20

Chapter Text

The walk back home was somber but relaxed.

They'd even held hands, until Lisa noted that they probably looked like lesbians and they were kinda walking through Empire territory at the moment, so that ended pretty quickly.

Still, by the time they'd arrived home and relaxed a bit in the living room, it seemed both she and Lisa wanted to get onto topics less personal and emotional, having gotten all the ugly sobbing and sniffling out of their system, so she asked her what girl she was looking for, and Lisa told her, after appealing mildly disturbed at how easily Taylor had eavesdropped on her mere feet away.

Emily.

Or Spitfire if one didn't want to skirt the rules.

Her pattern was patternless, in a way that indicated more panic and confusion than anything actually deliberate. She was chaotic because she had no idea what she was doing, and in a rather ironic way, that was what had kept her alive and unaffiliated for the past month or so.

It did not seem like that would last much longer.

The way she and Lisa saw it, the girl's options to keep it that way kept closing.

If anything, they could guess the only reason the girl hadn't gone to the PRT yet was because she didn't know that they'd likely just give her a slap-on-the-wrist probation before inducting her into their ranks, probably thinking she'd be thrown into prison or something instead.

And while a bit cruel to think like that, she could leverage that thought.

The problem was waiting for her to commit a robbery again.

That subject brought them to a related subject, which was money. Lisa said she kept most of hers stashed around the city or put into a secret bank account by a banker rogue called Number Man.

All in all, Lisa had three thousand dollars to play with, from three different stashes, and about double that in her ghost-bank account, which she couldn't access until she made a phone call to him because she lost her card to his black-market bank.

Which somehow worked through bank cards. And was accepted in all known banks on the US continent.

How the fuck he pulled that off, she had absolutely no idea, and neither did Lisa, for once. Still, exceedingly convenient.

There was only one small issue.

"Twenty percent of intake is taken as a fee? Twenty? " She emphasized, incredulous.

Normal banks paid you to put your fucking money in them, even if they were like, two percent annual. His wanted twenty percent of all the shit she put in it?

It wasn't a crippling amount, but it was a lot.

Lisa shrugged, flipping through the news channels nonchalantly, her now-ginger hair bouncing about with the motion.

"Yeah. It's a lot, but it's convenient and leaves no paper trail."

And just like that, she was sold. Lisa kept talking though.

"Unless you've got a master of money laundering lying about, and you're not afraid to have all your cash in physical form, it's worth it to avoid the IRS chasing after you."

She pursed her lips.

"And he's really trustworthy? No sketchy business, no randomly locking your account to empty it for himself?"

Lisa shook her head.

"Unless he got a multibillionaire to make an account, it would never be worth even the small blip it would put on his reputation. Most people would rather keep steady income than scam people for big bucks a couple times before people catch on and never deal with them again. And this guy's old. I think he's been running his services since the early two thousands. So, yeah, he's trustworthy enough. And if you don't want to put too much money in one account and make him tempted or something, you can make as many accounts as you want." Lisa said, the droning of a news reporter in the background seeming to relax her for some reason.

Stale coffee wafted into her nose from their kitchen as her dad walked past them, upstairs.

If her dad found something weird about them talking cape stuff, he didn't show it or seem to care. If anything, he was avoiding it.

Likely trying to forget it all. It was quite in character for him, truly.

"Damn. Okay. I'm making an account then." She mumbled, and pulled out her main burner phone. "Do you have his number somewhere?"

"314-159-265-359." Lisa smoothly recited, still sounding bored, and Taylor stared at her.

"Why do you remember all of that? Also that's twelve digits, not eleven."

"It's the pi number. That Greek letter, in maths?" Lisa said, and Taylor's face scrunched up.

"That is so cheesy."

"I know right?"

She called it anyway.

A mere two hours later, she went to a drop-off point as a limping old man.

She sat beside the man in the red puffy jacket, and sighed like an old man resting his weary bones.

"The space worm made of crystals likely tastes like apples." She said, seemingly to herself.

The man glanced at her blankly, before nodding.

"I suppose so."

He left, leaving behind a small paper bag.

She pocketed it, and walked into the closest alley.

As a Legend, whatever she held could be transported between forms, assuming they were similar enough. Turning into a dragon Legend for example would just make her card vanish. Just… deleted from existence.

She'd tested stuff like that in her bunker for a bit.

