was no shooter in sight, but there was a trio of touching dark grey plates hanging in the air in the direction from which she imagined the shot might have come. Another shot sounded, followed by a brief burst of sub-machine gun chatter, and she localized the sound to an open window. A television. She had been spooked by a television. As her adrenaline faded, the plates vanished.

Had they responded to her fear, then, or to her knowledge or expectation of where an attacker would be? If it was dependent on her awareness of an attack, then she was vulnerable to a surprise attack, a sniper, or a concealed explosive. She took several rapid breaths, amping herself up to a fight or flight state, imagining the woman in the black suit was behind her about to fire. She spun around, and grinned viciously when she saw a plate hanging in the air.

She continued her tachypneic exercise as she tried to approach the plate to examine it. She could not see the white porcelain the assumed would be present on the other side, and what was facing her looked dark and metallic, but as she walked towards it, it moved in sync with her, staying the same distance away. She focused on it, as she slowed her breathing to stave off dizziness from tachypnea, and willed it to turn.

It spun slowly towards her, revealing a gleaming white porcelain surface. "So, it was me," she panted. She let her breathing ease off, trying to find a mental state that would allow the plate remain, but it vanished as soon as her heart settled. Unwilling to give up, she stubbornly began trying to convince her mind she was about to be attacked without the artificial boost from her breathing exercise.

Several minutes passed in silence before a plate appeared directly above her head. Imagining a light-speed attack from a satellite-borne laser was apparently simultaneously a real and logical enough threat, and one that her own senses could not convince her was not present, that it worked with no fear or anxiety in her system.

Once she had the first hexagon in place without fading, she found it took only a tiny effort of will to produce more. They moved with her as she moved, at first, though she could push them around slowly with her mind.

She painfully slowly brought one down within reach of her hand, and grabbed at it, trying to halt its movement. Her hand stopped it easily, though she could feel it pressing against her gently, and when she moved her hand down, it continued downward with her. She pressed upwards, but it refused to budge. Pushing up mentally had no effect at first, then at last it began to rise. Pushing up with her hand did not speed it up, but putting her hand above it, she was able to halt its upward momentum.

She mentally pushed it upward, and felt as the force against her fingers slowly built, until it pushed past her, rising now at a much more respectable clip. She tried, and succeeded in causing it to vanish before it got above the alleyway. Trying again, she managed to get one moving only very slowly near her hand, then she tried to get it to switch to moving with her hand instead of with her whole self. After a minute of trying, something finally clicked in the feel of it, and suddenly it moved freely in her hand. She let it go, and it hung in the air before her, still following her hand around.

She looked around and found a hubcap, and with a bit more effort, figured out how to push her concept of the hub cap into the same mental spot on the plate, at which point it abruptly stopped following her hand around.

---

Jan 23, 2011

Annette set the plate under a dumpster, flipping its link between her hand and the hubcap, like picking up a mouse and moving it when working a computer, to let her adjust its position, then move her hand without affecting it, then adjust its position again. Cycling one more time with it nearly centered under the nearly full dumpster, she slowly lifted her hand. The dumpster moved up smoothly as though weightless. Flipping the link back to the hubcap, the dumpster remained in the air, resting on the levitating plate. She mentally pushed up on the plate, and nothing happened for a long time, before it finally started moving grudgingly upward.

She shifted directions, letting it settle back to the ground before letting it fade out of existence. It was hard to get the plates to every stop once she had mentally pushed them into motion. She was sort of picturing her hand pressing them in one direction or the other, and they started moving, but they did not slow down. They appeared to be ignoring friction, air resistance, and the like - once set in motion, they wanted to stay that way. Probably if she could provide an exact opposite press, she could stop them, but somehow it was always off balance, or misaligned, or something.

Moving on to other things, she tried to make a bigger plate, which was as simple as creating a regular one had been, then a small one, then a tiny coin sized one. All easy. She tried to make one without the porcelain cover, which worked, but surprised her. Instead of the dark grey metallic substance being under the porcelain, it shone like gold, like the gold leaf on the NASA moon lander from the sixties. She did not think it was, though, as it was perfectly smooth, and did not wrinkle or dent or become marred in anyway when she rubbed it, tried to scratch it with her keys, or ran its surface along the brick wall.

Trying to create it with neither the gold nor the porcelain layers did get the metal alone, but trying to create only the gold or porcelain layers accomplished nothing at all. They had all been gently curved, as if to fit together into the surface of a sphere, but with an effort she found she could create a flat one.

She could not resist creating a flat one large enough to climb onto, and she settled herself into a kneeling position on it, then linked it to her hand, feeling a little silly. After all, this was like something from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, lifting with skyhooks, or the proverbial pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. She lifted her hand slightly, and then panicked when she began rising, and speeding up. She flipped it back to herself but that did not stop the rise. Pushing the remembered and well-practiced hubcap into it brought the plate to a sudden stop, but to her horror, it did not stop her from rising above it.

She waited in fearful anticipation until her stomach told her she was at the peak of her rise and beginning to fall before duplicating the creation of the plate. This left her balancing safely on a plate with only a very light impact on her shoes, but perilously high and exposed. In the distance, out over the bay, she saw lights and... was that a helicopter? Indeed, it looked like a helicopter and a giant ball over the Protectorate platform.

She looked down, and cursed herself instantly as her stomach rebelled. She dropped into a sitting position, and nervously pushed down on the plate. It began descending tortuously slowly, and she pushed until it was moving a bit more quickly, then tried to reach out for the other plate below her, which they were probably going to impact shortly, and let it vanish, then focused back on the plate holding her up, adjusting its velocity as the ground approached. She breathed a deep sigh of relief when she dropped back below the roofline, but knew that she had very likely been seen, and someone might be on the way that very moment.

She vanished all the plates except the one above her head, then quickly worked on it until she what looked to be a yellow yarmulke on, and hurried out of the alley.

She ducked into another alley three buildings on when she heard footsteps echoing above the rooftops. She could not afford to be seen. Panicked and grimly determined that this first day of her second life would not by any means be her last, she inadvertently and quite fortuitously foresaw her daughter's power without realizing it. She needed to be concealed but still mobile, she knew the plates could form very small when they needed to though it took visualizing a very small attack to manage.

Just before two people dropped into the alley, she finished her visualization and breathing exercise, as she pictured being utterly surrounded, on all sides, by a swarm of bees and wasps all inches from her skin, about to sting.

What Shadow Stalker and Gallant dropped in on was clearly female. She was not statuesque, but she was well-shaped, fit, and outlined in a nearly skin-tight suit of tiny interconnected golden plates. Shadow Stalker looked around curiously, then a bit disgusted. "No fight," she complained a little bitterly, having been hoping that what she had seen was someone getting away from a fight for a moment before diving back in to finish someone off.

"Good evening, Miss. I've not seen you about before, are you new on the scene? Or just new in town?"

"In town," Annette responded in clipped tones, her heart beat slowing. She did not recognize either of the two heroes, but as they had not immediately moved to the attack. "Just passing through. Don't want any trouble."

"Ah, screw this," Shadow Stalker spat. "Coddle the newbs on your own time, Gallant! I want to find some action."

"Sorry," he said to the oddly stiff woman in gold as his partner for the night turned and ran out of the alleyway, "but I do need to keep up with her. I hope you have a good stay in Brockton Bay." He turned and followed behind Shadow Stalker, a bit disturbed at the darkness in her as always, but also very curious over the strange mix of fear and determination in the unknown heroine. Whoever she was, she had not matched any of the critical bulletins he had read, so he would report it, and that would be it. She had not, as best he could determine in the short time Shadow Stalker had given him, been committing any crimes.

---

Jan 23, 2011

Annette had been almost totally motionless while the two heroes were present, not by her choice, but because almost any motion was restricted by the tiny plates that surrounded her. It had only been by luck that her mental image of the insects had left enough room between the plates and her skin for her to breathe and speak, though it was a narrow margin. As soon as she was sure they were gone, a little amused they had been so amateurish as to miss getting her cape name, not that she had one to offer yet, she dissolved the plates everywhere except over her face, and took a deep relieved breath.

