*000000*

Taylor had opted to come see Amy after school because Pemmy and Demmy were still busy with their lab. Yew wouldn't be free from work for another few hours, and she didn't really have any other significant obligations at the moment.

Besides the holy war thing, but not only did she not want to think about that, she really didn't want to tell Amy about it.

It was embarrassing.

"So kick him to the moon or something. You're making this way harder than it has to be," Amy pointed out.

"Normal people can't just throw people into space for annoying them," Taylor fired back.

"Normal people are stupid," Was Amy's immediate reply.

"You wouldn't use your powers to make someone's arms fall off just for annoying you," Taylor pointed out shrewdly.

"That's different," Amy answered, taking a pull from her cigarette and then flicking the remaining nub at the ground.

"What, cus you can't get away with it? It's not like-" Taylor started to argue.

"Because no one tries to hit on me like that. Or at all."

"So you would do it if they did? I'm not buying it," Taylor responded with a snort.

"Nah. I'd just tell Vicky and she'd use her sociable popular girl powers to deal with it," Amy said.

"…Fair. Hey, do you think-"

"Her amazing powers of 'being pretty and famous' only really extend to our school. Sorry," Amy cut her off.

Taylor shrugged and said, "Damn. Had to try."

Silence passed between the two for a moment as Amy withdrew another cigarette from within her robes, causing Taylor to frown.

"You shouldn't smoke so much," Taylor said with a sigh, stretching a hand out to yank the smoke away from her.

"Legally speaking, I shouldn't smoke at all. And yet here we are," Amy shot back dryly, snatching the cigarette back from her.

There was no reality where Amy could take much of anything from Taylor if she didn't want her to, but ultimately Taylor didn't think it was fair to stop her. She didn't agree with her - but she didn't own her, either.

What was she supposed to do, hover around her all day stopping her from smoking?

"Someone's cranky today. Did something happen?" she asked instead of continuing to try to convince her to stop. For all she had her own problems, Taylor was very aware that other people had their own issues. It just so happened that issues most other people found insurmountable, she could typically manage with ease. Maybe she could help with whatever-

"There's this girl I like, but she's kind of dumb and never notices. And this guy I know is also into her, and it stresses me out because I'm afraid they'll end up together," Amy said, eyeing Taylor with a weird, somewhat nervous expression as she spoke.

Taylor blinked once, then considered.

"I didn't know you were into girls. Have you tried talking to her?" she tried, slightly annoyed that romance was the one area she was absolutely horrible in.

"Whenever she remembers me, yeah," Amy said, still giving Taylor that funny look.

"I meant about your feelings," Taylor clarified.

"What, like, just ask her out, point-blank?" Amy asked incredulously.

"Sure, why not?" Taylor asked, tilting her head in curiosity.

"She's… picky. Like you," Amy said awkwardly.

"Must be this tall to ride?" Taylor joked, holding her hand out parallel to the ground and restraining the urge to cringe at the unfortunate choice of words.

She'd been very annoyed and flustered at the time. She didn't feel like she could be blamed for that. She'd gone from most bullied kid at school to, well, whatever she counted as now, in a very short period of time.

People liking her freaked her out.

Amy winced. "Yeah."

"I'd still try it. If it was me anyway, it might work. I just said all that stuff before because I didn't want random people approaching me because of my looks. If you actually know this girl? She might listen," Taylor said with a shrug.

She was platonic life partners with her own superpower. She really wasn't in a position to judge other people's choice of partner.

"So… if I were to ask you-" Amy began slowly, her face turning bright red.

"What's up, bitches!" Vicky yelled as she came in for her landing, practically shaking the rooftop as she hit the ground.

"Vicky!" Amy shrieked in indignation at the sudden landing.

"I give it a six out of ten on the landing. Needs work," Taylor said blandly.

"I don't wanna hear about landings from a girl who can fly but chooses to run on air instead!" Vicky countered, instantly getting between Amy and Taylor to pull them into a group hug that neither resisted.

"Flying with magic is hard. Running is way easier." Taylor defended herself.

"Suuuuure. Do you have much time? Wanna go shopping? I'm still scouting the best places at your new mall-slash-castle-slash-house," Vicky said with a glint in her eyes.

Taylor blanched.

Vicky was definitely one of her best friends - but shopping with her was anything but fun. Mostly, it was just hours of trying on progressively girlier or more revealing outfits until Taylor's tolerance for such was exceeded.

And then Vicky would coax her into continuing, anyway.

"WowlookatthetimeIgottagodoathinginanotherdimensiongreatseeingyoubye!" Taylor blurted out, noting Amy's eye twitching rapidly as she was thrown to the wolves.

'Sorry Amy! I really am busy though!' she thought at her brunette friend as she hurled herself bodily off the roof and quickly through a Gap.

Crisis, averted.

***

Tomorrow's actions are limited to attending Parian's event. Training will progress as normal.

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Hebert Household, Brockton Bay

As it turned out, running away from your friends in order to avoid 'shopping' was almost as boring and monotonous as following Vicky around while the blonde shoved her in and out of change rooms to try things on. Vicky seemed to take endless joy in treating her like a doll to be dressed up, which was flattering, but she tended toward clothing Taylor would consider somewhat… scandalous.

Granted, she was so highly averse to showing her skin that even something as simple as a sweater that showed a little too much of her shoulders was 'scandalous' to her.

But recently, Vicky had been on a swimsuit kick, and Taylor could actually see Amy's soul leaving her body every time she was forced to wait for the duo to change into a new, almost but not quite identical set of swimwear from the last.

Personally, Taylor kind of figured she'd just end up getting a pair of boys swim trunks and working from there, but the mere mention of doing so had nearly made Vicky explode - so she kept the thought in mind without actually voicing it. Not that it was liable to come up any time soon - it was like 20 degrees out, tops. Not exactly swimming weather.

Unfortunately, at least that particular experience, common as it was, wasn't what Taylor ended up doing with her evening. If she had, she would have at least had the company of Vicky and Amy to stave off some of the boredom.

Instead, she spent her entire evening using alchemy to produce machine parts for Pemmy and Demmy.

She didn't mind helping out, but the first few times she had asked what any of it was for or why they were so serious about it, she had gotten another polite but obvious deflection - something which was starting to really get on her nerves. She didn't like being mad at Emmy. It happened often enough when she was Dante, but that was in a more… playful kind of way. It wasn't genuine anger or annoyance, but more exasperation, rather.

But Pemmy and Demmy were so tight-lipped about whatever world changing thing was stressing them out that it was starting to actually bother her.

She knew she could order them to just tell her… but she was equally sure that if she did that, then she would lose something about their relationship that she would probably never get back - in addition to a great deal of self-respect.

Hopefully, however, the time for secrecy was soon past. While she hadn't previously been able to make heads or tails of the purpose of any of the machines she helped rapidly put together last night, she had made sure to keep them firmly in her memory for later.

She had a feeling that once she actually had a Tinker power of her own she could reason some of it out herself, and hopefully, even help.

Once she figured out what the problem was, anyway.

"You know, I looked up how lightbulbs are made, and this is about ten thousand times more complex - for no additional benefit," she pointed out groggily as she carefully used just the barest hint of Ozma's particular brand of magic to move a silver filament barely a micron wide into position.

She had no earthly idea how anyone was supposed to design and make anything using technology so tiny and delicate without an entire factory floor dedicated to the manipulation of such things, but she supposed that her power always found a way, so she shouldn't be all that surprised by it.

"Maso-powered bulbs last almost indefinitely, and only require the barest fraction of a mote of power to be turned on," Pemmy lectured her like a school teacher, putting one hand on her hips and wagging a finger at Taylor like a schoolmarm.

She was actually very warm and motherly to be around most of the time, it just wasn't immediately obvious because of how frequently she would get sidetracked by whatever was bothering her and her sister.

It made Taylor even more annoyed that they were hiding things from her, because now it just felt like this secret of theirs was keeping her apart from her best friend.

Friends.

