Disclaimer: I don't own Worm or any other known properties that may be referenced in the course of this story. Any original characters are mine. I also own several stuffed animals and a collection of penguin cookie jars.

Anyway, this idea's been percolating in the chasm I call a brain for a while but I could never get the setting or feel right. Then, while trying to sleep off my insomnia, I had an idea for the introductory scene and decided to get shit done, son. This story will, naturally, be available on all my usual sites and will be free on . With luck, this will help me stave off writer's block and keep churning out content for my readers. Now, on with the trainwreck!

Contagion 1.01

The humanity of parahumans is something scientists and scholars continue to debate over, mostly in anonymity because waffling over whether to call a person non-human is something that inevitably brings up allusions to slavery and the Third Reich.

In truth, parahumans probably shouldn't be classified as homo sapiens the same as everybody else. They have unbelievable powers, and some of them are changed completely. There are people made out of metal, or bizarre plastic-like strips; people like Newter and Gregor the Snail have completely different biological makeup despite being demonstrably organic. The issue, of course, is that they were human, before their trigger event.

Trigger events aren't widely talked about on PHO, which is something I consider to be a disservice. I get that people don't necessarily want to portray all capes as broken people, and the kind of suffering that causes a trigger event isn't something to be brought up lightly, but I think people need to know and understand what kind of horror is required to get powers. In fact, I didn't even learn about what trigger events were until I started looking up old scholarly articles at the public library.

So the big issue with parahumans is that they were human, the same as everyone else, except for one thing: a little bit of extra tissue in the brain, the corona pollentia. When a trigger event occurs, another little cerebral polyp appears, this time the corona gemma. With most parahumans, that's the extent of the biological changes, but others increase in height or get suddenly muscular or any number of other bizarre happenings.

I'd gotten this deep into the scientific and philosophical definition of cape humanity for a simple reason: I was a cape, and I was fairly certain I was no longer human. Humans shouldn't be able to do what I can do; shouldn't be able to even conceive it except in the context of science-fiction. Worse, as a sort of final fuck-you from the universe to me, my power endlessly reminded me of my trigger event.

Trapped in a locker that shouldn't even have been able to hold a human being while empty – my fitting inside due only to the fact that the campaign of bullying had killed my already low appetite and changed me from thin to skeletal – I was surrounded by rotting filth, blood and bodily fluids and god-knows what else. In that tiny metal coffin, through the haze of deathly stench, I cracked. I wished for death. I wanted to kill myself, but I couldn't move well enough or even find any protruding metal with which to slash my wrists or neck. I spiraled into self-loathing, hating every last aspect of myself. If I was just someone different, if I'd been born another person, maybe I could have had a happy life.

Apparently people black out when they trigger, likely because the brain is rewiring itself. When I came to, I was pooled in the bottom of the locker. My entire body's volume was a liquid, yet I somehow retained my senses. I could understand direction and could somehow see, despite being a puddle. My mass was cohesive, thankfully, so I managed to force my way through a crack in the locker and ooze out. The next few hours were spent figuring out how to reassemble myself. As far as parahuman powers go, being a red puddle wasn't high up on the usefulness meter.

When I finally got fed up and just tried to force myself back together, something really freaky happened. I reassembled myself, but I wasn't myself. I certainly didn't have skin like dark chocolate, or tight muscles from years of athletic training. I also wasn't so damn short. Looking back on it, 5'5" isn't actually very short for a girl, particularly a fifteen-year-old, but when you're used to being 5'11" it seems like a Smurf. My stomach dropped out and I ran for the nearest mirror to find that I had indeed taken the form of one of my tormentors, the one who had actually shoved me into the locker: Sophia Hess.

And Sophia – I – was naked.

That prompted two separate freak-out sessions, followed by a rush of anger. The goddamn lights were off. No-one had helped me, no-one had rescued me from that filth. I'd been in there for probably eight or ten hours, and not one student had spoken up about the stench and the dripping goop. Not one faculty member had done the barest amount of their goddamn job to check on a student they knew was being tortured.

With a scream, I lashed out and punched the wall. Or, I should say I punched through the wall. The locker-room wall offered no real resistance to my fist as it went in one side and out the other. That definitely wasn't some aspect of Sophia; if she'd been that strong I had no doubt she'd have just beaten me to death.

