23

Chapter 23: Interlude 3-a: Mitotic Axiogenesis

Trust 3.a: Mitotic Axiogenesis

Taylor's body was strange, peculiar, and downright fascinating.

It wasn't that it was inhuman. She had all the right number of bones, her musculature was not in any way altered, and it wasn't like she had extra organs or anything. She didn't have a third eye or a tail or anything like that. No, everything was in its proper place, and Taylor had exactly as many parts as she was supposed to and no more.

What made her fascinating was in how those parts were structured. Her bones were sturdier than they had any right to be, her muscles were denser and stronger than any athlete Amy had ever had the pleasure of examining, her blood and her cardiovascular system were more resilient and more efficient than should be humanly possible, and her nerves…the speed at which her neurons fired, the rapidity with which impulses traveled from her brain, down her spinal cord, and into her limbs was just…

If a normal human being was a machine working to the tune of The Rolling Stones' Rock 'n Roll, Taylor's body was a Classical symphony written by Beethoven.

It was possible to explain all of that if Taylor was a parahuman with a Brute power (and she was, indeed, a parahuman, because Amy could see the well-formed and active Corona Pollentia and Corona Gemma), and in terms of biology acting in ways it wasn't supposed to, Aegis of the Wards still had her beat for sheer oddity.

But only because his power let him adapt and do things like breathe through his skin or hear through his fingernails. In other ways, Taylor was stranger still, because with a body structure like hers, her muscle definition should rival an Amazon and her metabolism should have her going through almost four times as many calories as a normal human — and yet, neither of those was true.

How? Amy didn't have an answer, right then. But it might have something to do with the strangest part of Taylor's body.

Because the strangest part? The strangest part, the part that was both fascinating and frustrating, was what Amy couldn't see. There were parts in Taylor's biology that were just…not missing, exactly, but invisible. They were like black holes; Amy could only see them, could only tell where they were, by their connection to the surrounding tissues. Otherwise, they were just blank spaces thrown randomly around Taylor's body. Whatever was actually in those blank spaces, Amy could only guess based upon where they were and what was around them.

Amy had never seen anything like it, before. Of all the countless people she had touched and healed, of all the maladies and diseases she had cured, of all the subtle differences in everything from genetic structure to calcium content to some truly bizarre allergies, Amy had never before touched someone whose body wasn't like an open book.

Taylor was a mystery.

And she definitely wanted to solve it.

Amy's brow furrowed.

Of course, the fact that parts of her were so mysterious and invisible also made her much harder to heal. The strangely dense bones and the peculiar, too-strong muscles were easy, because it was just a matter of copying the way the rest of them looked. Trying to put back together a part that she couldn't see, that was completely invisible to her power, would be like trying to pick the right toy in one of those claw machines while blindfolded.

Fortunately, none of the bone fragments that were scattered throughout Taylor's arm were located in or connected to one of those blank spots. If they were, Amy would have had to give up and send Taylor to the hospital to have them manually put everything back together — a long, difficult, painful process that would never have healed quite the same way and probably would have resulted in permanent loss of functionality in her hand and wrist.

It would have been even worse, because Taylor's hand was basically a maraca. Her fingers were mostly intact, but the carpals had all been…pulped wasn't a good word, but most of the bone fragments were measured in millimeters. A normal doctor would've had to remove at least some of them and reinforce whatever of the rest he could reconstruct with pins and metal rods. No matter what, Taylor would have lost most of the fine motor control in what was probably her dominant hand.

What had possessed Taylor to try and meet Vicky punch for punch, Amy didn't know. Vicky's strength was well known, and her propensity for accidentally causing more damage than she meant to was often joked about on PHO — Amy should know, she heard about it every few days when Vicky decided she need to vent.

"Alexandria Junior" was one of the nicer versions. "Collateral Damage Barbie" was the one that really got Vicky's blood boiling.

