6

Summoner - Chapter 6 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series

Chapter 6

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

"You can't be serious." She deadpanned, and the man sighed.

"Look, nobody goes to the trainyards for a regular fee. Most won't do it at all. The place is in between like six gangs-"

Four, actually. But, did Coil even count as a gang? The guy didn't fucking do anything, according to PHO.

"-and not even the cops go there, so yes, I'm charging five times the price. I'm not driving my car into that broken shithole for anything less. In fact, I'd much prefer it if you just got out of my car, because you have to know how fuckin' sketchy this looks, right? Jacked white guy with nothing on him trying to get to the trainyard? Are you Empire or do you not know what could happen if you were to go there alone at this godforsaken hour? It's barely six AM, the sun ain't even up. I'm not a good guy but I don't want your death on my conscience alri-"

"Oh my fu- Okay, holy shit, just drive, I know what I'm doing!" She cut him off, exasperated and honest to gods feeling annoyed at the constant, condescending chatter.

Having her voice match her manly appearance was uncomfortable as shit, but she had to look big and tough and confident enough to not get jumped by some ABB gangbanger for their human trafficking operations.

Feeling the genuine apprehension and concern he was emitting like a space heater did a lot to quell her annoyance with him.

But the taste was just eugh. Indescribable, but eugh.

Perks of being a demon. Feeling and tasting emotions in the air.

Fucking joy.

At least she could get a pick-me-up from either pleasuring or hurting someone, and she was probably going to be doing a whole lot of the latter and none of the former, so she couldn't complain too much.

Also, wasn't emotion sensing its own sub-power?

Evelynn's legend was almost too good, and she wasn't even the strongest one, technically, she was just absurdly versatile.

Decent Brute with shapeshifting, Mover powers, invisibility, selective invisibility, two diamond-tipped tentacles that could probably cut a car in half with a swipe, extremely strong Master powers that were probably close enough to Heartbreaker's to…

To have the PRT shove her into the Birdcage the moment anyone knew. She wasn't stupid, she had heard about the Canary trial. It was at the top of PHO with an absurd amount of threadmarks, and she was likely to head to the Birdcage sometime this week as far as she knew. She paused as a thought rose, then shook her head. Not the time for that right now.

Fuck.

Back to her previous thoughts, Evelynn was the full package, a wet dream for any cape, and she was perfect for this secretive stuff.

The driver raised his hands in surrender, muttering something under his breath as he finally began to drive, and she sighed, turning her head to the side to watch the world pass by, a black-orange canvas of concrete and streetlights, broken, cracked pavement, scorch marks, the occasional crumbled building, likely the result of a cape fight, and closed stores.

That was the most depressing part of the whole ride.

So many closed stores.

Empty facades, crumbling, aging papers glued to their glass windows, renting or selling or saying 'find us in Boston!' with an address scribbled under the large letters.

And she knew how much trouble, how much effort and hope went into making one's own business, so the sight of dozens of them all closed and abandoned, each a monument to someone's time and hope and dedication, rotting away in piss-stained alleys and rotting with broken windows, it was an image and a moment that she knew she'd remember for a long time.

What could fix this? How would it even be achieved? Was it possible at all?

Eventually, the buildings scattered, the concrete receded, leaving only a neglected strip that led up a hill, and the driver carefully moved onto it.

Five minutes of careful, paranoid driving later, and the car slowed to a stop.

The driver adjusted his beanie, fiddling with the gun in his waistband as he anxiously peered through the windows.

"We're here. Give me eighty."

She sighed, and dug into her pocket for her wallet, digging out four twenties and holding them out between the car seats. The driver snatched them, and then got back to staring and glaring at every shadow, jumpy as a rabbit. She rolled her eyes, opened the door and kicked it open to shuffle out of the car.

She'd barely gotten herself out of the door before the guy hit the gas and did the messiest U-turn she'd ever seen in her life, his aging mess of a car making all sorts of noises of protest as it bounced around the rough concrete and dirt depressions, his door flapping wildly.

Then he was off, and she was left in near-bitch black darkness with only a vague direction in her mind.