The surprise of that punch shocked me out of my emotional overload. First things first, I thought, making a mental list to help keep myself on track, I need to figure out how to turn back to normal, get some clothes, and go see Dad.

Since Winslow High was pretty much abandoned at night, I sat down on a bench and just thought. I had hours before anyone would show up again, so I didn't need to worry about hiding or covering up. On that train of thought, I realized that I wasn't cold. Winslow was a shithole and didn't splurge on necessities, so they definitely didn't keep the heating on at night. It was January, and it was dark out, yet I felt perfectly fine.

"Curiouser and curiouser," I muttered before shelving that line of inquiry for later. The most important thing now was to turn back into myself. How had I become Sophia in the first place? I got angry, tried to force it, hating myself not like I had in the locker, but with scorn and derision. I'd inadvertently put myself in a Hess-like mindset. So what, then, was my mindset? Suffering, I thought, the word tasting sour even in my mind. But no, that was what I had become, what they'd beaten me into. But that was just the outside. Who was I, in truth?

Of course, it was just like me to ask one of the all-time biggest philosophical questions and expect to solve it immediately. And like that, it clicked. I was the one who dreamed big, who used her mind and dared to hope in the darkness. Even when Mom died, I hurt – I hurt a lot – but I stayed strong for Dad. That was at least part of who I was. And with that, I felt my body shift, my perspective rising. My glasses appeared on my face, my loose jeans, tee, and baggy hoodie materializing around me.

I hurried home. Dad had been terrified and I'd had no choice but to tell him about the attack, the bullying campaign, and who was responsible.

How I wish I was writing a story. I could say everything got better, that we took the school and the Barneses for all they were worth, and restarted our lives. That I joined the Wards and became a superhero, idol of many. Unfortunately, the events that followed helped show me another part of who I was: fate's punching bag.

The first few lawyers we tried to hire agreed to take the case, but each one would soon turn around and drop us like steaming shit. When we did finally get a lawyer with the balls to fight, we found out why the others had declined. Something was rotten in the state of New Hampshire, because the judge threw out the case with barely a moment's consideration. Legal fees brutalized us and we had to sell a lot of things just to keep the house.

The bullying didn't stop. If anything the failure of our lawsuit made them even bolder in their abuse. After a while, I just stopped going to school. Dad didn't object. He didn't do much of anything.

And that leads me back to the question of humanity. In the process of natural selection, when a mutation or other quirk of birth led to an exceptionally advantaged specimen, that bloodline would take precedence and become the dominant gene until such variation had occurred that a new species had to be classified. And with the advent of this new species, the old one would soon become extinct.

So, in truth, what I was planning wasn't murder; it was natural selection. I was a parahuman, the new genotype, and my tormentors were homo sapiens, the old breed. I was just furthering human evolution.

(BREAK)

Despite living in an age of such advanced technology, few people put it to use. They look at Tinkers and fantasize about what could be, rather than looking at the goddamn internet and seeing what is. While not having a computer at home anymore made research a bit more difficult, it didn't take long for me to narrow down the few Hesses in the yellow pages and then search the phone number to get the address. I then did the same for Clements, which was a slightly more common surname.

Sophia was my first target. She was the monster who took my friend and twisted her into something nightmarish. She was the brute who was always going on about predator and prey. I'd show her what it felt like to be prey. I understood that my reason for action – vengeance – was petty, but if I couldn't fix my life then I was certainly not going to let them be happy. They didn't deserve it. Another part of me, the part that used to want powers, to be a hero, provided a different argument: they would keep hurting people. They wouldn't stop even if I disappeared, and there was pretty much no chance of reforming them. I needed to remove them to protect all the other poor, hurt children. That was a valid reason, and it was a good one, but it was minor compared to my wrath.

Oh, I wasn't going to make them suffer like they did to me. I didn't have the time, patience or stomach for such a campaign of hate. Instead, I was going to deliver all that pain in a lump sum and see if they could survive. I wasn't betting on it.

Most parahumans, hero or villain, need to protect their identity. Even freaks like Lung, a towering Asian bastard rippling with muscle, still wore a mask even though he was easily identifiable by body type alone. Me? I didn't need a mask. Not when I could wear other people's faces. I'd originally been confused as to why I could take the appearance of my three tormentors and most of their clique, until I took a moment and looked at it rationally: I seemed to be made out of blood, and I'd been packed in with other blood. Somehow I'd absorbed the other blood and could then use the...memory of the DNA to take their appearance. So, for perfect cover, I slipped into the night wearing Sophia's face.

