Chương 31: Chapter 31: Mandatory Downtime
Guardian
a Worm/Destiny Crossover
Chapter 31: Mandatory Downtime
When Taylor emerged from the tunnels, Velocity and Dauntless close behind, it was to a city overseen by a setting sun. It was only then did she realize how utterly filthy she was – covered from head to toe in sweat and dirt, grime and grit, blood and viscera and something she could only describe as 'pseudo amniotic fluid'. Her wrist throbbed with a dull, fading pain. Already healing. By tomorrow, her broken wrist would be nothing more than an echo of a sound. She wanted a shower, and to sleep for several days. That did not seem likely, however, based on what lay before her.
She would later learn that while she was in the tunnels a conclave of sorts had been called. Every super-powered faction in the city came together to discuss Nilbog's recent activity and concluded that it was near or equivalent to that of an Endbringer attack. Accordingly, a truce was declared, until it was done. What was in front of her was a display of that truce.
Kaiser had cut the entire block off in a quarantine of steel walls and curling spools of razor wire. Further, the building she'd just exited was encircled by a spiked wall that was just higher than her chest. He and all of the capes he could bring to bear were directly in front of her. It was a tactically sound decision, and a display of power at once. We will form the front line, it stated, because we have the numbers and the capability to withstand it. The jagged crown of Kaiser's helm peered over his wall and his eyes settled momentarily on her. Whether he recognized her as the one who'd been assaulted by his men before or not, he briefly inclined his head. Recognition of the feat she'd just accomplished. Pompous asshole.
The left of the building's wall was held by Lung, and him alone. Another statement. I am all that is needed. Hate me if you wish, but you will respect my strength. Though that being said, Taylor could hear the shuffling footsteps of people behind him, so while he was certainly confident, whether or not he was arrogant was still in question. The seven foot man in a dragon mask did and said nothing as she emerged, but she still felt as if her measure had been taken by him.
On the right was a much more welcome sight. The PRT, Brockton Bay division, was there. All of them. Even the Wards, which was surprising, but not in a way that she would be thinking on too much. Assault stood next to his partner and rumored wife Battery and, when he saw the three of them, whistled loudly and waved. Miss Militia had a very large and intimidatingly sleek looking rifle propped on the wall and did not seem all that eager to use it, which was nice to see. Armsmaster and a scattering of costumes she didn't recognize were further on and, when they locked eyes, she received a second nod of recognition. This one meant quite a bit more to her.
Then her attention was drawn upward, where Faultline and her crew had taken up roost on the roof across the street. A giant of a man, bald and fat and covered in shell shaped growths stood next to a guy who looked rather ordinary if not for the orange skin and tail. A girl in green, another in a custom gas mask, and a third in a thick robe stood behind their leader, who stood with arms folded at the very edge of the roof.
Taylor whistled quietly.
Dauntless chuckled. "I know, right? Not every day you see this kind of gathering. New Wave even got involved."
She quirked a quizzical eyebrow at him, to which he pointed up. Sure enough, there they were in a dazzling array of shimmering fields of power and potential blasts of lasers.
He touched her shoulder, gently turning towards the PRT side of the wall, where an opening was appearing. "Come on, let's get you checked out. We'll take it from here."
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Take it from there, they did. Taylor watched from the back of an armored troop carrier the size of school bus as Kaiser lowered the metal wall and the gathered powers of Brockton Bay descended on the tunnels. On her advice the more durable members were carrying some impressive explosive devices to deal with the...the nest...flower...thing. She'd have to come up with a name for that sooner or later. That is, if she didn't just go with 'hive'. Mulling over that, and exactly when she could escape to a shower, took her out of her own head for a while. Which was nice, given that a medic was prodding at her wrist – ostensibly to make sure the bone had set correctly before healing. For some regenerators that was the case. For others, it was not, which led to the bone being re-broken so it could be set and heal properly.
She rather hoped, and to be honest suspected, that she fell into the former category. One broken wrist was enough.
After a long time trying not to think about how much prodding fingers hurt an already sore area Taylor was given a clean – relatively speaking – bill of health. After the medic left and took his hateful fingers with him, Director Piggot approached her, followed by a pair of the biggest, most heavily armed and armored PRT troopers Taylor had ever seen. What was more worth noting was the Director's appearance. No longer did she look a dying woman. Where before her skin was an unhealthy gray it was now a warmer, more human pink. A face once held in a rictus of pain was now...well. It was still tense, but the woman's eyes were clear of their former fog of pain.
