11

Disillusion 2.2

When I'd calmed down enough to look around and take stock of where I was, it was to realize that my legs had carried me much farther than I'd thought they had. Somehow, they'd taken me halfway into downtown, and around me, there were businessmen and women in expensive suits and skirts scurrying about on their lunch breaks. A few of them looked at me askance as they passed, as though asking me why I wasn't in school or judging me a hooligan because of it, but most of them paid me no mind as they walked briskly to restaurants and fast food places to grab a quick bite to eat.

For a moment, I felt lost and didn't quite know what to do. The idea of returning to Winslow didn't appeal — I was going to face something much worse than a few unkind words, next time I saw the Trio, and part of the reason I'd left the school was because their revenge would have been swift and painful if I'd stayed — but I didn't feel like explaining to Dad why I'd skipped out if he came home early.

The longer I could avoid that conversation, the better.

That didn't leave me with too much to do, though. I could maybe have gone over to the Boardwalk, but I passed through there every morning on my runs, and the novelty sort of wore off after a while. I could have gone to a coffee shop and sat down with one of the novels I'd rescued after Friday's "shower," but I wasn't sure I'd be able to focus on it enough to enjoy it — not after what had just happened, at any rate.

Maybe I should get some training in? I had been focusing more on magic, lately, so I'd neglected to finish mastering my martial arts. On the other hand, there was that project I needed to finish, so maybe what I should spend the rest of my day doing was trying to get that done? I'd certainly feel a lot safer, once it was completed.

Right then, my stomach rumbled, as though to chime in and offer its own opinion of what I should be doing, next. I reached for my backpack so I could grab my lunch, but as I bent down, a crumpled piece of paper slipped out of my pocket and fell to the ground. I grabbed it, too, and as I slung my bag over my shoulder, I deftly unfolded the paper with one hand.

A ten-digit number was written at the top — a cellphone number, I remembered — and beneath that, a little ways down, was a screenname: LittleMissDelphi.

Tattletale.

That was right; she said she'd wanted to meet me again today, after school. I'd meant to shoot her a message while I was on the computer earlier, but I'd gotten so sidetracked by all of the comments and praise in the Lung thread that I'd just forgotten about it.

Well, no reason not to, right? I didn't really have anything else to do today, so I might as well just skip right to the part I'd been most looking forward to — not that it was much of a competition, considering what a usual day at Winslow tended to look like for me. Didn't hurt that she'd been infinitely better company in maybe half an hour than my classmates had been in nearly two years.

To the library, then. I'd log in on the computers there and see if I couldn't get Tattletale to meet up with me a little earlier than planned.

My stomach rumbled again and I grimaced. After, of course, I found somewhere I could sit down and eat my lunch.

I folded the little piece of paper up neatly and stuck it back deep into my pocket, to make sure it would stay there, then I shifted my bag around to keep it from slipping and set about finding somewhere to eat.

In the end, I found a little coffee shop with an outside terrace, where maybe two dozen other people were sitting down to eat. I pulled up a table and grabbed my lunch out of my backpack, half expecting someone to show up and either throw me out or ask me why I wasn't in school. Fortunately, no one bothered me, so I got to enjoy my food in peace — a rare thing in Winslow, where I usually had to sneak away somewhere hidden and pray I wouldn't be discovered as I ate as quickly as I could.

Once I was done, I slung my bag back over my shoulder, then ordered a coffee on my way out to show my thanks for letting me stay and eat. I nursed that — it wasn't bad, but it wasn't the best coffee I'd ever had, either — on my way over to the library and tossed the cup out in the bin outside.

When I made it inside, just after one o'clock, it was to find the place mostly empty. Anyone who might have come here to spend their lunch hour in quiet had already gone back — to work, to school, or whatever they did with their days — so the line of computers on the second floor was almost abandoned. Only one other person was up there, an older woman who paid me no mind as I sat down and glanced around to make sure I had some privacy.

It wasn't hard to find the username LittleMissDelphi once I got onto PHO. She was active in quite a few threads, mostly dealing with capes and theories about their powers. A couple of her posts I read, mostly out of curiosity, consisted of logical arguments about why this cape had this power, not this power, but this was why people might get confused.

That wasn't the only kind of thing she wrote, of course, but I didn't have all day to read through her history or something, so I scrolled back up to her name, clicked on it, and a drop down menu appeared. I clicked on 'Send a private message.'

Immediately, it gave me three options: make a new account, sign up with an already existing account, or send anonymously, and for a moment, I was just going to send it anonymously. Something stopped me, though. A thought. Something Tattletale had said the previous night, about how capes could get railroaded because they didn't have good enough (or any) control over the narrative.

