Discovery 


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.