"Yeah, but… if the power source is in the bulb, how do you turn off the lights?" she asked pointedly, fitting the final filament into position and gently putting the base of the bulb down. Then she gently put the top half of the casing back on, and tapped it with a finger, using alchemy to seal it shut.

Then she held up her creation for inspection.

"This is a model of lightbulb most often used in laboratories where the staff work twenty four seven. They aren't intended to turn off," Pemmy noted idly, bending forward to examine the simple object with a critical eye.

"If you really had to, you could just put them in recesses in the wall though. Just close the panel to dim the light," Demmy added from off to the side.

In a rare showing, the pair had decided to both be present for her training today. Taylor took that as a sign that she was probably done acquiring the power - even though she didn't feel any different than usual. Mostly.

"Or I could just make magic lights. Or use normal light bulbs. Or a million other things. Your world seriously just decided to replace everything with this Maso stuff?" she asked incredulously.

"It was an easily synthesized infinite power source that could be safely contained within any object it was to power. You don't realize how vulnerable a power station is until you really need one," Demmy answered with a shrug.

"Speaking of easily synthesized… Do you have some on hand so I can see if this thing will work?" Taylor asked, flicking a fingernail against the glass bulb.

She wasn't a Tinker, and she didn't feel like a Tinker - but she was a wizard, and so had taken a few extra minutes out to enchant the glass bulb to be more durable.

Just in case.

"No, but we can test it in the lab later today," Pemmy said agreeably.

Taylor slowly lowered the bulb in her hand and squinted at her partners.

"...After the fashion show, right?" she asked pointedly.

The two glanced at each other, and Taylor could swear an entire conversation happened right before her eyes, with the two wiggling their eyebrows and shifting between dozens of facial expressions in a handful of moments before turning back to her.

"We… think what we're working on is a bit more important than-" Demmy started to explain, then paused when Taylor's expression shifted from suspicious to sad. She couldn't help it. It didn't feel fair. She didn't want to say she hated Emmy when she was like this… but she kind of did. It was almost enough to make her cry.

"Fine. Whatever," she bit out through grit teeth, turning around so the pair wouldn't see her eyes start to redden.

She was aware that Emmy always had and probably always could tell what she was feeling at any given moment, but her rational mind didn't want anything to do with such thoughts.

She just didn't want her friend to see her cry, especially not when it was over something so… stupid. They had more important things to do than be with her. Big deal. It happened all the time.

It just… also felt like being abandoned. And she hated it.

"Taylor-" Pemmy tried to comfort her, but Taylor wasn't having it.

"I'm fine," she bit out again, stepping away so the extended hand from the redhead that should have landed on her shoulder fell somewhat short.

To distract herself from what was going on behind her, Taylor lifted the stupid lightbulb again. She'd finished it, but it hadn't yielded any actual insights. She wasn't even sure she got any kind of power out of completing it. It was just… a stupid light bulb. A stupid magic powered lightbulb with no magic around to power.

Well. There was magic. She was magical as shit, if she was being entirely honest with herself, but it wasn't the right kind of magic.

Or was it?

Struck by a strange inspiration, Taylor gently began to run some of Ozma's magic through the base of the bulb, extending the power up from her fingertips into the spiral base of the object. She could sense some of the connections that were within lighting up… but not all of them. Not even most of them. It was as though the power she was providing was only one part of what was needed to light the stupid thing, and - feeling that frustration was probably a better feeling than sorrow at the moment - she tried again.

This time, she pushed some borrowed power from the ambient spirits around her into the bulb. The same thing happened again, though different connections seemed to light up.

She was dimly aware that Pemmy and Demmy were behind her saying something, but at this point she was almost in a trance. Some far off part of her mind guessed that she was probably experiencing a tinker fugue, but that couldn't be right because she wasn't really tinkering. This was more… wizarding.

A wizard fugue.

Regardless, she now had a hypothesis to test, and even though she knew she could exit this state anytime she wanted… she also knew that doing so would just bring back that crushing sensation of abandonment from earlier - so she didn't.

Instead, she gathered up everything she had available to her. Spiritual Power, Aura, Demonic Power, Prana, Ambient Spirits, and the 'Soul' Magic specific to Ozma.

And she drove it all into the lightbulb at once.

All of the connections lit up, each individual power lighting up different connections and filaments… but somewhere between start and finish there was a… disconnect. An incompatibility. All of the power reached the end of the connection… and then nothing happened.

There was no light.

So then, the problem was obviously that she needed every connection to light up… but each connection needed to be compatible with the next one.

What she did next, she was sure would be impossible to replicate, and later when asked, she wouldn't even really remember doing it.

But she began to sort of… fold… her power. It was hard. The hardest thing she had ever done with her powers in fact. Control had always come fairly easily to her. When your first power has the limitation of either being under control, or killing everyone around you, that kind of thing tends to happen. This… this didn't come easily. This felt like trying to breathe water. Like trying to swim in concrete. A fish could more easily fly through the sky than she could simply force all of her powers together into one cohesive whole.

But second by second, minute by minute, using the will and focus of someone who had spent every morning for months meditating, and focusing, and controlling herself in ways most people could not even begin to understand, she made it so.

And for one single, beautiful moment, the bulb lit up. It was a ghostly pale blue, with streaks of white rippling along the outer edges as though it were being contained by something. And looking closely at it… she could almost… almost… see… another person? They were like her, but… not. They seemed to be completely unaware they were being watched, and more importantly, seemed to have taken much more after Dante than Taylor ever had, wearing aviator glasses and a resized version of his red leather coat as naturally as Taylor herself wore her haori.

She was just about to reach out to do… something. Anything to try and interact with the strangely familiar girl… when the light went out.

Well. No. The light didn't 'go out'.

It exploded in her face, sending a pulse of energy washing over the garage and knocking everything - including her - to the ground.

That was about when Taylor snapped back to reality, dazedly feeling something moist and wet dribbling down her face from her ears, eyes, and nose.

Pemmy and Demmy had rushed over to her before anything else, with panicked and stricken looks on their faces that Taylor for some reason found profoundly amusing at that exact moment.

Still somewhat dazed, she grinned impishly up at the red heads leaning over her, trying to help her sit up, and quickly kissed them each on the forehead.

"I love you guys. Wizard fugue… bad," she stated matter of factly.

And then she blacked out.

***

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Brockton General Hospital, Brockton Bay

She woke up feeling… actually a lot better than she had felt for most of this past week. The lethargy of depression didn't hinder her in the slightest as she bolted upright in the weirdly uncomfortable bed she found herself in, only to be immediately levered back down by Pemmy and Demmy, who appeared next to her with their hands already outstretched to land on opposite shoulders.

She was drastically stronger than either of them - at least, when she chose to apply herself - but she still allowed them to push her back down into what she now recognized as a hospital bed.

If she was being honest, she was just glad that both of them were with her when she woke up - even if that did make her feel somewhat guilty.

"What were you thinking!" Demmy barked at her, letting go of her along with her sister the minute Taylor was back on the bed, and rapidly turning to fiddle with anything she could get her hands on. Seemingly unconsciously, the messy haired redhead went about smoothing her blankets, readjusting the backrest of the bed, and double checking all of the monitoring equipment sitting around her.

She supposed they must have given her a private room, because no one else was present, and she had a fairly nice view out of the window that took up most of one wall of the room.

"Well, I just thought that-" Taylor started sheepishly.

"That was very dangerous! In all of our studies, only beings of phenomenal age and power should be able to condense their own Maso!" Pemmy continued on from her sister's initial bark.

"How was I supposed to know-" She tried again, only to be cut off as Pemmy abruptly deposited a tray of food in front of her. Nasty hospital food at that.

Or maybe it wasn't nasty. Maybe she just got so used to eating well-cooked homemade meals from the Heap or Emmy or, well, herself, that her sense of what was good or not was skewed. She could remember a time when a baloney sandwich with no toppings was Mana from heaven.