Thankfully, Evelynn had night vision too, because why not?

And some kind of soul perception ability, because she was apparently not absurd enough.

Regardless, she made her way forwards, passing signs and bent fences, crumbling brickwork and small office spaces with smashed open windows, stretches of waiting seats torn off the metal and tossed around everywhere. A couple homeless people slept inside some of the offices under rotting desks, which she knew by being able to feel their souls as she passed by the buildings, and after another twenty minutes of walking, passing red brick buildings overgrown with dry reeds and with hundreds of broken, dusty windows, she found what she was looking for.

The center of the train yard, the main train hub, where all the trains that had no immediate destinations to go to or needed repairs would sit, outside of public reach.

It was wide enough for six different train tracks to pass through the building, and tall, open, and crumbling enough to match, it was a solid two hundred feet long, enough to fit any train head to tail comfortably in its walls, were any still in here.

To the left wall was a space that still smelled of oil and old grease, likely a small repair and maintenance section, complete with empty racks on the wall and graffitied metal benches with broken vices. 

Various pipes and containers of all kinds were strewn across the floor, mangled and stomped, likely for some Merchant asshole's entertainment. To the right side of the interior, a two-storied office space, with various windows on the face to oversee the workers and trains below, and likely just as many windows on the outside to stare out into the trainyards, a place fit for a guard and an office worker both. 

If she even went above ground, this place would work great. Large building, lots of space to modify, smack dab in the middle of a wide open area that made sneak attacks more than a little difficult. And lots of places for cameras everywhere.

Not that the cameras worked anymore. Or anything else, really.

For now, she ignored it. She didn't need to go in there at all to make her little base, she just needed to find this landmark to know roughly where she was.

She watched every shadow, careful of anyone watching her, and moved away from the station, to a tiny storage shed just fifty feet across it, tucked against a thin concrete wall topped by barbed wire. Perfectly insignificant.

The hole in the concrete right next to the shed made said barbwire useless, but it certainly added to the dreary vibe of the place.

She nudged the shed's metal door open with her foot, the metal creak all too loud in the silent eve of morning, her nose assaulted with the stench of stale air and rotting paint, paper, and wood. She turned around just one last time to make sure no eyes hid in the shadows, considering it would be quite simple to connect a man entering into a shed and disappearing into thin air with some kind of cape stuff she didn't want to yet be implicated in. She swapped Runes, going back to Precision, just for the added visual clarity, and swept her eyes across the distance, finding nothing and nobody. She was just about to turn around when her eyes saw him.

With the Rune of Precision, things didn't melt and mold together, did not blend together. Every object, every grain of it was visible to her, so the man very, very sneakily peeking at her from behind a shed did not quite blend into its wall like he thought he did.

She let her eyes drift off him to fake looking around elsewhere as she wracked her brain. Evelynn could do anything she wanted to someone, so long as they looked into her eyes for her magic to start working. It was kind of strange how the term "the eyes are the window to the soul" was so absurdly accurate. She could also taste the emotion in the air to notice the sharp deviation that occurred when most people lied. A very reliable lie detector, not quite perfect but closer than anything else besides a straight up power.

She considered the Runes and the various effects that would help her deal with whatever she decided to do to the man, mind racing.

She quickly settled on the Rune of Sorcery, a dark blue crystal focused on spells, power, and sheer destruction, not selecting any main effect precisely because of that.

'Absolute Focus' would help her pick up on any lies he said. Additionally, it had a permanent effect that stacked on its own without her doing anything called 'Gathering Storm', one that simply made her spells or magical artifacts hit harder the more time passed, so she had quickly decided to spend as much time as possible with the Rune on, and she had no idea how long it would take to resolve this.

Decision made, she looked back to find a single eye peeking around a wall at her, still there, unmoving. She turned invisible, before exploding into smoke and dashing forwards and above with the speed of a car, closing the distance deceptively quickly. She watched the man's eyes bug out as the person he had been watching simply vanished, and then he jerked back around the corner, out of her sight. She moved higher, a little faster.

