Taylor

"So, want a little boost?" you ask in a forced-casual tone. You get a slight whiff of yourself. Ugh. Armor-funk.

Youngish, blondish, nondescriptish doesn't seem to know how to react.

You turn your body to fully face her. The loose Armsmaster-branded T-shirt and tight Battery-branded booty shorts that you were wearing under your armor contrast sharply with the painfully professional blouse and black pencil-skirt that she's in.

"C'mon," you push further into the forced-casual tone, "I made your old boss into a superhero and she's not even a parahuman. Can't tell me you don't want a little of that action for yourself, yeah? Least I can do after you so carefully fed me all that delicious General Tso's chicken over the past week," you offer, pulling up a hazy memory from last few nights.

She pauses for a length of time that's an eternity for you, especially since Sifter has immediately told you that you she's going to accept, but is probably just a moment for her. Eventually she gives a firm nod and tentatively holds her hand out.

"You want the full Director special?" you ask in a tone that has gone from forced-casual clear into forced-jaunty.

"Yes… um… yes please," she replies.

With all the practice you've gotten over the past two weeks with healing and giving Piggot tune-ups, you're able to blast through her body at light speed. You didn't get any particular command not to touch her brain, so you're able to plop in little nodules of neural processing power meant to handle the increased input from things like UV/IR vis, magnetic-field visualization, and proprioceptive intuitions relating to wings, electric eels tentacles, squid chromophores and so on.

Just for the challenge of it, you push extra hard on making sure that externally she still looks entirely like her normal self.

Truth be told, Piggot was starting to look kind of odd, with her extra-bulky limbs, greyish skin, goat-pupil eyes, and photo-sensitive pits all over her body. But when you'd asked, she'd barked at you something along the lines of "don't you dare weaken me, Hebert, I'm not in a beauty contest, I'm in a battle for Brockton Bay's soul just give me those wings and give them to me now!"

Twenty minutes later and you're done. Voila! Brand new non-parahuman superhero! It's a masterpiece, if you do say so yourself.

Piggot was little more than a study in preparation for what you've done to your PRT minder. You've streamlined everything to the point of perfect. Sure, she wasn't as powerful, but she was agile in a way Piggot would never be. The chromophore density in her skin was so high that she could basically turn invisible at will (so long as she was standing still. And naked.) She couldn't fly with the same raw speed, but you'd given her a seemingly inertia-free omni-directionality of flight that would make a housefly jealous.

You open your eyes and stare straight into her entirely-human-looking brown eyes. "Hey, what's your name?" you ask.

"Jess," she replies in a daze. "Jessica Masters."

You continue the morning's theme of forced emotions by giving a forced chuckle, "well, just about the only power I didn't give you was a Master power, so your name is kind of ironi…"

You trail off, realizing that she's not paying any attention to you at all.

"Hey, Jess? Go home. Don't do anything weird, okay? The Director can't really pass for normal anymore, but you don't need to give folks a show, alright?" you voice takes on a low, placating tone. A few troopers enter the tent, looking like they're just on a normal patrol.

"Jess?! Hey! Jess!" you get her attention. "Just keep it cool and head back home, okay? Think things over there?"

She seems to get the message. She gives you a shaky nod and meanders out of the tent.

'Well, I'd say that was nice of you, but the world of parahumans is a cruel one. Just hope that doesn't bite us in the ass later,' Sifter offers.

'Fuck you, Taylor fucking Sifter Hebert, right in the foreshadowing anus of doom, you bitch,' a voice gripes.

A laugh from Amelia sounds in the back of your head, 'you have such a sweet mouth, Reload.'

'I'm with Amelia on that. Sweet music to my ears,' Sifter responds.

'Don't blame me if harmless little Jess Masters over there turns into some sort of super-villainess mastermind that takes over Brockton Bay and destroys everything we're trying to accomplish here with the recovery. It's not my fault, it's Sifter's fault for saying "hope that doesn't bite us in the ass later."'

'Oh thank god, Vicky!' Amelia interrupts, 'and for once, without Carol.'

Amelia noticed Vicky's return first, mostly because she was constantly patrolling the Bone Throne Tent with her eyes up towards the sky.