"You could have seriously injured yourself! Your powers aren't supposed to interact that way! They're separate! Distinct!" Demmy insisted, lifting a hand as though to jab her in the chest with one finger to emphasize her point, only to recall where they were and why they were there, and choose to brush some of Taylor's hair out of the way instead. The oddly loving gesture was completely at odds with what the twins were saying, but Taylor supposed that they were - in their own way - demonstrating their love and care.

"I mean, it totally worked for a second-" She tried again.

"You nearly catastrophically destabilized the calibration our back-end uses to keep you alive! You're like six nuclear reactors strapped together, why would you plug them into each other?!" Pemmy hissed at her.

Taylor sighed, loudly, then tried, yet again, to explain herself.

"Stop," she commanded, well, not literally commanded because she could also have done that, but still. The intent was there.

The twins turned to each other at her singular word, then back to her with flat, unamused stares.

"First off, how was I supposed to know any of that? All you told me was that Maso was dead dragon magic you scraped into a petri dish and used to power your lightbulbs. Second, I'm what?" She asked incredulously.

"You're fine. We fixed it. Just… don't do it again." Demmy rushed to calm her down.

"Okay, so am I dying now, or what? You're sending mixed signals." Taylor asked in exasperation.

"You're… physically fine. Your powers too. It was just a bit… touch and go for a second, is all. You superseded most of our… call it programming, and did something you really shouldn't have been able to do," Pemmy offered with a thoughtful expression on her face.

"But it totally worked," Taylor pointed out, much to the twins' annoyance.

"Yes, and technically, if you fed a dog a radioactive isotope you would have a living nuclear dog as long as you didn't care about the dog's survival," Demmy fired back.

Taylor winced, and then frowned at that.

"...Are you comparing me to a dog?" she asked suspiciously.

"Why is that the part you latched on to?" Pemmy asked in exasperation.

"Because worrying about exploding just because I tried to cross the streams once isn't productive. What time is it?" she asked by way of deflection.

It was possible that she held an unhealthy lack of fear for her own life, but she just… didn't feel any danger on this topic. She did, however, know that Pemmy and Demmy would give her a hard time over it, so…

She opted to apologize now and to keep fiddling with it on her own time.

Maybe with some safeguards? Oh, she could make a variation on the lightbulb but with a capacitor instead of a bulb! Then she could pour power in and try to force it together away from her body!

And… actually when did she know what a capacitor was? Before it was just a sci-fi term to her, but now… now she actually knew what one was and how to make one tuned to magic.

"It's eleven-thirty," Pemmy said in a suspicious tone, no doubt picking up on enough of her emotions to know she was feeling somewhat defiant in the face of their combined warnings.

But not enough to do anything about it.

This caused Taylor to drop her musings on her newfound technological mastery - okay well, she mostly had a list of mundane items she could modify to run on magic, but still, - and bolt back up in bed again.

"We gotta go!" She blurted out, hastily moving the food tray out of her way and opening a gap that swiftly deposited a set of casual clothes on top of her.

"Wha-" Demmy began but Taylor blithely interrupted her.

"I mean, I gotta go," Taylor amended somewhat bitterly as she ignored their newfound attempts to keep her in bed.

She felt fine, and she could heal herself anyway, so the hospital was an entirely superfluous place to be. So, thinking, she rapidly changed into the jeans and loose fitting cardigan she kept as 'backup clothes', heedless of the presence of either Pemmy or Demmy.

She'd gotten accustomed to changing around her projection so long ago that it barely even registered to her anymore.

"Are you sure you feel alright?" Demmy finally asked her, rather than trying to convince her to stay - a prospect which she assumed was obviously a lost cause to the twins.

"I'm fine. I have to prepare for Sabah's fashion thingy! I told her I'd go help setup, and I forgot to ask Vicky if she wanted to come!" She hurriedly explained, her mind swiftly switching tracks away from the heavier topics that made her antsy and uncomfortable, and onto something more mundane.

…For certain values of the mundane.

You could call it denial, or deliberate avoidance of a problem, but if asked directly she would just point out that heroism is great and all, until you stop appreciating the life you are being a hero to protect.

Work life balance was what it was.

That was her story and she was sticking to it.

When she was done changing, she turned to find the twins standing far closer to her than she had originally expected, both of them favouring her with worried, mildly annoyed looks that left her feeling slightly guilty. As though reading her thoughts on the matter though, the pair shared another of those looks with each other, before turning back to her.

"We can postpone our work for a day. Alchemy has already put us ahead of schedule," Pemmy offered, as though unsure if Taylor would take the olive branch.

She almost snorted.

She was many things, but as she had come to find of late, she was not actually in possession of a great deal of shame.

She felt like the her from three months ago would probably scream into a pillow for an hour at the assertion, but it was true, and her first set of powers had taught her anything, it was how to capitalize on an opportunity.

"Promise you won't leave me halfway to do something mysterious?" she asked pointedly, to which Demmy could only roll her eyes at her, while Pemmy looked mildly taken aback at her change in tone.

"We promise," Demmy responded dryly, to which Pemmy could only nod along like a deer in the headlights.

"Yes! Next stop, wherever Vicky is!" she cheered, before hastily pulling out her cell phone to text the girl in question.

"It's a school day, you know," Demmy pointed out to her.

"Yeah, but it's lunch time, and Arcadia does that half-day thing for the Wards anyway," Taylor responded distractedly while clumsily typing; 'Can I meet you outside your school?' with the slow laboriousness of the elderly into her smartphone.

Hey, she owned one, that didn't mean she was completely fluent with the things. Vicky said she had a lot of catching up to do in this area, mostly in the form of not needing to type full sentences, but she didn't see the problem, so she had no intention of changing.

When she got an exasperated affirmative from the blonde, she grinned, and ripped open a gap that deposited her, Pemmy, and Demmy, on the sidewalk in front of Arcadia High.

It was perhaps because of this timing, that she did not notice the door to her hospital room exploding open mere moments after she left, disgorging Amy into the room after her, holding a bouquet of roses and looking anxious.

"I heard that… you were… injured," she began then trailed off when she determined the room was, in fact, empty.

She slowly allowed the arm holding the flowers to droop and then growled in irritation.

"That teleporting bitch," she muttered with a combination of anger and fondness, before spinning around and exiting the room.

* * *

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Arcadia High School, Brockton Bay

"Wait, I wanna guess!" Were Vicky's first words upon seeing Taylor emerge from her gap. She paused for a brief moment to glance past Taylor at Pemmy and Demmy, and the more rowdy of the two twins - Demmy - quickly waved her off.

"There's two of us now. Don't mind it," she said nonchalantly.

"Yes. We're only here to supervise - she hurt herself but won't stay in bed," Pemmy added with a wry amusement that wasn't quite enough to hide her actual annoyance.

"Uhuh…" Vicky said slowly, before doing what everyone that spent any length of time around Taylor did when something weird happened - and swiftly moved on.

"Anyway!" she repeated herself, waving exaggeratedly at the gap behind Taylor for emphasis.

It was probably a testament to how weird Brockton Bay had become, and how famous Taylor was in the city at this point, that all the surrounding pedestrians did to respond to the nightmarish hell portal was swerve to walk around it - some without even bothering to look up.

Oh sure, there were also a great deal of gawkers, some candid photography with cellphones and the like - but overall, anyone who wanted to could see the same sight outside Winslow at the beginning of nearly every school day, so it was much less jarring than it could have been.

Taylor was a known factor now, as it were.

"Uh… sure, but we don't have much time, so-" Taylor started to say, while awkwardly scratching her cheek.

"No, no, I totally have this!" Vicky insisted, landing on the sidewalk, having obviously only just deigned to float out of the school building behind them to meet her. She was wearing jeans and a white hoodie with her family's logo on it, and had her school bag slung over one shoulder haphazardly. She looked for all the world like a standard-issue sporty teenager, which was much at odds with the excessively glamorous way she liked to dress herself outside school.

Taylor just raised the patented Hebert eyebrow at her before gesturing for her to go on.