Then she crested the roof of the little office building he was hiding behind, and she watched him fumble for something in his jacket for only an instant before honing in on his soul and his mind. She couldn't influence someone from afar, she couldn't even make them feel anything momentarily.

But she could talk in their head so long as she felt their soul in her range.

You will put your hands in the air before three seconds pass, or I'm going to kill you. She whispered in his mind, no doubt sounding more like there was a mouth pressed against the inside of his skull and mouthing things from inside him, and the man froze solid for only a second before his hands shot up, his back pressed against the wall.

"Whoah whoah whoah whoah whoah hold on hold on I'm not- I was just curious I'm sorry sir-" The man babbled, his voice oddly grating and high pitched to the ear, and she took the time to observe him.

A chubby, middle-aged asian looking fella with a thick black jacket and simple jeans with a baseball cap.

She reformed back into a man just six or so feet away from the man, put her hands in her jean pockets, and subtly filled the- her frame with even more well-defined muscles than before, adding scars across her face and arms to complete the intimidating look.

Then she turned off her invisibility and was face to face with him, a head taller and significantly more hard-looking. A slight push and a prod, and her tentacles, all twenty five feet of diamond-tipped velvet, extended out of her shoulder blades, invisible but coiled and ready.

"Keep those hands up if you want to keep them." She growled, and the man nodded frantically, silent, his brown eyes wide in very genuine fear.

"Good. First of all, who are you with? Merchants, ABB?"

A small pang of anxious terror at the latter, and she nodded.

"ABB then. You're assigned to watch the train yards, right?"

He nodded again.

She took a step closer, a lazy one, staring at his eyes as he avoided her gaze, staring at the floor like a submissive dog afraid to challenge her.

Good.

"How did you know where I was and that I was here to begin with?" She asked.

"I- t-there are people around, being bums or, or sleeping here for shelter and such, so we just, we pay them to give us tips if they see someone odd coming in and out of the yards." He quietly stuttered out, and she tilted her head, remembering the homeless people in the admission building she'd passed by without care.

Sloppy of her.

He was also telling the truth, and slowly calming down as he realized she really wasn't about to gut him via powers.

"I see. Interesting. I'm new around here. I know the rough state of what's going on and who the players are, but I don't know recent events. So you're going to tell me, and don't waste my fucking time with lies or obfuscations. Spill. What's been happening the past few months around here?" She asked, subtly adding another two inches of height, coming up at a towering six and a half-feet tall, just to make absolutely sure he wouldn't be annoying about all this.

He flinched before pressing himself further against the wall, trying to inch away from her, and she let him.

Five feet of distance was nothing, her tentacles reached something like thirty feet.

"Well- shit, few months? Uh, uhm." He hurried out, eyes on the ground and glazed in a look that someone trying to brainstorm very intensely would have. "There- there was a scuffle with some Empire capes- ah, y-you're not Empire, right?" He asked, his terror rapidly mounting, and she realized why.

Huge, jacked white guy covered in scars. Obvious assumption.

"No I'm not and it's none of your fucking business. Talk." She growled, and he grimaced, very obviously not believing her, trying to make himself smaller and actually starting to tremble a bit.

Maybe she should tone it down a notch.

"R-Right, uhm there was a scuffle with some Empire capes fighting Merchants around the docks a-about uh, two months ago, t-there was a trigger event at some school like three-something months ago that got a lot of fucking attention, some kinda huge, uh, purple monster thing-"

She grimaced internally.

Of all the fucking things to turn into, she had to panic pick Rek'Sai, a rather unique void creature the size of a fucking school bus, terrible enough to be named and feared.

While in a very confined hallway.

Good job, Taylor. Granted, from what little she remembered back then, she likely didn't even know she was Taylor at that moment.

"The school incident. Details." She demanded, because honestly, she hadn't even thought to look up her own trigger event, how much was known about it, and she certainly did not remember much of it besides a lot of ear-scraping noise and the plastic scent of containment foam, smelled through a nose that could likely smell blood from a mile away.

