ooOoo

Coil checked his notes immediately after splitting the timeline. He then double-checked his appearance. He was wearing a long trench coat to conceal his cadaverous frame. A bandanna wrapped around his face covered his creepy smile. A last glance around the area confirmed the lack of supervising adults.

His notes mentioned that teenage girls were fascinated by the freedom represented by an automobile.

Coil stepped out from behind the bushes and approached his target. She turned to face him with some trepidation, so Coil gave his best attempt at a reassuring smile. It was probably for the best that his bandanna hid the resulting expression.

"Hey little girl. Do you want to go for a ride in my van?"

The reaction was immediate, albeit unwelcome.

"Pervert!"

The unfortunate thing about teenage girls, Coil thought, feeling a phantom pain even as he dropped the timeline, was that they were at just the right height to strike a man in a very uncomfortable place.

ooOoo

Taylor largely found it a waste of time to attend class at Winslow High. She wouldn't have continued to go except that dealing with the fallout of an attempted expulsion would waste even more of her time.

"Might squeeze a couple chapters out of it, though," Taylor said, showing a poor grasp of the concept of dramatic tension. "Whatever."

The students at Winslow at this point gave her a large berth as she strode down the hallway, so her strange commentary didn't so much cause them to step away from her as it did lead them to intensify their disinterest. Ever since she had punted Madison through a window most students had made a point of avoiding Taylor's notice.

One period that Taylor did enjoy was Miss Knott's computer class. It allowed her to catch up on her reading on PHO. There was a time that Taylor would have done her assignment before browsing the web. That time was the year before she had been stuffed in a locker full of used tampons.

Taylor was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the more active threads on PHO was discussing her debut. The thread included a video of her fight with Lung up until the point where he put her through a wall. Taylor was disappointed to see that most of the discussion was not related to her sweet costume or cool power, but rather focused on insulting her intelligence in her choice of opponents. The thread starter opined that she would likely be dead within a week. The other thread participants didn't seem to give her more than a month to live.

That just wouldn't do. Taylor created a new account before making her first ever post to PHO.

Come on, guys, if anything pop culture told me about katanas is true then that attack totally should have worked. I mean, maybe it did work. For all you know I actually cut Lung in half and he just didn't fall apart until after the video cut out.

Anyways, I've got twenty bucks that says I survive for at least a year.

P.S. I'm still trying to come up with a cape name. I'm thinking with my power I never really lose a fight and I'm kind of young, so "Kid Win" is a good fit. It's kind of lame, but all of the good names are taken.

Message posted, Taylor spent the rest of the class period perusing the cape fiction section of the web site. She did receive a PM from the moderator asking her to describe her conversation with Armsmaster, but a quick one-word reply of "What?" was enough to earn her Verified Cape status without pulling her too far out of the tale of forbidden romance between Rune and Shadow Stalker.

Winslow being what it was, class ended just when she was getting to the good part.

Taylor suffered through the rest of the school day with good grace. Well, she suffered through the rest of the school day, anyway. When it ended she hurried home, eager to get back onto PHO. She was somewhat gratified to see over a thousand responses on what she considered to be "her" thread. She was disappointed to see that "Kid Win" was taken, and even more disappointed that the vast bulk of the discussion was a flame war regarding the relative merits of the katana.

Somewhat more disturbing was the speculation that she might be a new enforcer for Empire 88, Brockton Bay's neo-nazi gang. Apparently some people considered wholesale slaughter to be villainous behavior, and saw Taylor's heroic efforts to be more about fighting for turf than for justice.

"That does it, then," Taylor said, closing out her web browser, "clearly I'm going to have to change my behavior so that people stop saying bad things about me on the internet."

She dressed in her civilian outfit of blue jeans, t-shirt, sweater, and full face mask. That done, she dashed out a quick note to her father before heading out the door.

Dad,

Went out for a bit. Don't wait up for me.

Love,

Taylor

P.S. Don't worry, I'm not picking any fights with Nazis.

Finding skinheads in the middle of committing a crime was frustratingly difficult. Finding a bunch of skinheads hanging out in front of a bar was much easier. Taylor glanced around the corner to confirm the presence of her prey before pulling back and taking a deep breath to compose herself. There were four of them. Three had the sort of roughneck appearance she usually associated with gang members, while the fourth could have been an accountant if not for his shaved head and gang tattoos.

