Sophia: and we cant get in trouble for just listening to music
Emma: ya
Sophia: cant believe you were her friend.
Oof, if Emma does regret her actions, this one’s gonna sting.
I’ve been thinking the same thing for almost a year, though.
Emma: she was lame but not depressing and lame @ same time.
Who do you think made her “depressing”??
Sophia: what did you say to make her cry? that was awesome. blew my mind.
Oh wait, this is more recent than I thought. This is after Taylor left her bag behind in 2.4, not the first time her bag got stolen (as described in Gestation).
Emma: (SAVED MESSAGE) crying hrself to sleep for a week? she told me she did after her mommy died
Sophia: you r so evil
But did Emma take that as the compliment it was intended as, or did it make her feel supremely shitty?
Emma: ya ya
Sophia: can i use that one on her? saving that one for posterity btw
Emma: won’t have same bite to it. brilliant bit was the suprise. that slow realization abt what i meant.
There are two ways to read this. One is Emma genuinely thinking about how to best hurt Taylor. The other is Emma trying to convince Sophia not to do what Emma regrets doing herself.
Sophia: teach me o master
Emma: lol
Emma: wont be as good but i was thinking of that day. think i remember musc we were listening to when she got the phone call abt her mom.
Now why would you be thinking about that?
But oh cod, are you suggesting playing the same music during an attack?
Emma: we shld wait a while and then see if she cries agn if we play it in hallways or b4 class.
Whether you take pride or shame from it, Emma, you are brilliantly evil.
Some were inane, others he just didn’t understand. Then he found one that gave him pause, that confirmed his suspicions about who Emma was.
It seems like Taylor hasn’t told them about her exact relation to Sophia, though she’s let slip that she knows Sophia’s civilian name and what that was. Mixed with how Taylor acts and talks when Sophia is involved, Regent seems to have put two and two together and figured it out for himself.
Emma: what r u doing with her bag?
Ohhh boy, we’re going way back.
And it actually kinda sounds like Emma wasn’t on board with it? Maybe?
Sophia: am in art class atm. was thinking i can fill it with paint when teach leaves room. put it in lost&found. her art midterm is inside so she might look for it and find it and
Sheesh, always with the art projects.
Sophia: be all yay i found it and then she looks inside and sees its fucked
Emma: lol.
I’m not sure to what extent Emma was on board with what Sophia was doing, but if she wasn’t, she had at least decided to humor the murderous cape whose identity she’d discovered. Given how Sophia reacted to Skitter finding out, that might’ve been a good idea, as far as self-preservation goes.
Doesn’t mean I’m forgiving Emma, but it’s starting to become more understandable.
No text messages had been exchanged on the smart phone, so he dug through the archive of old texts on the crummy old phone. Lots sent to Emma. Some sent to a Madison. Others, relatively few, to a mom, a Terry and an Alan.
I wonder if Madison is in on the secret. I doubt it, which leaves her in the odd position of third civilian wheel, whether she realizes it or not.
When he’d gotten sick of paging through the texts in the order that they’d been sent, he went looking for the saved texts, the messages Sophia had deemed important or noteworthy enough to save from being deleted. What he uncovered was telling.
Some of the ones from Emma?
He had to do more digging to find the rest of the discussions for each message Sophia had saved, in order to get as much a sense of things as he could. It was hard, when each series of texts was in response to some event he hadn’t participated in.
It’s hard, being a kid and trying to make sense of someone else’s text history. It’s hard, and nobody understands.
“Taking this out on patrol? Is that stupidity or arrogance? What if you lost it?” He shook his head, then offered her a dramatic gasp, “What if it got into the wrong hands?” Her voice was far better for the gasp than his own was.
He couldn’t help but chuckle after hearing it.
Hehe!
Or into her own hands under someone else’s control…
This Emma girl was listed in both of the phones. Now he had a strong suspicion as to who it was.
How much did Taylor tell you about Sophia?
A quick read of the received texts gave away Shadow Stalker’s name, but he already knew that. Taylor had let it slip, before.
Ah. That much, at least.
Her pulse was pounding now, and he could feel a growing sense of… what was that? Outrage? She was pissed at the invasion of privacy.
On top of everything else.
He tried a giggle on for size, to see if he could, and to see if it irritated her. It worked on both counts.
Ahaha
“Contacts,” he murmured, pressing a button, “Weld, Clockblocker, Vista, Flechette, Kid Win… boring. Nothing I can work with, here.” Director Piggot? No. Some potential there, maybe, but she was probably on top of this body-snatching situation. Fully informed.
Which leaves the one other contact we know of.
Emma Barnes.
He scrolled down. Beyond the contacts that had been pinned to the top of the list, there was a short list of contacts that were sorted in order of who had been contacted most recently. At the top of the list was an ‘Emma Barnes’.