It was a bit strange, like the old robed man tried to go for convenience but just couldn't quite get it to work before he gave up, but she appreciated the efforts regardless.

This also meant that she thankfully didn't have to do some complicated process to store the card. Flash back to herself, shove it into her wallet, shift back, fly away.

Simple.

Lisa had decided to take the day to finally hunt down those stashes she had, her paranoia about them being watched thoroughly calmed by now. The one hundred and four impact grenades she had in her pockets in the form of red glowing cards, those likely helped with making her feel safe.

It was a surprisingly warm thought.

And Taylor had a lot of shit to do, herself, so she went on with her mid-day chores entirely separate.

Primarily, moving stuff into her bunker.

Firstly, it was simple things. She went to thrift stores, she filled up the camping backpack, she went to the junkyards, in the wood section where people would toss out half-broken or unwanted furniture, and with every Teleport, her bunker slowly began to fill up around the edges, at least enough to where she could actually do some work.

A flat wooden table with chipped edges, a really old wicker-wrapped chair, a sagging armchair that she barely managed to get off the floor, and then cleaning all of those up, and creating an eater plant, a biological trashbin, essentially, which she shoved up in the corner to consume all the junk and detritus that were a result of her cleaning.

And just in general, the waste she'd be making while Tinkering, when she eventually got to that.

Then tupperware, sponges, general household items she could come up with that might be needed…

It still wasn't even close to what she'd need to make some Tinker-tier weapons, but that was fine, she was expecting it all to be rather slow.

It took about three hours. By six PM, she had cleaned the table, the chair, the old, slightly tilted armchair, and was left with the unavoidable pile of stuff crammed into another corner, and a choice.

Making some kind of suit.

She had planned on making one for the Wards, but she honestly only expected to be with them for as long as it took to absorb information on protocols and how they operated and thought, plant a mole or two, get somewhat friendly with the Wards, and use their gyms and sparring mats as much as she could, because while dumbbells and a bench could do a full body workout, it was far from optimal and shadowboxing just wasn't quite the same without the threat of hurt to force her mind to really commit her combat movements into memory.

For all she knew, she might only need to be there for a week to achieve all that, gym aside. She couldn't work on the assumption of a month or two. She just didn't know.

And frankly, she did not much care about what her Ward image would be like. It would be a pitifully short career that she was exploiting almost exclusively for information. She'd debug and burn any trackers that might be in her suit, and that would be it. It just wasn't worth the effort.

So, in order to conserve enough energy for herself to not have a headache again when she woke up tomorrow, she decided to just make two silk bodysleeves, one for herself and one for Lisa, made by horrific, magical abominations that roughly resembled black widow spiders.

A silk armor bodysleeve which she and Lisa could easily wear their costumes over, instead of whatever barely-bulletproof kevlar weave they'd put in her cape clothes.

With her current direction decided, she turned into Elise, The Spider Queen.

The spider legs on her back shuddered as she got up and stretched, feeling oddly content like this. And tall.

She turned to the wooden table, and after a brief moment of thought, swapped to the Rune of Sorcery for the 'Perfect Focus' effect.

Was this thing addictive? It felt like she just shot up every single concentration drug she could think of in one go.

Now, what silk was the strongest, but least exhausting?

The more magic she pumped into her spiders, the tougher, faster, and stronger they'd be, and the tougher their silk. She could also modulate how large they'd be when she created them, somewhat independently from the rest of the side effects of pouring more mana into her summons.

The question here was essentially how much she wanted to exert herself.

A pounding headache, shy of a migraine, that sounded like something she could deal with and would go away by tomorrow morning. 

So, say… maybe just twice as tough on the silk department? Normal silk suits were already stab, cut, and bullet-proof. Twice as tough? It might even stop one of those huge rifle bullets she'd seen on TV movies once, those that were about as big as a finger.

So, perfect, assuming it wasn't a shot to the unprotected head.

With a wave of a clawed hand, a thick, red-black miasma spewed out from her fingers and palm, shifting into shapes and lumps before it even hit the table, and when it did, it dissipated, leaving behind a person-sized blanket of a few hundred little black widow spiders, all of the same thumb-sized variety, crammed onto the tabletop.

"Shoo, kids."

They skittered to the edges of the table, cheerily chirping and hissing, rolling and jumping onto each other, then turning to stare at the free space they left.

All things which normal spiders didn't do, contrary to strange fantasy novels.