She also closed the gap behind her, if only to prevent pedestrians meandering into the road to avoid it.

"Alien invasion!" Vicky blurted out, lifting a hand into the air with one finger extended.

"What? No, we don't even have aliens like that in this dimension," Taylor responded blankly.

"I'm gonna ignore the particular way you refuted that for a second, but we'll circle back to it," Vicky said dismissively, before extending a second finger.

"You did something so crazy-stupid that you need my esteemed help to figure it out!" Vicky tried again.

"When do I ever- actually, don't answer that. Thin ice, Dallon." Taylor said pointedly to her friend, who shrugged at the response before extending a third finger.

"...You're here to drag me on some poorly thought out adventure without any warning or preparation?" Vicky asked finally, now sounding unsure of the statement, which caused it to come out more like a question than anything else.

Taylor rolled her eyes at her, before answering.

"None of the above. I came to ask if you wanted to come help me with Parian's fashion show thing in Boston today. I told her I'd go and I know you're into fashion stuff, so-" Taylor began, only to be cut off when Vicky lowered two of her fingers to make a pause motion at her, while pinching the bridge of her nose with her other hand.

"Got it. Third one. So I was right," she said with a mixture of annoyance and excitement in her tone.

"This isn't even an adventure, though!" Taylor insisted dejectedly.

"You're trying to whisk me away through a magic portal to do something exotic! How is that not an adventure?" Vicky shot back.

"There's no fighting though!" Taylor continued to insist.

"Adventures aren't defined by fighting, you psycho!" Vicky insisted in turn.

"Well… fine. It still doesn't count though. I'm warning you now, alright?" She asked dejectedly. Honestly, sometimes the disconnect between what other people thought was normal and what she thought was normal bothered her more than she'd like to admit. Not because it existed, but because she genuinely couldn't seem to remember it half the time.

She supposed that if the weirdness meter for most people maxed out at ten out of ten, hers maxed out at one hundred - so being at eleven out of ten barely phased her anymore.

"Taylor, I love you, you're very sweet, I appreciate all the opportunities you give me to do cool stuff, but ten minutes and then a quick shove through a portal isn't 'advanced warning'. I mean, oh my God, a fashion show? I have to do my hair, and get make up on, and change clothes, and probably shower since I had gym today and-" Vicky began to rant, then paused to squint at Taylor with a baleful glare.

"You… don't do any of that, do you?" she reasoned aloud.

"I shower!" Taylor objected instantly.

"But you don't do any of the other stuff? No skin care routine, no makeup, no- do you literally have a power that gives you perfect hair? Do you just… wake up like this?" Vicky asked incredulously, to which Taylor could only nod, dumbfounded at the question.

Was that not obvious? She felt like she was always a disheveled mess. She just didn't mind it because she was at least a fit, healthy one.

She understood intellectually that she was even kind of pretty by default now, and frankly, that was so much better than what she had going for her before that she was happy to take what she could get.

…Also, makeup sounded like a lot of work.

"Ugh. You're the worst," Vicky groaned at her, before pulling out her cellphone and rapidly firing off a bunch of text messages in the time it would have taken Taylor just to unlock her doohickey.

"Just… drop me at my house for ten- no, twenty minutes!" Vicky asked after a moment… well it was more of an order than a request, but Taylor shrugged, complying.

"Sure," she agreed, opening another gap that Vicky didn't even bother looking up from her cell phone at before floating upward and drifting through it.

Taylor could only snort at the nonchalance on display. She kind of missed it when people were freaked out by her gaps. It was funnier that way.

…She had the feeling she'd just had an extremely odd thought, but try as she might, she couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was, so she eventually let the thread drop, and moved onto the next thing on her mind.

After all, didn't she have another blonde friend who definitely wasn't used to her gaps that would be interested in high fashion?

* * *

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Beacon Academy, City of Vale, Remnant

"Wow, your cafeteria is… large," Taylor noted as she stepped through her gap and into open space at the foot of an excessively large lunch table.

"You knew that already, Master," Pemmy pointed out, from behind her, and Taylor could only shrug in response.

"Yeah, but still! My highschool still serves mystery meat sometimes, and I've never actually been here before!" Taylor countered, and then, when Demmy looked like she was going to say something clever back to her over it, she pointed an accusatory finger at the disheveled looking twin.

"Power-induced fever dreams don't count!" She added pointedly.

The twins paused at that, then turned to look at eachother, and shrugged as though they weren't invested enough in the argument to continue - even if they didn't necessarily agree. Emmy was always touchy about the 'accuracy' of her emulations, after all - even if they were fever dreams.

Then as one they vanished from mundane sight.

It wasn't just the table itself that was unreasonably sized though. Everything in the room was. The room itself was oversized. Like someone had taken the main hall of a castle and then plunked a kitchen and dozens of dining tables down in it.

Which, she supposed, was exactly what happened.

Taylor made a mental note of that for when she finished working on the derelict ferry back home. She wasn't quite sure she could achieve the same amount of spatial warping Yukari once had to create the Heap out of a defunct garage - but she'd worked with the enchantment enough times by now to be confident that she could emulate it to at least seventy percent of its original function. Sure, she'd technically taken the tools Yukari had left her and done most of that herself - but she'd be lying if she said she had a full grasp of everything that was going on at the time.

Heh. Emulate.

Regardless, it was like the difference between a colouring book and graphic design. The two things were related, but only technically.

"Uhhhhh," a blonde boy - Jaune Arc - let loose, leaning towards his partner, a crimson-haired girl, and whispering;

"Are we in trouble? Why's the scary guest lecturer here?" he asked nervously as Taylor approached.

"I am… unsure," the redhead - Pyrrha Nikos - responded cautiously, eyeing Taylor with a glint in her eyes.

"What, not going to call her your 'snow angel', Arc?" Weiss - who was sitting at the table with her whole team, in addition to four other teens Taylor took to be Jaune's team, said sarcastically to him.

"Please, no offense, but vomit boy already knows better than to hit on my sister while I'm right here," Yang replied for the flabbergasted young man.

"You have another sister? Wait, she was your sister this whole time?!" was said young man's only real response to the insult, which Taylor found very telling.

"We share a mom, but not really, because of interdimensional shenanigans and- look that's not why I'm here. And Weiss, be nice to Jaune," Taylor began to explain, only to pause and refocus herself, while absently chastising the heiress.

She still had vivid memories of this place. She'd lived a subjective lifetime here in the simulation that had garnered her Ozma, which - now that she thought about it…

'Awfully quiet, aren't you?' she asked him pointedly.

'I'm… acclimating to a new situation. Pay it no mind.' Was the distinctly feminine response she got back from hi- her. Her now.

'Is it… a situation I need to be worried about, or-' She asked suspiciously.

'It will embarrass you, but will not likely cause you any real problems,' was Ozma's succinct, and somewhat concerned response.

'So I should be worried?' she tried to ask for clarification, only to receive no discernible answer. She would've continued pressing for answers - because much as she wouldn't admit it, she hated being embarrassed - but the presence of her watchers made having a shouting match with her mental roommate impractical at the moment - so she didn't.

"I don't see why I should," Weiss responded to her chastisement with her characteristic petulance.

"Because being a bitch sucks?" Taylor offered absently.

"Excuse me?!" the heiress blurted out indignantly. Taylor blinked right back, somewhat surprised by the response.

"Has… has no one ever told you that you're kind of mean? I mean, you got better, but if you could just learn to be nicer from the start-" Taylor started to not really apologize only to be cut off by Ruby yelling off to her left.

"Blake! Oh my god! Blake's dying!" she blurted out, and Taylor turned to find the dark-haired faunus girl gagging and shaking in her seat as though having a seizure. Ruby buzzed about her with the air of a worried nurse, unsure of what to do to help the situation.

"Nnnnoooo, I think she's just trying not to laugh," Jaune pointed out bluntly.

"I am not-!" Weiss began to shout.

"She has gotten better though. A bit," Yang interrupted her lazily, leaning back in her seat to eye Taylor speculatively, before winking at her.