Reload had a tendency to sulk, sitting in the corner of one of the medical tents left strewn across Captain's Hill park. Sifter was always, always, restlessly pacing the entire area, testing the limits of her tether to you, always gathering as much information as she could. Mom…

That was tough.

Mom was…

Mom wasn't…

Marquis wasn't dealing well with things.

Endbringer things.

She tried to keep up her façade, of course. Her voice never wavered from the cultured, unflappable tone that it always had. But when she'd had her little breakdown in front of Leviathan, something… else… had broken inside of her. It was like she just didn't have the mental or spiritual fortitude to handle the devastating reality of a force like Leviathan. Like her entire worldview, her entire world, was defined by a lighter tone, a kind of weightless floaty surreality that couldn't hold up in the brutal face of reality as you knew it.

She hadn't talked much over the past two weeks.

Sure, she'd make the usual clucking noises, soothing you and your sisters and Amelia when you got into a spat. She'd try to tamp down on dissent, and offer warnings when the Protectorate or PRT had someone especially dangerous around you. She really didn't like Dragon and her occasional presence.

But mostly she just stood around. Her attention would get captured by some or another view of devastation and she'd just blankly stare at it. For hours.

When one of your PRT minders had left a radio tuned to a news station, she'd been horrified about stories of the Slaughterhouse 9. She couldn't understand what they were saying about "that dear boy Jack Slash, he would never…" and had just kind of zoned out for an entire morning.

It wasn't that you didn't love her, that you weren't infinitely grateful to have Mom back, it was just that…

You know what, whatever. Never mind.

It's been a long couple of weeks, you tell yourself. Time to get some real sleep. Time to rest and turn your attention inwards. Time to decide what's best for Taylor and where to go from there.

=====​

You sleep the sleep of the damned. Or blessed. Or was it babies? Babies slept well, right?

In any event, you got a long, full night of recuperative rest. When you awake, it isn't to more damaged bodies needing healing. It isn't to the insistent demands of PRT personnel or Protectorate heroes.

No, it's to the sound of birds chirping and a cool breeze gently flapping the drapes against your bedroom window.

Wait.

No.

Those were definitely chirping birds, but that heavy flapping noise is more like canvas than drapes… and…

Your brain finally re-engages fully and brings you back to where you are. Surrounded by the heavy off-green canvas of a PRT tent, on top of Captain's Hill, surrounded by the devastation of an Endbringer attack.

You cast your eyes to the corner of your vision, and for the first time in the past two weeks, you fully direct your attention to those little numbers (98950/103300), and dive completely into your power.

Taylor Selection welcomes you home. The non-space is completely unaltered by the passage of time. Your legions stand in front of you, ready to serve. You glance over at your active circles and start by deactivating everyone there.

You need to just clear your mind for a moment. Reset back to baseline.

You sit down on the black non-floor, let your eyelids droop, and meditate for a while.

Well, you try to, anyway. You've never actually meditated before, but you've read enough about the practice that you figure you should be able to handle it.

Turns out you can't. Despite this place not being real, you find yourself immediately distracted by random itches on your skin and random thoughts. The occasional stab of painful and embarrassing memory, sure, all of those Emma-centered, but really your mind just can't let go of the insanity of the past two weeks.

You sigh and clamber back to your feet.

It's then you realize you feel that little tingly-buzzy feeling of energy that can be used to improve your power. It'd been so long you'd almost forgotten.

Without a moment's hesitation you walk over to your ghost mannequins, right to front-and-center. You face Anne, hold your hand up, and consider pushing the energy into her. She's the closest thing you'll ever have to a sister, and the last two times you pushed energy into her, you let her talk and then made her solid. You're certain that leveling up her power will get her closer and closer to a real person. Maybe she'll even finally break free, totally independent of you.

You can hope.

Just before you act, you're struck with the thought that things are getting extremely limited with only four ghosts. You can't ever deactivate Sifter – last time you did that, you lost 90% of the high school and college education that you'd completed together. That didn't really make sense to you, since you were pretty sure memories were stored in a different part of the brain than your current, active attention, but that's what happened.

So that's one spot always filled.

You realize that can quite literally never get rid of Reload. Unless you're sporting a very high-end Brute power, you're always at risk of dying to something as simple as a stray gunshot. And with your worldwide profile now, there's plenty of folks that would be happy to see you go down.