"Uh, I- there's not a whole lot to say, the news says it just burst out of the school grounds, through a wall, tumbled into the yard, then started like- uh, screaming and screeching like a banshee. It was, uh, really loud, we could hear it screaming from the other side of the fucking city. T-There's a video, you can find it, it just shows some giant… purple... thing ." He tried to explain, not having the composure nor, in his mind, the time to describe a form she was already intimately familiar with.

Her chest felt tight. Someone was whispering into the back of her skull, but she couldn't make out the words. She tried to turn around, but she felt like her entire body had been stuffed into a cast, skin-tight.

What the...

"It was uh, clawing at itself and bashing its head into the floor and trying to like, tear itself open and scratching at it's… armor plates, or- or something like that, the uh, the video was kinda crappy, I- I don't know anything else-"

The man shifted, broke. Pipes and stone twisted on him like a fractal, green chemicals slithering on hanging wires, the world around him breaking into transparent walls and battlefields and broken magical fields, mountains, skies and seas mixing like a thousand overlapping pictures.

Her mind faded as something clicked open, a repressed memory, a familiar feeling.

Get it off get it off get it off I'm still in here, still under this flesh get off me get off me get these plates off me where is my body, why is everything so small I need to find Jinx the Runes are in the wrong hands Barlo's never going to forgive me if I don't show up for the assault on Gangplank's territory I need to find my husband, I heard my brother's voice in the cherry blossoms, I can't find the mage, where is my body where is the flesh and fur, I'm not this large but I should be, glorious evolution demands it, wait no, that's not- why are there plates on me, where is Taylor- who the fuck is Taylor get this purple shit off me Garen WHERE ARE YOU-!

Foreign claws and limbs as thick as men scraped at her back, trying to peel off the bony plates, to peel her flesh off and dig her body out from inside the Land-Tracker, hundreds of bodies and she had to dig them all out-

-STOP MAKING SO MUCH NOISE STOP SCREAMING GET IT OFF GET IT OFF-

She jerked back to awareness, stumbling a step back as she took a sharp, deep breath, not quite a gasp.

The man suddenly grew quiet, his rambling cut short by the sudden, vibrating tension in her muscled limbs, his knees bending and quaking as he tried to half-crouch, like an animal recognizing an angry dragon staring it down and hoping for mercy, his arms not above him anymore but half-between them as if to shield his head.

She took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, letting the tension bleed out of her with it.

This…

This was fucking bad.

She hadn't realized how much of a fucking spectacle she'd apparently made with her episode. Shit, embarassment was barely an emotion she could feel anymore, and she still felt its whiny grasp on her mind as she thought of how fucking loud she must have been. Rek'Sai had a set of lungs larger than a human adult. And many sets of vocal cords. In a mouth that could probably swallow a human whole without much issue. More than half the city must have heard her fucking screaming like she was being skinned alive.

God fucking damn it.

How the hell did she not find anything about it on PHO? Granted, she only spent a couple hours on the site, and most of it was keysearched with the word 'gang' in it, so it was entirely likely she just scrolled over it without realizing, if it showed up at all. With another deep breath, she relaxed fully again.

"Right. Keep going. Heard enough about the school incident. What else?"

"O-okay." The man whimpered, actually whimpered, and she inwardly frowned. She wasn't even trying to be too intimidating right now, what the fuck was wrong with him? Was he an actual gangster or an errand runner?

"U-Uhm, there was- oh t-there was this- this huge fight, a month ago or something, uhm, around the docks. Lung, uh, our leader, he found some group of dudes that stole from him, and went to kill them. Had a buddy that went with. They were all capes, I- I don't know many details but the heroes came eventually, Lung won. Oni Lee's gone, we don't know where, and one of the guys we went to kill got away, two of them died, a-and one of our lieutenants caught one of them, I- I don't know what they did with her or where she is, I swear , I-I'm just a fucking soldier, man." The man said, for some reason assuming she particularly cared about this extra person that got caught.

And also lying. That spike of unease and guilt mixed with fear whenever he spoke a lie was like flashing a strobelight into her eyes, it was hard to miss it.