That…was a problem. I'd beaten Lung, met Armsmaster, and he and Miss Militia had both left me on good terms, but even despite that, some people in the Lung thread earlier had suggested that maybe I'd done it because I was with the Empire or wanted to join them. A few had said I was doing it for street cred, so that I could muscle my way in on Lung's territory. They'd been vastly outnumbered by the well-wishers, but there were still those few who'd looked at it and imagined some nefarious purpose.

That was the issue, when it came down to it. I was more aware than perhaps anyone else exactly how easily public perception of a hero could change, how thin the line between being a hero and a villain was when it came to what people saw and believed, and Tattletale had only driven that home last night. If no one came out to say I was a hero, to clarify my alignment and let everyone know I was a force for good, then anyone could say anything and make any claim about me they liked.

I'd lived with that sort of thing for nearly two years, in my everyday life. Sophia, Emma, and Madison were the ones controlling the narrative of my life at Winslow, making me out to be worthless or a druggy or a slut or any other number of vile things. I couldn't stop it at Winslow, but that didn't mean I had to let it happen as Apocrypha, too.

If I joined the Wards, it wouldn't be a concern. I'd have the Protectorate and the PRT handling any concerns about narrative or public image, releasing official statements and defending me from lies and slander. What if I didn't, though? I still wasn't absolutely sure about it, so even if I was leaning towards it now, my final decision might just be to keep my independence, and then it would be a concern. I'd have to handle my own publicity, and that would mean engaging the people on PHO and giving my side of the story.

Maybe it was a little bit heavy to think about all of that just because of a sign in prompt, but even if not then, I'd have to worry about it eventually.

I opened a new tab and set about creating my new account. I filled out all of the necessary details (just a few scattered things, like date of birth, email, and password), went through the registration process under the username "Apocrypha" (surprisingly, it wasn't taken). The longest part of the whole thing was waiting for the confirmation email to show up in my inbox, and even that only took about twenty or thirty seconds. There was something about cape verification included, where you had to send the mods a picture of yourself in costume using your powers, but I decided to wait and handle that part later, when I had a little more privacy to transform and show off.

Once it was all done, I went back to my first tab, refreshed, clicked back on LittleMissDelphi, and clicked 'Send a private message' again.

And for the next ten minutes, I sat there, staring dumbly at the screen. I couldn't think of what, exactly, to say or how to say it. Tattletale didn't strike me as being really formal and stuffy, so wording it like a job application or something would just be strange, but it wasn't like we were close friends and I could just go, "Hey, want to meet up?"

In the end, I went for something simple and probably really timid, but I was really out of my comfort zone and didn't have any other idea for how to contact her.

[Hi. So, you said you wanted to meet up with me today and finish our conversation…?]

I was waiting for maybe three minutes before the reply came in.

[Hi, Apocrypha,] the message read. [Yeah. I'm available whenever you are. Is three o'clock good for you?]

I typed back, [Sure. Three o'clock works fine. Where are we meeting?]

[Do you remember where we met last night?] asked LittleMissDelphi. [I figured we'd meet up there, then head to this little coffee shop just off of the Boardwalk. Casual clothes, if you know what I mean. That all right with you?]

Casual clothes, which had to mean meeting in our civilian identities.

For a moment, I wanted to say no. Maybe it was just paranoid of me, but I was a little uneasy about the idea of showing up to a meeting with another cape as plain, ordinary Taylor Hebert. Especially since that wasn't quite done, so I was actually just as squishy as any other human being, right now. Even though Tattletale and I had been friendly enough last night, a couple minutes of amicability did not an ironclad trust make.

Eventually, though, I managed to convince myself, mainly by reminding myself that she was the one to suggest it, so she was going to be showing up in her civvies, too. Or so I thought. How could I know? I couldn't. The compromise was that I would go there and see if she actually showed up out of costume, and if she did, then I could extend her this much trust, if only because it would mean she was risking just as much as I was.

[Sure,] I wrote back to her. [That works.]

[See you then! ;D]

For an instant, I hesitated. Then, seized by a sudden boldness, I parroted her line from last night back to her.

[It's a date.]

I waited for a response for a few more minutes, but none showed up, so I spent another minute or two rechecking the Lung thread I'd looked at earlier — it was up to nearly three-hundred pages, now — then signed off. I grabbed my bag from where I'd set it on the floor, slung it back over my shoulder, and then I left.

It took me about forty-five minutes, all told, to get back to the place where I'd fought Lung and met Tattletale — Mason Street, the post on PHO had said, although with most of the signs having their paint stripped off from the fire, it was a little harder to rely on those — and I stopped just one street over, rather than marching up to there boldly. I checked my watch to see how much time I had, and it said two-thirty, which gave me half an hour until I was supposed to meet her.

I glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then I slipped into an alleyway, changed into my base Breaker form, and used my increased strength and speed to leap up onto a nearby building — I managed to reach the second story fire escape. From there, I climbed up to the roof and sat down.

A moment of concentration was all it took, and I had Installed Medea again. Maybe another caster type would've done just as well, but I had to admit, Medea was growing on me, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that I could make comparisons between how she had been dragged through the mud and how I had, too.

What came next didn't even require some of her Divine Words. I just channeled a bit of that energy she used, held my hand out over the roof, and pushed. Like a weed on fast-forward, a few seconds later, a jagged crystal roughly twice the size of a baseball had formed beneath my palm. A photonic crystal — not a philosopher's stone, but from what I remembered from Flamel, one of the steps to making one.

From there, it took maybe five minutes to shape it and breathe a transient, artificial life into my creation, and as I lifted it gently into my hands, the crystalline bird that was my new familiar turned its head with a deceptively fluid motion to look up at me with blank eyes. No spirit, no soul, just a rudimentary intelligence more like a computer program than a living thing.

Traditional methods involved the use of an actual animal. Cats and birds were the most common, but just about any animal could be turned into a familiar, if you had the skill. Medea preferred her Dragon Teeth, but those were too conspicuous to use in broad daylight, and I wanted a scout, not an army to fight my enemies with. For that matter, I wasn't looking for a permanent assistant or anything, either, just a temporary set of eyes to help keep me safe. If I decided on something more lasting later, then that was for later.

The last thing necessary was to enforce my control over it. That, too, only took a moment of thought and concentration, a whispered contract, and a few seconds later, I felt my mind open up and connect to the bird in my hands.

It was nothing special. No epiphany or vast increase in visual acuity or anything. No, "I was blind, but now I see." Just a…link, for lack of a better term. A bridge between my mind and the basic intellect of the crystal sitting on my palms. If I pushed, I could share its vision, so I closed my eyes, threw that connection wide open, and after a brief moment, barely a second, of disorientation, I was staring up at myself.

It was…weird. There was a strange disconnect between my sight and my sense of self. Medea wasn't bothered, but to me, it was still a bit off-putting. I had to take several long minutes just to get used to awkwardness of the perspective, of the world being so much bigger, of looking up at myself, so tall and almost overbearing.

I didn't have that much time, though. Tattletale was going to be showing up, soon, if she wasn't there already. Fortunately, even though I could have taken manual control of my new familiar, it still had enough intelligence to know how to fly all on its own, so when I gave it the command to take off and scout out the area on Mason Street, it spread its wings and went without issue.

It would take some adjustment, having a bird's eye view of everything. It wasn't at all like just looking down from the top of a building — it was the constant motion that made it different, the constant moving forward, the jerking as wings flapped to maintain altitude and flight speed. Things looked, at once, both bigger and smaller, like I was above all of the problems below, but at any moment, they could reach up and swallow me.

It did give me a really good view of what Lung and I had done, last night. The damage looked even worse in the daylight, where shadows and darkness couldn't hide the scars of our battle. A feeling of unease and not a little guilt churned in my stomach — like I'd thought before, if this had happened downtown, even this devastation would have been so much worse, and so many people would probably have died in the crossfire. Every broken wooden beam would instead have been a bone, every crumpled house, a family that would either be homeless or dead, and every patch of melted road, a person forever scarred or maimed.

I couldn't think about that now, though. I had a reason I was here, after all, so I focused back on my original goal.

The first circuit around the street was done from up high, way above the roofline, to check for an ambush or some group waiting for me to show up. There was no one. The second circuit was done lower, to look through the alleyways and check again to make sure I wouldn't be pounced on the moment I went down there. At last, I had it go lower, about thirty-five feet up, and check on that meeting spot.

My familiar made virtually no noise as it swept over the street, but for a soft, keening whistle as the wind soared over its wings. No chirping that would draw attention. Even so, as I watched it make its circuit and saw a blonde girl standing in the exact spot we'd met last night, she paused and looked up from her phone and seemed to catch sight of it. She even offered it a wave and a grin, as though she were greeting a friend she'd been waiting for.

The girl was tall and slender and obviously took care of herself. She was dressed in casual, everyday clothes: a black shirt with a stylized purple eye in the center of the chest and a simple denim skirt that went down to her knees. Thrown over her shoulder was a satchel, a beige thing made of some kind of thick, hardy fabric, more like something someone might carry a laptop in than a purse.

My familiar was too far away to get a better look at the fine details, but this seemed to be Tattletale, and she had, actually, come in civilian clothes. I pursed my lips in my real body, then commanded my bird to get in closer. It made another half circuit of the street, then swooped down, and as it came to her, the girl lifted up one hand in offering, so I ordered it to perch itself on her outstretched finger.

