Interlude 2.c – Thinker Hijinks

Hebert Residence

What did it mean to be a Hero?

To Taylor Hebert, for most of her life being a Hero meant having supernatural powers and then using those powers to fight Villains.

It…wasn't something she'd put much thought into beyond that. Not when she didn't have powers, and especially not when her best friend had spent years telling her that she amounted to nothing.

Then she experienced the worst day of her life and got powers.

So, again, without much thought, she wanted to emulate the Hero's she grew hearing about.

Make a costume, go on patrols, beat up criminals and Villains, and voila you're a Hero.

Then she experienced the best day of her life and all her problems started going away one by one.

Now she had a little more perspective.

Taylor realised that people didn't really need powers to be a Hero. This was something that gave her pause, pause enough to reevaluate her decisions.

After a lot of thinking and reading up on her journal, she realised that while she did want to be a Hero, she also really, really wanted what came out of being a Hero a lot more.

It was selfish and it was stupid, but she wanted recognition. She wanted to be in the spotlight and she wanted people to rely and depend on her. She wanted to matter. She wanted control.

'Did it really make me a Hero if my intentions weren't completely pure?'

Once she'd started thinking along those lines, she'd started thinking beyond just beating up Villains.

She truly started to analyze her power and think of what she might be capable of.

And the answer was: a lot.

Taylor had been instinctively tagging people with bugs for a while, and it had taken only a single incident where she'd smoothly moved out of the way of someone that was about to bump into her subconsciously, to realize that it wasn't normal. She'd realized that her awareness of her bugs and hence awareness of where they were was amazing. Her spatial awareness, co-ordination and reaction times was essentially supernatural.

Another thing that she'd noticed was how she could leave commands to her bugs even when they were not currently in her range. She'd discovered this when Daniel's bug spray had forced her to build her costume outside her house and not in her range when at home, only to discover that her bugs that continued her work when she'd returned.

Taylor had realised that while she was undoubtably a Master class Cape, she was also a Thinker. Something that made her feel a lot, lot better.

Once she'd had that thought though, it was inevitable that she'd tried to see research how a Thinker usually fought in battles and the answers the internet had given her were mixed. But what she'd come away with was that traditional Thinkers didn't fight, at least not directly.

Combat Thinkers were known menaces in battle, but they were rarely ever even thought of as Thinkers. Taylor knew that she herself could be thought of as a Combat Thinker, but without any martial experience, even her supernatural senses and co-ordination were meaningless.

Taylor was also sure that she could qualify as the more traditional Thinker, the kind that gathered information. Her power could even be played off as a short-range clairvoyance if she could better parse her bug senses, even the 'short' was debatable when she'd realised her range was growing!

Thinking of Range and Senses, Taylor couldn't help but sigh in frustration. She'd realised with a little testing that both her Range and her ability to understand the senses of her bugs was improving as time went on. But somehow, it was less her getting better with training, and more her power simply improving on its own. Nothing she'd found was improving her rate of progression.

As far as the senses went, smell was something she'd found was the easiest, though for now it seemed unnecessary. Smell was something she only really used to identify people, but she'd realised that she could perfectly count and keep track of her bugs, which meant that remembering who she'd tagged with her bugs was a piece of cake.

What this meant was that she could easily go out without a costume, use her Thinker ability to collect information on gangs without anyone ever knowing. And while Bug Power's might have been weak, compared to the average Thinker she actually had the ability to defend herself against other Capes.

'So why was it that my first instinct was to wear a costume and go out to punch criminals?'

Compared to most capes…Taylor was pretty sure that she was weak. After all her power was literally controlling bugs. And…every time she remembered that fact, she felt a painful feeling in her chest. Thinking that even after everything she'd been through…even after she became a Cape…she'd still be the same Taylor that was at the Trio's mercy. The only difference would be that it would happen as a Cape.

It was this thought that made her completely ignore looking into her powers further and simply think of herself as strong since she actually had a power, no matter what it was.

Only…after a lot of research did she understood that 'power' wasn't always so straightforward. For a self-proclaimed cape nerd, she'd realised that she was quite superficial in her thinking, only ever interested in the flashier capes.

Accord, a Villain Thinker from Boston was a 'weak' man. And yet…he was apparently one of the most terrifying Villains around, with the PRT and Protectorate unable to do any real lasting damage to his organization.

She'd only heard about Accord, because of a very public bounty the Villain had put on another Villain who had apparently disrespected the man.

She'd tried to find more about other Thinkers, seeing names like 11th Hour, Roullete and Appraiser, but she couldn't tell if those sources were accurate, which when thought about seriously, made sense.