Hell, Amy didn't understand why Taylor hadn't just lied down and stayed down after Vicky had first tackled her. Some sense of pride, maybe? Those moves she'd used had looked like some kind of martial art. Maybe Taylor had wanted to test herself against a Brute, to see if skill could overcome strength? Or maybe Taylor had just never had a good fight before? For that matter, maybe Taylor's week had been about as shitty as Amy's had been, and she'd just wanted to blow off some steam.

Whatever the reason, the results were about what Amy might have expected. Most injuries and diseases, she could fix in a matter of seconds, and those that took longer than that tended to be things like regrowing an arm or dealing with more sensitive tissues. To fix Taylor's shattered arm and hand, it took Amy what must have been twenty minutes, which consisted entirely of carefully maneuvering the fragments of bone back into their proper positions and merging them back into their original shapes.

It was a bit more time consuming to do it that way than, say, turning all of the bone fragments into stem cells and maneuvering them back into place, then turning them back into bone, but it did give Amy a longer look at Taylor's biology. It also gave her time to think about the whole messy, fucked up situation and decide whether she was going to yell at Taylor for being stupid or ask her to be friends. So, slow and meticulous way it was.

After that, she also had to fix the lacerations and soft tissue damage inflicted by the bone fragments. Those were much easier, though. Soft tissue always was. It didn't break off into rigid chunks the way bone did, so it was usually just a matter of putting the ends back together and reconnecting them. Amy could have done that in her sleep, and sometimes, she wasn't sure she didn't.

It was about an hour after the Undersiders' escape, sitting on the back ledge of an ambulance, that Amy finished healing up Taylor's arm. It was as good as if it had never been injured in the first place, everything back the way it was supposed to be.

Fortunately, Taylor was the only bystander who'd been injured in the whole thing. Everyone else had been shaken and maybe a little bruised from where they'd bumped into each other when the Undersiders released them, blind and deaf, through that cloud of darkness, but none of them had needed actual medical attention, so Amy had been able to take her time.

And maybe ogle the strangeness of Taylor's body a bit. Just a bit, though.

"All done," said Amy.

Taylor took her arm as Amy let go and started flexing her wrist and checking her range of motion. Her hand curled into a fist, then unfurled, then curled into a fist again, and then Taylor touched each fingertip to the heel of her palm one at a time.

"Thanks, Amy," Taylor murmured. She seemed somewhat distracted.

Amy wasn't quite sure where to go from there. She'd never really been very good at the whole…friend thing. She'd never really picked up one of her own. Most of the people she hung out with were Vicky's friends who liked things Vicky liked, and Amy only hung out with them because it was really Vicky she was there for.

God, it sounded even more pathetic like that. How desperate was she for even the slightest scrap of attention from Vicky that she'd hang out with a bunch of people she didn't even like, just because it made Vicky happy?

(Who was she kidding? She'd do it over and over again, and no amount of self-loathing was going to change that. It never had any of the other times, either.)

Now, there was Taylor, and…maybe she was a friend? They hadn't had enough time to really connect beyond the basic, "What's your name and what brings you here?" The only reason they'd even gotten that far was because Taylor hadn't asked for touch-ups the way most idiots who tried to "befriend" her did, and because…

Well, because Taylor was everything Amy had wanted for herself almost since the moment she got her powers. Taylor was…normal. She was just plain. There was nothing special about her that garnered attention, like Vicky's good looks and celebrity status. She didn't turn heads everywhere she went. She was nobody important and there was no reason why anyone would pay her any mind as she walked down the street.

And Amy, who was Panacea, the famous healer who could fix anything shy of death itself, craved that more than anything else. To be normal, again. To not have any worries about her power and using it for good. To not have that pressure.

Enter Taylor, who didn't know Panacea and didn't really care to. "Thanks, Amy," she'd said. Not, "Thank you, Panacea." Amy. Just Amy. No blubbering, no tears, no clinging awkwardly to Amy's arm. No slavering praise all over the great "Panacea." Just a simple, honest, "Thanks, Amy," like Amy had just passed her the salt or handed her the milk.