Taylor had no idea why. She really wasn't making a joke here - Weiss was just kind of a mean person for no reason sometimes, and it bothered her, because bullying was more than just stuffing people in lockers. Putting people down constantly was just as bad, in her opinion.

Just then, a loud bang drew the attention of everyone at the table, and Taylor found herself turning once more to a short, ginger girl that reminded her an awful lot of Emma. At least to look at. The differences were more than noticeable - she had shorter hair, a different facial structure, all kinds of things.

But still.

"Ren and I would like to know what's going on, please!" the ginger - Nora - called out pointedly to the ground with a wide smile on her face.

"Actually, I would prefer not to be inv-" a black-haired boy of asian looking descent began to argue from off to the side, only for Nora to turn and glare at him.

"Ren! I'm trying to use our collective bargaining power here! Stop undermining me!" she barked pleasantly at him.

As one, all eight of the teenagers at the table paused and turned to Taylor as though expecting an explanation.

So Taylor gave in, if only because she really didn't care if they believed her, and more importantly, really didn't have a need for secrecy here.

"I'm from an alternate reality where there are no Grimm and where a different version of our mom had me. So I'm not really related to Yang and Ruby, but I guess I sort of am in a cosmic sense," she explained flatly, noting dimly that Pemmy and Demmy had taken the opportunity to ghost through the floor and far into the bowels of the castle to do… something. She switched to their point of view for just a moment to make sure they weren't causing any trouble, and found them both staring intently at a giant mechanical pod with a girl frozen in its center.

The confused look on her face must have been noticeable, because she was soon drawn back to her own point of view by a poke to the cheek - where she found Nora standing right in front of her with one finger extended.

"So you're like, mirror Yang?" she asked quirkily.

"No, I-" Taylor began to argue only for the ginger to meander over to Yang and gesture for her to follow after her.

"Just stand next to each other for a second," she said and while Taylor was dubious about how this was going to help explain any of the situation to anyone, she acquiesced - if only because it was kind of nice to hang out with teenagers who neither worked for her, nor feared she would smite them for existing in her space.

Which was most of them back home, except Hao, who fell into the mysterious third category of being someone who knew she could smite him, and simply didn't care.

"And now! For the moment of truth!" Nora declared with a flourish, like a stage magician about to perform a trick.

At this point, most of the cafeteria was staring at them, and many of them were politely edging away from their table in fear of the still swirling portal full of hellish eyes behind Taylor.

She hadn't expected to take this long just talking to these people, but she didn't really mind it. Although, with that in mind, she should definitely close the gap before some poor idiot stumbled into it by mistake and she forgot them in there.

Boys may have pockets, but she had gaps.

It was at this point, that Nora casually reached towards both Taylor and Yang - who was curiously standing next to her with a bemused expression on her face, and swiftly yanked on a single strand of their hair. One for Taylor, and one for Yang.

She probably was going somewhere with that, or was going to say something pithy, but as one Yang snapped a hand out to lift Nora from underneath one shoulder, and Taylor snapped a hand out to lift her from the other.

"Don't."

"Touch."

"Our."

"Hair!"

Both girls snapped at once, hoisting the girl overhead and hurling her across the room.

Taylor wasn't stupid, of course. She was perfectly aware that Aura would keep her safe from the damage of being thrown that far and straight into a stone wall. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Regardless, while the surrounding students rapidly broke into a tremendous food fight - courtesy of Nora sliding down the wall and onto a bench, which subsequently upended several other students who took umbrage with the displacement - Taylor sighed and turned to Yang.

"Anyway, you wanna come to a fashion show on my world? I get you have school, but-" she was cut off by her sort-of-not-really sister lifting a hand to place a finger on her lips.

"Ssssh. You had me at 'fashion'," Yang said, already just as calm as Taylor was after the sudden outburst.

…Okay, so maybe they were more than just slightly similar.

Then there was a coughing noise from behind them, and Taylor turned to find seven sets of eyes staring expectantly at her.

Which gave Taylor an idea, actually.

"You know what? If you guys wanna come along too, I could use some extra security," she offered, only half-heartedly meaning it.

She didn't need security because she was probably the most secure person on her planet in the first place. Probably.

What she did need was not to have to drop everything to beat some guy up when she should really be focusing on making sure Sabah's show went smoothly.

In cooking terms, it'd be nice if she could get someone else to stir the boiling pot for her, at least once in a while.

The group exchanged glances amongst themselves before Weiss turned back to Taylor with an entirely serious expression on her face and said;

"Let's talk payment."

* * *

Thursday, March 31st , 2011

Liberty Hotel, Boston

"Taylor! You're late!" Sabah barked at her the second she entered the room.

It had taken something like an hour to arrive at the hotel, because while she could use her gaps to go anywhere she was familiar with, she was not familiar with this particular hotel, and more importantly, she had been forced to trick at least half of her 'security' detail into traveling through a second gap in the first place.

The trip home to earth had been somewhat jarring to the members of Jaune's team who had no experience with them, which had of course necessitated the use of the van slash tank abomination Dante had left her to transport them.

Then, naturally, she had planned on simply driving through a gap and into Boston proper, which was when Taylor had hit her second roadblock.

The group was about as comfortable with Taylor's driving as they were with her nightmare portals. It wasn't her fault that a group of trained hunters and huntresses couldn't manage a bit of motion sickness! And… a bit of phasing through high speed traffic! And also… a few near misses…

The point was, after a brief period of being subjected to her amazing skills at driving, they had all agreed that a gap was preferable, which she had taken to mean it was okay to drive the van into one, but which apparently was not what was being asked of her, because combining the two unpleasant experiences had resulted in her being glared at by…

Well pretty much everyone.

Regardless. They were here, at the fancy hotel that was hosting the event, and they were only… sort of… late.

"I got here as fast as I could!" Taylor defended herself, although she didn't know why she bothered.

Sabah came in two flavours most of the time. Laid back and willing to go with the flow of any situation, or in a ballistic fashion rage.

Taylor had made that term up herself, but she was hard-pressed to find a better way to describe it. When her chosen profession was involved, Sabah got very, very, intense - very, very, quickly. Taylor was about seventy percent certain that if she had told the cloth-controlling cape that Behemoth was planning to steal her dress designs, the Endbringer would be dead by the morning no matter where it was on or under the planet.

"You can teleport!" Sabah accused her instantly, pausing in the midst of organizing a group of dresses hanging from a rolling rack nearby to glare at her some more. "And why did you bring them? I don't have time to make clothing for every one of your friends, Taylor! I have a life!" She continued.

Taylor opened her mouth to protest this point, as she had not in fact come here to make such a request, but was overruled as Sabah kept angrily yelling, now pacing back and forth in front of the assembled group of teenagers.

"Honestly, it's a miracle I already had your measurements for your costume! Everyone else is already getting changed!" She continued to cajole and growl as she moved about, stretching a hand out towards the rolling rack in a way that gave Taylor a distinct sensation of danger that had nothing at all to do with her actual, literal, danger sense.

"They're security!" She blurted out before anyone else could get a word in edgewise. Sabah - Parian, really, as she was currently in costume - paused at this, turning to glare past Taylor at Yang, who seemed entirely nonplussed by the treatment.

"Is that true?" She asked pointedly.

"That sis hired us to run security on your gig? Yeah, totally," Yang drawled, unbothered by the confrontational tone.

"And you aren't here for a favor? Or free clothing? Or…" Parian's voice lowered into fearful whisper at this point, "...one of those horrid dolls?"

"Hey, when she says horrid dolls, does she mean like… haunted toys and stuff? Because I really don't want-" Jaune began to whisper nervously from behind everyone else only to get elbowed in the side by Ren, who's face remained placid throughout the exchange.

"Don't ask questions you don't want answered," The asian boy cautioned him with a self satisfied nod.

"Okay, but-" Jaune tried, but Parian spoke up again.

"So… you're really just here to help?" Parian asked again, in a much more relieved tone.