She practiced with the face plates she had left in place, trying to link more than one at a time to move with her head. Eventually she worked out that imagining two specific points as the corners of a box let her hit all the plates within the box at once. It still did not work as a mask though, even once she had all of them tied to her head's movements. They followed her head back and forth and side to side well enough, but they ignored rotations, which left her face uncovered as soon as she turned, and left the plates in her curly hair trying to get tangled and caught.

A larger, less fitted partial sphere would work for facial concealment and let her move around without caring that it was not following her turns, since it would be all around her. She was not very enthusiastic about going about looking like a bobble headed mascot for a fast food chain. Maybe it was because she was feeding it a single object, and it was seeing it as just a point. Could she do something different in the visualization to pass a direction at the same time?

She tried again, this time pushing the concept and image of her head with an arrow pointing through her head from the back straight out through her nose, with a dot on the back of her head, and a dot on the her nose, and a ray extending out, the way she recalled vectors being drawn in her college math courses, along with a crosshair on the line about a quarter inch from the tip of her nose, and picturing the plates bound to this point. She turned her head, and this time the collection of tightly fitted plates turned with her head, just as if the mask was fixed on a rod through her head.

"Perfect," she crooned, pleased that she now had a workable mask in case she ran into any more heroes. Time to hunt down Diana, and get a place to sleep. Now, where to find a phone?

---

Good-self turned slowly, looking around her lair, thinking about what she wanted to do next. She had a couple of sheets of spider-satin now, and the spiders and ants were busily working on the third, which would be finished by morning. She was thinking she would switch them to twill then, to see how that felt, and how it compared in strength.

Shelob's clutch would probably not hatch before three more days at the earliest, and possibly take a fair bit longer, and she would not be very willing to move before then. Several of the other black widows had responded to the extra warmth in the room from her laser-eyed flies by laying clutches of their own.

She was considering moving, though. This was a small space, and Scary-self had surely not anticipated their rapid growth in numbers and capability, or the advantage of Lockheed, which might allow them to find a better lair without much concern over how far it was from Scary-self's home.

Scary-self was back home already, of course. She had left in the late afternoon, and Good-self had continued her work since, albeit a little disappointed that her wasp still lacked a name. She had not even had a chance to introduce it to Scary-self, and show off her work. She had made another anyway, after Scary-self left, so that the unnamed wasp could have some company. She planned on four of them, for Scary-self's fingers when she was heroing. She was not worried about them being crunched into bits by punching, as they could just fly away when she went to punch someone, and fly back afterwards. They would be fine.

She did not want to make the last two yet, though, as she desired Scary-self's opinion. No, that was not strong enough. She desired her approval.

Still, they would likely be in this lair for a time yet, and it could stand some improvements. The first thing she noted was that the laser flies had to work continually and in shifts because the shed lost heat quickly if they stopped. She had stopped up the holes, but this was clearly not enough.

She had a large supply of spiders that were not black widows, and plenty of food for them, as her roaches and beetles were breeding not only here, but in the abandoned warehouse as well, and had plenty on which to feed themselves. Her enticements for rats and mice had worked as well, providing them with additional carcasses on which to fatten her spiders.

She set these spiders, unworthy to make Scary-self's hero costume, to the task of filling the gaps between the wooden uprights with loose mats of webbing to hold the warmth.

When she felt Scary-self's dreams going to scary places again, she did as before, pushing Scary-self's dream center into Lockheed and sending him flying, then took another dragonfly in hand. A great blue skimmer, Scary-self's memories named it, and it was indeed a pretty blue color, which she was careful to preserve as she grew it to a size to match Lockheed. It was female, but she once more turned off its ability to reproduce, at least for the time, then set to working on its lifespan. She would need to do this to Lockheed when he returned as well, she realized, and put the other enhanciles on the list as well.

Ordinary insects might last only a few days or months, or a couple of years, but Scary-self could live for a hundred years if nothing ate her, and Good-self too shared that attribute. Now she was passing it on, to make sure that the bugs most important to Scary-self would be around for at least a fair chunk of that time. Alright, so it was at least partially so she did not have to constantly redo her work.

She went ahead and gave the bug laser-eyes as well. To her surprise, the new dragonfly, unlike the flies, was clever enough to find the toggle and turn on her laser eyes herself. She clamped down on it quickly, and gave a brief lesson, making it clear which of the controls were safe, and which could set things on fire. She gave it the power to make holes last, paying more attention this time to what she was doing, so that she could follow up by making that same tweak to herself.

It was curious, she noted, that she could not give herself laser eyes, though she had tried, just to see, when she could so easily give them to flies and dragonflies. She went to Shelob and caressing her now foot-long body gently, pushed in the changes to enhance her lifespan. She tried to push the laser-eyes into Shelob, wondering that she had not attempted this before when it was Scary-self's image of Shelob that had first given her the idea, but this too failed.

Building

Jan 24, 2011

Taylor woke refreshed and happy. She had experienced a wonderful flying dream with Lockheed, and this time she had recognized that it both was and was not a dream, and had avoided the heroes, and avoided the activity going out at the Protectorate Headquarters in the bay.

Flying out over the bay, seeing the light of the gibbous moon reflected in the waters had been relaxing, even if the ships in the bay reminded her of her dad's difficulties. It had been less relaxing, and more ridiculous fun, when she had realized by accident of dream logic that she could summon Zaravida Starfall to herself, and it came to her there in the sky where only her dreams were. Lockheed could neither grab it, nor hold it readily if he could have, and so the blade that had appeared beside the giant insect fell from the sky and pierced the water, living up in a curious way to its second name.

She had spent a while targeting arbitrary spots in the water before gaining enough confidence to try sending it down close to anchored vessels without hitting them.

Before she had gone home, she had spent a short time with Arachnae, trying to get a handle on what that black rectangular slab was. It was about four inches deep, seven and a bit wide, and almost a foot tall. She could not cut it, Arachnae had tried but could not eat it, hammering it did nothing at all. She had given up on figuring it out when she had noticed the time, and had slipped through one of Lockheed's openings to get home.

Now it was once more time to prepare for school, but she had slept so well that she had woken up early. Deciding it was best to begin as she meant to go on, she grabbed the pepper spray her father had purchased for her, and headed out to have a run. Her darling Arachnae could do many things for her, including making her miserable school days genuinely productive instead of a waste of her time, but there was nothing Arachnae could do to improve Taylor's own fitness.

As she headed out the door and started picking up speed, Taylor stretched her mind out, feeling for all the insects she could reach. She did not think her range had grown any, but she hoped that it would increase over time. As she ran, she made little adjustments to the various insects around her, flushing termites out of houses through Lockheed's openings to the wood piles in the warehouse's yard, getting black widows away from houses and sheds. She left the ones that were nesting away from humans, to keep up a supply in case she needed it, trying to avoid completely stripping the insect life anywhere.

She knew there was an ecosystem balance, though it was a more dynamic and reactive one than the carefully maintained scales many people pictured. Removing all the spiders could cause a surge in the fly population, or removing all the flies could cut the spider population. Cockroaches and ants competed for space, eating many of the same things in houses, with cockroaches being vulnerable to egg-theft from the ants. Ants competed with ants, with termites, but were not much bothered by spiders, their numbers being too great for spider-induced losses to matter much to most colonies, and their replacement rate too fast.

So long as she left some of everything, they would probably recover. Lockheed made it easy to collect the better ones, or to relocate others in the same area.

A quick shower after she got back from her run, and she was on the way to school. She would have to watch and get her bugs on her tormentors again. While they had not tried anything in class yet, though they had sought her between classes three times that week, she suspected that they might try to start things up again this week. Maybe not Monday, but probably sometime soon. They had to be getting irritated at not catching her between classes, and in class she was a sitting target.

She briefly entertained a vision of going to the Protectorate and registering. They would push her to the Wards though, and that would be just a different clique to deal with, one where her bug-power seemed unlikely to make her any friends. Very few girls were interested in how pretty or useful bugs could be, and most guys either captured them only to mistreat them, such as pulling their wings off, or to scare girls. She was not sure what was scary about them, but then, she did not understand why they enjoyed continually belittling and attacking someone who did not fight back, either.

