Wake-up Call – Chapter 72

Female morning wood is not a thing.

Wait, let me correct myself: it [shouldn't] be a thing.

I shouldn't wake up next to an extremely naked Taylor wrapped around my own bare body, burning heat between my thighs and a spot of wetness on the sheets below. I shouldn't be desperate for her touch, yearning to grab the back of her head and pull her lips to mine, above [or] below.

I shouldn't have…

Spent the night in her arms, feeling the stress of the past few days melting away as my… as I… as Taylor…

"Hey," she whispers, eyes slowly blinking open in front of me as she greets me with a soft smile, and I…

I kiss her.

Hard and sudden enough that she flails as I turn her on her back and straddle her, taking her lips and pushing my tongue past them as she lets out a panicked 'hmph' that makes the heat inside of me [roar—]

"Do you want waffles?" Alec asks from the other side of my [very locked door].

"Ignore him," I whisper in Taylor's ear as her eyes widen farther right before I worry at her earlobe with the points of my canines, my nose buried in fragrant dark hair that smells like sleep, and me, and [her].

"That is actually a rhetorical question. Mostly because we don't have waffles," Alec continues despite my defying silence.

Taylor's hands are on my hair, her fingers tracing thin, blazing flames over my scalp as she pulls me harder against her, her left thigh sliding between mine, tilting up, [pushing in just the right way—]

"What we have is French toast," Alec continues despite my gigantic, mental middle finger.

I slide my sex over the top of Taylor's thigh, up and down in strokes as long as I can manage without letting go of her ear, and then she bites her wrist to silence her muffled moan, and it's all I can do not to throw open my bedside table, grab the double-headed dildo, and—

"French toast that's about to get cold," [Satan] idly comments. "And that Rachel cooked."

…

"Fuck," I whisper into Taylor's ear.

"There… There must be something… Can't we say we've got an upset stomach?" Taylor almost begs me.

Which isn't as enticing as I thought it would be.

No, it's [worse].

At least, with how turned on I am.

"She spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen. Brian helped," Alec continues to sadistically and savagely twist the knife.

I push myself up and look down at Taylor.

She whines.

Or maybe I do. Or both. It's hard to know, at the moment.

"I don't even know why it's called French toast. Do you know what it's called in French? Pain perdu. It's kinda weird, because that means 'lost bread,' and if it was lost, it certainly wouldn't be available as the main ingredient of the dish—"

"I swear to whatever passes as a God in Call of Duty chat rooms, Alec, I will have my vengeance!" I yell as I throw my pillow against the door.

"Oh, you're up? Good. Breakfast should be ready in about five minutes," he answers.

…

"Do you think we could—" Taylor starts asking.

"The breakfast Rachel is making," Alec cuts her off.

And I whine.

Or Taylor. Or both of us. It's hard to tell, at the moment.

***

"These are delicious, Rach," I say as I take yet another bite of the slightly crunchy, blackened-in-places, eggshell-pieces-laden [pain perdu].

…

Look, it's still tasty, all right? Usually, Rachel's culinary approach involves either a phone or a can, so this is to be encouraged, as Alec [knows I would think—]

Vengeance. I shall have it.

Taylor nods as she spoons a few blueberries on top of the whipped cream covering her own serving, then proceeds to take a sip of her Earl Grey, and now I'm picturing her in a Star Fleet uniform, but [definitely not bald], and…

And I don't whine.

Mostly because a girl who's trying far harder than she ever has is looking at me in search of any traces of deception, so what I do is take another bite of the portion of slightly too-dry French toast, and I appreciate how Brian has managed things so that the worst pieces are all in our plates while Rachel is eating the best samples of her own cooking, which are still far from perfect, but… But they are good enough for a first try. Encouraging.

That's what she needs. Encouragement.

So I smile in satisfaction that is not at all faked at the… the idea of it. Of Brian really stepping up and doing what I could only hope he would do after I prompted him to, with Alec being somehow perceptive enough to not only pick up on it but collaborate, which is [also] part of what I hoped to see in his own path to recovery, if such a thing exists, and…

And…

Damn it, I'm about to cry.

"These are really good," I say, my throat raspy before I grab my glass of orange juice and try to swallow it all at once just so I won't keep thinking sadly happy thoughts that—

"You already said so," she says.

I almost choke on the juice before I manage to finish my gulp in a somewhat non-drowning manner.

And I look at her.

She's still staring at me with that intense way of hers, that not-quite-expressionless thing that is still meant to hide everything that she feels. All the varied nuances of shame, insecurity, and sheer [courage].

"I talk too much, don't I?" I finally tell her with a slow, soft smile.

"Sometimes," she answers, looking at her food.

And then she looks up into my eyes, and… and I can almost feel the push. The effort.

And she smiles.

"I don't mind," she says.

And I have to pretend something got in my eye just to avoid looking like a weirdo.

[Lisa Wilbourn's lacking self-awareness—]

Oh, shut up.

***

"Okay," I tell my gathered teammates. "Okay."