But these did, because they weren't normal spiders, and were the indirect spawn of a dark demigod spider as large as Leviathan.

Fuck Vilemaw. Absolute dickhead. Even if he had quite the groovy moves when he decided he was in a good mood and there was a bard captive in the feed dungeon. She'd never forget that sight. It was too absurd to forget. And damn it, his shuffle game was good.

If he hadn't given Elise her abilities, he'd be even higher on her mental shit-list of Runeterra. She could never take spiders seriously after him.

Another wave of her hand, another spew of black-red miasma, another couple hundred thumb-sized black-widow imitations that shifted and spun to look at her with their beady, faintly luminescent red eyes. Thankfully, Elise wasn't a total diva, and had gotten quite a bit into weaving, as a curiosity. Living in her underground, dark palace would occasionally get boring, and she still had the tastes of a noble. Whether to lure victims or to get funds, the woman and her spiderlings made a lot of silk in her days.

She pursed her lips, staring at her spiderlings.

The thing about these little shitheads, was that they really were not spiders, not real ones. She couldn't stress that enough. Every single one of them was a magical familiar of sorts, created to be summoned and killed at her whim. Technically, the only limitation being how much mana she had. And while there was a strange sort of hivemind going on here, with her being able to use all of their far-too-clear eyes to see, and access all their memories, and individually tell apart each spider, they were all somewhat autonomous and intelligent if she wanted them to be. Telepathic link felt like a weak word for it, but it worked.

She'd kind of missed these assholes. A little too much, if she was honest.

"C'mere." She ordered, and extended a finger down.

Like a jumping spider, a single black widow hopped onto her pointer finger, waving its front legs and chirping.

The first one.

Miranda, Elise had named her, before realizing she could theoretically make a million of them and still tell them apart without a name needed, and stopped naming them.

She couldn't help but smile.

"How have you been, you shitty little rascal? How long since you've bitten someone's ankles?"

The legs drooped, then the spider wiggled its body side to side like a stiff dance move, trying to imitate a headshake, ideas and impressions throwing themselves back at her mind, running in a parallel tract she could observe.

"A century or so before the end?" She guessed, and the spider wiggled its butt and head up and down like a see-saw in a nod.

"Oomph, that's rough. Gonna have to set you loose on some poor bastard soon to unwind a bit." She murmured, and felt a giant wave of mock-jealousy and envy roll over her from the table.

She rolled her eyes with a smile. She couldn't help it.

Some Legends had pets that came with them, as a sort of conjoined package, like Quinn and Valor, the scout and her eagle, but those things weren't capable of growing. The animals, that is. They were just an imitation, a perfect projection maybe, so while she could enjoy their company, it did not feel like they were the same, and it did not feel like they had much, if any, real connection to her, Taylor Hebert.

These things could learn and remember new things. More importantly, they weren't Elise's. They adapted to her the first time she tested Elise, almost flawlessly. They had all of the Legend's memories, hers, and Elise's. And they hadn't changed or stagnated one bit, the little guys. So, sue her. She liked her spiders too much. They were her fucking children.

Well, Elise's children. But also hers now. They were vicious as shit and twice as murderous when they were Elise's, but that bitch was dead now, so she could let them be as silly as she wished them to be.

"That goes for all of you, shush. You'll get to bite some ankles eventually." She reassured, and lowered her hand for Miranda to jump off and join her sisters and brothers.

"But for now…" She trailed off, visualizing what she wanted in her head, even adding faint traces of patterns on the whole thing, visualizing with slightly-creepy focus how Lisa's figure and proportions looked like, how hers looked like.

"Make these, if you can? In say… hm… Is seven hours enough?" She asked, and cracked open a pained eye to her swarm.

She watched her spiderlings curl into a ball and roll themselves into the middle of the table, before forming a small circle in the center. A single spider skittered into the middle, and then began making odd gesticulations with its front legs as it waved them around and chittered and hissed at the observing masses, who chittered back, pretending to have a heated debate on the topic.

She had to turn away lest her smile and building snickers turn into a laugh.

Curse her pounding fucking headache. Her kids were trying to make her feel better and she couldn't even laugh at their antics.

"Alright, alright, enough theater, chop chop, get to work." She said, and went to go sit in the armchair and meditate to slow down how fast the headache would build.

She'd already expended all the power she was going to, but even not doing anything as a Legend tended to expend some of her soul power, and her soul was for some fucking reason attuned to her mind instead of her heart.

