None of that was even touching on that growing terror over the fact that, hey, I couldn’t feel my legs, and it wasn’t getting better.

Yeeeah. Let’s hope Panacea pities the fool bug, or some other healer or medical personnel can help out on that front.

If my back was really broken, it could mean my best case scenario was surgery and years of physical therapy, years of crutches and wheelchairs.

And explaining what happened to Danny, for that matter. Whether you tell the truth or lie, that sounds miserable. Question is, miserable moment or miserable life?

Taylor has enough of the latter already without having to live a lie towards her dad while recovering from paralysis. Besides, isn’t it better if Danny knows that it happened while she was protecting people and the city, even it does mean telling him she made some questionable and dangerous choices leading up to that?

I guess what I’m saying is Taylor and Danny both deserve better than Taylor lying about this.

My worst case scenario would be never walking again.  I didn’t have a power that would help too much on that front.

Tell that to mister Sha “wheelchair of bugs” Rks.

It would mean the end of my career as a cape, never having sex with a boy the natural way, and never going for another morning run.

“the natural way”

Taylor, the girl who thinks of almost everything, has clearly already considered her options here.

My arm hurt, and hanging from the manacle made that ten times as bad.  My back was the worst thing, a slow, steady, pain that terminated in my midsection.

Owwww.

It seemed to build in intensity every second I paid attention to it, settling into a dull blistering of pain when I focused my attention elsewhere.

Try not to think about elephants. Or the Game. Which both I and all of you readers just lost.

(By the way, it just occurred to me that the Game is a lot like inter-continental nuclear war. The only winning move is not to play.)

If I didn’t focus on keeping my breathing steady and deep, I found that I unconsciously held my breath to minimize the pain.  That only made it worse when I did have to breathe again, because it brought tightness in my throat and chest, along with agonizing coughing fits.

Ouch.

All of the adrenaline, emotions and endorphins that had been building since I first heard the sirens, maybe even before them – when I learned about Dinah Alcott – made for one hell of a rush.

Oh yeah, there’s been a lot going on over the last few hours.

More relevant to the present, it made for one hell of a mental wipeout as I came down from the rush.  A low point to equal the ‘high’.

So essentially, the cape life is… “intoxicating” enough to give Taylor a hangover.

The background noise of screams, shouted orders of doctors and nurses, a hundred heart monitors beeping out of sync and my ‘cell’ of three curtained ‘walls’ cutting me off from everything else?   Didn’t help.

Oof, yeah, that doesn’t exactly sound very conducive to getting over it.

Granted, I fortunately don’t have personal experience with this particular kind of mental wipeout, whether that means the wipeout following the high of fighting a monster that killed over fifty people over the course of a single chapter, or the alcohol-induced kind I just half-jokingly compared it to.

(Or do I have the former kind of experience…? You don’t know. For all you know, I could be a vigilante superhero billionaire.)

“Please-” I tried again, looking to the PRT uniform, but he was pushing his way past the curtain, leaving my company.

Leaving me chained up.  Alone.

Well. This certainly is a development.

I looked up the Hippocratic Oath to see if it mentioned this kind of behavior. It doesn’t seem to (not that it’s legally binding these days anyway), though on the bright side, I did notice that the original oath was sworn in the name of – among other medical deities – the original Panacea.

“My other arm’s broken, please don’t move it,” I pleaded.

He gripped it anyways, and I couldn’t help but scream, strangled, as he pulled it to one side, clasped a manacle down on my wrist, hooked the other side of the manacle to the second pole.

Well fuck you too.

“What-” I started to ask a nurse, as I forced myself to catch my breath, stopped as she turned her back to me and pulled the curtain closed at the foot of the bed, walked past it.

Great. You’re great human beings, you know that? Simply fantastic.

“Listen, my friend, Tattletale, do you know-”

“She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand.  “Designation Master-5, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis.  No super strength.”

Nice.

Arthropodovoyance is a clunky word, but a pretty good description of her ability to sense and sense through arthropods. Arthropodokinesis less so, technically, because that sounds more like she directly moves the bugs rather than making them move themselves.

The nurse nodded, “Thank you.  Handle it?”

The man in a PRT uniform holstered his gun and stepped up to the bed.  He grabbed my right wrist, clasped a heavy manacle around it, fixed it to a vertical metal pole by the head of the bed.

Damn it.