As she stood waiting for the bus, she noticed an orange and white tomcat watching the bus-stop from a nearby fence. It wandered off soon after she noticed it, probably in search of a warm sunbeam to layabout in, and she envied it. She and Arachnae were so busy constantly. She had really been in no state to enjoy her enforced stay in the hospital bed, and it was not actually so much the opportunity to laze that she envied, as the cat's ability to enjoy being lazy.

This time, as she descended from the bus, Taylor was better prepared to take advantage of her flying friends. Trios of flies set down together on the fenceposts, tree branches along the walk in to the school, and on thin ledges just inside the doors, giving her a much better chance to find and tag her targets. Indeed, by the time she got in the door, she had Sophia, Madison, and Emma all tagged.

In her homeroom, which was also the computer classroom, Taylor logged on to PHO, scanning the recent comments looking for any mentions of Lockheed or bugs in general, but saw nothing of interest. There was a post claiming a military helicopter had flown over the town, and that something super-secret was going on; the usual conspiracy fare, in other words. Though she knew that part of it was true, there had been a helicopter in town, it had gone to the Protectorate building.

What were they delivering? Doubtless the musings on the forum about aliens, autopsies, or captured villains were ridiculous. The Protectorate HQ was not a research center, nor a prison. If something had been delivered, it was probably just an addition to the building, or a large piece of lab equipment or something. Sure, it was delivered at night, which was a little odd, but then, maybe that was to avoid villains snatching it?

---

Jan 24, 2011

"Yes, I promise, Diana. No cape activities while I'm living here. It should only be a few days to get my feet under me." Annette smiled warmly at her friend. It had been ages since she had a chance to sit and talk with her, and catch up on how she had been doing. She had been anticipating Diana's request ever since she had met little Artemis, a precious little four-year-old with shiny, slightly wavy black hair.

Diana had straighter hair than her child, but the same shiny black, and a more statuesque figure that had garnered her rather a lot of unwanted attention during their college days. She nodded, her mouth curled in a little grin as she watched her little girl playing on the living room floor with her husband's old G.I. Joe figures and her newer Alexandria doll. "It's fine. I did not think you would, but Stephen asked that I get that promise. Personally, I'm still not half over the shock of seeing you at the door."

"Imagine my surprise at walking in to my house and finding I had been dead and buried for years, my family limping along without me." Annette's voice was dry, but not bitter. She had slept long and well, no memories of how she died had troubled her dreams, only pleasant memories of her family. She might not be in a position to mother her little owl anymore, at least not directly, but with cape powers, she could watch over them. Her powers seemed ideally suited to defense, though she had already figured out several ways to use them offensively.

That was all for later, though. Now was for catching up with her friend, for pampering and spoiling her sort-of-niece Artemis.

---

Good-self carefully hung the completed satin sheet with the other two, and set the spiders that had rested during its production to laying down new warp threads, then turned to Shelob. She had an idea. She was reaching for the large spider when she stopped. No, no, Scary-self said experiment on fresh subjects first.

Not wanting to mess with the black widows currently laying down lines, or the other black widows being fed, pampered, and cleaned by ants, she went poking through her other spiders for a large garden spider. A bit different from many of the spiders in having two pairs of legs pointing forwards, and two pointing back, and having a pretty yellow pattern on the back, it had the advantage of being still a web-weaver rather than a hunting spider, and of being fairly visually distinctive, since she was not planning on making this one bigger.

Beyond the simple patterns of silk, twill, and plain weaves, there were true patterned weaves, where pictures and words could be woven in the rise of weft over warp, and those she could already do as they were just built in the order of which warp threads you went over or under. But there were also colored weaves, where the images were not dyed into the cloth afterward, but woven in with different colors of threads.

Scary-self had not paid much attention to these, but Good-self remembered, and thought it might make a nice surprise for Scary-self. So she took the yellow-backed garden spider in hand, and sank mentally into it, examining its spinnerets. All dyes were, she thought, were bits of colored stuff mixed in with the silk, caught up on the thread. If she could mix them in while it was still fluid coming out, the dye should stick even better than dipping satin in dye afterwards could manage.

She was a bit hampered by not knowing what exactly the colored bits she needed to add were. That was what experiments were for, after all. She had the spider extrude a bit of silk, then built it a new organ for chemical synthesis and linked it to the silk extrusion pathway and drew out a bit more silk. It was a duller gray, and she tweaked the pathway a bit, then drew out more silk until the color changed.

---

Taylor employed the same trick with the strategically placed flies covering all approaches in the rest of her classes, including some hidden in her hair, peering out between the strands. Just as she had guessed, this was the week their courage returned fully, when no retribution was forthcoming from their previous behavior.

They were careful to work at one remove at first, egging one of the outer coterie of hangers-on to spill juice on her seat. She had spotted it before she reached the room and had sent flies buzzing around the fluid as she went for a different seat. It was Mr. Gladly's class, one of the younger male teachers who tried to be the student's friend. Well, the popular student's friend, really.

"Taylor, you should," he got out as he turned, but stopped short when he saw the flies buzzing above the chair, and on the seat itself, clustered around the juice.

"I'm fine here, thanks," Taylor responded agreeably, as if he had been going to offer her a different seat rather than forcing her to sit in the sabotaged seat as he had done previously. Even his general willingness to go along with the popular kids and ignore the plight of the bullied could not stomach the obvious parallel of ordering Taylor to sit in a mess with insects already buzzing around it.

"Janie, go to the bathroom and get some paper towels to clean that up, please?"

Janie, a normally pleasant and pretty blond with minor acne problems and hair that was rather straighter than she would have liked, pinched her face into a scowl. "Make Taylor do it, it's her seat," she protested.

Mr. Gladly frowned, irritated at having his authority questioned, even by one of the popular set. "Well, it was not her juice," he retorted. He had seen who had poured the juice, and his words let Janie know it too, though he would have overlooked it. A class full of flies for the rest of the day was not something he wanted to even imagine, ugh, their constant buzzing, the complaints of the girls that would have to sit close. Not worth it.

Janie left in a huff, and gained a secret companion of her own as she stepped through the door. Taylor refrained from smirking or even glancing at Madison, the instigator of this particular prank. She kept her head down, and did her work.

She avoided several more traps that day with the help of her friends, but near the end of the day, she was struck in the gut by a twisting, knotting nausea. She had been focused on the fly on Sophia, assuming correctly that the angry, abusive girl was probably frustrated at her inability to corner Taylor, when something inexplicable had happened, her vision and sense of where the fly was warped strangely. She stopped in the hall, clutching her stomach, then panicked as she realized that not only was she currently out of sight of other students and teachers, somehow that fly on Sophia was coming right towards her, practically ignoring the walls and doors between.

She stepped backwards through one of Lockheed's openings into her lair, her last glimpse of the corridor one of a roiling cloud of blackness appearing through a wall, a hungry shadow cast by nothing.

---

Jan 24, 2011

"That... that was Sophia!" Taylor cried out, her mind reeling even as her stomach settled slightly. She was only nauseous now, instead of feeling as though her guts had been spun in a blender. Her bag fell unheeded to the ground as her fingers lost their grip. Sophia was a cape? All this time, she had been holding back to avoid being the cape bullying civilians, and Sophia had been exactly that?

Frantically she ran through the PHO reports on Brockton Bay capes, trying to match Sophia up with one, any of the villainous capes, but no, she could not make any of them fit with what she had seen. The only one that fit, the only... she fell to her knees and vomited on the floor. Arachnae sent in waves of cockroaches to clean it up even as she embraced Taylor from her left side, her legs canted far to either side to lower her torso enough to wrap her lower arms around her other self, while her upper right arm kept Taylor's hair up and out of her face as she eructed the last bits of her lunch.

Confirming that the house was empty with a quick Lockheed hole to extend her senses, Arachnae pulled Taylor through the hole into the bathroom at her house. It took but a moment to access Taylor's memories of using the facilities there before she had water running, and Taylor was quick to take advantage of it and wash her mouth it. Recovered, she turned and hugged her other self tightly, tears of anger and frustration leaking out, before she shut off the water and ushered them both back through into the lair.