Then there's a pause.

A [long] pause.

"Lisa…" Taylor, wearing her full regalia, arms crossed over her chest, foot tapping on the ground, says.

Unfairly.

"I mean…" I gesture. At each of the Undersiders wearing their costumes, at Rachel's dogs already fully grown, at the pieces of rusted metal surrounding us, at the Boat Graveyard at its quintessential awfulness.

"You do?" Alec asks with a head tilt that makes me want to smack his stupid mask off.

"Yes! Yes, I do mean… something."

Four superpowered teenagers (and isn't that a scary thought) look at me.

And I sigh, shoulders deflating as I try to get a hold of the rollercoaster that used to be my emotional balance.

"All right, I—please, guys, don't take this the wrong way, but we're about to have a job with Dragon, and she's cool. Like, I [know] she won't judge, but I still want to give a good impression of what we are now, and I particularly want to give her any and all reasons to get us off the villain's list the next time a PRT director asks for her opinion, and—I am rambling. I am rambling, aren't I? Sorry, I just—"

"Lisa wants her adoptive mom to like her friends," Taylor translates.

I… blink at her.

"What?" she asks.

"That's not [at all] what I was saying—"

"Look up, in the sky," Alec interrupts with a studiously bored drawl. "It's a bird? It's a plane? No, it's Lisa's parental issues—"

"I have a gun."

"And I have the power of friendship," he replies with a shit-eating grin peeking under his Venetian mask that makes me want to accept the unstated challenge.

"Hello, Lisa," Dragon's kind voice greets me as something massive that should not be half as silent as it is hoovers above the circle of gathered teenage supervillains who may or not have an arrest warrant on their heads.

Just kidding. We don't.

I think.

[Lisa Wilbourn's parental issues—]

Oh, fuck [you].

"Hi, Dragon! These are my friends—I mean, employees. Except Taylor. Because if I paid her for anything at all, I would be committing quite a few crimes, some of them related to harassment in the workplace—"

Taylor, for some mysterious reason, smacks the back of my head.

"This is domestic violence," I tell her as I rub the stinging part of my body—[phrasing].

"Self-defense," she states in the laconic manner of those who are engaging in anti-Thinker protocols while blushing up to their hair roots.

Dragon, for equally mystifying reasons, giggles.

Which is a bit disturbing when it comes from a hovering, quadrupedal, reptilian crimson thing with rotor-blade-saturated wings and what I think is a jet on the tip of its waving tail.

…

I can feel you salivating, Power.

[Diameter of tail-shaped limb, articulation size, segmentation, projected stress when engaging jet—]

Yes, I know. Tinkers are bullshit, and you, for some reason I've yet to learn, like material sciences.

[Anthropomorphizing of parahuman interface abilities—]

Right. Moving on.

"Anyway! Tests! Very important tests to do! Brian, do the thing!" I say.

And Brian, across from me in our broad circle, stares at me blankly. Or so I presume the prolonged silence while his arms remain crossed means.

"The thing is spurting a blob of your stuff," I patiently explain.

"Phrasing," Alec states, making me struggle not to shoot him a glare.

Or something else.

I [do] have a gun.

"Right. Where?" Brian asks, willfully ignoring the interplay with arms still crossed before he tilts his head to signal the barren earth with sparse tuffs of grass and quite a few things that I still wonder how they got out of the water—

[Storms, sabotage, dismantling efforts—]

That was an [idle] wondering, you overenthusiastic—

[Dragon suit claws remain apparently sharp despite being used as landing apparatus, suggesting a hardness and ductility—]

… I can't believe I'm about to say this to anyone at all, but stop nerding out.

"Here will do just fine," Dragon says as a latch opens on the underbelly of her suit, and a small sphere floats down till it alights on the ground in front of Brian.

He shrugs, dramatically unfolds his arms, and unnecessarily points his palm toward it as coils of pure darkness swirl from under the sleeves of his jacket and in front of his palm to—huh.

Does he watch Dragon Ball Z? And how can I best use this information to make him regret ever crossing me?

[Brian Laborn hasn't, in fact, crossed Lisa Wilbourn—]

Details.

Anyway, the slow blast of shadow travels down to engulf the sphere, and that coincides with the tail of the Dragon suit no longer idly waving in the air above us as it goes suddenly rigid.

"It… It broke quantum entanglement," she whispers in what I believe is both sheer awe and the third person of the day about to be a nerd at me in unsettling ways.

"Wait, what?" I stupidly ask.

"It's… as far as I can tell, it's a perfectly isolated system. This… Has [implications]. I could—a perfectly safe testing environment! No radioactive leakage, no high-energy particles messing up with delicate sensors—or causing cancer, I guess. This is—how do you feel about Canada, Brian—I mean, Grue! Grue, how do you feel about moving to Canada and being my lab assistant forever and ever—"

"Do I need to call Colin? I feel like I need to call Colin."

"No! He will steal him from me!"

"I—" Brian tries to interject.

