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.