A skittering carpet of insects swept the discarded bookbag up and through a new hole into Taylor's bedroom, and Taylor dragged out the one lone stool that had survived in the shed and clumsily collapsed on to it. "Sophia is Shadow Stalker. She's a fucking Ward! She's supposed to be a hero!"

"Heroes don't bully," Arachnae said in her buzzing voice. Taylor barely noted that it was almost understandable now even without the mental component that made her other self's words always come through clearly to her. "Not a hero."

"Right, she's not," Taylor said, "but the damned Protectorate says she is, which means they'll go to bat for her. If I fight her without proof that they can't deny or cover up, they'll call me a villain! Me!"

"Taylor scary, not bad." Arachnae commented, stroking Taylor's arm. Taylor hiccoughed and laughed.

"'M scary, huh? I guess to a little spider I probably do look scary."

Arachnae shrugged. "Scary is inside. Look strange, insides on outside, but scary is inside." It took Taylor a good minute to parse that, which did push her angst over Sophia out of the way a bit.

"So, uh... because our flesh is not inside our bones, we are inside out? I guess that makes some sense, from a spider view... ooh, I wonder..." She turned to look Arachnae over, running her fingers up and down her carapace. "I wonder if you are going to shed like a spider? Probably so, huh, if you grow? Though Shelob hasn't, and she's gotten a lot bigger."

"Shelob get bigger because of bee-stuff," Arachnae pointed out, then went for a change of subject "Made light for lair in dark, want to see?"

Taylor glanced around, realizing for the first time that it was indeed fairly dark in the lair. With no electricity, and no windows to let in light, the only light that got in during the day was thin bands of brightness along the roofline. She had never really noticed because from day one she had filled the place with insects. Within the lair, she could see everything as clearly as she could want, except, well, colors. Everything was pretty much shades of gray.

"Sure, light it up, Arachnae." She grinned encouragingly at her smaller self. There was a buzzing of rapid flight as beetles swarmed aloft, grasping legs and forming a sort of almost sphere, like a large bell, open at the bottom, with their iridescent backs facing inward. Light bloomed, filling the room, as a quartet of laser flies fired uncollimated light into the sphere and the backs redirected it, bouncing it around and spreading it, until it escaped out the bottom as a gentler white light.

Arachnae had figured this out while Taylor was at school, when she realized that all her attempts at color were gray because everything was gray in the dimly reflected light from the roof strips.

Taylor gasped in surprise as for the first time, she saw the iridescent green shimmering on Arachnae's chelicerae above her gleaming black fangs, then again as she saw a mat of white silk hanging from the rafters, with a border done in gold, and 'Taylor's Lair' picked out in red with black bordering.

Arachnae buzzed happily, and held up the black and yellow garden spider for Taylor to admire. It extruded a bit of silk, and catching it with the silk claspers on the tip of her finger, Arachnae drew it out to let Taylor watch the color change. She had ended up needing to add a way for the spider to empty and recycle the prior color to get it to where she could get the right color on demand, but she had figured out six colors so far, gold, red, blue, yellow, black, and green, and or course the spider's mostly could all produce white already. She would figure out more over time, she was sure, but that was a good set to start with, and more than enough to have made a sign for the lair.

"Oh, Arachnae, that's awesome! What are you naming it?" Taylor stroked the back of the colorful spider even as she felt its ability, and thought about what she could do with color on demand when weaving.

Arachnae stepped back, her upper hands worrying her fangs. "Me? Not name, Scary-self names."

"Oh? Okay, I'll have to go back to my books, probably, but I'll think of one."

"And wasps," Arachane pointed out, the wasps she had made flying down to her hands. She held them out invitingly, and Taylor linked with her and sank into them as she showed off what she had done, how they could sting with either painful venom, or adrenaline to combat anaphylactic shock, or a numbing agent that might cause someone's grip to loosen in a fight, or ease pain after the fight.

"Wow, this is so perfect!" Taylor praised her little self, grabbing her into a hug from the side so as to not squish the wasps, after letting the spider climb onto the bench.

"Not all," she said, leaning into Taylor, happy at the praise and encouragement, and wanting more. Her beautiful blue skimmer appeared rather suddenly before them, having been out skimming the waves of the bay, looking at the ships, with Arachnae watching through her eyes and considering them as possible new lairs, or even second lairs.

Taylor smiled widely, leaning forward to stroke the long, bright blue back, properly visible in the white radiance from above, and squeezed her other self more tightly for a moment. "So wonderful," she praised, her own heart lighter for hearing praise, even if it came from herself, and for knowing that she was one more step closer to being a true hero, to being what the Wards weren't, if they could accept a person like Sophia among them.

---

Jan 24, 2011

Knowing that when she left the temporary sanctuary of Diana's house, privacy and safety might be hard to come by for a while, when Annette had finished catching up with Diana, she retreated to the guest room she had been offered. There, she went back to work on understanding her power and its limits.

Her skull cap had vanished in the night, but she was soon able to recreate the mental state of concern about lasers from the sky and regain it. She was a little surprised but pleased that her power had apparently remembered her alterations from the day before, recreating the golden skullcap without forcing her to recreate it from the curved white-faced hexagons that seemed to be the default. Feeling a sense of excitement as she found a new wrinkle to her power, she visualized her mask from the previous day. It sprang easily into existence, already tied to that invisible point in front of her nose, as cocking her head revealed.

As she focused on the dark inner surface, she quite suddenly realized something that she had missed during the entire period from encountering the two Wards to finding Diana. The mask had no hole. No eyeholes, no openings for breathing, nothing. Yet she had worn it, and walked down the dark streets with no difficulty. She let her eyes focus past the mask, and realized that she was instantly seeing the room beyond, as if the mask had simply vanished.

She reached up and ran her fingers along the gilded front surface, confirming physically that it was still present. She mentally flipped the vector tied to the mask from passing through her head, to passing through her palm back to front, still tied to the mask at the same intersection point, then drew her hand away, the mask coming cleanly with it.

As soon as the top edge passed out of her center of focus, the mask suddenly appeared in her hand. She lifted her hand up, but her eyes were focused on the mask again, and it stayed present. She deliberately focused on her wrist, and ran her eyes up - to her bare hand, cupped as if holding something. She could still feel it, but there was almost no visual sign of it. Due to the curvature of it, with the mask this far from her head, she could see that the edges of the mask had not changed, and were still visible, but the back-plate was somehow showing exactly what would have been seen if it was not there.

She settled in to play with the visual aspects of the plates, an ideal subject to explore, since testing the plates strength or speed or better means of controlling their movements were all more likely to cause damage, and she wanted to avoid giving her friend any difficulties.

---

"So, if you can make this little wonder produce colored silk, can you make other spiders like this produce stronger silk? If we were not limited to black widows, but could use all of our spiders, we could really speed things up, huh?" Taylor was back to stroking and playing with the yellow and black spider, her mind whirling as she imagined the different things she could make.

"More room," Arachnae commented, gesturing around the lair. Taylor looked around thoughtfully. Between the need to have room at the bench to work there, the dressmaker's dummy in the center, the large beehive taking up one corner, Arachnae's hammock-web in another, and the boxes of black widows, now used to give them nesting space since they were no longer weaving, or, well, felting in them, and the floor taken up as space for actual weaving, space was at a bit of a premium.

The cockroaches had fit into the sump area, there was a termite mound below the dummy, and she could feel a lot more in the woodpile outside. The walls were full of random spider's webs, and wasp nests and mud-dauber nests festooned the walls and ceiling.

There were several ant nests in the softer ground just beyond the edge of the property, and one large group of them in another window-box stuffed with dirt.

"Yeah, a larger space would be good. I was not expecting things to grow so much, or so well, and certainly never this fast. We could do with a place that had access to the ground, instead of a concrete slab underneath."

"Cave?" Arachnae's buzzing voice improved day by day, but her inflection was still fairly flat. Without the mental component, Taylor would not have recognize that this was a question and not a statement.

"I'm not sure if there are any good caves around here," Taylor pointed out. "Or how to find them. Well... never mind, that was stupid." She blushed. Of course it was obvious how she could find them. She just needed to find insects that lived in caves.