She nodded to Taylor as she approached. "Guardian." A moment's pause. "You stink."
Taylor gave a dry laugh. "I was in a sewer at one point, Director."
Piggot hummed. Or grunted. "Charming, I'm sure."
"It had its moments."
A corner of her mouth ticked up. It might have been a smile, given time to grow. It wasn't. "I see. Anyway, I'm going to want you to come in and give a full accounting of what happened down there. Any information you can share would be invaluable."
Taylor looked down at her filthy costume, then back up at the Director. "Right now?"
"No. I need to stay and oversee things here, and you need to get home and clean yourself up. When you do, can you please inform Tattletale that she doesn't need to go ahead with her plan? The Secretary of Defense would thank you, as would I." Perhaps feeling she had explained enough, Director Piggot walked off.
Taylor, feeling that no such quality explanation had occurred, was left confused. Then, she just left.
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She had never been more tired.
She had also never wanted a shower more. Well. Maybe the day she became a Guardian.
…
Today was a close second.
As she'd made her way back to base the various effluvia covering her costume had started to dry and flake off. In so doing they had managed to smell even worse, and that – that was not supposed to be possible. Curiously, as each piece flaked away, it dissolved. Crumbled first into flakes and then into nothingness. Which was also not supposed to be possible. Of course, she did have to acknowledge the fact that Nilbog was involved. Since Nilbog was a biological Tinker...probably...it would make sense for her to throw out the book on what was impossible when it came to his demented creations.
Anyway.
She was atop a building across the street from the base and reluctant to go in. Reason being that there were a number of vehicles parked around it. Of which she only recognized three. Lisa's, her dad's, and Sabah's. There were still two others. The first was a truck. A thick bodied, rust-painted pickup that was more dented than not. Mud splattered its tires and wheel arches and there was one of those thick, chromed tool chests in the bed. The second wasn't actually a car at all. It was a motorcycle, and laying eyes on its sleek lines and raw potential for speed roused something deep within her. A longing. Maybe it was because she was tired, or she was feeling especially reckless today, but she wanted one.
She wanted to fly, to feel the power beneath her as the road stretched away over the horizon. To hear the rush of wind and the engine's roar and Lisa's warm body pressed against her.
Speak of the devil...
The door to the building that stood above their base groaned open and emitted a costumed, visibly tense Lisa. She fished a pair of earbuds out of a belt pouch and hopped up onto the trunk of her car. She folded her legs beneath her and rolled her head, flexing her shoulders to work out kinks.
Taylor dropped to the street, grunting from the effort of landing. Another first. Feeling that surprising her girlfriend may not the best idea at that moment, given the tension radiating from every line of that sleek, sexy –
Get it together, Taylor.
The point was that sneaking up wouldn't be the best idea. Or the easiest, given Taylor's general stench, but that was irrelevant. So she picked up a chunk of asphalt and pinged it off the bumper of Lisa's car. Lisa was off the car, reaching for the pistol she wasn't wearing, in a blur of speed that made Taylor proud. They stood across the street from each other, and for some reason neither of them moved.
Lisa spoke. "You uh, you're back." She then saw Taylor's costume. "You're bleeding! Are you hurt? How bad? Do you need a doctor? I can call Pana –"
"I'm not hurt. I mean, I broke my wrist earlier, but it's healed now. None of that's mine."
"You broke your – Taylor!" Lisa all but charged over, reaching out to physically inspect every single inch to satisfaction. Something she decided against about five feet away. The wind had shifted. Her nose wrinkled. "Holy hell. What is that?"
Taylor gestured at herself. "This? Perfume. Courtesy of Nilbog's twisted little imagination."
The tension flowed out of Lisa, riding on the wave of an almost inaudible sigh. "Perfume. Ha. Okay. Okay, you're okay. You're not hurt. You smell like a dead skunk's ass, but you're not hurt. So...yeah. Let's um, let's get inside. Clean you up. There's some people I think you want to meet."
"Lead the way." As they walked, Lisa making sure to stay upwind of Taylor, something occurred. "Director Piggot asked me to ask you not to go ahead with your plans. She mentioned the Secretary of Defense being grateful. Were you going to blackmail the military?"
