Sophia.

Here. In my bedroom. Lounging on my sheets, in fact.

"Wha- what..." I manage to stutter out.

"Well well. Look who's home." Sophia says, almost casually. "Was wondering when you were finally gonna stop moping around and show up."

How the hell did she even get in?! The house was locked, and the windows are too high to climb into! There isn't even a spare key for her to find!

My mist power abruptly coalesces back into existence. Not much of a surprise, considering it had shown up both other times I'd felt threatened by Sophia, and this time she was in my fucking house.

"Don't worry, your dad is still at work for a while, right?" Sophia continues. "Plenty of time to have ourselves a little chat."

The last word is punctuated with a stab of anger, and I prepare myself to move, to run. Thankfully, Sophia does nothing more than stand up from the end of the bed, not yet making any movement in my direction, and thus I begin inching my way backwards towards the still open door. As inwardly furious as I am at the invasion of my home, my only safe place, confronting Sophia here and now is not likely to end in my favor, given that she's apparently been waiting for me.

"So, guess what, Hebert?" Sophia asks, a quiet rage settling into her voice, seething just below the surface of each word. "You just broke my probation. Know what that means?"

I'm pretty sure it's impossible for me to have broken her probation, whatever that was even in reference to, but keeping her talking and distracted is important anyways right now. Before I can ask her what she's implying however, she answers her own question.

"It means that now, the fucking Protectorate's after me."

I start at that, despite myself. What?

"Bet you're happy about that, huh? You spineless little wimp." Sophia accuses. "Can't fight your own battles, so you do this instead? It's a pretty good 'fuck you', I'll give you that."

I have absolutely no idea what she's talking about.

"...The Protectorate?" I ask, cautiously. "How... why are they involved...?"

Sophia's expression falls into a sort of gape for a moment, before she throws her head back and cackles, sounding halfway to madness. "You didn't even do this on purpose?! Oh WOW, that's truly impressive Hebert."

She laughs again and grins, her face falling back into that same cruel smile I've seen in many a nightmare. "Well, it's not like it'll matter much longer anyways."

My breath hitches as Sophia's right hand dips behind her, and pulls one of our kitchen knives from her back pocket.

"I'm going to make sure this is the last time you ever fuck me over, after all."

I move. Sophia moves faster, springing at me like an uncoiling cat. I manage to backpedal out of her reach, and try to whirl around towards the door, only for her to duck low and sweep my feet out from beneath me, kicking the door shut with the same movement.

I land hard on my thankfully carpeted floor. Sophia straightens from her crouch and rises in front of me, her face a rictus of hate.

Well, it isn't as if I can reveal anything MORE to her at this point.

Before Sophia can act, mist leaks rapidly from beneath my fingernails and interposes itself between us like a semi-see through screen. Sophia quickly jinks around it, but I'm already adding more, the sheet of mist expanding to the left wall of my room just in time to cut her off again.

She moves around to the right, and I do the same thing, making sure the mist expands from floor to ceiling as the room becomes divided into two distinct sections. It's a good thing that manipulating this stuff is basically instinct, because the sum total of my prior practice amounts to roughly ten minutes of funneling it out of my own way as I ran down a sidewalk an hour or two ago.

"Fucking- what is this shit?!" Sophia growls angrily from the other side of the now foot-thick curtain of mist, ramming herself into it in an apparent bid to force her way through. Thankfully, my power is working as advertised, and no attempt she makes gets more than few inches in, no matter how hard she shoves. In response, I add even more to mist to the wall and begin expanding it backwards, pushing Sophia further into the other section of the room as I try to calm myself down. It's fine now, Sophia's trapped, there's nothing she can do to get to me. I just have to breathe... breathe...

My panic starts to subside as the screen of gray thickens to the point that I can't actually see through it, and Sophia's frustrated grunts of effort finally begin to die off. She won't be going anywhere anytime soon. I sigh with relief- Sophia's murder attempt failed.

Having spent the entire time building the mist barrier sitting on the floor, I finally, shakily get back to my feet and move to head back downstairs. Who am I supposed to even call in this sort of situation? There has to be someone appropriate, but-

"Sorry Hebert, but it's a bit too late for this." Sophia's voice snarls from somewhere behind the barrier, just before I can leave. "You already gave up, remember?!"