If you're killed by a copy of yourself, is it murder or suicide?

(BREAK)

I never got tired. That doesn't simply mean that I didn't need to sleep, which seemed to be a trait a fair number of capes shared: I literally never seemed to run out of stamina. I didn't bother with a bus, simply running from my house near the docks to Sophia's, which was southeast of downtown. Flat-out, I could probably manage about twenty miles an hour, and I never ran out of energy. I wasn't even sweating or breathing hard, which made sense since I was really just a construct made out of blood.

Brockton Bay at night was a dangerous place. Well, Brockton Bay at any time of day was dangerous. But at night the scum of the earth didn't fear to crawl out and do whatever evil they did. Despite moving so quickly, I could easily keep track of everything going on around me. I saw drug deals, sex in decrepit alleyways, a group of E88 beating the shit out of two black kids...

Damn it, I growled to myself, I don't need this. I'm in a hurry! But try as I might, I couldn't justify my inaction. I was better than Sophia, who'd just smirk at the prey too weak to fight back. I was better than Madison, who'd just run and hide. I was better than Emma, who'd probably just ignore it altogether. And despite what I was on my way to do, I liked to think I was still a decent person.

I didn't announce my presence other than my rapid footfalls before crashing into the nearest skinhead. They were all relatively young, late teens and early twenties, probably new inductees looking to prove themselves. My target and I fell in a tangle of limbs and I had to keep reminding myself that this body was six inches shorter and had far less reach. Regardless of size, I had Brute-level strength so it was simple to pry myself loose from the ganger. I didn't bother controlling my strength and heard several of his bones and/or joints crack when I extricated myself. He huddled in on himself, lying on the ground and screaming from the pain.

The other three turned to face me. The oldest had his head shaved and wore a leather jacket emblazoned with the Empire Eighty-Eight symbol, a Nazi flag with two swastikas, each one manipulated to resemble the number 8. He must've been showing the ropes to the others. The remaining two just wore black bandanas around their arms. "Well look at this," the leader said in a southern accent, "another porch monkey wants to join the fun."

Oh, that's right. I was still wearing Sophia's form. Well, I could work with that. Maybe I wouldn't have to fight and waste time. "I figured it'd be poetic," I smirked before shifting to Julia's appearance. It took more concentration to overlay my clothes, but I managed it. Julia was tall, skinny and blonde; a perfect choice. "This make you more comfortable?"

"Shit, cape!" The younger two rushed me, but it was a distraction. They must've practiced this, or maybe Empire training covered defense against parahumans. Either way, the pair broke apart at the last moment and a deafening blast split the night. I felt the sharp impact in my eye and was thrown off my feet. "Let's get gone!" They left the injured skinhead and I could hear their footsteps fade into the distance.

Well, I wasn't dead. In fact, it didn't hurt all that much. Oh, the initial impact hurt a lot, but having never been shot I didn't have anything to which I could compare it. But the pain was fading and I could feel a weird grinding sensation in my eye socket and... Something popped loose and I managed to catch it. My body had pushed out the bullet. Cool.

The young couple staggered to their feet, two effete-looking black men. Boy, did they lose out. Black AND gay in Empire territory after dark? "Are...are you alright, miss?" one of them drew up the courage to ask.

I pushed myself to my feet and shifted back into Sophia's form so I wouldn't forget later. "Yeah. Hurt, but I'm okay. You?" I dusted myself off a little. "What were you doing in Empire territory, anyway?"

"Missed the bus," the other one replied while examining his ruined glasses. "I heard Oni Lee's been roaming the area, staking out new territory, so we figured it'd be better to move through Empire and risk a beating than ABB and risk getting our throats slit."

It was hard to argue with their logic. "Well get moving. Those guys are probably gonna report back and then you'll have to worry about Empire capes in the area." I strode toward the alley's mouth. "I've got my own appointments to keep or I'd offer to escort you back."

"You've done enough already," the first man smiled. "You stay safe."

I gave them a smile and a wave. I'd left with them thinking I was a hero. Now it was time to go kill somebody in cold blood.