I was also worried I wouldn’t earn Coil’s trust and respect.  Until this was resolved, I wouldn’t be able to rest, take it easy, or have a day to myself.  Not in good conscience.

Any minute spent taking it easy is a minute spent not working to save Dinah?

Depending on what happened, it might be a long, long time before I could relax again.

This really isn’t healthy, Taylor.

What worried me more than anything was the idea that I might save Dinah, only to find that Coil had broken her spirit or her will to the point that she couldn’t go back to her old life.

Oof, yeah.

I worried that, like in my nightmare, I would be too late.

Too late to save her from major irreversible consequences, including but not limited to death.

My alarm clock sat on the ground by my inflatable mattress.  I picked it up and turned it around so the I could see the green numbers of the digital display.  Five forty in the morning.

Almost time for a morning run, perhaps?

Maybe she’ll run into the watchful gaze of the dragon.

Time to wake up, I supposed.  There was no way I was going to be able to fall asleep again in the next few hours.  It wasn’t just the idea of having another nightmare.  The dream had left me with a feeling of an impending deadline.

Ah, yeah. I did mention saving Dinah in time.

How long could Dinah be expected to hold on?  I doubted Coil was taking bad care of her, so she wouldn’t die of malnutrition or overdose on whatever drugs Coil was giving her.  Still, there was a limit to what the human mind could handle.

True that.

How long until Coil pushed her abilities too far?  If she was getting headaches from the use of her power, there was a chance she could suffer more severe issues if pushed to use it more often.

Ah, yeah. Good thing Coil can do half his questions in one reality and half in the other, I guess.

Pain generally signified something was wrong.

She does have a point. That’s literally the entire reason we have pain, and just about all other parahumans we’ve seen have no apparent trouble using their power, even if some uses can lead to sensory overload or backfires.

I guess maybe the headaches could be the beginning of a backfire, with a power that’s got little wiggle room before getting to that point?

Fuck.

It had felt way too real, and it had sucked.  My shirt stuck to me with the damp of my sweat, the room was warm, but I still shivered.

It was really damn convincing to me too. How long did it take before I figured it out?

*counts* About 11-13 paragraphs, depending how you count and where you stop.

It was written largely like Taylor’s narration of real events, except with these smaller and bigger inconsistencies with what we know, peaking with Coil killing Dinah, Taylor sensing Coil’s power, and Coil being Danny. Even at those points, it was still being written the way it would be if it had been real.

If I’d been a bit dumber, I could’ve ended up

genuinely

thinking that Wildbow had just killed off Dinah, put Taylor in Coil’s service as a zombie and revealed that Danny was Coil.

I honestly think this is a fantastic way to write a dream. It’s not how you remember a dream afterwards, but while you’re in it, it does feel quite convincing, and this is first person narration.

■

I woke up, and for a long moment I stared up at the ceiling of my room and reassured myself that it was all a fabrication of my own scumbag mind.

A mind that is remarkably creative and vivid in its fabrications, holy hell.

It had been a nightmare or a terror dream; I wasn’t positive on the differences between the two.

If there are differences, I’ve never heard of the latter, I think.

It was my brain drawing together all my guilt about what we’d done to Shadow Stalker, the role I’d played in Dinah being kidnapped and leaving my dad; knitting it all into some convincing, disturbing scenario.

Ah, yeah, I guess I was on the money about the zombie powder having to do with Regent’s power.

Not the worst I’d had, but there was at least some repetition and familiarity with the usual ones.

Eesh.

I recognized him.  He was someone I knew all too well.

Oh boy, who is she projecting Coil onto, or vice versa? Danny? Mr. Gladly?

They were both tall, thin.  How hadn’t I seen it?  Coil’s costume could must have been designed to highlight his skeletal structure, make him look thinner and more bony.  All it had taken, beyond that, would be an affected change to his voice and different mannerisms.  I’d been unable to see it. 