"Fine, we can hunt for caves, but we need to find one that is not easily accessible from the surface, and we'll need some searchers that are less obvious than Lockheed and... uh... Martina, there." She shrugged at a questioning noise from Arachnae. "Well, she's a girl, so we can't just call her Martin... Alright, fine. Martin is is. Anyway, they can't be seen until we're ready, or we'll have trouble with the PRT and the Protectorate, so we need little bugs that can make the openings. Is that, I mean, can you?"

Arachnae buzzed agreeably, another blue skimmer already in her hands as she tinkered with it. It grew a little bit, but when she was done it still just looked like an ordinary large dragonfly, nothing beyond what nature could do.

"Perfect!" Taylor grinned happily and impulsively hugged her more innocent half again. "Now, back to this stupid box." She sat back at the bench, and dragged over the black rectangular prism she had pulled out from beneath the Heromaker. Zaravida Starfall appeared in her hand in the guise of a letter opener, and she began prying at the prism. She had decided that it must be a box containing some remarkable Tinker-tech. She had not been able to bash it open, or even mar the surface the day before, now she was searching for a seam.

It was challenging because the box was so featureless - it was hard to even tell where the edges were, but the improved light with Arachnae's trick gave her hope she might manage to pry into a seam.

Good-self sighed as she watched Scary-self get absorbed in poking the silly box, and grabbed a spider to try making its silk stronger. A moment later, she went and grabbed a black widow, so she could compare how they worked on the inside.

---

Jan 24, 2011

Shadow Stalker cursed as she ran across the rooftops. Technically, she was not on patrol tonight. She had been sent home after enduring another lecture from the Director. So what if she had pushed on too fast for Gallant to get that stupid weakling's name? He should have talked faster. Not like she mattered anyway.

She was spoiling for a fight, her crossbow was loaded with potentially lethal broad-headed bolts from her secret stash, where she had also hidden the Tinkertech receiver she had purloined. Its range was too short to track something across the city, so she would make do with weaker game tonight. She had made sure to check the patrol schedules for the night before she left, so she knew where the Wards would be, and where the Protectorate heroes were patrolling.

The Boat Graveyard and the Docks were clear of official presence tonight, and New Wave didn't go too far outside of their own area, usually. The Boat Graveyard would probably be dead, unless she got lucky and that new bitch showed up there to practice. She been just passing through, though, according to Gallant. Stupid prissy rich boy, if he had just left her out of the report, they wouldn't have had to listen to yet another lecture. God, but she was tired of all the rules. Everyone knew there was really only one law, anyway. Be predator... or be prey.

The Docks, though, that was Merchant territory, and they were the lowest of the low, drug-peddling low-life cowards. Not as much of a fight generally as she liked, but tonight she was hunting her some druggie scum. If she found one on the right stuff, his paranoia would see her power as something straight out of a horror show, should be good for a laugh. And since they were druggies, no-one would take any stories they might survive to tell as being the truth.

---

Good-self worked quickly, modifying one dragonfly, then one spider, alternating between them. It took almost no bee-stuff to modify a spider, as she was basically just rearranging a few physical details and adding some new instincts so that they would spin a particular type of webbing, their dragline, the bit of web that a spider would anchor to something, spin to the ground, then crawl across and up something else to provide an anchor for the rest of the web, in a certain way.

The dragonflies took more, as she had to give them the ability to make tunnels, and to link back to her. She was linked to them, of course, when they had a tunnel from the lair to where they were in the field, but she lost three of them before she added this step, when their tunnels closed. They had then been beyond her range, and had not had even wit enough to open a tunnel, much less to open it to the right place to get back under control.

Lockheed had recovered them for her, and she had fixed them, and now they were all getting both modifications, and both took a bit of bee-stuff. So she had to pause regularly, and evaluate her supply. It was a tricky thing, since it was not like she could just know how much she had in gallons or something, or see it on a gauge. It was more like feeling how tired you were, and whether you could keep running another mile or not.

As each dragonfly was finished, they were launched to search the city for caves, specifically looking for crickets, worms, or beetles in large open spaces well below the surface. Of course, they were not the ones doing the searching - they were merely the conduit for her to do the searching, and she had been forced to link Scary-self to Martin and send her flying again to keep her from being adversely affected by the steadily expanding regions being examined.

---

Danny stood at his daughter's door and looked in, feeling his tension ease a bit when she was there in bed and fast asleep. Not tossing or turning either, though he was a bit curious why all her school things were scattered over the floor next to an empty bookbag. The morning would be soon enough to ask about that. He eased the door shut, and went back downstairs. He had taken his shoes off shortly after getting home to keep from waking her up. She had been looking better over the last week, more confident, happier.

Not that he had actually seen her smile, he mused, but still, there was more light in her eyes, and more self-assurance in the way she held herself. He only wished it had been something he had done that had made the difference. He felt so powerless to help her. He had not even made it home in time to feed her, this time. Actually, she had fed him, had left a plate out for him.

It had been a long day, but two more of his crew had work now, at least for a while. It was actually easier for the few of his crew that had experience operating the large cranes to get work when construction was happening in town, though there was stiff competition for even those jobs.

The rank and file, though. He sighed as he settled on to the couch and turned the television on, lowering the volume from its already low level. He did not want to see them working as henchmen for villains, and it pained him to see it happen, but a man had to feed his family. If that was the only work available, they would take it, even at the risk of their lives and freedom, and the only thing he could do about it was fight even harder to find better jobs, real jobs for them. Jobs that did not come with a short life expectancy.

The news on the television was mostly ignored, just a background rumble to his study of the papers as he searched for new projects that he could try to get his men into. If he could only get City Hall to actually make a move on reopening the ferry. The half dozen to a dozen jobs he could get out of that were just the tip of the iceberg, as it would also revitalize the neighborhoods that would regain the business from the increased traffic. That it might result in more pressure from the PRT on the gangs in the area was a minor but not absent hope, as well.

Expanding

Jan 25, 2011

Taylor awoke to the knowledge that Arachnae had discovered a new possible lair site. It was well to the west, inland and actually beyond the technical borders of Brockton Bay. As it was still within easy reach for the openings of the...

Taylor paused. Something had changed, a while ago actually, and she had only just noticed. Arachnae could open these portal things herself now, and as Arachnae was Taylor was Arachnae, Taylor could too. Oh, sure, technically she was using Arachnae's power to open portals while using Arachnae's link to Taylor to open them where Taylor was, but it was still her doing it.

She made a small opening and grabbed her notebook from her desk without getting out of bed. It was not actually very different from using Lockheed, and as far as she could tell, it did not change what she could do from what she had been able to do before. She had already been able to use the power through Lockheed to open them wherever she wanted, as long as one end was within her extended range. Given that Lockheed could have multiple openings at once, that was really no limitation at all.

The difference, such a minor thing that really made all the difference in the world, was that when using Lockheed's power, she could only sense the portals from Lockheed's side, using his power. Somehow, the fact that she was Arachnae and Arachnae was her meant that she could sense the folded space, even when there were none of the portal capable insects on her side. It was not sight, exactly, she could not see them, but she had known exactly where they were, where the edges were.

It was something that made a massive difference in her confidence in using the openings. It did not seem like it should have that big an effect, since she had specified both ends of most of the openings she had made, but apparently, intellectually knowing where they were and actually physically knowing were worlds apart.

She made a quick note in her book to spend a bit more time exploring what she could do with the portals, then she hopped up and started getting ready.

---

Good-self had done more than just finding a lair. She had already started occupying it. With Lockheed and Martin to keep her linked to the main lair, she had gone through herself, and installed laser-fly beetle lamps to light the space, and then created more laser flies to act as infrared heaters. It was a dark granite cave, rather than the limestone caverns that so often made for beautiful pictures. There were no smoothly rising stalagmites, nor elegantly descending stalactites, no massive slow-formed crystals jutting from the ground. There was a large pool of glassy still water, and a broad expanse of broken jagged ground. The cave was nearly forty feet tall in the center, tapering down to nothing along the edges.