She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes.

The man's fear slowly upgraded to terror.

"You're lying. You're not a soldier, and you do know more. Lie again and I'll rip your arm off. Spill." She demanded, and he keeled instantly.

"Okay okay okayokay! The girl- she's some kinda smart cape, one of those psychics or some shit I don't know what they do, he's got her chained up in his asia-themed club I don't even know where it is or what he's doing with her, and I'm not a soldier yet I haven't done the initiation shit that's all I have I swear!" He rushed out in a single breath, more of a constant sound of letters than a string of separate words, and she tilted her head.

All true.

Lung with a Thinker in his basement.

It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke, but she honestly couldn't tell what he would even do with the woman-

Her head tilted, eyes narrowing at the wall.

He said ' girl'.

"How old is she? Affiliation?" She asked, and the man gulped audibly.

"I- I don't know, but from what I got fr-from my friend, probably not an adult. Lung called them 'kids'. She was with the Undersiders, some small time group of thieves."

A teenager then? She'd rather not consider how an actual child would fare being a dragon's pet. And having experienced many forms, and many years of imprisonment, she could likely understand exactly how she was feeling and dealing with it.

"Any other developments?" She asked, and he bobbed his head up and down.

"U-uh, there's some new Tinker in our gang, she's making some crazy shit, completely insane as far as I've heard, the people I know told me to avoid her like the plague. Uh, there's, uh, fuckin'... nothing, shit, I don't know anything else, I'm barely even in the gang!" The man rushed out once more, and that was not a lie either, so she nodded. 

So the ABB went from two capes to three. Not great, but not terrible either.

"Alright. Now, I want you to do something simple. Get up." She said, and walked forwards, casually, gesturing with her hands for him to rise, which he did on shaky legs, his arms raising again.

When they were just three feet away and the man's bitter terror was thickening the very air around him with her emotion senses, she stopped.

"Look me in the eyes real quick." She said, making it sound like a casual demand and with the most supreme of discomfort, he obeyed.

Her eyes flashed gold, the color undulating and swerving like a spiral that sucked his gaze deeper and deeper.

Anchored to her eyes as he was, stunned, she felt his mind connect to hers, and she pushed his down, down, squishing it and grinding it beneath a metaphorical boot. His pupils dilated, thought fleeing him as his eyes unfocused, his emotions suddenly swapping to a perfect blankness.

Evelynn had about two thousand years of experience of fucking with mortals in every sense and way. She knew how to break someone completely and utterly in every way, she knew every psychological trick in the book, how long it would take her to turn a proud man into a pathetic dog that would lick her heels clean for a mere shred of her attention and time, only to deny it to him and crack his self-esteem into suicidal despair.

She loved doing all that and more.

Thankfully, she had all of the experience without any of the fucked up insanity, or so she thought, and thus, churning his mind around was easy.

She wasn't altering his brain, of course. She was altering the more abstract concept of the mind, which the brain would quickly change to fit with.

And the mind did not have thoughts, nor memories, unfortunately. She couldn't read his mind or his memories, nor alter them. Those things were for the brain to house.

The mind was more like the core, something connected to both soul and brain in different ways. It had essences and ideas and concepts and intermingled emotions tied to a hundred different thing like a spiralling, circular tree. Trying to explain it to even herself, if only to reach a deeper understanding of it, would take fucking days of uninterrupted talking.

She was guided far more with familiarity, instinct, and the natural grasp Evelynn had on her own abilities.

She connected the idea of Taylor Hebert, herself, her mind and soul, to the idea of loyalty, of undying devotion, but not obsession, nothing that would make him weep blood should she ignore him or anything like that, nor desperate lust, like Evelynn would do, but purely platonic, overpowering loyalty and reverent respect that trumped all others in his life.

From now on, to him, she might as well be God himself, manifest down to earth to give him a divine mission of obedience.

Should she ask, he'd likely shoot his own brains out without more than a single moment of hesitation, fear and sadness.

That carried problems of course.