Something moves in my peripheral vision, and I turn around just in time to see a black silhouette hurtling through my mist screen, completely unimpeded.

There isn't any time to truly comprehend what's happening before the dark shade breaks past my mist's inner border. Then the shade is suddenly Sophia, still moving at the same speed, and charging directly at me.

Her entire body slams into mine shoulder first, not unlike something a linebacker might do. Fortunately, Sophia does not have the weight of one, and most of the impact disperses on my arms, which I desperately crossed in front of myself just before being hit. I scramble a few scant feet backwards to avoid a kick from below aimed at my kneecap, even as my mind finally catches up with current events and the pieces begin rapidly coming together.

A cape. She's a cape. And her power... Shadow Stalker. Sophia is Shadow Stalker.

A ward. A hero.

A hero who tormented me for over a year, savagely attacked me earlier today, and is currently trying to murder me in my own home.

Sophia straightens up languidly from the crouch she'd fallen into, a malicious looking smirk on her lips. I frantically drill five concentrated jets of mist from my fingers towards her chest, only for her to immediately switch back to her shadow state. The jets pass right through her, not even slowing her down as she steps in front of me, changes back, and buries her left fist deep in my stomach.

The air vacates my lungs, but a hand grabs my hair and pulls upwards before I can fully double over, forcing me painfully to my feet. The knife flashes at her side, and Sophia grins sickly, her expression warring between triumph and hatred.

"Looks like you lose, Hebert."

A profound combination of terror and outrage swells within me, and mist all but explodes out of my upper body, my pores momentarily engorging to the point that I feel like an oversized sponge. Sophia's grasp on my hair loosens as she's flung away, the sudden force tossing her towards my barrier. She switches to her shadow form before she can impact it, and flies back through unimpeded.

I let the mist I just expelled swirl around me as I gingerly touch my scalp, biting back the pain echoing through it. Okay, an edit to the plan seems to be in order- before I go anywhere or call anyone, I need to completely surround myself with mist. It'll be difficult to move in, since I'll have to constantly concentrate on pulling it along with me, but it should at least theoretically protect me. In her normal form, Sophia shouldn't be able to get past it, and as a shadow, she can't physically affect me. Or at least so said Shadow Stalker's wiki page.

Shadow Stalker. I'm still barely processing that little revelation- after I'm done fighting for my life, the reality of it will probably come crashing down on me like the fist of Behemoth, but right now all I really care about is surviving her efforts to kill me.

A human shaped patch of darkness bursts from the fog, running not at me this time, but at the door. I curse- it's closed, but that doesn't mean anything to someone who can phase right through walls. If she gets out, then I'll be trapped in here, unable to leave as she waits in ambush again, except on the opposite side of the door this time. I push the mist out of my way and move, my hand closing around the doorknob-

-and then something collides very solidly with my back, ramming me forward to smash my head into the door.

I slide down the wood, letting out a brief moan of pain. I scrabble to my feet as quickly as I can, but before I so much as manage to look at the door again, my shoulder is grabbed from behind and forcibly whirled around.

The shadow that is Sophia stares back at me. Her expression is impossible to make out, but her head is tilted, as if surprised.

What the- she isn't supposed to be able to-

Her fist impacts with my left shoulder, hard enough to send me stumbling back towards my dresser and away from the door. Sophia's silhouette doesn't follow, instead taking a moment to look at her fingers and flex each one of them individually, as if she's never used them before.

I grasp at the top of the dresser and come up with my alarm clock, a blocky piece of junk with the weight of a decently sized rock. I fling it at Sophia's head, figuring that if she can suddenly hit me in that state, then she can be hit as well. To my dismay, despite a throw so excellent I'm all but certain I'll never manage to replicate the feat, it passes right through her. She unfortunately takes that as an impetus to start moving again, closing in quickly and slamming her shadowy hand into my throat, driving me backwards to pin me against my room's front wall.