Good-self's eight legs had not had any difficulty traversing the rough terrain, but it would not be rough for much longer. Her searching dragonflies no longer being needed for hunting down a new lair, they now located massive piles, small mountains of sand, rocky aggregate, and gravel made, though Good-self did not realize it, by the road crews as temporary storage while they worked on repaving roads. The dragonflies did have to be cycled through warm lair to recover from being active in the chill air, but the lightly drifting snow did not cause them any real problems. Tunnels deposited groups of insects near the tops of these mounds, then another portal linked the bottom edge with the cave, and the insects dug until they caused a collapse in the side of the pile, sending sand or gravel hurtling down the side, and through the tunnels into the cavern.

She redirected the output tunnels here and there, discovering as she did that she did not need to have the dragonflies dismiss and reform the tunnels. She could drag and reposition them using her own power over them, which made things faster and easier. If a bit of snow made it through on or with the sand or gravel here or there, it was not a concern, the snow quickly being melted as the infrared laser flies kept the temperature up.

Committing an innumerable string of small, unnoticed thefts, and entirely unaware of the illegality of her actions, she took shameless advantage of the potential energy the human workers had put in place by building their mountains, and filled in the low places of her cave, and then went on, deepening it until it was several feet from the top of the sandy layer to the hard rock below.

The stillness of the pool was disturbed continually, as gravel and sand trickled here and there into the waters. Ants and termites poured in next, as the dragonflies spread through the countryside, setting up collection points for her to draw colonies through. On their backs, they brought in worms and beetles and spiders that were close enough to reach the streaming rivers of ants.

Here and there a few insect hunters, rodents, frogs, scorpions, and centipedes came through by accident, though Good-self was not bothered by them. Let them eat some of her insects now. They would be food themselves in good time.

Some of the ants trucked in fungus with them, smaller fungus-farming ants from the forests there about, and these too she let pass without comment. Managing to get wood for her termites to eat was a trickier proposition, and here she actually got involved herself. A dragonfly who spied a sizable fallen branch would put a tunnel on the end of it, and she would reach through and drag it in. She amassed a fair pile of dead wood and leaves by this method, piling it all by one side of the cave.

As she proceeded, she noticed that the musty, unpleasant, almost choking quality of the atmosphere was steadily being ameliorated, becoming almost pleasantly woodsy. Curious, she sent some of the dragonflies to the coast, and setting up a tunnel, reached through it and collected a cloud of flies and brought them through in a rush. The salty tang of a sea breeze and a mild flurry of snowflakes came in with them.

She double-clapped her hands. Scary-self would be pleased with her for figuring out a new facet of their abilities, she knew. It seemed that the blockage against air passing fell when something else was crossing the tunnel, even though the blockage of light did not.

Pleased with her progress as Scary-self's school day neared its end, but recognizing that there was no-where yet in the cave for Scary-self to sit or work, she set her bugs to building a chair. To avoid compromising her nice large space, she placed it at one end of the cave, though far enough out that Scary-self would not find it cramped in height.

Out of simple necessity, it ended up resembling a throne more than a chair. Rather than a chair's spindly legs and cross-bracing, Good-self's insects carried in stones cooperatively, and stacked them carefully into a layer. The spiders wove webs, tying the stones together, then the mud-daubers filled in the gaps with mud, and the wasps papered over the outside to keep smaller stones from falling out. It rose up, layer by layer, while Good-self set her modified spiders to laying out two smaller weaves.

She could not use Shelob to do the weft lines, so she modified a couple of spiders, making them larger and capable of weaving thicker strands to make a strong weft.

The mass of unmodified spiders wove and climbed, back and forth, felting together a mass of airy silk, while Good-self carefully designed another spider, with a hard carapace like the spiny spider, but that was much more slender, with a single long spine that reached past its cephalothorax. It was designed to act as a living needle, weaving a thicker, stronger thread than most, with an abdomen that was only partially covered by the carapace. It would use the carapace to pierce a hole in the silk that it could squeeze through, then repeat the process from the other side, generating its thread as it went rather than having to draw it through.

---

Jan 25, 2011

Taylor's good mood did not last long into the morning. Breakfast with her father was fine, as was her morning run through a thin veil of falling snow, but when she got on the bus and had to face thoughts of school, she remember the revelation she had the night before. Sophia Hess... was Shadow Stalker, a 'hero' with the Brockton Bay Wards.

As she walked in to the school, her fly-eyes ready and watching, her enemies quickly tagged, she was expecting, anticipating that Sophia would be burning with anger, frustrated to the point of exploding with having continually missed her on Monday. She was not at all expecting the look of smug self-satisfaction on her tormentors face. One of the school's track stars, Sophia Hess was a strongly built black girl, and the one behind most of the physical aspects of the bullying. Taylor had thought the school overlooked the bullying because of Sophia's track wins, but now, she wondered if the school knew that she was a Ward.

To think she had considered trying to join the Wards! That was a nightmare she had thankfully dodged. Unfortunately, Sophia's good mood boded little better for Taylor than a black mood. Angry or happy, Sophia seemed to genuinely enjoy pushing others around, even gang members, so she would probably not be looking to avoid Taylor today.

It also meant that Taylor's budding plans of somehow using her knowledge of the Trio's whereabouts to get them to commit an obvious act of bullying where someone official could see it was pointless. They would look the other way to keep their Ward. Everyone knew that all the Wards went to Arcadia, the fancy high school downtown close to the PRT headquarters. They were probably getting paid hush money or given extra facilities or something for having Sophia there. Not that the school couldn't use it, in her opinion, Winslow was a dump.

Taylor spent much of that day enjoying a variety of visions of using her powers to make Sophia's life miserable, from laying spider-silk trip-wires to send her sprawling, to dropping bugs on her, or letting her find a bug in her lunch. She particularly enjoyed the mental image of Sophia dropping into a space-fold and landing in the salty waters of the bay.

She did not act on them, though she did push her own boundaries a bit by using her ability to monitor those in the area and know when there was no-one in her line of sight to skip straight from a stairwell to the girl's bathroom in an empty stall, and then back again, leaving the occupants to wonder when no-one came out after the toilet flushed. If they decided it was haunted, that was no skin off of her back, as long as it could not be tied to her, and it let her neatly avoid a cordon Emma tried to lay for her. She could only hope that a few more failed attempts like that would see Emma's star fall a bit in the eyes of her peers, as she kept failing to humiliate Taylor.

She noted the Trio and their various hangers-on waiting outside the door to school at the end of the day, and smirked to herself as she slipped into the bathroom, ducked into a stall, and stepped out into the lair.

Which was curiously empty of her innocent smaller self. She reached out for her sister-self's memories, confident that she would not have gone out where anyone could see her.

---

With a fresh sheet of paper borrowed from Diana's printer, Annette started charting out a decision tree. She had researched the current cape scene in the city, since if she wanted to watch over Danny and Taylor, staying in Brockton Bay was a given.

She had choices though. She could either hunt for private work and avoid the cape lifestyle as completely as possible, or accept her powers and become a cape. If she did the first, she would have to still somehow scrape together enough money to get a replacement identity, and avoid having it looked into, which would limit her job prospects. Getting that money without being able to get a job first and without being a cape would be beyond tricky.

If she took the second course, she could either try to make a go as an independent hero or rogue, or join or found a group. Independent heroes had short life expectancies, she had seen the figures, which would cut short her ability to watch out for Taylor and Danny, unless whatever had brought her back did it again. Against that, though, was how well suited her power seemed to be for defense. Sure, she had thought of a few offensive applications, but given the way it seemed to act on its own, and to want to close her in an impenetrable ball, she might have better prospects as a rogue or independent hero than many.

Joining a group was touchy. The Protectorate would involve revealing her identity to them, so that was out, since they would undoubtedly check it quite thoroughly due to Master/Stranger protocols, the defenses they had against those capes that could appear to be someone else or pass unnoticed, Strangers, and the capes that could control other people, or make and control things that seemed like people or could pass as such, Masters.

New Wave was a family grouping, a pair of interrelated families, and being all open about their identities, would likely expect the same from her even if their decision to do so had led to the death of one of their own.

The local villains groups were equally problematic. The ABB, the Azn Bad Boys, were an asian-only group, and engaged in unconscionable behaviors according to rumour, including forced prostitution. Not a pleasing prospect. The E88, the white supremacist - well, truthfully, the Nazi group, she could fit into, being white herself. It was hardly an enticing prospect for all that, given how few of their views she shared, and how repugnant she found their politics.