You've hated missing Anne these past two weeks, and you realize you'll nearly always want to have her active. And if Dad gets hurt or there's a medical emergency, there's Amelia needing to always take a slot. All four spots, basically filled all the time.

Well, that answers that. You walk over to your active circles, stand next to one of the grey ones and push the energy into it. It takes on a soft, blue glow.

You're startled to realize you still have the energy dancing across your fingers. Two boosts? Must've been something to do with surviving your first Endbringer attack.

After several long moments of thinking things over, you realize that both you and Anne are "Level 3," so to speak. You pushed the energy inwards twice and into Anne twice. When you used the energy on yourself, you got much better at using all of your ghosts' powers, and even unlocked access to much stronger ghosts like Amelia.

Put that way, the choice – for now – is obvious. You nod to yourself and begin to push the energy inwards, making an iron-clad promise to yourself that you'll level up Anne next.

As the energy settles in your chest, a deep thrum passes out from you in a spherical shockwave, rushing past all of the ghost-mannequins. As the shockwave reaches the edge of your active ghosts, another tier brightens and becomes available to you. The shockwave then dissipates off into the infinite distance.

Walking briskly past Marceau, Amelia, and so on, you come to the back row, the ones that just went from being completely in black shadows to now simply being greyed-out. In this row, two ghosts have the little footlight glowing up on them, indicating that you can activate them.

-​

You'd thought it was bad getting an Emma. You'd thought it was a shock getting an Amy Dallon.

That was… those were… nothing compared to suddenly seeing a little six-year old copy of yourself. Your breath catches in your throat. Your heart starts thudding faster and faster. The horror of… of a child having to go through the trauma of a trigger event.

Your mind momentarily flashes back to your own childhood, images of laughing and playing with Mom and Dad and Emma and eating Spaghetti-O's with your Alexandria spoon while sitting on the couch, laughing yourself silly when Dad tried to talk along with the show and would do this terrible high-pitched voice for the girl characters.

Racing through the park, sliding down the big corkscrew-slide with your gold blanket stuffed down the back of your shirt collar, holding your hands forward screaming Alexandria's catch phrases from her cartoon. Roasting marshmallows over the campfire that Emma's dad built in the fire pit out on the beach, on one of Brockton's rare, perfect clear evenings, falling asleep before it could finish and you jerking awake at Emma's peals of laughter when your marshmallow dipped down so far it hit the flames and turned into a giant, black flaming ball of sugary mush. Your insistence that you wanted to eat it anyway and the burning from the heat and the bitter blackened ash in your mouth and then finally breaking through to the gooey sugary remnants and all of it mixing in your brain until it burned a memory so deep that to this very day, the smell of burnt sugar fills you with a pleasant melancholy.

All of it, all of it all mixed up in your head. It was childhood. It was what childhood should be.

And here, standing in front of you, with a blank, expressionless face that you'd finally come to accept on your other ghosts, is a dead reflection of your childhood, twisted through the funhouse mirror of fucking parahumans, broken with a trigger event and burdened with unwanted powers and the obligation to do good with them.

-​

You're not sure how long you stood there, staring blankly at little Taylor's face.

Eventually, you realize you need to make a decision. You take a half step back and try to take in the gestalt of the ghost. Try to figure out who she is and what her powers are.

You get the second shock of the morning. Standing behind her you can see a figure, very faint, and you realize that this ghost has ghosts of her own. And the ghost trailing after her…

…and the decision is made for you. Any chance, any chance at all to bring back Hero must be taken. Even at two removes, even an echo of an echo, and it is morally required of you to try and bring Hero back into the world.

You realize that you've fully understood her power. Glaistig goddamn Uaine.

After the gut-punches you've taken, the fact that you have a Fairie Queen power doesn't faze you at all. Nothing could, really, after a Siberian Mom power.

You activate her without another moment of hesitation.

-​

There's a bit of fear, now, about the other active ghost back here. Out of the corner of your eye, you'd seen that it was just another you, looking basically normal. So no obvious shocks, but still, you're wary as you pace over to her.