Here we go. What the hell kind of trouble can Regent cause between these two now?
He checked the other, older phone. No password. A quick examination showed it was her civilian phone.
Ah, hang on, something else to do first. Although maybe he won’t make that call, since he doesn’t seem to know anything about Emma.
I mean, anything he knows that he knows.
One of the phones looked years out of date. The screen was scuffed so badly it was barely readable, and the plastic cover for the plug slot at the bottom was missing. The other was a touch screen smart phone.
I guess the older one might be part of her civilian identity.
He didn’t recognize the make or the model, and the interface when he turned it on and touched the screen was unfamiliar. Special issue from the Wards? Whatever. Not important.
It’s a WardPhone 3, running Android Sentinel.
Or maybe it’s the kind of phone you get in Undertale, with tinkertech allowing it to turn into equipment like a gun or a jetpack.
The smart phone was password protected. That was more Lisa’s thing, but he did have one trick up his sleeve. Holding her fingers above the keypad, he let them follow through with the most natural feeling sequence of numbers, ingrained into the mind-body connection through the habitual repetition of a sequence of movements over weeks or months. Muscle memory.
Niice.
It took two tries. The first felt slightly off at the end. The second was spot on, and was rewarded with a vibration of the phone and a menu.
This Arc and all the opportunities to make hacker voice jokes…
He felt her struggle to open her mouth and respond. He could have let her, by giving her some limited control over her own movements, but he didn’t.
So that is a thing he can do, despite the instance of that last chapter being fake. Got it.
“Right. So I’m taking it upon myself to ensure this all goes smoothly. My teammates have other shit to worry about, and I’m kind of enjoying flexing my powers. So I’m dealing with this situation myself. You and I? We’re going to go another route.”
So what do you have in mind (if the sleeping thing wasn’t a lie)? Murder by suicide? Another way of putting Shadow Stalker out of play?
He fished in her belt and pockets and began withdrawing the contents. He tossed the things he couldn’t use over the edge of the roof. Billfold, spare cartridges for the crossbow, a small knife, spare strings for the crossbows, bandages, keys and a Wards ID card fell to the ground by the side of the gas station, in and near an overflowing dumpster.
Well, that’s gonna be annoying to retrieve, if Sophia does get her body back.
There were plastic cuffs in the belt, but he couldn’t be bothered to fish out every last one and throw them all away. At the right hip, he found two cell phones. Success.
Right… you gonna make a call and ruin Sophia’s agreement with the PRT? No, that wouldn’t work, they know about Regent’s control over Sophia.
“Almost forgot you were in there,” he murmured, barely loud enough for her to catch. Not that it mattered. She was as aware of the movements of her mouth as he was.
Yeeah, let’s not forget that Regent is essentially keeping Sophia prisoner in her own body.
He could mouth the words and she would probably understand. He smirked for her benefit as much as his own.
“So. Bet you’re wondering what’s up,” he commented. “Funny thing about having this control over you, I can feel your emotions, your body’s reactions.
Of all the people to open up to.
Like a really, really good polygraph test. I wasn’t even half done saying my piece back there when I caught on to the fact that you were too pissed and too angry to back down and walk away.
…of course she was.
There’s no way you’re going to leave town if I let you go, right?”
Yeah, no, probably not. She’d be terrified of being controlled again, probably, but her anger would override it and have her seeking out Regent to kill him.
Shadow Stalker wasn’t emotionally dulled. Her emotions were rich, uninhibited. She was passionate in her emotions: angry, judgemental.
Oh, absolutely. If I were to define her personality in just a few words, “passionate” would probably be one of them.
Even the negative feelings were something he could savor in their own way. He wasn’t really experiencing them – it was more of a very involved spectator role. Her fear was thrilling in the same way a fantastic scary movie was, with the detail and the immersion cranked up to eleven.
Huh, interesting.
He leaped straight up into the air, then activated the shadow state. When she was as high as she would get, he had her grip her cloak in her hands and use it to guide her descent so she could land atop the roof of the gas station. He stopped, stretched her arms.
Heh. Stretching someone else’s arms isn’t something you come across often.
She was breathing hard, but not as much as his Alec-self would be after even half as much running. He could feel the endorphins being pumped into her body from the hard exercise, and he was all the more aware of it because he had his other body to compare to. She was an athlete.
I suppose being able to compare and contrast directly lets you be more aware of your own body, for better or worse.
He ran her hands down her chest, felt her breasts, the muscles of her stomach.
Sophia’s desire to kill Regent probably just skyrocketed way past the point it already was at.
Stretching once more, he clenched her hands, felt the muscles in her arms flex. He felt her shudder in revulsion.
She’s being groped by her own body.