Probably because the summon core replaced her heart with a disco-ball looking thing, but yeah, not pleasant. She'd still have preferred to have intense heartburn instead.

It was a negligible amount, but seven hours of negligible drain was still seven hours.

It was three and a half hours into their work that the messages she was getting from her swarm began distracting her, and she blinked out of her meditation, staring at the chittering swarms half-way done with climbing onto each other and hopping around to make the suits.

They had access to her memories, so it wasn't exactly impossible to consider they might do this as a joke, but she was still struck between bursting into laughter and sputtering in disbelief.

"Are you guys seriously - hey! No unionizing! Back to work!" She scolded, mock-scowling at the swarm teased of forming protests by sealing all the juice bottles in her fridge shut, her lips wiggling into a smile despite her attempts otherwise.

The rascals could sense her mirth, unfortunately.

A spider jumped out of the fray, waving its strand of silk in the air as it mentally projected ' viva la resistance!' in a valiant, silent war cry, and dramatically threw its string onto the table. Or the floor, for them.

The spiders all paused, raising their legs in the air, hissing and hopping in support like an angry mob.

She couldn't help it.

She let out the most undignified snurk-snort sound she'd ever heard, and clamped her hands over her mouth, grimacing in pain as she desperately tried to choke her laughter down and not agitate her headache, a losing battle she realized, when tears of mirth began to flow down her red face.

It only got worse when the spiderlings pretended to have a worker's rally on her half-finished suits, making a platform using their bodies while Miranda sat in the center, waving her front legs in anger and stomping to emphasize her chirps.

"Gg-geahah- gehhtt-" She trailed off into a groaning, laughing wheeze, then gave up, just mentally projecting to tell them to get back to work, for real this time.

Seeing that she was serious, the little show they put on for her amusement immediately stopped, and like a well-oiled, creepy machine with about eight and a half thousand legs, they began to weave again.

She really loved these little guys. They were one of the most unique Legend interactions she'd checked so far, and with how funny she found spiders to be, they were perfect stress relief. Even if they were technically a part of her, and she technically just made herself laugh, it was pretty… whatever. Nobody here to judge her for it.

Shame she couldn't keep them out while using any other Legend.

Oh well, Sile should have made that black widow box order by now, she could just take those over, give them commands, mutate them a bit, and she'd have roughly the same result, without the ability to resummon them if they died, nor the individuality and semi-intelligence. Good enough for her purposes.

She swapped to the Rune of Inspiration, and settled back down, mildly brainstorming as she let the clicking and shuffling calm her down.

As she slowly got her lungs working right again, she couldn't help but smile, and wonder how Lisa would react to all this.

Maybe she could prank her with the spiders somehow…?

Wait, no, Thinker. Anything other than a jumpscare would instantly make Lisa realize.

Damn.

And bless the Inspiration Rune, because she just realized she could have made Lisa a Brute 1, permanently, with just Lulu alone, and instead just went for a disguise without even considering it. Another bullet point to the list of tasks.

Her head was too fucking swamped…

She had to delegate a bit.

And she had four inactive minions.

Once she was done with the suit, she'd give them some light tasks to do for her, before giving Lisa the more important ones that her power could help her with.

Back to meditating for now. It did help, for some reason.

The light was annoying, and she couldn't swap to Zyra without removing her spiderlings.

Miranda broke off the swarm and skittered up to her face, calmly moving across her closed eyes and weaving a blindfold, having noticed that the light-plants above somewhat bothered her.

Which, of course she did, semi-hivemind and all that.

Both the light tapping on her skin and the tingly bits of silk were calming, so she urged her forth. One spider didn't make a difference, there was something like a thousand of them on the table there. 

The Inspiration Rune brought even more ideas forward, and she was stuck wondering if it was worth it to meditate rather than brainstorm.

With tomorrow being a Sunday and her last day before going into the Wards, meeting her dad's mechanic associate, and finally starting on a proper diet and exercice regimen, she decided to just go for brainstorming. Tomorrow would be a rest day regardless.

She would likely regret this by then, but that was for future her to complain about.

Notes:

is the humorous bit too much? always had this dumb idea of elise's spiderlings being complete goobers and her having to wrangle them into being vicious and intimidating instead, and I channelled that dumb idea into this a bit, i won't lie xd

next chap: PRT