And now that the chance for a normal, real friendship was dangling in front of her, she…had no idea what to say.

"What were you thinking?" was probably not the right thing, though.

Taylor blinked and looked back at her. "Huh?"

"Fighting Vicky," Amy clarified. "Why? What were you thinking?"

Taylor's expression was somewhere between a smile and a grimace. A wry grin, self-deprecating.

"It's complicated."

"Complicated?" asked Amy. "What does that even mean, complicated?"

"It means that I can't explain…" Taylor cut off and glanced around, then leaned in a little. "Look, you've figured out I'm a cape already, right?"

"Well, yeah," said Amy, not quite sure what that had to do with anything. "With your body the way it is, there's no way —"

"Right," Taylor spoke over her. "So it's got something to do with that, but I can't really…"

She stopped and glanced around. Amy did, too, and realized what she meant after a moment: they were basically surrounded. No one was paying them much mind, right then, but there were police and PRT squads all over the place, and they'd cordoned off the whole street in front of the bank. Some of them were interviewing witnesses and hostages, and some were holding back the reporters and the crowd of busybodies who were clamoring at the police line and trying to see what was happening.

"Oh."

Right. Yeah. New Wave had openly embraced the idea of capes without masks, of cape accountability, and even though they hadn't tried pushing the movement forward since Fleur, it was still their official policy. Amy could understand, however, and respect the fact that most capes didn't want to have their real names and their faces beneath the masks plastered all over the place. There were days when Amy wished she could have been one of them.

With that many people around, there was no way to have a private conversation about cape stuff. To try would mean Taylor would out herself, and if Amy's suspicions were correct, out herself before she even put on her costume for the first time — if she ever even planned to go that far. There were some parahumans who never even bothered to put on a mask, for good or for ill, and just went about their lives without really using their powers.

"Right. Yeah."

Taylor frowned and didn't say anything, and the two of them fell into an awkward silence. She looked like she was thinking very deeply about something, and Amy suddenly felt like she was unwelcome and intruding.

Fuck. She was terrible at this, wasn't she?

"Right. Yeah. Okay. I'll just…"

Good job blowing it, Amy. It was time to make a graceless retreat. She started to slide off of the ambulance, trying to remember where it was she'd last seen Vicky.

"I could explain it to you, if you'll hear me out," Taylor said slowly, stopping Amy in her tracks.

"What?"

"I could explain it, if you'll hear me out," Taylor repeated. "Somewhere where we won't be overheard."

Amy hesitated.

"I…there's a coffee shop on the Boardwalk that Vicky and I go to —"

"No Vicky!" Taylor snapped. She grimaced and took a quick glance around, but no one seemed to have heard her outburst. "Sorry. Um, no, uh… Just you and me. Not your sister."

"Okay, but…why, exactly, should I not bring Vicky?"

Taylor's brow furrowed. "Because…she doesn't know?" she offered. "That I'm a cape, I mean."

Amy stared at her incredulously.

"Are you kidding?" she asked. "Taylor, Vicky's not stupid. The way you were moving…"

"That…has nothing to do with my power, actually," Taylor corrected. "That was all martial arts."

For a moment, Amy couldn't believe that she was actually serious. But Taylor didn't suddenly shout, "Gotcha!" or laugh it off as a joke, so Amy had to take it to mean she was serious. "Taylor," she said slowly, "you were moving faster and with more grace than I've seen in most professional athletes."

Taylor blinked and turned to look at her with a dumbfounded expression on her face, like Amy had just told her that the sky was green or the Earth was flat. Had she really not realized exactly how incredible it was that she'd been managing to keep up with Vicky well enough to dodge around her that easily?

"Huh," Taylor mumbled with a slight bit of awe. She looked down at her own arm with wonder. "I mean, I knew that things back then were… But I never thought…"

"Never thought…what?" asked Amy.

Taylor blinked again and looked back up at her, and then her lips pulled back into a frown. Amy didn't need to hear her say it to figure out what she meant. "Right. That's part of what you don't want to talk about out in the open."

