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.




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

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