The second floor, as I liked to think of it, was Skitter’s.  It was for my costumed self.

Ahh, I see. You’ve got the first floor for employees, second floor for the boss’s offices and such, and third floor where the boss can be her civilian self without risking (too much) that the employees come upstairs and catch her unawares.

It still needed more than a few things to complete it.  I flipped a switch in the stairwell, and tinted flourescent lights lit up on the undersides of the shelves that ran along two adjacent walls, floor to ceiling.

Nice.

Each shelf was lined with terrariums and backed by strategically positioned mirrors so that the light filtered through the front of the terrariums and into the room.  Only a few were occupied, but they each had the same general contents – a layer of dirt and pieces of irregularly shaped wood.

I like this. Seems fitting to surround the bug girl with decorative bugs like this. 🙂

Maybe Coil should try something similar himself, keeping a large snake in his inner sanctum. It’s cliché for a reason.

Ostensibly to protect these new buildings until people started buying up the properties, each had been set up with heavy metal shutters to seal the windows and wall off the front.  It made the building dark, with only faint streams of light filtering in through the slats at the top of each shutter.

Well, good for illicit activities, I suppose. Or for sticking tons of bug swarms in.

The topmost floor was mine and mine alone.  Taylor’s.  It was living space, with a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.

Sweet!

I take it the lower floors are for your eventual employees, then?

The bedroom was spacious enough to serve as a living room as well as a sleeping area.  The first things I’d done after Coil’s men had unloaded the furniture and supplies was to hook up an internet connection and computer and get my television mounted on a wall and connected to a satellite.

Good priorities.

No, really.

At least I could see.

I walked through my new base of operations wearing an oversized t-shirt and a pair of underwear.  Not exactly fitting attire for a supervillain.

Oh jeez, this makes it so Taylor’s gonna need a lot more time to change in and out of her costume, doesn’t it. Her mask lenses are prescription – where before she could just take off her regular glasses, she now needs to start wrangling contact lenses in order for the mask lenses to not be all wrong.

Anyway, more to the point – looks like we’ll be spending some of this chapter exploring the Skittercave.

No… the Hive.

My new abode was three stories tall, which made it taller than Grue or Bitch’s places, which were the only ones I’d seen thus far, but it was narrow.

Nice.

It’s not shaped like an S, right?

A cafe had stood here, before, but it had been flattened by one of the first waves to hit the city.  

Now the only thing on the menu is pancakes.

Coil owned at least one of the companies that was managing the restoration and reconstruction efforts, and over the past two and a half weeks, as his crews had started clearing and rebuilding on the Boardwalk, he’d had them set up some buildings, all squashed together.  When the Boardwalk was fixed up, these same buildings would be at the westmost edge of the same block that had the stores, restaurants and coffee shops.

Huh, neat.

If the Boardwalk ever got going again, they would be prime real estate.

And one of those buildings is your base, did I understand that correctly?

I hated contacts so, so much.  I’d tried them in middle school, at Emma’s recommendation, and they had never felt comfortable.

Well, that rules out personal preference.

That, and I had never figured out how to put them in properly.  It seemed like ninety-nine out of a hundred times, they flipped inside out to cling to my fingertip instead of sticking to my eye.

I’ve never tried lenses, and I don’t want to. Besides feeling like glasses are part of my identity, this is one of the reasons. I don’t trust myself to put them on properly and I really don’t want something on my eye, especially if it’s not properly placed. And then there’s the stories of lenses getting stuck under eyelids and such…

Just, no thanks.

True to form, it took me four minutes to get the contacts in, and I found myself blinking every two seconds after I did have them in.

Sounds about right.

With this in mind, I sat up and tossed the sheet aside.  I reached for my glasses, by the alarm clock, then stopped.

Hm?

Instead of putting on my glasses, I stood and made my way to the bathroom adjacent to my room.

Gonna put on your mask instead?

Alongside fresh supplies of toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, tweezers, shampoo, conditioner and all that, I had a small box with packages of disposable contact lenses, daily use.

Oh! Huh. Ditching the glasses, are we?

Why? Just because you feel like it, or is there some deeper reason, like associating the glasses with your old life?

Or maybe it’s to throw off facial recognition software? Taylor by default doesn’t know Dragon knows her face and is looking for it via that kind of tool, but she might’ve guessed something like that based on Dragon’s parting words, or maybe Lisa found that out with those same parting words as basis. (If there’s any chance Taylor can guess something based on something, there’s a bigger chance Lisa’s power, supercharged Sherlock, can tell her about it.)

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.