"Time to implement my brilliant plan," she said, lying to herself.

"Time to implement my ingenious plan," she said, slightly annoyed, and still not within spitting distance of the truth.

"Time to implement my plan," she said, in a technically true statement.

Shaking her head, she pushed down on her irritation and stepped out into the street. She walked about half of the distance between herself and the group of four skinheads before visibly reacting to their presence.

"Oy, vey," she said, dramatically bringing the back of her hand to rest against her forehead. "Nazis!"

She paused, waiting for reaction. She figured with her face covered and her slightly curly hair, there was no reason the skinheads would assume she wasn't Jewish. It's possibly worth mentioning at this juncture that Taylor's primary exposure to Jewish culture came from reruns of Seinfeld.

"That reminds me," Taylor said, "what's the deal with the airline food?"

Somewhat to her surprise, it was the weedy accountant-looking guy who spoke up. "Could you please leave?"

"No! This is a free country, and that means that if I want to stand here and do observational humor, then I will," Taylor said, bringing her hand down to point dramatically at the men, then pausing. "I also do puns."

The three big guys charged her without any further prompting. Taylor suppressed a giggle at the success of her plan. Things hit a minor snag when she realized they had been tugging on her outstretched arm for a while, but she relaxed and let them maneuver it behind her back to be tied up.

"Oh no," Taylor said, "please don't take me to your super-secret Nazi base. Anything but that!"

Things continued according to plan as they threw a bag over her head before tossing her into the trunk of a car. Taylor tried to keep track of where they were going, but it turned out that counting turns was a lot like counting sheep. She was fast asleep long before they arrived at their destination.

She awoke to the sensation of being dragged out of the trunk. She was carried a short distance before being unceremoniously dumped onto a folding metal chair. Her legs were duct taped in place. Taylor could hear several pairs of footsteps walking out of the room, then the sound of a car starting. A moment later the bag over her head was removed, and Taylor found herself face to face with the accountant-looking guy.

"Look, I know you're a cape."

"Aha!" Taylor said, tugging her hands apart, easily ripping the duct tape, "you think you've caught an innocent Jewish girl, but I'm actually-wait, what?"

"We have more men killed by random teenagers than by the ABB and the Merchants combined."

"Seriously?" Taylor asked. Looking around, she could see that they were in a room that looked much more like a rundown warehouse than some kind of secret Nazi base.

"If you want to show you're an edgy vigilante but not too edgy, what else would you do but kill a bunch of Nazis? Face it, kid, you're not the first to think of it."

"Pssh, no, that's not what I was thinking," Taylor said, lying through her teeth. "I just wanted to beat up some Nazis and maybe steal some Nazi super-science."

"Super science? We don't even have a Tinker."

"Man, what a waste," Taylor said, shaking her head. "Wait a minute-if you knew I was a cape, why are you still here?"

"If we run into a teenage cape, the Empire 88 handbook says that one man is supposed to sacrifice himself so the rest can get away. I drew the short straw."

"You know where they went, though?"

"Oh, no," the man said, holding up his hands. "I'm not saying anything."

"Look... what was your name again?"

"Bob," he said.

"Look, Bob, I meant what I said about heading out tonight planning to beat up Nazis. So the question is, am I going to beat up a bunch of Nazis a little bit, or do I put a whole lot of hurting on just one or two Nazis?"

Fifteen minutes later, Taylor kicked down the door to a popular Empire 88 hangout. The door was unlocked, but Taylor thought it was kind of pointless to have super-strength if you didn't use it in this kind of situation. Besides, she liked having everybody's attention on her as she made her entrance.

"Hey guys! Bet you did Nazi this one coming!"

Taylor's "wit" was met by an unimpressed silence.

"You know," she said, glaring around the bar, "you guys have a pretty refined sense of humor for a bunch of skinhead thugs."

One of the men standing at the bar, six foot six if he was an inch, glared right back at her. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Taylor suspected that the kindergarten saying may have stuck with the man because it was the highest level of education he'd completed. She held her tongue, though, as she grabbed a bar stool and broke off its leg with a casual tug.

"That works for me."

After a brief interlude of senseless violence, Taylor found herself the last one standing in the middle of a wrecked shambles of a bar. She felt some satisfaction as she surveyed the unconscious skinheads strewn across the floor, but she also felt like something was missing. Sure, she'd knocked a bunch of creeps around, but tomorrow they'd be out interacting with civilized people. Limping a little bit, true, but still basically passing for normal. Their tattoos marked their membership in the gang, but kept that tiny sliver of deniability that kept them out of jail.

