Author's Note: a rewrite of this story begins at Chapter 7.

To make it clear: All rights to characters, setting, story and central concepts in this story remain the property of Wildbow, Worm's author. This is just me playing in the sandbox. Worm can be found at parahumans dot wordpress dot com.

Trigger

Winslow High

It had been quiet on the bullying front. This made Taylor uneasy. There was a tension building up, a feeling of static electricity filling up the hallways. Then again, maybe it was just her. Perhaps they really had gotten bored of tormenting her. Right.

She checked around, didn't see anyone obviously threatening nearby. Her locker seemed to be all right this time. She walked closer and started to pick up a smell. It got stronger the nearer she got to the locker. What had those bitches done now?

She almost didn't open the locker. The stench was revolting, but she had to see. There were things in the locker she just might need if they would be salvageable. She hastily opened the lock and pulled the locker open. The stench rolled out, some of the waste falling out. There was brown-black goo slowly flowing out the locker.

Taylor bent over and heaved the contents of her stomach on the floor in front of the locker. Then someone grabbed her waist and hair and pushed her into the locker. On the toxic waste. The used and discarded feminine products had fermented and marinated in the locker over the holidays. They had attracted bugs. The door of the locker was banged shut and Taylor heard the lock being replaced.

Taylor screamed and banged the door. A bug crawled near her mouth, so she clamped her mouth shut and tried to wipe her face clear only to bring more bugs to her face on her hand. She shut her eyes and felt bugs crawling on top of them, some of them probing her nostrils. She tried to bang the doors more. She had to vomit again. The stench was overpowering.

No one was coming. They'd leave her here. She'd be stuck until one of the school staff came by, and they rarely visited the third floor. Almost all of the classrooms up here were abandoned. She'd go insane or catch some horrible disease. She tried banging the door and the walls again. She felt the bugs in her hair, crawling across her face, inside her clothes.

Then Taylor saw, with her eyes still tightly shut, two huge entities, traveling at an incredible speed toward a blue marble floating in the darkness. Their helical route would obviously end on that planet - Earth - and there would be work to do. The entities were shedding something that sped towards the planet ahead of them.

Taylor came to. She was still in the locker, still stuck. She lifted her hand again to try to shield her nose from the bugs. Her eyes had adjusted and in the dim light coming from the grill and the edges of the door she could see her own hand. The hand that started to unravel right in front of her eyes, turning into more bugs. She screamed.

Hospital

"... understand, your daughter is a parahuman. Our regular staff is not…"

"... want them punished for …"

"-or, honey, are you waking up? Taylor?"

Relief flooded over Taylor. It was her dad. She felt his hand squeezing hers. She also knew him. All of him. Every mole, every hair, every ounce of muscle, bone and fat. Every twitch of a muscle, the beating of his heart, the quiet processes of liver and kidneys. It was disconcerting. She opened her eyes, looked at her dad.

Danny Hebert was not a handsome man. Balding head and weak chin. Tall but not muscular. Somewhat overweight. Now with extra bags under his eyes. A hesitant smile on his face, a few tears rolling down his face.

"Taylor, you're awake!"

His exclamation alerted the nurse in the room. He turned to Taylor and offered a sip of water from a straw. Taylor gratefully accepted it. Her mouth was dry and her throat felt parched. Water was soothing, cool.

"Dad, I… I'm sorry." She felt tears rolling down her face.

"Oh Taylor, baby. You have nothing to be sorry for. It wasn't your fault, none of it." Daniel Hebert bent down to hug her daughter. She sobbed a little on his shoulder. Shortly the shudders ceased.

"Dad, what happened? I… I remember the locker. Then…" A shudder ran through her. "The bugs. Oh my god, the bugs were everywhere." Her eyes were tightly shut and she shuddered. "My hand… my hand broke apart, dad. It became bugs."

"Shh. Taylor." Her dad was trying to calm her. He was rubbing her back. "It is all right." A couple of minutes and she calmed down again. Danny straightened up, sitting back on the chair next to the bed.

"Taylor, you triggered in the locker. You are a cape, dear," he said softly. "I don't know it all. I don't understand it all. But if you want to, I can call Miss Militia. She knows about it, and tried to explain it all to me, too."

"Triggered? Dad, what do you mean I'm a cape? Miss Militia?"

"You have powers, Taylor. I don't know all of it, not yet, not until you can explain some things. The doctors found out some, and Miss Militia offered to help with all the cape stuff. She's also helped with Winslow. With that bastard Barnes, and the Clements' too. Sophia's been arrested."

"Dad, how long?"

"It's been two days, Taylor. You were in a coma for two days."

Miss Militia

A woman walked into Taylor's hospital room. She looked Middle-Eastern. Her face was partially hidden by a US flag bandanna covering the lower part of it. Taylor looked for a weapon on her but couldn't see one. Perhaps a knife or a pistol in the small of her back?

"Hi Taylor, I'm Miss Militia," the woman said, offering her hand for Taylor.