The first impression you get is simple – she has absolute mastery over her own body. It doesn't seem to have the fine-grained perfection that the other self-biokinetic, self-Amelia, has, but you're sure it's absolute. This is a person who could voluntarily control the secretions from any gland in her body, her blood pressure, blood flow anywhere in her body, all of it. She may not have the scientific insight of true biokinesis, but her complete control over her body would make her a damn sight tougher than a normal person.

You take another long moment to just soak in her presence. That level of perfect self-regulation would, by itself, be an impressive parahuman power, but would still be appropriate for the front of the parade – up by Worm or Lea or Mycroft. This girl was standing back here next to the goddamn Fairie Queen, so there had to be more to…

You gasp.

You literally gasp. A short, sharp suck inwards of air and then holding your breath. You turn and flee in terror. Your eyes screwed shut, you go barreling back over to your active circles.

You collapse in a heap.

She… she violated everything. Every rule, every understanding you had of who you are and where you are and what you are… that ghost just spat in the face of all of it. She could step between worlds as easily as you step down a stair.

No, not worlds. Universes. Not even universes… metaverses. This wasn't self-teleportation to Earth Aleph. No, nothing nearly so innocuous. She could step to a universe where fact was fiction, fiction fact.

Did you want to visit the Rats of NIMH? Br'er Rabbit's briar patch? Oz?

…

…

…

The world where Anne was real and you were a figment?

…

…

…

You could. Easily. So easily. Just go activate that ghost over there and take a step to the left. Go anywhere. Anywhere at all.

Nothing would matter because there would quite literally never be a problem you couldn't avoid. In an infinite space filled with infinite multiverses, each with infinite variations on every possible outcome, you could always find a world where everything was exactly the same, but for that one thing you'd like to be different?

Ever make a mistake? No problem, just find a universe where you didn't. Kill that Taylor and take over her life.

Forget even mistakes – ever have a moment where an outcome was due to chance and didn't like the outcome? A quick hop and it goes your way.

Nothing would matter. Nothing. No causes, no effects, no consequences for your choices, no responsibility, no meaning at all, no meaning whatsoever.

And what if you did decide to visit the world that Anne is from? That Sifter is from? And you learn that whenever you activate them, you're stealing them away from their families. What of Anne's Danny? Does he have to grieve every time Anne disappears for the day? Week? Longer? Are you ready to face that possibility? To literally give up all of your powers because you can't face the horror of knowing… of knowing that you could know the truth about what happens to your ghosts when you activate them?

Why even fight Scion? To save one planet? To save a measly trillion planets? Just step to a world with no Scion. And so what if you do defeat him, after all, there will always be more multiverses with such awful suffering. Things worse even than Scion. Are you now required to activate that plane-jumper and spend the rest of eternity solving the infinite problems of an infinite trans-multiversal space?

And what about those who live in those spaces? Shouldn't they have the right and responsibility to solve their own problems? The opportunity to either succeed or fail and thereby give their own finite lives meaning?

-​

You've never had alcohol before, but now you decide that you're going to get completely shit-faced.

===​

Sifter, Mycroft, Anne, Reload, and Amelia watch you get drunk.

Sifter's power doesn't help.

Dad doesn't ask why you didn't activate Mom.

Dad sees the look on your face and doesn't ask why you're taking huge swigs of a bottle of Johnny Walker. He doesn't even ask how you got your hands on scotch (because, duh, offer fountain-of-youth to a liquor store clerk). Before he can take it away or guilt you into stopping, you give him the slip.

You drink until the world is spinning and you're puking and you drink until the bottle is gone and when you wake up the next day, you're in a hospital bed and a VERY angry-looking Alexandria is standing over you and Dad is asleep in a chair in the corner of the room.

You sigh, enter Taylor Selection, and hop back out a moment later.

Sifter, Mycroft, Reload, little Glaistig Uaine, and Plane-jumper appear in front of you.

"Dad! Wake up!" you croak just loud enough to get his attention. He gives a bleary blink, sees the little Fairie Queen, and jolts to his feet.

"This is gonna be a long talk," you begin.

Never let it be said that you didn't know when to ask for help.

==​

You give a little laugh, realizing that your entire power is nothing but asking for help.

=====​

Choice!

How much do you explain to Dad and Alexandria?