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.)