Her breath hitched as she drew in a breath.  She shook her head violently, to shake away the tears.  She had stopped screaming, but her dogs were making up for it as their voices had joined hers and continued long after she’d stopped, almost drowning out Angelica’s howls.

Awoo.

So many bad memories.  Memories she wished she could purge from herself, scour from her brain with fire and bleach and steel bristled brushes.

Maybe there’s a cape out there somewhere who could help you with that.

She was unhappy because humans were pack animals, she decided.

Heh. That’s the most doggish way she could possibly come to the same conclusion I did when she first raised the question.

Though maybe she’s come to a slightly different conclusion that’s still covered by the topic of social interaction, so let’s have her elaborate.

Taylor and Lisa and Brian could smile and laugh because they had their pack, they had their family members and they had each other.  Alec was more of a loner, but he could still joke and laugh with Brian.  They had their pack, their dynamic.  She wasn’t really a part of it.

That is true. There have been plenty of occasions with all of them except Rachel together, and when she has been present, she has often been remarkably distant from the rest. I’ve even ended up using the word “teammate” instead of “friend” to describe her relation to Brian.

Also, I notice she didn’t really consider Aisha here. I suppose she doesn’t quite see her as part of the team yet.

She’s still running, isn’t she.

She’d woken to her power in that moment of panic.  Fed by her power, Rollo had grown enough to tear through the cover.

YES! Called it!

He’d then torn through her foster mother.

Ah, yes. I hadn’t forgotten that the trigger event led to the dog killing people.

Honestly…

This punishment is both matching AND proportionate.

The shrill screaming of her foster siblings indoors had drawn his attention, and he went after them too, pouncing on them like any excitable dog might do with a mouse or rabbit.

These ones don’t deserve it, though. At least as far as I know, they’re just fellow victims.

He’d torn through door frames and walls, and an entire section of the house and collapsed in on her foster family.  In one fell swoop, she lost the closest things she had to a home and family.

Oh, right. That’s a problem.

It hadn’t been perfect, it had been nightmarish at times, but she’d had so little for so long, she found herself clinging to the scraps she did have.  She ran, then, and she kept running for a long time after that.

With the caseworker she had, being homeless might be better than wherever they’d place her next, especially after this.

But a dog couldn’t be chained to a tree, not for twenty-two hours out of every day.  She’d seen him grow increasingly agitated and unhappy, to the point that she couldn’t play with him without him hurting her.

Ouch.

So she’d untied him to take him for a walk.  He’d slipped free and headed for the house.  Her blood running cold, she’d chased after him. 

Is almost losing Rollo going to be her trigger event?

When she caught up to him, she found him in the pool; she couldn’t swim, and he couldn’t climb out.

At least he can’t at his current size.

If this is in fact her trigger event, then I think that might support the idea that the Dandelions are trying to help but don’t really understand humanity. Giving Hana weapons to fight back, giving Brian a way to hide from his mother’s boyfriend after the fight, giving Taylor company and awareness of something outside her confined space, etcetera.

Maybe it makes complete sense to them to give a girl who is afraid of her puppy drowning the power to turn her puppy into a huge dog monster that can easily get out of the water.

She’d pleaded with Rollo to come out of the pool, tried to run around the pool’s edge to get to him so she could pull him free, but he’d been scared, and swam away from her.

Aww.

But Rachel hadn’t been equipped for these things, would never be equipped for school or manners or piano.  She fought back, challenged her foster-mother’s authority at every turn, and when she was punished for this, she fought back twice as hard.

Yeah, that sounds more like the Rachel we know.

She might have gone insane if it wasn’t for Rollo.

Ooh, Rollo… first dog, right? I seem to recall Rollo being brought up before. Blog search isn’t helping, though.

She’d stumbled onto the mangy, hostile puppy in an alley between her after-school classes and home.  After earning his trust with scraps of her lunch over the course of days and weeks, she brought him home and chained him up at the very back of the expansive backyard, out of sight of the house.

Nice! 😀

She had stayed quiet when her foster-mother complained about the neighbor dog’s barking, feeling a confused mixture of smugness and terror every time it came up.

Hehe. Sure! Those damn neighbors, am I right?

Her lunch money went towards buying the dog scraps of food, guessing at what he needed, and this sacrifice of her lunches coupled with the frequent lack of dinner left her getting headaches and her stomach growling constantly during school.

Ah shit. I’m all for you taking care of the doggo, but you gotta take care of yourself too.

She would wake up at four in the morning to visit him and play with him, and the lack of sleep left her so tired she would drift asleep in the middle of class.

Yeeah, no lunch and little sleep isn’t a good combination for education. Which… I guess she would end up having to catch up on through the after-school make-up classes? Which may or may not cause her foster mother to find out.

Unable to keep the feelings bottled up within her, she screamed until she couldn’t breathe any longer.  Then she took a deep breath and screamed again.

Even though she screamed until it hurt, it was tiny and insignificant compared to everything she wanted to convey.

Seriously, though, this is arguably still more healthy than bottling it up.

Though of course, that’s not the point here. The point is life sucked for Rachel.

Then the foster homes.  Home one, where the parents were kind, but lacked the patience to deal with a little girl who child protective services had labeled a borderline feral child.

Hrm.

Her foster-sister there had been a mongoloid that stole things, breaking or ruining what she couldn’t take for herself.

Not exactly a good term to use, but this is from Rachel’s perspective. I feel like this is an example of Wildbow writing the character rather than him actually using this word himself, much like the Mrs. Knott situation back in 2.2 was supposed to be according to some of the asks I got about it at the time.

Basically, it seems a lot more clear this time why this description is here. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that it’s an Interlude, and maybe the fact that I’m more familiar with Wildbow’s writing and personality at this point, but I also think the phrasing and formatting has something to do with it – it’s italicized, emphasized, implicitly made a deal out of, whereas the Mrs. Knott description was written straight as if it were completely normal to think/say/write something like that. Granted, part of Wildbow’s point may have been that to Taylor, it was, but I think that might’ve contributed to it looking like it was that way to Wildbow as well.

(Incidentally, I realized recently that it’s plausible that my liveblog reminded Wildbow to go change the Mrs. Knott section. I do know he was reading my liveblog around the time I received the news that it had been fixed.)

Rachel had responded the only option she could think of, attacking the girl who was three years older and fifty pounds heavier, leaving the girl bloody and sobbing.

Well, that answers one question: Rachel was kind of unstable even before she got her power. “borderline feral”, even before her power took that up to 11.

At least I think this is before she got her power. I would’ve thought we’d get a mention of the incident we learned about in 4.1 if it wasn’t.

That might be coming up, actually.