For example, people got quite upset when people insulted their god, and if he were to flip shit and try to kill ABB gangbangers 'cause he heard some of them talk shit about her, that would not be exactly ideal.

So she attached reason and temperance to that blinding sun of devotion and loyalty, attached a vague sense of protectiveness and rationality, of concealment, and flared them as high as she could without breaking something or making his existence detrimental to himself and her.

Then she added a small but reasonable feeling of safety attached to the very idea of her, just so he wouldn't be quaking in his boots when she released him and they could talk like humans without him fumbling for every other word.

Thankfully, like everything to do with Evelynn, this type of mind-alteration was very convenient, in the way that he would instantly know who she is the moment he laid eyes on her, no matter what legend she was wearing, or even her civilian identity, so he couldn't be tricked into betraying her.

Mind was connected to the soul, and right now, she was the soul. Legends were more like projections of souls, maybe, so it didn't quite interfere with it in any way. It was a tad weird.

Less thankfully, mind control was basically more of a myth in Runeterra, and so were Thinkers like the so called 'psychic' she was idly considering to rescue, and since the gangster she didn't even know the name of right now would know her if he ever saw her, she had to put some stopgap measures in case someone went prodding around his head, or simply Mastered him in a way that overpowered the changes she made and used him as a Taylor-finding radar dish.

Which she assumed would be very easy for a master to do, because she was altering his mind, not controlling it. Heartbreaker for example could squeeze the truth out of him without more than a couple words exchanged.

This part was a lot more difficult. 

Stopgap measures were essentially putting tripwires inside one's mind, except they were a complex web, except the web was made of fire that burned everything.

So she took the idea of herself that she'd implanted in his head, that connection point, and covered it in such webs.

Now, should something or someone trip these webs, whether in his mind or brain, the connection to her would be burned away. This wouldn't change his memories or remove them, not even close, so any mind-reader or anything would still know who she was if he saw her in her civilian identity, but it would extinguish the ability to find her with a glance.

It wasn't perfect, but anything more would be both paranoid, nigh-impossible for her, and more than a little dangerous, so she stopped there.

Then she blinked, finally, after what must have been ten or twenty minutes of silently staring at each other, and she withdrew her claws from his mind, cut the connection.

Her knees almost buckled as she let out a short, wheezing breath, wide eyed, her hand going to her chest as she hurriedly righted herself.

Holy shit.

She was fucking exhausted.

And it hit her all at once when she came back, so right now she felt like someone had just punched her very soul. Had she fiddled around with his mind more, it was likely that she would have gotten a killer headache.

The ABB gangster blinked rapidly after a couple seconds of his eyes slowly focusing back, then turned his head to gape at her, his arms dropping.

"Wow, that is… a very strong Master power, sir." He said, calmer than she'd expected, and she felt her brows raise.

"I suppose it is. How are you feeling? And what's your name?" She asked, and she felt his ecstatic joy of being asked who he was, even if his face barely changed into a small, proud smile.

The rationality and temperance to avoid having him freak out when interacting with her or in general talking about her were successful, thankfully, otherwise, having his forehead scrape the concrete at her feet would be quite an awkward way to talk.

"Sile, sir. I feel a bit... confused and a little alarmed, but it's fading. I'm half-chinese. Before the CUI was a thing. First wave refugees." He said, standing there meekly, but not afraid shitless.

It was a bit bizarre to see firsthand how effective this was.

She nodded.

"Alright, Sile. Here's what I want from you. You will give me your phone number, and keep an eye and ear out on the ABB. Don't draw attention, don't even make anyone think you're a little too curious. Basically, ask and pay attention more than before, but not by too much. I'll probably call you occasionally to ask what you've seen or learned. We'll hash out the details later. Oh, and you will also fix your diet and exercise regimen, refrain from drugs and alcohol, and absolutely do not kill or rape if you can avoid it while also staying in the ABB." She hurriedly tacked on at the end, feeling a bit odd about… all of this, actually.

She didn't feel guilty, of course. This guy was a coward, not a good person. He wanted to be in the ABB, he was just a bitch so he hadn't gotten in yet.