"Hey there, little guy," she said quietly, still grinning. "Or girl? No, neither, huh? You must be Apocrypha's."

She had green eyes, I noticed, deep, bottle green eyes. There was a smattering of freckles across her nose and under her eyes, where they would have been hidden by her mask, last night. Her hair, now that my familiar was close enough to see, was done in a loose braid. She was…actually really pretty. The kind of girl Emma would have hung around with.

As my familiar quirked its head to one side in a distinctly avian manner, Tattletale gently lifted her hand up and started examining it from other angles.

"You're made of crystal," she muttered. "Not diamond — hell, that would be expensive — not glass, not sapphire… Maybe quartz? That still doesn't seem right, though…"

She let her hand lower back down and stared at me…at my familiar directly in the eyes. The grin took on a somewhat embarrassed tilt and she gave a rueful chuckle.

"And you can hear me, can't you, Apocrypha?"

In my real body, I startled, but my familiar didn't move at all. Reeling from the surprise, I had to sit there for several long seconds and wonder: How the hell did she know?

"Or maybe you can't?"

The words drew me back to her, and when I refocused on my familiar's sight, Tattletale had leaned in closer, frowning.

"I'm pretty sure you can see me, at least," she said. "This thing doesn't have any vocal cords, so I doubt it can give an oral report when you call it back. Plus, it's got no personality, no real…intelligence. Just enough to move and take orders, right? On the other hand, powers are pretty bullshit…"

She tilted her head to one side, eyes narrowing.

"But your powers are all about mythological heroes and stuff," she mused. "This is…wizard-y stuff, right? Familiars or something like that. I'm not an expert, but there are a few witches that I can think of from legends —"

How dare you?!

The word stung something inside of me, something that wasn't exactly me, and I had to grit my teeth against the surge of rage that welled up from inside my soul. My familiar suddenly jerked off of Tattletale's fingers and took flight, and I didn't care if it scratched her with its talons in the process. As it left, I barely heard her murmur to herself, "Guess I said something I shouldn't have…"

When it returned to me, I took a moment to breathe out and focus myself, just so that I wouldn't obliterate it in my anger, then I gave it one final command — to go home and hide in the gutter or under the porch until I got back. I'd figure out what to do with it then, whether I wanted to improve it to something more permanent or just dismantle it.

After it was gone, I took another couple seconds to calm down, then released my Install and sat there, stunned, as the anger vanished with it. All of that, all of that rage and indignation, it was all from Medea and all over a single, innocent word? Not even something meant as an insult, just a simple, innocuous word that had come to mean "female magic user" in modern culture?

I lifted my hand up to my chest, and I felt the phantom of that anguish and fury still fading. That was…wow. Medea really felt that strongly about it?

After another minute or two, I pulled myself to my feet, walked over to the edge, and let myself drop down to the alleyway below. The building was barely three stories up, and if I was a normal person, that probably would've been enough to seriously hurt, but in my base Breaker form, I landed with…well, it wasn't exactly catlike grace, but it was graceful enough that I didn't make more than a muffled thump as I hit the ground.

I took another moment or two to collect myself and try to squash the nervousness swirling in my belly, then I let my powers go and became normal, ordinary Taylor Hebert again, I squared my shoulders, mustered my courage, and stepped out onto the street.

Tattletale was nursing her right index finger as I came upon her, and immediately, her head swiveled around to look at me.

"Hi," she said a little ruefully. "Listen, I'm sorry about what I said —"

"No," I cut her off a little gruffly. I cleared my throat. "Sorry. It was my — I mean, Medea doesn't like the word 'witch,' so…"

I trailed off awkwardly. I had the urge to apologize for hurting her, but the lingering remnants of Medea's influence felt that such a light injury was justified.

"Your powers can…" murmured Tattletale. She shook her head and offered me another smile. "It's fine," she assured me. "I'm used to saying things that piss people off, just not doing it accidentally."

She laughed a little and shook her head again lightly. "Let's start over. Hi, I'm Tattletale, but you can call me Lisa."

For a few seconds, I hesitated. This was it, the point of no return. I was about to trust someone I barely knew with my most important secret — who I was beneath the mask. A part of me was screaming not to do it, probably the damaged part that had suffered under the Trio's "gentle affections," but Tattletale had already opened herself up to me, already shown me her face and offered me her name.

I wanted to trust her, too. I wanted it badly. Maybe I should have been more suspicious, maybe I shouldn't have been willing to risk it, but there was a girl here offering her hand and her friendship and I wanted that so badly.

"Taylor," I said at last. "My name is Taylor."

— o.0.O.O.0.o —