"Yuuuuup." Yang added, along with several furious nods from all the others.

"Good. That makes things easier. My apologies for the rude introduction - some of you, I believe, already know me - but my name is Parian. I am not the main contributor to today's events, which means everything must be perfect. You can find Trainwreck downstairs in the lobby for assignments - he's already taken charge of the normal security," Parian said with a swift and decisive nod, pivoting back to the clothing rack in dismissal.

"Welp, guess we'll just head downstairs. Sorry about that, she's usually nicer, she's just high-strung and-" Taylor began, only to be cut off before she could safely make her exit.

"No, since the entire team is present, I have ensured you seats near the front of the media coverage, which will necessitate a change in dress. Come here." Parian interjected with the cold impartiality of an executioner.

"What's wrong with my normal costume!?" Taylor complained, even as she felt the fibers of said costume constrict around her, pick her up, and then deposit her back in the center of the room - mostly because even while speaking she had been trying - halfheartedly - to flee what she knew was going to happen the second she arrived.

"It's your normal costume. That's the problem," Parian said dryly, and Taylor turned a forlorn glance on her sort of sister and her friends as they moved to exit the room, hoping for a last minute save, but actually just getting an amused snort in response.

"But… security?" She tried again, only for Parian to give her a hard look and then roughly yank a dress off the rack.

At a glance, it was just a simple black evening dress. The skirt was a little too short for Taylor's taste, which of course meant that her ankles would be visible in it, but it wasn't… too excessive.

At least, it wasn't until Parian flicked it, and it revealed itself to be one of a handful of dresses made from the elemental fabric Taylor had helped her make in the first place. The sudden shift in energies caused the entire dress to billow like roiling black clouds in a storm, and for flashes of ethereal lightning to silently dance across the tapestry. With each flash of lightning, the silhouettes of two dragons fighting were revealed. It has to be understood that this wasn't a visual illusion. It was not an image playing out across the fabric.

The fabric was a storm cloud. While also, being fabric.

It would have been very impressive if she didn't have to wear it.

"...I have to pick up Vicky. She said she'd help." Taylor tried again to resist.

"Oh, good. I made one for her too," Parian said absent mindedly, which forcibly reminded Taylor herself of something she probably shouldn't have forgotten in the first place.

Vicky actually liked this kind of thing.

"Damn it," she muttered, before grouchily opening another gap to pick up her other blond friend.

* * *

"I'll literally pay you to take my place," Taylor begged her sort-of-sister, who was eyeing the evening dress made out of a living storm with a hungry look on her face.

"I don't see the problem. Just wear the dress, get things over with, and then you can introduce me to your friends," Vicky interjected, earning a glance from Yang before she returned to staring at the article of clothing.

"I already introduced you," Taylor said distractedly, shaking the plastic bag with the dress in front of Yang like it was catnip and she was a cat.

"No, you teleported me into the room they gave you to change in, then you teleported her into the same room, then you said 'help me please, I hate girly stuff, wah wah' and now here we are," Vicky said pointedly.

Taylor paused at that, turning to glare at her friend in the cramped room they were in.

"I did not say that!" Taylor petulantly complained, moving the dress she absolutely wasn't going to wear about an inch closer to her salivating half-sister.

Yeah, half-sister. That's what she was gonna go with from now on. Way easier to understand for people who didn't regularly jump between dimensions for fun.

'Why is my life like this?' she half-asked herself, and half-asked Pemmy and Demmy, only to receive a mental shrug from both sides of the connection.

'Have you considered living as a hermit in the woods, so the only things you can corrupt with your weirdness are woodland creatures?' Demmy suggested jokingly.

'...Do you think that would work?' Taylor perked up hopefully, only to be immediately shot down.

'No, I'm pretty sure a small percentage of the woodland creatures on earth recently started doing instinctive displays of kung fu, and talking. I doubt that's the kind of normal you are looking for.' Pemmy added helpfully.

Taylor couldn't help but let loose a groan at this.

"You did! You do it all the time! Wah, I'm Taylor, my powers come with a built-in beach body, woe is me! If a boy so much as sees my ankles I'll get pregnant and explode! Wah!" Vicky continued to pester her.

"Hey, lay off blondie, it's not for everyone," Yang snapped at her without thinking, not bothering to turn away from the dress that had mysteriously found its way into her hands as she did so.

"Excuse me? Do I know you? Do you talk to everyone like that?" Vicky shot back, acerbically.

"Uh-" Taylor started to interject at this sudden downturn in civility between the two.

They'd been in a room together for less than ten minutes, but originally Taylor had been positive they'd get along. They had the same interests, had very similar personalities, hell, they even had the same tempers. If Taylor didn't already know she and Yang were theoretically related themselves, she would have actually assumed that Yang and Vicky were dimensional displaced alternates of each other - like her mom and Raven apparently were.

'I should introduce Jess to Raven like that. Just to see what happens,' some distant part of her mind conjured up even as she thought.

"Nope, just people who screw with my sisters," Yang continued pointedly, before hesitantly reaching out for the dress - an activity that was swiftly halted when Vicky snatched her wrist away from it. Rather than react immediately and violently, Yang turned towards Vicky with a raised eyebrow.

Evidently, this expression - so similar to one Taylor herself often used - was enough to throw the New Wave hero off, because she swiftly let go of the offending appendage to speak.

"She can't just run away from everything even slightly troublesome, you know. Maybe she'll like it!" Vicky insisted.

"Oh yeah? Hey, sis, were you recently adopted?" Yang asked, suddenly turning to Taylor.

"Huh?" She blurted out, entirely unsure how to mediate this situation between two people she actually liked.

"I mean, she's acting like our mom and all. I don't really remember asking though," Yang continued blithely, earning her an indignant cry from the other blond.

"Hey! Taylor, tell your weird interdimensional sister to mind her own business!" Vicky added on, also turning towards Taylor.

"Uh- that-" Taylor mumbled, unsure of what to do. On the one hand, she didn't want to just ignore Vicky because they were friends, and that would be a shitty thing to do in general.

On the other hand, Taylor really didn't want to wear a storm cloud and not much else in public.

"I- thanks for defending me Yang, but Vicky's my friend. I'd… prefer if you got along…" she tried neutrally, unable to comment on the dress without picking a side.

The two blondes paused at that, turning back to eye each other before Vicky scratched the back of her head in mild embarrassment.

"...Sorry, I just worry about her," she said awkwardly. Yang considered that for a moment before nodding appreciatively in her direction.

"Yeah, I haven't known her long but I get the feeling she's… you know?" Yang said diplomatically.

"I knooooow! She's like a preschooler with unlimited power sometimes! You know, one time we were watching this romantic comedy, and she just kept talking about ways she could solve the main character's problems with magic!" Vicky suddenly began complaining.

"Hey! You said we were watching it to make fun of it!" Taylor defended herself.

"Yeah, by calling it bad, not by theorizing a way to turn angst into lasers!" Vicky fired back pointedly.

"You said it was funny!"

"That doesn't make it sane!"

The two bickered as always. That was part of what Taylor liked about Vicky. She wasn't scared of her, and she wasn't afraid to tell her she was being weird. It wasn't that the people around her didn't all do that, but most of the people in her immediate orbit just took for granted that her weirdness had a point to it sometimes.

It made it hard to gauge things occasionally.

Either way, their brief spat was cut short when there was a knock on the door, followed by said door opening to reveal Parian, who was carrying another two dresses into the room with her. She threw the first at Vicky - a serene white cloud version of the stormcloud dress Taylor had previously been given, only instead of flashing dragons, small ethereal birds flew in flocks through the cloudy expanse that would probably make whoever was wearing it look like a giant by comparison.

And the second, she threw at Taylor.

"Wait, wait, wait-!" Taylor tried to stop her, even though she still caught the plastic dress bag.

"Taylor, you promised. Look, I even made extras for some of your friends, so can we please just get through this without any of your… you-ness making everything so chaotic? Just this once? Please?" Parian begged.