"Yeah," Taylor agreed a little awkwardly.

They fell into another silence, and Amy sat there, wondering whether it would be worth it — worth it to go somewhere with this veritable stranger just to satisfy her curiosity, worth it to try and befriend this strange girl who had fought her sister (whatever the actual reason was), worth it to actually try and make a friend after so long with Vicky as her only real friend…

It was a little peculiar in and of itself, really. Amy wasn't sure why she wanted to be Taylor's friend so much, why she was even considering the idea so seriously. Wasn't Vicky the only friend and companion she even needed, even if Vicky would never love her the way Amy loved Vicky? Did she need to make another friend in this girl, even if it would be her first real friend outside her own family, even if she really wanted to understand why this girl's body was so strange and why she'd fought Vicky?

What it really came down to was normalcy. Taylor represented that, represented a chance to have some of that, a chance to spend time with a girl who considered her Amy first and Panacea a distant second, if at all. If Taylor could give her that, even if it was only a little bit, even if it was only a few hours a week…

Amy wanted that. Amy craved that maybe more than she'd ever realized, before. The chance to stop being Panacea of New Wave, the chance to go a little while without that hanging over her head and invading every moment of her life. The chance to be Amy, just Amy, if only for a little while.

"So," Amy began, sounding to her ears more sure than she felt, "where, uh… Where do you want to meet, then?"

Taylor looked at Amy as though she wasn't quite sure she believed what she was hearing. After a moment, she said, "There's a little coffee shop a few streets away from the Boardwalk. Kinda rustic looking. It's called Ahnenerbe. Red brick, green sign."

"Ahnenerbe?" asked Amy. "That sounds a bit…Well…"

Nazi-ish, she didn't say. Maybe it was just that the E88 had ruined anything even vaguely German sounding, though. That tended to happen when the leader of the gang called himself "Kaiser" and every single one of their members appropriated Norse and German mythology left, right, and center.

Taylor seemed to catch on and shook her head. "I don't know about any of that, but I didn't see any posters of Hitler or swastika flags hanging from the rafters. My friend, Lisa…"

She stopped, and for a moment, she looked so incredibly lost that Amy had to check the withered, anemic impulse to reach out and offer her a friendly hand. After a few seconds, she gave a tiny shake of her head and went on as though she'd never stopped.

"My friend, Lisa, could probably explain everything about it," Taylor said. A wry, bittersweet smile tugged at her lips and was gone just as quickly. "She probably knows where each brick came from and how it was laid. She's the one who showed it to me."

That last bit hung in the air for a few seconds, and Amy wondered if maybe the pause had been because Lisa was a friend Taylor had lost. Killed, maybe, in a gang shootout? Amy had seen plenty of those victims over the last couple of years.

She didn't ask. Amy, better than most, knew about the keeping of one's secrets and pains suffered in silence.

"So…"

"Tomorrow morning?" Taylor said. "Say, around ten o'clock?"

Amy shook her head. "School."

Taylor blinked. "Oh," she said simply. "Well, um…"

"But I get out around two-thirty," Amy added. "So I could be there around three."

"Oh," Taylor said again. "Sure. That works."

"Don't…you have school, too?"

Something crossed Taylor's face, a dark expression that she hid by turning away. "It's…complicated. Something happened recently, and Dad said I'm not going back until it's all been sorted out."

"Oh," it was Amy's turn to say. She didn't really know what else she could say. Taylor didn't seem like she wanted to talk about it, so Amy didn't ask.

She cleared her throat.

"So. Tomorrow afternoon around three?"

Taylor turned back around long enough to offer her a wan smile so fake that it almost hurt to look at.

"See you then."

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

It was early evening by the time Amy and Victoria finally made it home, and it had been a long, tiring day. Not only with the whole debacle at the bank, but in the aftermath, having to heal the Wards who had been injured in the fight. Just…the mess of that entire situation was already enough that Amy was ready to call it a day.

And Gallant, with his useless attempt at "helping" her. Fuck Gallant and his imaginary white horse.