I thrash and bring my knee up into Sophia's stomach, knowing it's likely futile to try to hit her, but desperate to escape her grasp all the same. To my surprise, it impacts, and I feel something indescribable through the fabric of my jeans. But if Sophia feels it, she doesn't show it, and her other hand flashes upwards, barely stopping before it hits me.

I cease struggling, my eyes locked on the long, pointed piece of blackness hovering mere inches away from my face.

"...huh..." the figure before me suddenly rasps. "...well, what do you know? A worthless power for a worthless person."

The voice is clearly Sophia's, but it's breathy, whispering, and tentative, like someone who hasn't spoken in years.

"Never gotten to choke a bitch while like this before." she continues, her voice gaining strength as she speaks. "Or talk, for that matter."

Her grip tightens, and I gasp, trying to draw in more air than I'm getting. Surprisingly, upon hearing that her hold readjusts, loosening back to a state I can breathe in, albeit uncomfortably.

"Oh no, you don't get to die just yet." Sophia growls. "Because I still want to know why. Why you make so little fucking sense, Hebert. So you're going to explain, here and now."

I can't concentrate at all on what she's saying, my mind too busy trying to understand the problem I was just presented with to even so much as try. Why the hell is Sophia, Shadow Stalker, able to physically touch me while in her breaker form when everything I've read on her says otherwise?! Given the little self-examination she did after colliding with me and what she said just now, this has to be something she can't usually do, but-

"I kicked the shit out of you because you didn't even move at the top of those stairs yesterday. You just accepted it and let yourself fall. Which is absolute bullshit. Even you have more survival instinct than that. There are fucking bacteria with more survival instinct than that."

A horrible thought strikes me. My mist is only "solid" while I'm nearby, and completely non-interactive when I'm not. But that isn't a property of the mist itself, its proximity to me is what allows it to become material to living things. My very presence causes an immaterial gas to act as a solid object. And if Shadow Stalker is inherently immaterial while using her power...

"So I have to assume that you just wanted death- that when you had no other options but to fight or to die, you chose die. And you know what, we already went over my stance on that. But this? This adds a whole new level of what the FUCK."

Sophia's fingers tighten their vice around my throat again, and I lose my train of thought as I cough up more dark grayish fog. My vision starts to blur- whether because of the mist, low light, or lack of air I'm not sure, but since I miraculously haven't yet lost my glasses, it has to be one of the three.

"See, apparently you're a cape. An actual goddamn cape, which should be impossible, because capes are supposed to be survivors. The ones who fight, claw past the shit they're in, and prove themselves worthy to keep living. Which you, as you've most definitively proven, are not."

She brings her face closer to mine, forcing me to stare into the shifting, ovular haze of darkness it currently is.

"So how? How do you have powers, Hebert? How do you in ANY way qualify for them?!"

My mind whirls ever harder and faster as it searches for a potential means of escape. Doesn't she have a limit on how long she can keep this form up?! I can't remember seeing anything about that online, and she doesn't sound like she's under any significant strain-

Sophia growls, pulls me forward, and proceeds to slam my head into the wall. I feel the plaster fracture beneath me, and silently thank the shoddiness of the construction, since that could easily have cracked my skull open otherwise. As it is, I can still feel a wet spot forming on the back of my head- she did that hard enough to draw blood.

"I do actually expect an answer at some point." she spits.

"The-" I wheeze, barely able to talk through her hold on my neck and the pain in my skull. "Locker..."

Sophia seems almost taken aback for a moment.

"That? THAT was your trigger event?" she repeats incredulously. "That's BEYOND pathetic. I would have respected you somehow fucking them out of Grue more than that. Only you could trigger off of something that stupid. No wonder all you got was this gray smoke shit."

My anger flares, despite my current situation. "You... you think YOU wouldn't have-!"

The rebuttal earns me a kick to my left leg. I let out a choked cry of pain, but the grip on my neck forces me to stay standing.

"Shut the fuck up. You're NOTHING." Sophia snarls. "You're a worm who somehow fluked into powers, and ones so useless that you can't fight back with them even now that you're actually trying, at that. You don't deserve to be a cape. You don't deserve to be anything..."