Taylor wanted to refuse out of principle, but the tone Sabah was using was just… tired. She understood intellectually that this was something that mattered to her friend, and it mattered a lot.

"...Yeah, okay. Sorry," she apologized meekly, holding up the new dress in her arms and trying not to wrinkle her nose in distaste.

There was nothing wrong with it. It was just… uncomfortable.

But she could deal with being a little uncomfortable for one day. For Parian.

"Thanks. Come on, I need to go over the itinerary with you, since you missed the morning rehearsal," Parian insisted, swiftly turning to leave.

"Aw, look at you, being all responsible and stuff!' Yang tried to cheer her up as the door closed.

"Yeah, and it's not that bad, Taylor. You're just being obstinate," Vicky pointed out to her.

"So I guess now that I've agreed, you guys don't need those dresses to force me to wear one anymore," Taylor pointed out mischievously.

"Let's not make any rash decisions now," Vicky returned immediately, putting her dress behind her back as though to hide it from Taylor. She noticed Yang doing the same out of the corner of her eye.

Taylor could only snort at that.

* * *

"This would be your solution to paparazzi," Vicky chided her as she, Taylor, and Yang filed into the venue wearing their dresses.

Taylor vaguely recalled this being called 'walking the red carpet' or… something. Maybe that was specific to movies? Whatever. The point was, after some coordination, Taylor had been forced to gap herself and her friends back outside of the hotel so they could walk back in the mundane way. Or rather, the intent was apparently to draw attention to their clothes, so she had opened a gap in the changing rooms that led to the exact front of the building, and then been forced to walk past all of the gawkers and reporters outside.

Typically, those reporters would be screaming questions at them, which would make normal conversation borderline impossible, but Taylor had enacted a clever and not at all petty plan to circumvent that difficulty.

She had drawn the same silencing rune she used to talk to Greg in class on the air, and then expanded the effect around her group. No sound in, no sound out.

Simple.

"I mean, once you've been bugged by them once it stops being novel," Taylor said dryly, pointing at a random man with a camera who was pointing a microphone in their direction and deepening her voice into a mocking tone.

"'We've noticed that you happen to be standing within five feet of any other cape, are you dating?'" she mocked, before pointing at a different reporter who likewise couldn't possibly have heard what she was saying and continuing;

"'People are concerned that the superpowers you didn't ask for give you too much power, can we get a soundbite of you saying something so we can misrepresent it on the news?'" she continued in a faux valley girl accent, before dropping both hands and shrugging.

"It's easier to just ignore them," she finished.

All through this, of course, she did her best not to look mocking or rude. She had enough by way of self control to not ruin Parian's fashion debut like that. Even just pointing at the two reporters had been masked beneath a gesture that could be easily mistaken for a broad greeting to the entire venue.

"And that totally has nothing to do with the fact that you look constipated right now," Yang teased her as they moved forward to make room for the rest of the team to exit the gap and land on the - yeah, it was definitely a red carpet - leading inside.

Taylor glanced down at herself, and restrained the urge to turn her glasses into a gas mask just to hide her face from view.

"...This is how actors pretend to look all intense and stuff," She defended herself, even as she restrained a grimace at her current attire.

She looked like she was on fire.

Not that she was 'hot', although Vicky had made that joke, even going so far as to snap a picture of her to send to Amy for later mockery, but rather, her current dress looked like liquid magma, that glowed bright blue instead of red or orange. It was - blessedly - at least one of those excessive long dresses that was designed to trail across the ground behind her, which, given the make of the excessively frilly gown, made her look like she was trailing a magmatic path across the ground behind her that somehow didn't emanate any heat into the surroundings.

She'd had to compromise on how much skin was showing topside however. While her chest and back were fully covered by the dress that crept up to her neck in a paradoxically very sleek and tight fitting design that was entirely at odds with the craggy magmatic blue flows that seemed to roll off her, her shoulders and arms were entirely bare.

It wasn't the worst of all the options she'd have - even just looking at Yang striding along next to her, preening at the cameras in a dress made of clouds made her want to bury her face in her hands in embarrassment - but it wasn't her preferred 'only my face is uncovered' either.

"I'm pretty sure that's not, true like, at all," Vicky pointed out, although she herself was much more nervous than Taylor would have originally expected from her. Oliver and Madison disembarked behind them, walking arm in arm up the carpet wearing a suit of living shadow and a technicolor dress of solid light respectively. Behind them, Aspirant stepped forth wearing a martial arts robe that was exactly as pearlescent as he was somehow, only it was a black lacquer that contrasted nicely against the young man's armored shell.

Trainwreck would be somewhere nearby, keeping an eye on the surroundings while coordinating everyone Taylor had brought with her, which meant that - as far as her main team, and also, Madison, went - everyone was here.

And they even managed to make it all the way to the door before one of the previously normal looking gawkers abruptly sprang into the center of the red carpet to glare at them. He flung his jacket to the side to reveal a vest covered in explosives beneath, and began shouting something at her group.

…Not that Taylor could tell what he was shouting.

"Should you maybe drop your quiet zone thing?" Oliver whispered behind her.

"Why? I'm just gonna drop him in a gap and grab him later. No reason to disrupt things," Taylor asked curiously.

"...You don't wanna know why a suicide bomber is trying to blow you up?" Madison asked incredulously.

"Not really, no," she replied with a shrug.

"...Is it always like this?" the short girl whispered to Oliver.

"Honestly? Yeah, kinda," he replied with a nonchalant waving gesture.

"I am kind of curious," Vicky said, even as the crowd began to move erratically away from them.

Which Taylor supposed was probably the normal reaction to a bomb threat but well… she'd already moved a gap up behind the idiot so she supposed she could humor her friend.

It probably said something about Taylor that the panicked screaming of the crowd and the frantic babbling of the reporters was a more soothing noise than a bombardment by the paparazzi, but what that something was would have to wait, as she dropped the sound barrier around them.

It wasn't so much that she wasn't curious about what was going on, but she also got the feeling if she looked to far into it, it would only add to her ever growing list of things to deal with, which she really wasn't overly fond of at the moment given everything going on with Pemmy and Demmy.

"-THE SECOND WAVE IS COMING! WE CANNOT ALLOW THE FREAKS TO RULE THE WORLD! WE CANNOT LET SAINT'S SACRIFICE BE IN VAIN!" The man seemed to be gasping for air, having just wound down from whatever it was he was screaming about.

"Huh. I was wondering when that would come up," Taylor muttered, lazily waving a hand that drew her conjured gap up from beneath the man like a shark breaching the water to swallow a swimmer whole. It sealed itself shut a second later, and Taylor idly wondered if the guy would blow himself up in there or have the good sense not to die for nothing.

'Can one of you handle that?' She begrudgingly asked Pemmy and Demmy, then expanded the gap she habitually kept on them enough for them to both slip through after him.

She didn't really care about whoever that was, but she also didn't want to be personally responsible for his death either. It just didn't sit right with her.

"Anyway-" She began, only to find the crowd staring at her like a particularly strange zoo animal. She sighed, sticking her thumb and pointer finger into her mouth and then letting loose a shrill whistle that jarred almost everyone present.

"Problems solved, back to fashion things!" She yelled, before striding quickly and pointedly into the venue.

She'd take a bomb threat over a miniskirt any day of the week.

* * *

"I just don't understand - I was supposed to have three models, why are you suddenly cutting one?!" Parian demanded in a hushed tone of voice that made the man she was speaking to - an unassuming fellow in an orange turtle neck with a hawkish nose and a gaunt figure - glance around the spacious lobby area that the guests were mingling in prior to the show to see if anyone else had heard it. His eyes landed on Taylor as she approached, and he grimaced slightly, but still turned back to Parian to answer.

"We had a sudden change in the schedule. I do apologize, but this is simply how the industry is - it's out of my hands," he said, and to his credit, he sounded genuinely apologetic.