So it was a very mentally drained Amy, with Victoria complaining rather loudly (for the third time in as many hours) about being forced to cancel their double date, who walked through the front door of the Dallon family home.

"— just had to be today," Vicky was saying. "Couldn't they have done it tomorrow, so we didn't have to cancel our double date? Or better yet, couldn't they have done their robbery on a weekend, like sensible, reasonable people? On a Sunday, even. No one does anything on Sundays. We wouldn't have had anything important going on, then."

Privately, Amy disagreed. Sure, it had been terrifying and horrific and not at all fun, and zero-out-of-ten, Amy would not do it again, but the bank robbery had gotten her out of that double date, in the end. If nothing else, she could be thankful to the Undersiders and their villainy for that much.

She'd never tell anyone, though.

In fact, when she'd desperately wished for something to happen to force the date to cancel (so that she wouldn't have to sit with a boy she didn't know or want to know and watch Vicky and Dean make kissy faces at each other), a bank robbery — while Amy herself was inside the bank — was not something she would have considered or asked for. Couldn't God or Scion or whoever had been listening have picked something a little more tame?

Gift horses, though. Amy wasn't about to go looking this one in the mouth.

"— you think so, Ames?"

"Sure," Amy replied automatically.

But Vicky didn't keep talking, and when Amy stopped and looked back at her, she was frowning. "What?"

"You feeling alright, Ames?"

"Fine," said Amy.

Vicky's brow furrowed and her eyes narrowed as she tilted her head a little.

"You sure? You don't look fine. Or sound fine."

Amy sighed. "It's just been a long day."

Vicky made a strange sound in her throat. "Is this about that girl from today?" she asked. "Because I said I was sorry."

"Sorry?" Amy snapped, patience suddenly gone. "You shattered her arm!"

It was, she noted in some distant part of her brain, one of the few times she'd genuinely shouted at Vicky, because Vicky rarely did anything that she got well and truly angry about. Maybe on another day, maybe after a less shitty week, she wouldn't even have been yelling and she would have let it pass. She did that a lot for Vicky — let things pass because she cared more about Vicky than about the things Vicky had done wrong.

Not now, though. Not after this week. Not after being woken up on one of the few nights she'd been sleeping well to go and check up on a de-limbed Lung. Not after Vicky herself had called her out to help heal another one of her "accidents," also in the middle of the night. Not after being caught in the middle of a bank robbery and having to fix another of Vicky's messes, this time a civilian girl (and one Amy might, just might, have been hitting it off with) who had been on the wrong end of one of Vicky's "act first, think about it later" moments.

"It was so bad that she would never have regained even most of the functionality in it, if the doctors didn't just amputate outright — if, if I hadn't been there to heal her!"

"But you were and you did," said Vicky simply, far more calm than Amy thought she had any right to be.

"Vicky!"

"Look." Vicky's voice began rising. "You healed her, she's fine, everyone's fine, so no harm done."

"That's not…!" Amy struggled to find the words, for a moment. "You almost crippled a girl, Vicky! A civilian!"

"Civilian my ass!" Vicky said. "You saw how she moved, how fast she was! You can't tell me that she wasn't a cape!"

"That's not the point! Whether or not she's a cape, she was there as a civilian and she was one of the Undersiders' hostages —"

"I still don't believe that!" Vicky interrupted. "If she wasn't with them, then why'd she fight me? What was she doing there, conveniently on the same day as the Undersiders robbed it? Why did she come back out with that blonde bitch, Tattletale?"

"You didn't give her much choice!" Amy shouted back. "And I was there, too, Vicky! I'm also a cape who happened to be at the bank when they robbed it! Does that make me one of the Undersiders' accomplices, too?"

"Of course not!" Vicky said indignantly. "But you have to admit, it's suspicious, Ames!"

"If that was enough reason to get into a slug-out with someone —"

"She was manhandling you!" Vicky exclaimed.