The last major gang in the city was the Merchants, and they were bottom on her list as well. Drug-users, drug-pushers, they literally gave villains a bad name.

There was supposed to be a mercenary group in town, but they seemed to mostly take jobs out of town, which would take her away from Taylor and Danny.

There were a couple of other minor groups. The Undersiders were a bunch of teenagers, probably not looking to have a mother-figure around, while Uber and Leet were a villainous duo that were focused on presentation, as they filmed their exploits to release them on an online video site. The rogue, Parian, who ran a clothiers, not something that barriers would be much help with. Finally, the rogue Planesman, a force field user who had given up on heroing and gone into construction, or well, destruction really. Tearing buildings apart. Apparently, his ability ignored the Manton effect and when he accidentally sliced a villain in half with his force fields, he swore never to employ them against humans again.

Her abilities might mesh well with his, so that was a possibility, though again, as a legitimate company setup, his employers might take issue with her lack of an identity.

She looked at the leaves on the decision tree. That was the point of laying it out like this, after all, to take into account not just the decisions one needed to make, but to make sure one could live with the outcomes as well.

---

Jan 25, 2011

Taylor took a few minutes to stroke Shelob and Masque, and to look about the place to make sure there was nothing else she needed to take care of, before she took a step and entered the new lair. Arachnae crossed the distance from the far end to Taylor's side nearly as fast, her legs, which Taylor was used to hearing clattering across the concrete at the lair, virtually silent as she flowed across the now even sand and soil.

"Big, see? And water." Arachnae gestured enthusiastically. "Got dirt for ants." There were a myriad of spider webs adorning the walls now, and mosquitoes were appearing from nowhere as dragonflies hunted them down and threw openings in front of them, only to get caught in the innumerable webs. There were several obvious ant mounds in construction, ants swarming over them, on the periphery of the cavern, where the roof ducked down to meet the floor.

Arachnae and her bugs had done a masterwork in leveling the gathered dirt and stones, forming a smooth though yielding surface. Arachnae tugged on Taylor's hand, drawing her down across the massive chamber to where what could only be described as a throne awaited her. There was a golden pillow sitting on the stone chair, which had armrests, and a high back. In the face of Arachnae's effort, Taylor could do nothing else but sit in the proffered throne.

Arachnae had clearly not been idle on her own behalf, for beside the throne, spanning probably twenty-five feet from the ceiling to several large stones set in the sand, was a massive web-hammock thing, which Arachnae promptly leapt onto. It swayed gently beneath her.

Her innocent smaller self mimed opening and holding out her hands, and Taylor obliged, whereupon several interesting stones fell into her hands. Flattened, but rounded, they were mostly clear, with streaks of color through them, like squashed marbles.

"What are these?" Taylor rolled them between her fingers, letting them clack and squeak against each other. They even sounded like glass.

"Tried melting sand." Arachnae was clearly enthused, and bounced off the web. She dragged a heavy flat stone across the sand, which was promptly smoothed and leveled by a platoon of beetles. Its surface had black spots and spatter.

Arachnae grabbed a handful of the sand and dribbled it into a blackened and very slight depression in the rock, then held up her hand. Two giant wasps flew down and latched on to her fingers, but contrary to Taylor's mental images, they grabbed on facing her finger-tips. They were too long for her short fingers, which she had to hold out fairly straight, as they crossed on to the back of her chitinous hand. She clicked her chelicerae together twice, then scraped her fangs together in what a moment later Taylor recognized as a fair approximation of a flint being struck, and two bright spots appeared in the sand, sending off dazzling reflections.

The brightness grew, then a globule of molten sand appeared, the bits of unmelted sand adhering to it, then melding into it, until a single blob rested on the rock, which glowed itself occasionally when Arachnae's aim faltered. She chittered, and the glow slowly faded to a warm red, then cooled further, leaving a glassy looking stone there.

Arachnae wiggled her fingers at Taylor, who giggled. "Awesome, just awesome."

At the same time, Taylor recognized that it was only really useful as an intimidation tactic. Her laser flies flying in controlled formation would give her better accuracy and control, and the ability to hit simultaneous targets. A trio of flies flew down to hover over her shoulder, and lit up the stone plate with three lights in a triangle pattern.

It took only a couple of minutes practice to be able to use her sighting of the three dots to get the fly's motions adjusted so that the dots followed where she looked. Seeing what she was doing, Arachnae pushed the still warm glass pebble off the platter and scooped up another pile of sand for her.

Where Arachnae had used the infrared wavelength she was used to using to keep her lair warmed, Taylor was using the red default, and when she pushed the power up, the beams were faintly visible as dust in the air drifted through them. She had to push the power up a fair bit more than she expected before she got the glow in the sand that Arachnae had achieved, but soon she too had a melted blob.

When she reached out to her swarm to find something close enough to a stick to make an opening and grab it, Taylor shivered. Her swarm had grown massively. She had hundreds of circles of control scattered across the coast and inland of Brockton Bay. Arachnae had shielded her from them while she was at school, but her attempt to reach out had encompassed them all.

Through millions of eyes she looked at once, and chose a nice straight stick. She reached out, her hand vanishing into the air, returning drawing that stick out. Four feet long or so, and nicely slender. Her flies maintained the glow in the little ball of glass as she reached out with the stick and poked it into the glass.

It came up on the end of the stick. Experimentally, she rolled it in the sand, then brought it back up. Her flies easily maintained their focus on the blob as it moved, and the sandy coating it had gained rapidly melted, and it once more formed a smooth blob. She drew back a bit, then stuck the stick through nothingness and rolled it in the smooth white sand of a beach and drew it back through.

The blob was large enough now, as the prettier white sand melted and fused into the same red glow as the rest of it, to continually try and droop off of the stick, so that she had to keep turning it to keep it on top.

The stick itself was flaring every now and then at the end, flames licking up momentarily, and it was getting blackened, but was not yet truly burning. She vaguely recalled from television documentaries that actually making something with glass this way usually involved blowing into a hollow pipe, but she was not really wanting to make anything anyway. Nor did she have the skills to, but it was kind of cool. She held it above the platter-like stone again, and let it droop down, then rotated that against the stone, and worked the blob off the stick by scraping it on the stone.

"That was fun," she said, wiping her forehead and realized that it was getting hot. A cooling breeze caught her by surprise, and she looked up to see that a flow of beetles was coming out of an opening in the air directed towards her, then flying up and passing out through another. A few lonely snowflakes drifted through amongst them, and laughing, she caught one on her tongue.

---

Jan 25, 2011

Now this, this was a beyond a breakthrough, Annette thought, staring at the bed in the guest room. She had remembered that the porcelain bits that had shattered off of the plate had not vanished when it had, after she had been shot at, and had considered trying to pry off the porcelain and sell it. She already knew she could not pry off the gold sheet, even to be able to find out if it was gold or something else.

But when she had gone for a shortcut, having already failed earlier in producing the porcelain by itself, and tried to cause the backing to vanish without the porcelain, which had worked perfectly to her surprise, she had seen her chance, and taken it a step further.

Now she was staring at a sheet of gold, or what at least might be gold, more than paper-thin. Against a dark backing in the light, it appeared golden, but held up, it was practically transparent. On the bed it seemed to barely tint the cover... but was it actually gold?

The next few minutes passed in a blur, incidentally demonstrating to Annette that her power did not seem to draw on her stamina, as in the air above the bed a flat plate appeared, gold shimmering on the bottom. It vanished, leaving the thin gold to fall slowly through the air even as the space above it was suddenly filled with another plate, which vanished.

It took nearly a thousand falling sheets before she thought she had about an inch of material once she pressed the air out. Another plate appeared, and she linked it to her hand and pressed it down to the bed, unlinked it, placed her hand on the back, linked it again, then slid her other hand in under, and turned the whole mess over. She produced another plate on top, and linked it to her free hand.

She pressed down, incidentally and finally testing the force she could apply. She had not dared test this in the alley, as if the plates actually did resist or apply significant force when moved in this way, she might have done serious damage to the surroundings.