And honestly, she would not have minded too much to simply be Mastered into being better, at least before the locker incident.

"Yes sir. I will never disappoint you." Sile said, putting a hell of a lot of emphasis on the 'never' part, and then suddenly went into a clumsy bow as low as his waist would allow, which was not a whole lot. Inflexible.

Just being around her made him feel inordinately focused and happy, she could literally taste it in the air.

This felt so fucking weird.

"Alright, Sile. Got any pen and paper?" She asked, and he hurriedly straightened to dig into his jacket.

It was strange to be watching a man who was spying on her forty minutes ago now bowing at her with every chance he got, and how a single nod from her made his emotions flare as if he just won the lottery.

Fuck, was she addictive?

Whatever. She hadn't done anything negative to him, if anything, he was better off with how she changed him. She did nothing wrong, and if she did, she didn't really care. Her lines in the sand were undiscovered, and she was certainly not a moral bastion anymore.

Not naive either.

She turned back to the shed and power walked towards it, her body framed by the light of approaching dawn, determined to at least get started on the complex mess of facilities she might and probably would need in the future. For what purpose she wasn't yet sure, but she sure as hell did not want to sit around and do nothing with what was essentially a second Eidolon-tier power. That would be both insane and immensely fucking stupid. Really, why have power if you're not going to use it? Why have power if you're not gonna use it for good, even if the definition of that word may vary wildly? 

She nudged the door open again, and after another brief look around with the Rune of Precision to make sure nobody was spying on her again, she ducked inside. Evelynn came off, and she quickly put the paper in her hoodie pocket, before Taliyah the Stoneweaver wrapped around her in an instant, molded to her own form.

Best way she could think of the girl was basically an Earthbender from that Earth Aleph cartoon, but more artistic and on magical horse steroids. And with a great sense of style, vaguely middle eastern orange-brown open robes wrapping around her while simple brown pants and a white t-shirt lay beneath, and a bit of light armoring in the form of padded shoulders on the robes and vambraces on her forearms. She quite liked Taliyah, not the least because she was one of the most human legends in all ways she could mean that. Beyond her ability to weave stone, she was just basically a girl, like her old self. Average looks, average body, average intelligence, average age, and a delightfully fun personality to boot.

She was also a very innocent legend, which was rare. No killing, no stealing, just a girl who had a gift and loved to surf across the deserts of Shurima with it, fighting raiders and saving people from the Void's insipid spawns. Quite wholesome. Shame she got half her torso eaten by a Xer'Sai, Rek'Sai's unnamed brethren monsters.

She tapped her foot, felt something like a few hundred feet of stone respond, ready to do anything she wished.

She felt basements, the way stone and concrete parted for other materials and foundations, with a strange sixth sense that was both accurate and easy to adjust to.

Another tap of her foot and a pucker-unpucker motion from her right-hand fingers as they grasped stone, and the concrete two feet in front of her slowly began to twist.

Slowly, because if she did this fast, it would be absurdly fucking loud. Really, turning solid stone to dust and sand and then pressuring it back into stone was a right racket, especially when half the floor had to adjust to fit the hole she was trying to make. Which was why she would be doing almost everything underground, among other reasons. After a couple minutes of stone grinding and breaking in infinitely tiny pieces, her command was finished, leaving a hole that led straight down for about fifty feet and just wide enough for her to fit into. She stomped her foot, pressurizing the sand-like stone back into its previous cohesive form, the hole widening a little in the process.

She brought her hand up from the side, ripping a flat, circular chunk of stone out of the wall, and floated it into the hole, holding it in place.

Then she stepped on it, and with a deep breath of preparation, as well as incoming dread because there was no way she was getting out of this without a headache later, she lowered the stone of her makeshift elevator down into the pitch black darkness.

Notes:

did i say lair?

i lied

minion time

lair next

also for anyone questioning the timeline and stuff, this world is Semi-AU because the timeline was for the story Wildbow was writing, and this timeline will be a bit different because im not writing the same story he was. So if you find differences, yeah no shit man xd.