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.

I opened the door, and it was far too loud, creaking, then banging into the wall with a crash despite my last-second attempts to stop its momentum.

Ouch.

The room looked like a prison cell.  It had concrete walls and floor, a cot and a metal sink and toilet.  Coil and Dinah were both there.  I couldn’t say whose presence left me more devastated.

Well, shit.

And even if this is the scrapped timeline, alpha Coil will now know that Taylor tried to do this. Or, maybe that’s why he’s here in the first place, since the timelines’ divergence is defined exclusively in terms of consequences of Coil’s actions in each. Perhaps he decided to be somewhere else in the base in the other timeline, found out Taylor was breaking in in that one, and used that information to go to Dinah in this timeline?

I could say Coil’s presence was the worst thing, because it meant my info was bad.  His power meant I was probably fucked on a lot of levels, that the odds were suddenly astronomically against me.

Oh, absolutely.

It seems to me they were already against you, but you did make it this far.

I was caught.  My gut told me that I wouldn’t make it out of the compound in one piece, now.  He was washing his hands in the sink, he turned to look at me, apparently unconcerned by my presence.

Yeeah, if Taylor does something he doesn’t approve of, chances are he can just scrap the timeline.

I’m confuse.

But if Taylor’s shocked about her injuries just now…???