Thinkers were elusive. Thinkers were scary. Thinkers tended to be the boogeymen of Cape society, even more so than Strangers.

At least that's what her takeaway was from her research trips to the library.

Taylor had been ecstatic when she'd realised that she wasn't as weak, or rather as valueless as she thought she was.

She'd been truly happy about her Power for the first time, after all even while weak and not something that directly affected humans, she wasn't happy to know that she was classified as a Master considering the stigma the term carried.

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No, she wasn't much of a Master at all. Taylor was a Thinker!

And surprisingly, ever since she'd cemented that fact to herself, she'd noticed that it was getting a lot easier for her to parse through and make use of the senses she gained from her bugs!

So…maybe she did realize that she had certain desires to go out and beat peop–criminals physically. And…maybe that might have been subconsciously affecting her decisions for a while now…but now that she'd identified it, Taylor wouldn't let something like that come in the way of her Cape career…and possibly her life considering how unprepared she was!

She still wanted fame and recognition, to be the one who saves the day and beats the Villain…but she realised that she wasn't truly equipped for something like that…at least not yet.

With her own Combat Thinker-ish abilities, she toyed with the idea of buying Tinkertech and using that to become a successful Hero.

Of course, that would need money she currently didn't have. But…that brought her back to her more general Thinker capabilities.

In today's day and age, Information was a product with a high demand.

The kind of things Taylor could find out with her power definitely cost something. Which meant that there would be someone out there willing to pay for such information. 'Preferably someone with heroic inclinations…'

And sure…it might not be all that Heroic to ask for money when the information she was providing would make the world a better place…but even Heroes got paid right? In fact, Taylor thought they were probably quite rich.

Naturally, the fact that she was even entertaining this idea was because she was confident in her ability to gather information on criminals. Because she already had.

Putting her face in her hands, Taylor realised she couldn't put it off anymore.

There was a reason she hadn't clicked on any of the many, many ads that had popped up when she was researching Thinkers, telling her that Watchdog or WEGGDG, one of PRT's sub-organizations was always looking for Thinkers.

Thinking back, Taylor felt stupid. It wasn't a novel feeling, but still, not realizing that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, despite how long she'd had to find out and all the little clues she'd been aware of, was monumentally stupid.

In the end, it wasn't even primarily her use of her Power, that had alerted her to her bully's Cape identity. No, that was when the absolute b-word had briefly attacked the dockworkers that had accompanied her and her father to school for her transition to homeschooling.

The question of why she'd attacked was simple. Unknown to her, her Father and some of the Dockworkers had taken it up on themselves to deal with her bullies…which made her feel things that she'd rather not think about right now. Sophia, had attacked them when they were asking pointed questions about her and the rest of the Trio, with the shadowy cape jumping the gun and suspecting her own identity as compromised to gang members, only realizing that the matter was one that involved her civilian identity after she'd attacked.

It was of little consolation that Sophia was clearly quite good at what she did, considering no one ever found out who had attacked the dockworkers other than the fact that it was a Parahuman attack after several objects had been thrown at the them that came out of nowhere. It was only Taylor, who'd tagged Sophia with her bugs before even entering the Winslow that knew it was her who was responsible.

…It was also only Taylor, who, through her bugs had noticed when a scarred, muscular woman had emitted a sonic-scream of some kind that disoriented both the bugs around her and Shadow Stalker long enough to taze her into unconsciousness and shove her into a van before disappearing down the street.

Seeing her dad's colleagues and friends and people getting attacked and finding out that one of her tormentors was a known Hero, just made Taylor freeze. So, in the end all she'd done was watch as one of her life's greatest troubles, who turned out to be a bigger problem than she thought possible, got kidnapped by who she later realised was a Neo-Nazi parahuman.

All of it was too much at once, but somehow despite her inner turmoil she'd managed to outwardly be the picture of calm. It was only later she'd realised that she had somehow offloaded her panic to her bugs, discovering another aspect of her power. She wasn't quite able to repeat the feat to the same extent yet, but she felt that practice would allow her to use it consistently…and she had a feeling she would be using it a lot in the near future.

The 'Unknown Parahuman Attack' on the school had led to the school day ending early, so they weren't able to finalize her leave from Winslow that day and ended up going home after everyone gave a brief statement to some PRT agent. It was actually quite brief, probably because no one was seriously injured and got away with just minor cuts and bruises…and yet Taylor couldn't help but think that they were being quite half-hearted as they worked.

Taylor had always thought that it was Emma's father who abused his status as a lawyer to protect the Trio and their hanger-ons from the consequences of their actions. Now, armed with the knowledge that Sophia was Shadow Stalker, she could easily see why Principal Blackwell never done anything about her situation.