"We have public health! Not that you would need it, seeing as you'd be working for me, but I could also get your sister into the best programs for children with ADHD—"

"Wait, what—"

"Dragon, your Orwell is showing," I tell her, raising my open palms to placate the goddess of everything Tay aspires to one day be.

"I find it both refreshing and awe-inspiring to finally see a hero acknowledge just how little the unwritten rules actually mean," Alec states, [apparently] nonchalant.

"People tend to write down things that matter. Or even those that don't, seeing as Ayn Rand exists," Taylor states, probably less wary than Alec is, both for the obvious reasons and because she doesn't see anything wrong with Dragon outright admitting to knowing our secret identities.

Rachel is taking a step back, though, toward Brutus, and…

Okay, this is no longer vaguely entertaining.

"Dragon is not a Tinker!" I yell, grabbing everyone's attention. "She's a Thinker, like me, only she specializes in technology, but she also can't help but pick up on details and connections. Given part of her tech is integrated with the net, she can't help but know the things she does."

Alec is warier. Brian is not entirely convinced. Taylor is looking at me in a way that promises further conversations on the subject as soon as we're alone.

But Rachel relaxes. And that's the best I could hope for.

"That… Is not entirely inaccurate. I do apologize for my outburst," the war machine modeled as a monster of legend says, managing to look sheepish in the process.

"No harm done," I say.

And then look at Brian.

Who looks at me.

"Wait, are you [asking] for my opinion?" he says.

"Well, you have just been offered employment by one of the few parahumans able to give you more benefits than I will. I figure I should start treating you better until I fool you into staying in the objectively worse place of work," I tell him with a shrug.

He… stares. Or I think he does.

Stupid helmets.

"Well, you aren't liable to give me cancer," he mutters as if that doesn't quite make up for the other things I'm liable to give him.

"I could! I could give you cancer if I wanted to!" I say. I'm not sure why; I just feel vaguely slighted.

And Rachel punches my arm.

"Don't," she says, eyes slightly narrow.

It makes me smile.

"Okay, but just because you asked."

"And not because I would rather not get cancer…" Brian mutters in the defeated sigh of those who know their place in the pecking order.

"Ah…" Dragon, floating war machine that she is, bashfully hesitates. "About the second part of the tests, Taylor, if you would, there are a few crates of fruit flies in my cargo depots. If you would be so kind as to navigate them through the maze they are in—oh. Oh, dear, that's fast."

"I have perfect spatial awareness of my swarm's relative positions, as far as I can tell," Taylor states in what I believe is her professional setting.

"Impressive. All right, stop; I think we can skip a couple of procedures. Let's see if you can—are you familiar with the theory that flowers have landing strips for pollinators?"

"What?" Taylor both asks and replies.

"There are patterns in petals that only become apparent in the ultraviolet spectrum—"

"Wait, [that's] why flowers look so bizarre to my power? I just thought Arachne was being weird!"

"Arachne?" I immediately ask.

And now the circle of supervillains plus hovering superheroine is staring at my girlfriend.

Great. I'm sure that line doesn't have disturbing implications.

Also, Tay, stop holding your arm and looking bashfully adorable. Not. The time.

"I mean, I was thinking earlier about how my power sometimes seems to, uh, assist me. And I got to thinking, and… There's absolutely [no way] I'm naming her something as ludicrous as 'Power.'"

Ouch.

[Sherlock—]

Fuck off.

"I'm torn between teasing you for your nerdy ways or encouraging anyone who would call out Lisa on her criminally unimaginative ways," Alec finally states.

"I have a gun."

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"… The reference is a stretch, but I will allow you to live nonetheless."

"I… I am not sure how to tackle all of this, so I will just ask Taylor to follow the ultraviolet patterns and—oh. Wait, can you do that in reverse?"

Taylor shrugs. Dragon's tail wags.

"That's… All right, in the crate nearest to you, there are a few monitors. Can you put a single fly in front of each of them—right. Should have expected it. Now, can you mimic what the insects in the screens are doing—"

Dragon stops.

Then the hovering ship slowly turns in mid-air, its neck elongating to point its head right at Taylor, the emerald eyes seeming to gleam.

"Do you realize what this means, Taylor?" she says.

"That Arachne is really smart?" my girlfriend asks with what I think is a hint of bashfulness.

"Parallel, simultaneous broadcast of nuanced information! The density of the signal more than makes up for the speed of its transmission mechanism! And you say—wait, more tests. We need to test if there's any delay. It could make—and it works through Grue's power? That… the mechanism for the spread of information could revolutionize broadcasting technology, not to mention the—"

Dragon pauses.

And I don't think it's because of Taylor's implicitly raised eyebrow behind her mask.

No, I think—

"Lisa, I just want to remind you that you made a promise," Dragon says with a gentle, careful tone that sets off every single alarm in my body.

And then the sirens sing.

"What—" I start to ask, mind whirling with fear, anxiety, and something rushing up and down my body that [roars]—

"Behemoth," Dragon says.

And my eyes narrow.

==================

This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 89 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!