"She was about to let me go!" Amy replied. "And she's a martial artist or something! Once you get good enough at that sort of thing, responding to violence becomes almost instinctual!"

"And for that matter," Vicky said as though Amy hadn't spoken, "and for that matter, if she was a cape and she wasn't with the Undersiders, why didn't she fight them?"

"Because not everyone can be New Wave, Vicky!" Something dangerous, a confession of her own pains and longings, hovered in the wings, waiting to be said. Amy had to force herself not to say it. "Not everyone can throw away any chance at a normal, civilian life just to stop a team of C-list burglars from robbing a fucking bank! Not everyone can spend every day of their lives being yo —"

"ENOUGH!"

Both girls whipped around to find Carol Dallon standing in the entranceway to the living room. Her face was fierce and stern, and her lips were drawn into a tight, foreboding line. This was a Carol that Amy had not much seen in recent years, a woman full of motherly wrath for her children who had stepped out of line.

Well. For her daughter and her barely tolerated guest, Amy thought bitterly.

"Both of you, living room. Now." Carol's arm snapped out and pointed imperiously through the entranceway. Neither of the girls moved, at first.

"Mom —" began Vicky.

"Now, Victoria," barked Carol.

Vicky, perhaps sensing that this was not the time to test her mother's patience, grudgingly started walking. Amy went just a step behind her, resigned to whatever was about to come. She felt Carol follow, so close that Amy could almost feel her breath on the nape of her neck, as though to block off all chance of escape.

"Sit," Carol ordered once they were all inside.

Vicky took a seat on the couch and Amy sat down on the other end of it. Carol, arms folded across her chest, stood in front of them.

"I received a very interesting call from Deputy Director Renick, this afternoon," she said levelly. "Would you care to know what he told me?"

"She was manhandling Amy, Mom," Vicky began, "honest —"

"Be quiet, Victoria!" snapped Carol. Vicky's mouth clicked shut, and Carol nodded. "Now, there was something about a bank robbery and breaking a girl's arm? The Undersiders were involved?"

Neither of the girls spoke. Carol turned to her and asked, "Amy?"

"…The Undersiders showed up while I was at the bank getting some money for the double date Vicky and I were supposed to be going on tonight," Amy said.

"I see," said Carol, giving nothing of her thoughts away. "And you were…?"

"One of the hostages, yeah," Amy confirmed. "I was…was sitting next to a girl I'd met while I was there — Taylor — when they came in. She almost had a panic attack."

She almost missed Carol's lips thinning as she shot a meaningful look at Vicky — as though to say, "See? Bystander." Vicky still didn't seem convinced.

"I see," said Carol again. "This would be the same girl, then, whose arm Victoria broke?"

"Yes," Amy answered.

"And she's a cape, too? Am I understanding that correctly?"

"…Yes," Amy answered a second time, a little more hesitantly. "Um, minor Brute and Mover, it looked like. Maybe a two or a three, but nothing to really write home about."

Carefully, Amy made sure not to mention the blank spots. That would count as a Trump power, and that was a bag she didn't want to open — especially since she didn't have any idea what it meant. What kind of Trump power only blocked some parts of the body from her view, anyway?

"And you, Victoria," Carol turned towards her daughter, "you think she was an accomplice of the Undersiders?"

"She came back from one of the offices just behind that blonde bitch, Tattletale!" Vicky said, sounding as though she'd been holding onto that since she'd sat down. "Then, then, I saw her grab Amy and put her into a — what do you call it — a submission hold! Yeah, like in those Kung Fu movies!"

"And that's when you —"

"I pushed her off of Amy, of course," Victoria replied, talking like it was the natural thing to do.

"And you didn't go to help the Wards, after that?"

"Well, that girl wouldn't stay down," Vicky admitted.

Carol's eyes flashed. "You fought her?"

"Well, yeah," said Vicky. "She wouldn't stay down. She just got back up and kept dancing around me like some kind of fu — freaking ballerina. Said something about how she wasn't with the Undersiders, but I mean, c'mon, she was in the back with Tattletale and came back out with her, too. And she hurt Amy."