"What's going on?" Taylor asked curiously as she approached, noting the hushed whispers they were speaking in and leaving the fancy looking glass of glorified fruit punch a waiter had provided her with to hover on a platform of magic, so that she could conjure a quiet zone around them.

"They're snubbing me!" Parian hissed at her as she finished.

"That's… not entirely inaccurate. I am sorry, again," The hawk nosed man said with a sigh, before extending a hand to shake with Taylor.

"I'm Jim Motta. I'm the organizer," He greeted her while taking a sip from his own much more alcoholic beverage.

Taylor had to assume the non-alcoholic variants existed purely for herself and her friends, because she hadn't seen anyone else drinking them.

"Taylor Hebert. Nexus, if you really want. I can't help but notice you don't seem enthused about the change," Taylor said with a glint in her eyes that Parian instantly noticed.

"Taylor-!" the cloth controlling cape said warningly but Taylor waved her off.

"Hey, I'm technically your boss, you know. If they're snubbing you, they're snubbing me too," she pointed out.

"You don't even want to be here!" Sabah fired back at her.

"Yeah but that's not 'cus I don't care. It's just uncomfortable, okay?" Taylor replied, a touch defensively.

"You two seem close. I was under the impression the relationship was more… businesslike," Jim interjected curiously.

"My team are my best friends, I just call myself their boss as an excuse to give them money," Taylor answered with a shrug.

"I see, I see. As to your previous question… I'm just an organizer. I arrange venues, connect models with designers, that kind of thing. If I want to keep my job I have to maintain my connections, which sometimes means bowing to pressure from people higher up the ladder than me," Jim said in a frank tone.

"Huh… and, just hypothetically, if you were given infinite money to start your own agency or whatever for this kind of thing-" Taylor began.

"Taylor, you can't just throw money at your problems until they go away!" Parian barked at her in a disbelieving tone.

"...Why not?" Taylor asked, turning away from Jim again, who himself was staring blankly at her as though she'd just asked him if he wanted to go to the moon on a unicorn.

"Because- Because it's wrong!" Parian complained.

"But… isn't that literally what's being done to you right now?" Taylor asked in confusion.

"That's- it's different!" Parian insisted, although now with a much less sure tone.

Taylor examined her for a second, before speaking.

"Look, I know this is important to you, and you wanna do it the right way and everything… but I mean, sometimes brute force is the solution. Besides, maybe Jim isn't interested?" She said before turning a questioning look on the man.

"It's… certainly tempting. I admit, being able to skip the backbiting to just put on a wonderful show sounds nice but…" he trailed off thoughtfully.

"Taylor!" Parian complained again, so she sighed and swiftly withdrew her cellphone from a small gap.

"Hang on," she cautioned, before finding Simone's number in her contact list and tapping it.

"Mother?" Her confused daughter's voice came through the phone.

"I'm trying to convince Parian to let me use my bank account to solve her problems," Taylor said dryly, which the cloth-controlling cape could only squawk indignantly at.

"Mother, you have to let people make their own decisions. You meddle too much," was Simone's quick response.

"But they're bullying her and screwing up her dreams!" Taylor complained irately into the phone.

"You're an actual child sometimes, you know that?" Parian grumbled at her, much to Jim's amusement.

"Bullying… how?" Simone asked her cautiously, her tone doing a one hundred and eighty degree shift from disapproving to tentative approval.

"They're getting her- uh-" Taylor paused to look up at Jim.

"How are they bullying her again?" She asked urgently.

"...another designer has pressured me to remove a model who he believes will be wearing a dress too similar to his own," Jim said dryly. Taylor nodded at that, then turned her focus back to Simone.

"You catch that?" She asked.

"Yes. Give Sabah the phone," Simone requested resolutely. Taylor did so, and watched Parian open her mouth - and then promptly shut it.

Taylor could have listened into this conversation, but opted not to. She actually tried pretty hard not to spy on people for no reason, mostly owing to the fact that she could do so with almost trivial ease and didn't want to make a habit of it.

Still, she was tempted, just based on the handful of rapid shifts in posture that Parian went through before abruptly releasing a long, drawn out breath that was more of a hiss than a sigh.

"...Fine. B-Bye Simone," She offered tentatively before handing the phone back to Taylor while pointedly avoiding eye contact with her. Taylor lifted an eyebrow and spoke into the phone.

"What did you even say?" she asked curiously, causing Parian to jump slightly in shock and the freeze in place.

"Nothing special. Told her I could help her get a date," Simone replied in a goofy sounding tone of voice that Taylor really wanted to question - but opted not to, now that she was getting her way.

"...With who?" Taylor asked curiously.

"The prettiest girl she knows," Simone said smugly. Taylor knew her raised eyebrow couldn't possibly be visible to her daughter over the phone, but she also knew that Simone would expect it anyway, and so her unspeaking response was rewarded a couple of moments later when the white haired girl simply added;

"...You'll find out when you get home."

"Fine. Thanks, l-love you," Taylor put forth, stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar words. She did love all her kids. She just… didn't actually say it alot.

Had she mentioned that she had no idea what she was doing as a mother? Because she didn't.

"Ah… yeah. Love you… too," Simone replied with equal awkwardness, before they both hung up.

Taylor considered maybe buying her something in Boston as a gift, but then recalled every story she ever read about a rich parent interacting with their children purely through expensive gifts and opted not to.

She could do better than that at least.

"So!" she said, just to get back on topic, clapping her hands in front of herself to get Parian and Jim's attention.

"Whaddaya say Jim? Do bribes work in this industry?" she asked innocently.

"You understand she's asking you to form an entire business from the ground up with her support, right?" Parian cautioned him despite her seeming agreement to at least make the offer.

Jim blinked at both of them, turning to stare at them in turn, and then smiling a surprisingly charming smile.

"I think I am beginning to understand why people say Brockton Bay is going to be big in the future. I accept your… generous… terms. Let me just go make the proper arrangements," he said, before his mouth shifted to a thin smile that didn't touch his eyes as he turned to glance at another group of rich-looking socialites who were only just barely managing to keep the looks they were sending towards Parian socially acceptable.

* * *

"Before we continue with the show, I'd just like to thank all of you for being here today, but especially, my team leader and friend, Nexus!" Parian announced from the stage while Taylor and her friends sat around a loose grouping of three circular tables, picking at finger foods while the show progressed.

Things had been pretty boring if Taylor was being honest. She'd seen some pretty exotic and strange outfits in her time traveling the multiverse, but she had to admit, some of the stuff that had been on stage so far was amazing because of how the designers had managed to turn absolutely mundane clothing into the most unworkable and useless monstrosities she could think of.

This was 'art', apparently.

Taylor got the impression she was never going to be very appreciative of such things, but to each one's own, she supposed.

She raised her glass of apple juice into the air in response to Parian's statement from on stage, and the renewed attention being directed at her. She was wearing a costume that was much different from her norm - not just because of a marked increase in the complexity of the various ruffles, bits of lace, and ribbons that littered the entire Victorian dress - but because of the one thing the costume was definitely missing.

It no longer obscured her skin tone.

​

Taylor could already hear the murmurs spreading across the hall in response to this change, and leaned back to watch as Parian allowed the murmurs to rise in tone for a moment before speaking again.

"As many of you have noticed, I am not the petite caucasian woman I am sure many of you assume I am. Which is why, when you see my new collection, I want you to keep one word in mind," The cloth controlling cape said dramatically, turning around with a flourish to face away from the crowd but keeping the microphone in her hand as she began to walk off stage.

"Expectations," she said decisively before vanishing from sight.

And Taylor had to admit-

Watching a woman walk on stage wearing a hurricane was definitely a novel experience if nothing else.

* * *

[ ] Planeswalk (Choose a setting: Bleach, Kung Fu Panda, Touhou, RWBY, Nasuverse, Full Metal Alchemist, Devil May Cry)

[ ] Write In

[ ] Take Time Off (Pick an Extra Social, on the weekends, this can be a second group)

Choose a Social Link (these are daily now). On weekends, you can choose an entire group to socialize with - but are not forced to.