The sound was good, metallic, as the sheets pressed against each other, rubbing and squealing as the air escaped and they flattened against each other. It was a curious thing, as she had to be careful to move her hand slowly. There was no force feedback, no sensation that made it feel like her hand was hard to move. She released the connection, just to allow herself a chance to untense. If she had simply dropped her hand when moving something like that, would it have been stopped by the pressure? Or maybe only by the other plate, while the metal in between, if that was metal, shot out as liquid at high speed?

Thinking of a possible safety valve, she rested her hand on the bed, then linked again. Now at least she could not accidentally drop her hand. Instead, she had to press lightly into the bed surface, listening to the squeal and crackle of the sheets as they were crushed between the two flat plates. When the mass in between them started glowing, she let up in surprise. Because her hand was still linked, the plate rose as well, pushed up by the expansion of the compressed bed, revealing a ragged edged lump of warmly glowing metal.

It was thin now, barely a tenth of an inch thick, tighter on one side than the other where the plates had not quite lined up perfectly with the sheets. What had been flexible, even where individual sheets still stuck, was now rigid, crinkled, and frankly, looked a bit dangerous. Held stiff, those slender protruding bits could probably offer one hell of a paper-cut.

She used a smaller plate to fold and press the sides down, then lined up several plates like a miniature car-crusher and squeezed the block together, shrinking and lifting it, forming it into an ingot shape. It took a couple of tries to get it right, and not leave sharp edges where metal had squeezed out between gaps, but eventually she had a nicely shaped lump that, given its malleability and the lack of a color change as the surface buckled, indicating it was not oxidizing, made her hopeful that it was genuinely gold. If so, then her money problems had just been solved.

Not only that, but the ability to apply enough pressure with her plates to cause metal to not only deform but become heated to the point of glowing, and probably of fusing and melting if she had kept going, the fear of which was why she had immediately stopped, confirmed the offensive potential of her nominally defensive power.

Of course, now she had the secondary concern of how to keep this development quiet. If it got out that she could simply make gold, any number of villains would be willing to do literally anything to bring her under their control, and given that Masters like Heartbreaker were out there, she needed to keep this very quiet indeed. Which meant, unfortunately, that she could not show off this aspect of her power to Diana.

That did not mean that she could not, or would not use it to help her out, or set up a trust for her kids.

She waited until it was cool enough that she could touch it, and tried to pick the block up. Though she was half afraid it would have welded itself to the underlying plate, it actually slid off as easily as it was on ice. It was very heavy for its apparent size, which was another promising point in favor of its being gold.

Unfortunately, while she had awoken in a familiar outfit, one she regularly wore to college, and had her key to the house and her identification card, now long expired, in a slim pocket wallet, her usual purse had not been with her, so she did not have a convenient way to conceal the ingot while she hunted for a place that would buy it from her, nor could she ask to borrow a spare purse or bag from Diana without the risk of revealing the gold ingot. She checked the window and confirmed that it had a removable screen. She created a container of small plates fully enclosing the ingot, linked most of the plates to the bottom plate, and the bottom plate to her hand, then slid it out the window, after lifting the screen out.

It took a couple of cycles of disconnecting it from her hand, raising her hand, connecting and lowering it, then repeating, before it was resting on the ground outside, neatly protected, as she restored the window-screen and closed the sash, and headed out to collect it.

---

Jan 25, 2011

Sophia grinned beneath the mask of a stern woman's face she wore, as she looked down from the rooftop and spotted an obvious drug deal going down. Still off-the-clock and off the patrol duty rotation, she did not bother calling it in or letting the PRT know. She shifted, and flitted as a shadow down to stand on the top of the covered bus stop, then returned to solidity. She could have easily leg-shot the drug dealer from here, if she had wanted to, crippling his ability to flee. That would have been too easy, too quick.

She drew out a broad-tipped quarrel and let the tip scrape noisily across the glass roof before she brought it up and slotted it ostentatiously into one of her crossbows. The snow had stopped about mid-day here in town, so she was clearly visible, silhouetted against the distant light of the street-lamps.

"Shit, man! Oh, shit, run! I don't want to die!" The druggie broke and ran, but the dealer had drawn a gun. She shifted into shadow-form and let him waste bullets, then solidified again, lifting the crossbow. Elation surged in her mind as he broke, turned, and fled, dropping the gun. She was tempted to stop for it, spoils of war and all, but it was probably stolen and hot anyway.

"Weak," she muttered, racing after the fleeing man. The weak were prey to the strong, that was the way of the world, and she was one of the strong. A track star against an overweight drug-pusher. Not much of a contest, normally, but fear of death lent swiftness, made it more fun.

---

Good-self enjoyed showing off her creations, the spiders that could now spin web as strong as the black widows, the needle-spider which really impressed Scary-self, and Scary-self had liked her little army of dragonflies that stretched their reach so far. But homework had reared its ugly head, and Scary-self had to leave, and have dinner with Angry-man and do her work.

Good-self went back to the first lair shortly after Scary-self left, to feed Shelob. She also arranged for the transfer of the actual beehive, as the lair was not really a suitable place for honeybees, to a wooded area near several large fields that could provide more flowers.

Then she set up another experiment Scary-self had thought of. It was easier here, due to the rafters. A large web was woven between the rafter first, but a flotilla of cooperating spiders, the first strand across laid much faster than a normal spider might manage it by simply having the spider carried across the gap by wasps.

From the center of the web, a spider dropped a line to the ground, where a larger spider took hold of it. Eight more spiders, each about six inches from the center, extruded a line that another, smaller spider grabbed on to and hung down, acting as a weight to draw the strand down.

When they reached the ground, they crawled to the center strand, the eight strands were glued to the ninth, central strand and gripped by the large spider, which began marching in a small circle, rotating the line again and again.

Good-self could see very quickly that while this might be a workable method of producing strong thread, it was far too slow and cumbersome to be worthwhile. It could be made faster if inverted and with wasps flying around but then the silk would all have to be extruded up front.

She perked up. Had not Scary-self thought of adding wings to spiders, or spinnerets to wasps some time ago? She left the spiders to their slow winding, and brought a black widow and a cicada-killer wasp to her. She considered for a bit. Would these be the best to use? She tried to picture a spider with beetle wings, and that seemed like it would interfere with the legs. Butterfly or moth wings could lift a larger body, but would attract too much attention. No, she decided, satisfied, a wasp was probably the best fit.

A beetle flew over and dropped one of the spiky bee-stones into her hand, still moist with fluids from where her insects had captured and slaughtered one of the bumblebees.

Theoretically, she ought to be able to do this herself, without a stone, but the stones had accomplished things she would not have thought to do, so having it might help cover for anything she missed in combining two bugs from such divergent lineages.

She pushed some of her own bee-stuff in to be sure there was enough, as she commanded them to "Combine!" After the glow faded, she delved in, tweaking and adjusting, examining the changes the stone had made, and giving it her own flavor. The outcome had been kind of patchy color-wise, and she made it all a glossy black with tinges of deep purple. It had no stinger, as that space was used for the spinnerets, and it had ten limbs. The venom had been diluted a bit, and she considered for a bit, before dropping it down some more, to where it would be a painful bite rather than a lethal one, to make her removal of the warning colors more reasonable.

Now she needed more, but she did not want to have to use a bee-stone for each one, nor did she really want to wait while they slowly grew. There should be some other way she could manage it. Could she just use this one as a template, and mold some spiders? Spiders swarmed up her legs, up her thorax and torso, and out along her arms.

She focused in, as spiders filled the three palms that did not hold a modified flying spider. A glow filled them, spiders melting together, merging into each other, combining and expanding, then details began to emerge, the chelicerae, the head, the eyes, the rest of the thorax, the legs, the wings, the swollen abdomen. Three wasp-spiders flew from her hands, and three more began to form. A third time, and then she stopped, tired and drained, and crawled up into her hammock, watching motionless through lidless eyes as ten flying spiders converged, one dropping spider like to form a central strand, the other nine linking their strands to it, letting them hang down, extruding a long loop to have enough room, before dropping and setting wings to flight, twirling down as they spun around and around, like dancers around a Maypole.

Hero

Not yet posted.