"I was swinging a fire extinguisher around," Amy mumbled.

Carol reached up and started to rub at the bridge of her nose. "And this," she said, "is when you broke her arm?"

"Well, she came at me," Vicky reasoned. "I took a swing at her, she was taking a swing at me. We met somewhere in the middle and she came off worse."

"And you were 'swinging' hard enough to break her arm," Carol clarified.

"Well, yeah." Vicky didn't seem to understand the problem. "I mean, she didn't go down the first time, did she? I had to hit her a little harder than that."

Carol turned now to Amy expectantly. "How bad was it?"

"Everything was basically splinters from the elbow down," said Amy. "Bruising and micro tears at the shoulder joint, from a near dislocation. Nerve damage. Tendon damage. Most of the small bones in her hand were completely shattered. With normal medical treatment…maybe fifteen percent functionality, after it healed? Damage that bad, the doctors might have just amputated it, though."

Carol's eyes closed and she let out a breath through her nose. "And you healed her? Fixed everything?"

"Even the bruised ribs," Amy confirmed.

"C'mon, Mom," Vicky said, "she was a villain. What was I supposed to do?"

Carol whirled around on her daughter. "Show some restraint!" she barked. "Victoria, you're an Alexandria package! Enhanced strength means that you have to exercise enhanced restraint! That means understanding when and how to apply your powers and how much of them to use! That means understanding that you have the serious ability to hurt someone, and that it is much easier for you to do serious or even permanent damage to anyone you hit! It means —"

She whipped out a piece of paper and waved it in Vicky's face, but Amy couldn't see what it said. "— that you do not hit a civilian girl with enough strength to shatter her arm, that you do not escalate needlessly when confronted with a problem that you can't easily solve, and that you do not — and I cannot stress this enough — you do not burst through the ceiling of a building made of brick and marble and endanger the lives of the hostages inside!"

Carol turned away only long enough to slap the paper down on the coffee table. "Deputy Direct Renick," she said angrily, "has assured me that the girl whose arm you broke has not intimated any intentions to sue you for damages, and fortunately, neither the bank nor the city of Brockton Bay is pursuing a case for the damages incurred from your little stunt."

Vicky looked as stricken as Amy felt, as though she had not even considered the possibility of something like that happening.

"In other words," Carol went on, "neither the police nor the mayor is interested in punishing you for what happened, today. That does not mean that I won't."

"But Mom," Vicky began.

"You're grounded," Carol said firmly. "One month. No dates with Dean, no hanging out with your friends, and no patrols." Vicky started to protest. "Don't make me turn it into two!"

"But what about Amy?" Vicky whined.

Carol's gaze swept over in Amy's direction, and Amy prepared herself for her own punishment — not, in the end, that being grounded would actually be all that bad, really.

"Amy," Carol replied, "didn't break a girl's arm. She did nothing wrong. She isn't grounded. You are."

Amy wondered if her face reflected the sheer astonishment that she was feeling inside.

"Now," said Carol. "Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes. Go get washed up, the both of you."

For a moment, neither Vicky nor Amy moved, as though they had been glued to their seats. Then, Carol made a shooing motion and said, "Go on."

Vicky got up first, looking vaguely stunned, and made for the stairs. After a few seconds, Amy got up, too, and followed her, wondering, with all of the strange and downright peculiar things that had happened today, what sort of crazy, sideways alternate reality had she stepped into?

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

I can see the rolled eyes from here. "Of course he had her befriend Amy," some are probably saying. Except...that's not really what's happened here, is it? Certainly, the possibility has been set up, but having that work requires that Taylor passes a charisma check against the most cynical girl in Worm. I... Well, if you want to see if she does, that's answered in 4.1.

Also, Amy doesn't like cooperating with me. She's hard to write for.

Also, also, a kinda reasonable Carol Dallon! It's like a Volvo with a gun rack, you don't see too many of those.

As always, read, review, and enjoy.

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