After a moment of hesitation Taylor took the hand and shook it. Information about her physical condition, dimensions and structure filled her mind. "Umm. Miss Militia? You should probably know that when I touch someone I sort of… know them? See them? I get information about how they're made up. So now, if ever I touch you again, I'll know it's you. Bandanna or no bandanna."

Miss Militia froze for a moment and suddenly she had a pistol in a quick-draw holster on her hip. Then she sighed and the weapon disappeared again. "I… see. Or I really don't. Oh well. That's what I get for making physical contact with a cape with unknown powers. I thought you were just a Changer."

"Changer? Dad didn't seem to know much about what happened to me."

Miss Militia drew out a chair and sat on it facing Taylor. "Yes, well, he didn't really want to know all that much. Said that it'd be better if I just explained to you and then tell him what you thought he needed to know. A good principle."

She seemed to be thinking about how to continue. "When you were pulled out of the locker, unconscious, your homeroom teacher, Mrs. Knott, said that you looked different. Your father said the same thing, and later the doctors confirmed it. You changed when you triggered, Taylor. Apparently you are now in optimal health and fitness according to your genes. More than that, the few genetic flaws and tendencies towards ill health are absent or dormant, even though your father still carries them." She seemed to spot Taylor's momentary alarm. "Don't worry, it's not anything serious. Slightly higher chance of lung cancer if he smoked, tendency to go bald, a rare congenital illness that he has inherited from only one parent when he'd need to have it from two generations on both sides. Things like that. You don't have any of them anymore." She looked at Taylor, making sure that she was following and was calm.

"You'll find that you're much stronger, agiler, fitter, than ever before when you get up and about. But that's not exactly what your power is, Taylor."

Miss Militia took a moment to think. "You see, when they pulled you out of that locker you didn't have a left hand. Your arm ended a bit under the elbow as if you had never had a hand. And then some of the bugs in the locker followed you out. They tried to swat them off, even squished some, but no matter how they managed to spread the bugs they always came back. After a while they gave up."

She must have noticed Taylor going pale, squeezing her fists closed so that her knuckles were white. It was obvious that the girl didn't really want to hear this. It was also imperative that she did.

"Taylor. Listen. It is all right. The bugs didn't do anything to you." She reached to Taylor, took her hand and squeezed reassuringly. "When you and the bugs they couldn't get rid of were in the ambulance the EMTs noticed that your hand seemed to be growing back. At the same time the bugs were disappearing. That's how we knew that you were a Changer. We don't exactly know what your powerset is, yet, but once you're feeling better we can find out."

Taylor was silent for a long while. "So it did really happen? My hand turned into bugs?" There was abject horror in her expression when she said it.

Slowly, reluctantly, Miss Militia nodded. "It appears so. I'm so sorry, Taylor. Trigger events are never fun, and yours was particularly horrible. And the power you got might not be what you would have wanted either, but it is what you got. You can try not to use it, ever, but it rarely succeeds. Powers want to be used."

Taylor cried, then. A silent sobbing, drawing her hands and legs in, to be as small as possible. Miss Militia rose slowly and sat on the edge of the bed, drawing Taylor into an embrace. "Taylor. Listen. It will be all right. Your father knows and understands. We can help you to come to terms with this. You can even join the Wards if you want, once you've discovered your powers."

Slowly Taylor ran out of tears and settled down. "What happens now? I don't want to go back to Winslow."

A grimace passed over Miss Militias face, replaced by a professional veneer. "You don't have to. You have a week or two of sick leave, and then you will attend Arcadia High. Your transfer has been already approved."

"As for the incident itself… You'll find out eventually anyways, but PRT is handling your bullying case. We're leaning heavily on the school to resolve the matter. Your father already signed a nondisclosure agreement, and you'll have to do it too, later, but I can tell you that one of your bullies was a Ward. Not anymore. She was already on probation. Her handler dropped the ball in a monumental and deliberate way." There was steel in her eyes, words, and posture. "I will make sure this never happens again. Anywhere."

Taylor thought for a while. A Ward? One of the three? There were only two female Wards at the moment, and Vista was much younger than her. That left only Shadow Stalker. It couldn't be Madison, and the build was wrong for Emma. Sophia. Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker. "Shadow Stalker? I was bullied by Shadow Stalker?" It made so much sense, too. How they always got into her locker. Sophia had just pushed her hand straight through the door in her shadow form.

Miss Militia nodded. "Yes. She's out of the Wards and on her way to juvie. The two others are being dealt with."

"How? I mean, why? How did you know? About the bullying?"

"When we got the call about a new trigger, we checked you out. We asked your father for permission to check your house for evidence and found your… diary." She shuddered at the memory of the contents. Page after page of incidents that should have driven anyone to drastic measures. Yet Taylor had taken it, never fighting back in any way. Yet she didn't seem submissive or passive. Perhaps she just had a moral compass that strong.

Taylor felt tears on her cheeks again and wiped them away. "So it's over? It's really over?"