Mr. Gladly does have wildly different mannerisms to Coil, and I could see him speaking with an affected voice even if he’s not a supervillain trying to hide his identity.

So dumb, so stupid.

I could understand it, too.  He’d been struggling to fix things, watching people failing to find work, knowing it was the city government that was to blame.

Ah, no, we’re going for Danny. Alright! That’s good too, a really good dream punch in the dream gut.

Man, I feel sorry for anyone who made it this far in without catching on.

Also, damn I’m gonna look dumb right now if this isn’t a dream sequence. That’s okay, though, I’m used to looking dumb. 😉

I could remember him telling me how he’d make the city work again, how he had all the answers.  I knew how hungry he was to do it.

Huh. Good work, Taylor’s subconscious. Even her dreams think things through thoroughly and make it kinda work, even though the nature of dreams is such that someone would usually just accept whatever.

He’d gotten powers.  He’d started to put plans into motion so he could do just that.

It actually makes sense, to some extent. Wow.

“Welcome home, pet,” he spoke, and he didn’t speak in Coil’s voice.  The voice I heard was my father’s.

Yeeah, this isn’t exactly how I was expecting to see Danny again for the first time since 6.9. 😛

I didn’t deserve this.

My eyes fell on Dinah.  She still stared at me, eyes wide and unblinking, and I couldn’t help but see the look as accusing.

*safari tour guide voice* And if you look to the right, you’ll see a wild Skitter feeling that if something worse than what’s already going on happens to that Dinah up ahead, it’s the Skitter’s fault for not saving her in time.

I did deserve this.  It was thanks to me that she’d been kidnapped.  Thanks to me that she’d been made into Coil’s slave.  Karma, perhaps, that I’d take her place.

No. Taylor, please. You’re not as culpable in this as you think. It’s on Coil. Hell, you were even actively trying to work against Coil when it happened, even if you were (as far as you knew then) temporarily doing his bidding as part of that. Out of all the Undersiders, I think that makes you the least culpable here.

Well, second least culpable now, though I can’t remember why.

The strength went out of me.  My head hung, and I stared at my feet.

Tears streamed down my face.  I didn’t wipe them away.  I wasn’t sure I could.

Aw.

“Look at me, pet,” Coil instructed, and I did.  I was glad to, like a compliant, eager to please child.  A part of me wanted more orders.  In that drug induced haze, I wanted to lose myself in obeying, wanted to serve.

Alright, now the drugs are starting to kick in for inner Taylor too.

That way, at the very least, I wasn’t to blame for my own actions or the tragic consequences that followed from them.

Ouch.

And here we have the side of Taylor that wants to give in fully to being a villain and Coil employee. The side that wants to say “fuck consequences, fuck culpability, this shit isn’t my problem, I just want to have fun as a villain”.

Coil removed his mask, and I stared.

Yeah, this is just straying further from reality as we go along, as dream sequences tend to do.

So what will we see behind his dream mask? Static? Void? A normal face?

He touched my cheek, brushed a tear away with his thumb.  He stroked my hair, and the gesture felt strangely familiar.  The way his hand settled on the back of my neck and gripped me there didn’t.  It felt… possessive.

Only one thing missing now. The word “pet”.

“Pet,” he intoned, and fresh terror shook me to my core.

Ah, there it is.

“You couldn’t have succeeded.  This was terribly unwise.”

Yeah, no shit.

“Okay,” I murmured.

No, no, no, NO.

And then of course there’s the inner Taylor, who is not “okay” with any of this.

That said, the fact that she has that inner self who is still clear-headed is just even more evidence that this isn’t real. It makes it a lot more like Regent’s body control than like a mind-altering substance. Actually, maybe this doubles as a way for the nightmare to explore Taylor’s feelings about his power?

I waited patiently for him to continue.  The notion of fighting or responding didn’t even occur to me.

This part is much like the original zombies, though, I believe.

