“I have a dad.  Love him to death, even if we haven’t talked lately.  I love reading, my- my mom taught me to love books from the time I was little.  My best friend, it wasn’t so long ago that she helped pull me out of a dark place.  I haven’t heard how she’s doing.  If she’s dead or if she’s here too.  Have you seen her?  Her name’s Tattletale.”

Oh man, Taylor is pulling out all the stops here.

Also, I love that Taylor is finally explicitly saying that Tattle is – was – her best friend. It’s how I’ve thought of her for quite some time now, and it’s good to get confirmation that Taylor does too.

“We aren’t supposed to talk to the patients.”

The patients? Or the villains?

“Why not?”

“While back, some cape sued the rescue workers after a battle much like this.  Hadhayosh, I think.”

Oh, huh, there’s an actual reason behind it?

Well, at least you’ve got her doing the exact thing she’s telling you why she shouldn’t do.

She ignored me, turned her attention to the heart monitor, made a note on the clipboard.

“Please talk to me,” I spoke.  “I have no idea what’s going on, and I feel like I’m losing my mind, here.”

This kind of openness might work, I suppose.

The nurse doesn’t seem all that comfortable with being in here either. This might help put her at ease a bit.

She glanced at me, looked away hurriedly the same reflexive way you’d pull away from a hot stove with your hand.

“Please?  I’m-  I’m pretty scared right now.”

I don’t think this nurse wants to be this impersonal, but has been told to.

Nothing.  She took more notes on the clipboard, noting stuff from the screen the electrode ran to.

“I know you think I’m bad, a villain, but I’m a person, too.”

Ooh, that’s a pretty good one. If nothing else did, this might get through to her a little.

She glanced at me again, looked away, returned her eyes to the clipboard and frowned.  She stopped writing as she glanced up to the monitor, as if she had to find her place or double check her numbers.

We’re not quite there yet, but progress seems to be being made.

To be clear, I was at least half-joking with the comment about Wildbow being a male author potentially being a part of the reason Taylor describes girls/women in terms of attractiveness or bust size. I think Wildbow is the kind of writer who’d stay away from doing that kind of thing without a legitimate reason (and he has at least one in this case).

Slander was not what I intended with that comment.

The chain of my manacle clinked taut as I yanked my right hand forward angrily.  The pain that caused me in my midsection stopped me from doing it again.

Ow.

A girl in a nurse’s uniform pushed the curtain aside to enter.  I identified her as a girl rather than a woman because she barely looked older than me.

If not for the fact that Taylor knows how she looks both in and out of costume and would probably identify her as such immediately, I’d suspect this of being Panacea.

Oh, and the pointlessness of Panacea changing into a nurse’s uniform.

Bigger in the chest, for sure, but baby faced, petite.

…it really does seem like the chest and/or general attractiveness tend to be the first things Taylor looks to when describing girls/women.

As a third theory for why that is, on top of “Taylor’s own insecurities with her appearance leads her to immediately compare other women favorably to herself” and “Taylor is bi”… I’m acutely aware that this is written by a male author. 😉

Her brown hair was in a braid, and the lashes of her downcast eyes were long as she stepped to the foot of my bed, picked up a clipboard.  She was very carefully not looking my way.

“Hi,” I spoke.

What has the PRT been telling her, I wonder?

I had suspicions they might come even years after I left high school behind me for good. 

Not unlikely.

I hear a lot of people still have school nightmares well into adulthood, and that’s in many cases without regular traumatic experiences.

But that state of mind in the nightmares?  I felt like that now.  Trying to keep from panicking, knowing that no matter what I did, I was counting on luck and forces beyond my control to not ruin my day, my week, my month.  Ruin my life.

Yeah, uncertainty and helplessness are shitty feelings.

I’d done the heroic thing.  Drawn Leviathan away from those in the shelter who were still alive.  A part of me was proud of myself.  The rest of me?  Faced with the idea of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair?  I felt like an idiot of epic proportions.

At least the sacrifice of the use of your legs wouldn’t be in vain.

I’d bought into the idea of the grand, noble gesture, and in the here and now it felt like I had to convince myself that what I had done mattered.  It sure as shit didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

Maybe not to the PRT, at least.

Another major counterpoint to that theory: We know well by now that the specifics of the powers are hereditary, though mutating.

Which, by the way, probably explains just why trigger events are so much easier for second-gen parahumans. While their parents had to go through something incredibly upsetting to get the powers in the first place, the kids have mutations of those powers in them all along and just need a trigger event (that matches the powerset, if that is indeed a thing) to unlock them.

…is flight and supernatural intimidation against the rules of our world’s basketball?

krixwell-liveblogs:

What if Taylor falls asleep here and wakes up at the PRT HQ?

Wait, no, that doesn’t work, the PRT HQ was destroyed by Leviathan.

I guess they have to have somewhere else to keep the newly arrested villains, though.

I hated this.  Hated not knowing, not having any information about what had just happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.

It always comes back to this, doesn’t it. Information. Knowledge. The insecurities and risks tied to not having that, the things having it can let you get away with, the power you wield against the world when you know what you’re up against well.

On the other hand, Wildbow killed off the one character who by all means should have the most of this power in this Arc.

Unless it turns out I’m wrong and Taylor was right to doubt the armband’s definition of “losses”, but while I’m not happy that Tattletale seems to be gone, that would feel like something of a cop-out at this point. Her death was well-written. Let her have that.