The pointed piece of shade in her hand cocks back, as if for finality's sake, and I have a sudden flash of insight. I can't affect her with my mist, but-

"...except, perhaps, a corpse."

The shadowy arm strikes- as does my skull, forced forward against Sophia's grip by the mist I just leaked from my head wound and expanded behind it to create an improvised piston. The knife passes by harmlessly, as my forehead smashes into my tormentor's featureless face.

The loud cry of pain and the loosening of her grip that follow clearly indicate that she can at least be injured as a shadow, allowing me to break away and fling the door open. I throw myself down the stairs as fast as I can, dense swirls of mist continually leaking from my body to clog the hall behind.

It's possible that I just missed my best chance to take Sophia down, but she's stronger than I am, in possession of a knife, has a hell of a lot more fighting experience, and- most critically- has seemingly taken on the properties of my mist, at least for the time being. Even worse, while I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure my own power is somehow the root cause of that last issue. Taken as a whole, that leaves me absolutely no way to effectively retaliate. I'm not about to try to fight her unarmed, but my mist can't be used to trap her, protect myself from her, or really do anything other than obscure her vision- assuming it's even doing that. All factors considered, the thought of trying to fight her head on right now seems like it would be nigh on suicidal.

I slide into the kitchen, flooding the area behind me with mist even as I scramble for the phone. To my surprise, an emergency card just like the one I'd gone looking for is sitting right next to the phone. I suppose it makes more sense to have it here than anywhere else, but I've never noticed, either because it's never been relevant before, or because I haven't really had anyone to call for the past year or so.

I hurriedly pick up the receiver, but immediately drop it and duck into the living room as a shadow phases through the ceiling and falls on to the kitchen island. I'd smack myself for not thinking about that possibility were it not for the noise it would make. In lieu of that, I inch behind the couch, diffuse what mist I have on hand to cover most of downstairs with a thin layer of it, and try to stay as quiet as possible.

"You know, for a moment I almost forgot how hard you so recently fucked me over." Sophia speaks, loud enough to reach anywhere in the house. "But then you ran, and I remembered I have more than one reason to kill you. So if you think I'm leaving while you're still breathing, you're dreaming."

I still have no idea what exactly she thinks I did, but it makes little difference given that she's clearly already gone off the deep end. At least whatever it was apparently made her angry and talkative enough that I can tell she's still in the kitchen for the moment. My mist is getting thicker and more opaque over time the more of it that I pump into the air, so if I can just hide for long enough, I'll be able to cut off vision within the house entirely, at which point I can hopefully sneak out through the window. Failing that, maybe I can at least get the jump on Sophia... not that I think that'll do me much good.

If only I had some way to actually hurt, or even affect her that doesn't amount to beating on her bare handed. Does Shadow Stalker have any weaknesses? It's been confirmed that she can't stall inside solid objects, but I can't make her do that, and right now I'm not certain that's even an issue for her. Isn't there anything else? Shadow Stalker's official power description claimed that she's immune to pretty much everything in her shadow form, so what am I supposed to do...?

Footsteps- oddly heavy ones considering that Sophia is presently a living shadow- draw close to the couch. That's not good, especially given how awful my hiding space is. Distraction, I need a distraction-

In the doorway leading to the hallway across the room, I open a pocket of mist just large enough for someone to stand in, placing a thicker, darker, vaguely humanoid shaped patch of mist in its center. I silently pray that Sophia is looking in that direction, and that the mist is doing a good enough job obscuring things that my very rough decoy can be mistaken as me, because if not, then I have nowhere to-

The footsteps stop, replaced by the sound of someone landing from a jump near the hallway. This is immediately followed by the sound of yelling.

"Really? Fucking really?!"

Damn it, she took the bait, but that distraction did not last nearly long enough. My house isn't large enough to play an extended game of hide and seek with a murderous cape in. I need time to get all this mist in the air, time which I do not-

There's a thump that causes the floor beneath me to vibrate, and a shadowy arm slashes down through the back of the couch towards my legs. I reflexively drew them up to my chest, barely avoiding the knife as it withdraws, and Sophia silently passes through the couch to stand above me in the cramped bit of space.