Taylor checked the pockets of one of the fallen and smiled when she found a penknife and a cell phone.

Bob looked over her shoulder as she walked out of the bar with her attention focused on the phone. He saw a selfie of Taylor giving a thumbs up alongside the visible face of an Empire 88 member with a still-bleeding swastika carved into his forehead. She was posting it to PHO along with the caption "He did Nazi that one coming!"

"You used that one already," Bob said.

"You know what they say: if a joke's worth telling once, it's worth telling over and over again."

"Nobody says that."

"I say it, Bob. I say it," Taylor said, clapping him on the shoulder. "If you say it too, that makes a 'they' in my book."

"That'll be just down to you by tomorrow," Bob said. "Kaiser'll kill me once he finds out about this."

Taylor looked at Bob in surprise. She found it hard sometimes to remember that other people were worried about things like getting shot. On the one hand, Bob was a Nazi. On the other hand, he had led her to a bunch of other Nazis. She would feel vaguely guilty if he got killed for helping her out.

ooOoo

Danny sat in his armchair completely failing to read the newspaper. He was waiting for his daughter to get home. His perfectly normal daughter. Sure, Taylor had to wear a mask everywhere these days. And sure, her behavior was a little odd every now and then. But if somebody was odd all the time, then being odd was normal, right? In that sense, Taylor was definitely normal. Very normal.

He was drawn out of his thoughts by the creaking of the front steps. He looked at the door and was relieved to see his daughter walk in. He was less relieved when she was followed by a strange man. The guy didn't look particularly threatening, although the shaved head and tattoos weren't exactly what Danny wanted to see in a visitor.

"Hey dad!" Taylor called out on seeing him. "Bob needs a place to lay low for a little while, and we have that empty guest room, so..."

Danny took a deep breath. Perfectly normal. They were a perfectly normal family that did perfectly normal family things.

"I've got meatloaf in the oven. Let's get something to eat before we talk this over."

There wasn't a lot of idle conversation over dinner. In fact, once Danny had served up the meatloaf there wasn't much sound at all besides the scraping of silverware against dishes as they all tucked in. Danny made it halfway through his meal before he set down his fork and sighed.

"So, Bob..."

Bob started, clearly caught off guard, and dropped his fork before snapping off a one handed Nazi salute. "Sieg heil!"

Bob flushed a bit when he saw Danny flinch back and brought his arm around to scratch the back of his head. "I mean, um, nice meatloaf."

"Bob, I really don't know how to say this, so I'll just ask straight out. Are you a Nazi?"

"We prefer Aryan supremacist," Bob began, before stopping when Danny raised a hand to cut him off.

"But you are a member of Empire 88, right?"

"I was, yeah," Bob admitted.

"He really helped-" Taylor said, before Danny cut her off.

"Taylor, I love you very much," Danny said. "That said, I'm really not comfortable letting somebody stay with us who joined the Empire of his own free will."

"My, uh, girlfriend made me join," Bob said, muttering just loud enough for the Heberts to hear him.

"Are you serious?" Somewhat surprisingly, it was Taylor who seemed most skeptical about this claim.

"She's, well, really racist," Bob said.

"I feel like we're not getting the whole story," Danny said, meeting Bob's gaze evenly.

"She's, well, really hot."

Danny kept his eyes on Bob's, and at that moment a sense of understanding passed between them. If they were younger men, they might have bumped fists. In an earlier era, they may have clasped forearms. As it was, Danny limited himself to a simple nod.

"He can stay."

Taylor, for once, elected to keep her mouth shut.

ooOoo

Coil checked his notes again after splitting the time line. His trench coat concealed his skeletal frame, as usual. A bandanna hid his facial expression. A pair of aviator glasses concealed his dead gaze. A quick glance around the area confirmed that his targets were alone.

His notes mentioned that teenagers were all quite fond of sweets.

Coil stepped out from behind the bushes and approached his target. She turned to face him with some trepidation, so Coil gave his best attempt at a reassuring smile. It was probably for the best that his bandanna concealed the resulting expression.

"Hey little girl. Do you want some candy?"

The reaction was immediate, albeit unwelcome.

ooOoo