Let’s take a moment to analyze, on the assumption that this is a nightmare:

• Everything up to entering the room: Taylor feels like she’s fighting Coil and his lackeys to save Dinah.
• Coil kills Dinah: She feels like it’s fruitless, and whatever she does, Coil will hurt Dinah.
• Knife split: Fighting Coil directly is also fruitless.
• Zombie powder: Instead of saving Dinah, she just ends up becoming a mindless lackey of Coil against her will.

“It strips imbibers of volition and renders them eminently suggestible.  As you can see, I attempted to use it on my pet, and the results were… tragic.  The price of hubris, I suppose.”

In reality, this is absolutely something Coil would use his power for if he were to try it, but Taylor’s subconscious didn’t read Interlude 8b.

He sighed.

“Take off your mask,” he instructed me.

I did.  My hair fell across my face as I let my mask fall to the ground.  My cheeks were wet with tears.  Was that from before, from when I’d first seen Dinah?  Or was I able to cry about my present circumstance, even if I was helpless to do anything about it?

Who knows. I wouldn’t be too surprised about the latter, though.

In one of those rooms, I stabbed Coil in the chest.  There was no satisfaction in doing it, no relief.  I’d lost, I’d failed in every way that counted.  The fact that I’d put him down barely mattered.

And, in fact, it wouldn’t matter at all as long as the other Coil kept from getting stabbed.

In the other room, he stepped back out of reach of my first lunge, raised one hand and blew a handful of pale dust into my face.  While I was blindly slashing in his direction, he grabbed the wrist of my knife hand and held it firm in his bony hand.

What’s that dust? Just powder he carries with him to blind attackers? Or something to do with the “candy”?

That room where I’d succeeded in stabbing him faded away.  The only me that existed, now, was coughing violently.  My knees buckled as I coughed hard enough to bring up my lungs, unable to get the powder out of my nose and mouth.  I pulled at my hand, trying to free it from his grip.  Futile.

Yeah, sorry, you’re fucked.

“Stop,” he ordered me, and my struggles stilled, though I was still finishing my coughing fit.

“Diluted scopolamine,” he spoke, his voice calm, sonorous.  He let go of my wrist, and pushed at the knife in my hand.  I let it drop.  “Also known as Devil’s Breath.  The vodou sorcerers, the Bokor, were said to use this along with the venoms of the puffer fish and other poisons.  With these substances, they could create the ‘zombies’ they were so famous for.  

Oh, huh. Zombie powder, to incapacitate her and make her vulnerable to suggestion.

These zombies of theirs were not raised from the dead, but were men and women who were forced to till fields and perform crude labor for the Bokor.  The uneducated thought it magic, but it was simple chemistry.”

Yep! The idea of zombies as we know them today largely comes from Night of the Living Dead, despite that film calling its monsters “ghouls” and the creator not thinking of them as zombies.

But no.  As I stared at Dinah and registered what I was seeing, I realized the image would be burned into my mind’s eye forever.  She lay on the cot on her side, her eyes open, staring at me, through me.  A bloody froth was drying at one side of her mouth and at the edges of one nostril.

…

Well that’s unpleasant. What did he do? Poison her? If that’s the case, why? Or is this just what she’s like immediately after getting the “candy” (which isn’t that different from poisoning her)? Is she overdosing?

So far, this is questions: the chapter.

I didn’t consider myself a religious person, but I prayed for her to blink, to breathe, to give me some relief from that cold horror that was gripping me.

Is this all Coil fucking with Taylor in a throwaway reality?

I was too late.

My vision practically turned red as I charged Coil, drawing my knife as I ran.  I felt him use his power, and suddenly there were two of him, two of me, two cells with two dead girls named Dinah Alcott.

Okay, that’s not right. Taylor has nothing that should let her sense that, and Coil has no reason to kill Dinah in the alpha reality.

I think this is a very vivid nightmare.