She swings the knife down again, this time at my stomach. Getting out of the way in time seems impossible, especially given that I have to move the mist behind me out of my way first, but somehow I manage it. I don't give Sophia the chance to lunge before pulling all the mist in the house to us, instantly blanking sight for the entire room- since she's already found me, there's no point in having it anywhere else.

I whisk the mist behind me away and tiptoe back towards where I hope the door to the hallway is. This is essentially my last remaining gambit, and it isn't a good one. Sophia can move effortlessly through this, so it isn't going to take her long to just run through the rather small room in its entirety. I can't risk making noise, so the phone is out, and if I run into a wall I'm dead. My only hope at this point is to get out of here as fast and as quietly as possible, and hope she keeps searching the rest of the house long enough for me to run away.

A frustrated growl issues from somewhere nearby, FAR too close for my liking. Though, anywhere in this fog is too close for my liking.

"Okay, this cat and mouse bullshit is...!"

Sophia's voice dies off mid-sentence for some reason, and from the same direction comes a sound I can only assume is some sort of cough. Apparently she DOES need to breathe in that form, though I have no idea how that works.

"Is... what... what the fuck...?"

Her voice sounds weirdly... strained. Exertion?

I hear another sound, not movement this time, more like someone falling to their hands and knees, followed by a very strange sort of gasping. What is this? A trick? A lure? That doesn't make much sense; is she actually...

"...air... how..."

Air? What, is she having breathing issues?

After another couple seconds of gasping, I decide to chance a look, figuring that Sophia has next to no reason to fake this sort of thing, and funnel just enough mist upstairs to raise the visibility of the room by a fractional amount. It's still like trying to see underwater in a peat bog, but the dark blob in the center of the room- all of ten feet away- is unmistakable as anything else. She's turned away from me, down on the ground, shuddering and making strangled noises in whatever she has that currently passes for a throat.

Huh... I guess she really is having some sort of issue breathing right now. But why? Is my mist starting to interfere with whatever process usually provides her with oxygen while she's like this? Or maybe because it isn't usually able to enter or pass through living things, it's interacting badly with Sophia's current state of matter? She certainly didn't seem all that bothered by it upstairs, but the mist there wasn't this dense, and she didn't stay in it for very long. Right now, the mist is essentially all pervasive- is that what makes the difference? Without any knowledge about what Shadow Stalker is normally vulnerable to, I have no way of knowing if this is a weakness I didn't realize was one, or just some sort of weird power interaction.

After shuddering one last time, Sophia finally seems to rally her strength and jumps out of her crouch from all fours. Her leap takes her directly through the wall leading to the backyard, and out of the house.

I am very abruptly left alone in the living room, the room silent aside from my own breathing. I stand there, stunned, fairly sure that I somehow just managed to accidentally force Sophia to retreat.

...then again, retreating doesn't mean she's actually left. I need to hurry and call someone, anyone, before she comes back even madder than before.

I turn towards the now barely visible kitchen doorframe and stumble over to it, cutting a giant hole through my mist to move through. My fingers grab uselessly at the phone for a few moments before I finally gather enough coordination to actually pick it up. My digits continue to betray me for several more seconds, sweat making them slip uselessly over the keys, before I manage to dial in the number on the emergency card.

"PRT hotline, state your business."

"Shadow Stalker just tried to kill me." I blurt out.

"Come again? Shadow Stalker is a Ward-"

"I know that." I babble over the voice, desperate to finish the call in case Sophia comes back. "She attacked me at school earlier, and when I got home I found her waiting in my room, with one of our kitchen knives..."

There's a reply, a question of some sort, but for some reason my brain refuses to parse it. Now that the immediate threat has passed, my adrenaline is quickly waning, and I'm starting to feel woozy. I keep talking, but either I'm hearing myself wrong or my voice is starting to slur. Everything hurts.

The phone slips from my grasp as I fall to my knees. No, can't sleep right now, Sophia could still be outside, can't-

AN: I told you I wasn't going to make this easy on her. Sorry Taylor.

Hmm. Sophia is a pretty awful person, but she's not usually THIS unhinged. I wonder what's going on...?