"...no?"
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The shower, she decided, was the pinnacle of human achievement. From that point, it would either be equivalent to or lessen than the pure supremacy of the combination of heated and running water. She luxuriated in it, standing beneath the showerhead with her face tilted up to fully experience the downpour. She scrubbed and scratched all over, erasing the last vestiges of evidence from her time in the tunnels. There had been stripes of dirt on her legs, dirt mixed with something else, that had seeped through where her costume had torn or been ripped by claws. That did not want to come off, but judicious use of a loofah had seen her through. Her face was a future acne battlefield, she could all but guarantee that.
And her hair! Whatever it was that made the...stuff...flake off her costume did not extend to the rest of her. There was this gross, massive clump of stuff she didn't want to know about right between her shoulder blades. Every time it thumped wetly into her skin she wanted to scream. Instead she growled, and tried again to bring the whatever-it-was over her shoulder so she pick it apart with her fingers. Just like last time, she was unsuccessful.
She gave up. Turned the water off and reached through the curtain for the towel she'd left sitting on top of the toilet. Instead, she poked someone in the ribs.
"Ow, hey!" That someone protested.
"Sabah?"
"Yup."
"What are you doing in here?"
"Because I was going to flush the toilet while you were showering and cause hilarity and shrieking?"
Taylor poked her head out to glare. "First of all, I would not have shrieked, and second..." She noticed the droop in Sabah's posture. How still her otherwise energetic and fidgety friend was. How it looked like Sabah had bitten her nails to the quick. "you're sitting on my towel."
Sabah hopped off the toilet and passed the towel through. Taylor took it, dried off, and wrapped herself up before swishing the curtain open. She was poking around the spare clothes Lisa had left for her – in the sink, for whatever reason – when Sabah spoke again.
"It got...it got kinda crazy today, didn't it?"
Taylor found the underwear and scooped it up, then turned to Sabah. "Yeah," she said. "It did. It wasn't supposed to, but..." she shrugged. "Now I'm getting dressed, so either scram or turn around."
Sabah chose to turn around. Taylor dressed quickly. As she did, Sabah kept going. "You know, Lisa sort of, kind of, maybe went nuts when your radios went out. It was scary, a little bit. Your dad had to stop her from blackmailing the military to come save you." A moment's pause. "She uh, she really cares about you."
Warmth bloomed in Taylor's chest. A small smile spread across her lips. "Yeah. It's...it's kind of mutual."
Sabah turned and looked Taylor over, nodding when she saw whatever she was looking for. "Good. It's about time you – ohgod what is that?!"
"What?!" The warmth turned hot, to alarm and a burst of fear. She looked over her shoulder. "What is what?!"
"This!" Sabah seized Taylor by the shoulders and turned her around. Moments later, she felt the clump of ruined hair being batted around. "This is horrible! It has to go, like right the fuck now. Sit on that toilet, and don't move. I'll be right back." With that, Sabah marched out a woman on a mission.
Taylor sat on the toilet.
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Her neck felt overexposed. The scissors went snicker-snack and another clump of hair fell to the ground. The knot of hair and she'd-rather-not-know had been bagged and thrown into the trash. What was happening now was something Sabah referred to as 'damage control'. Whatever that meant to Sabah, to Taylor it meant that her hair was being cut short. Like, really short. She felt like a sheep. Then she pictured Sabah as a farmer, overalls and straw hat and corncob pipe clenched between her teeth, bent to the task of shearing her sheep with oddly dark wool.
"If you laugh, this'll take longer." Sabah then hummed, murmured thoughtful nonsense, and snipped another length of hair. "You are gonna look awesome, Taylor, I don't know why you were so cagey about this."
"I couldn't possibly say."
"No sarcasm from you, or you might find yourself bald. Or bearded." She clacked the scissors. "I'm in a whimsical mood."
Taylor felt that pointing out scissors couldn't regrow hair would be pointless. She did it anyway, setting off a round of bickering about nonsense and – much more importantly – cheering up her friend. Thus did the time of the haircut pass, full of silliness and affection, bringing an end to this – Taylor's longest day.
As well it should.
=+= Chapter 31: Mandatory Downtime =+=
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