If it was the Taylor from a month ago, she would have immediately labelled the PRT and Protectorate as bad guys in her heart. She would have thought that they were conspiring against her, and that they allowed Sophia to do what she did on purpose. But…the Taylor of today could only really feel resignation and disappointment.

She'd always heard her father talk about how the government was incompetent when it came to solving issues for anyone who wasn't rich or politically powerful. She'd just dismissed it as the ranting of a depressed old man…but she could see it now. She could see it clear as day, and she didn't know what to do about it.

She didn't really believe that the Hero's knew what went on in the Winslow and Sophia's personal life. She didn't want to think that the other Wards were like Sophia…but she'd long since lost the ability to understand other people her age and wouldn't hold her breath.

But…there was still that doubt.

What if they did know?

What if they did know what was going on, but just didn't care enough to stop it?

Now she was at a crossroads.

She knew what happened to Sophia. And…Taylor had a feeling that they didn't.

This was the perfect opportunity to get back at Sophia for tormenting her, ruining her life, for insulting her mother…for causing her so much pain. And…she didn't have to do anything.

No one would know if she didn't say anything.

But is that what a Hero would do?

The rage in her heart, the one that had been simmering and bubbling for years, had truly shown its ugly face for the first time. For the first time she truly had a chance to get back at the Trio since she'd never thought of retaliating by doing anything they did to her to them.

Her anger screamed at her to do nothing. To sit at home and laugh. To gleefully savor the schadenfreude at the thought of the black cape being in the hands of one of the most racist organizations on the West Coast.

Her life was finally getting better. She had powers, was getting a proper education and had a family that was actually there for her and supporting her.

She even had a friend…of sorts. The grandson of an Ex-dockworker who was also working to get an online high school degree. He…was a bit of a nerd. Like Greg…but not as creepy.

Thinking about him, she inevitably, thought about the silly comic that he'd introduced to her. A web comic with hilariously bad art…which actually seemed to be done on purpose? It was completely different from the Hero comics that the Protectorate had popularized and followed a man whose Brute rating was basically ∞ and could defeat everyone in a single punch.

She couldn't deny that seeing him destroying Villains in a single hit was extremely satisfying…and made her envy him quite a bit. But…that wasn't what really stood out to her from the comic. No, it was a minor character called Mumen Rider that really drew her attention.

A man with absolutely no powers, who nevertheless still went out to be a Hero. A brave and honorable hero who never overlooked any crime. Someone who never backed down from a fight no matter the opponent. Someone who was perfectly willing to risk or even outright sacrifice his life for innocent people.

'What would Mumen Rider do?'

The answer was simple really. He would immediately call the PRT and give them the information, then take off on his bicycle to Empire territory and shout at and fight gang members and capes until they gave in and let go of Sophia.

Taylor thought about it.

Could she do that? Sophia wasn't an innocent person…but she was still someone who went out and stopped criminals.

Did she want to do it?

Picking up her wallet, Taylor walked to entrance of her house, idly tracing her eyes over its completely refurbished state as she did, recalling how she'd worked on it with her father, cousin and the dockworkers, and marveling at the absent creaking sounds that had once accompanied her steps.

'Sorry Mumen Rider…I can't be the kind of Hero you are…even though I'm sure that a younger, innocent version of me would probably love and idolize you more than even Alexandria.'

Putting on her shoes, she leaned her head further inside the house and shouted.

"DAD! I'm heading out!"

"Alright sweetie! Remember to stick to the main roads! OH, and remember to pick up your cousin from school!"

"Got it! See you soon!"

Walking out of the house she firmed up her resolve.

'I can't afford to act like Mumen Rider when I have a family to get back to. But…that doesn't mean I can't be a Hero…if only to prove it to myself.'

She didn't care about the PRT's or anyone else's definition of what a Hero was. She was pretty sure she had a good idea of the kind she wanted to be already.

Taylor felt that Saitama had the right of it. Screw what other people thought. She'd save the day and walk away.

She wasn't nearly as strong as him…but she could be just as deadly in the shadows.

How long would the Gangs last when they suddenly find all their secrets lost to the public? How would they continue to be carefree when they find their secret identities compromised? What would they do when they had no shining beacon of a Hero to blame or attack in sight for their misfortune?

'I'll contact the PRT and ask them for payment for the information. If they refuse to pay…I'll give New Wave the info for free. I've seen them have enough passive-aggressive feuds online to know that Brandish would gladly take any proof of their incompetence and use it well.

After that…I can try discreetly looking for Sophia's whereabouts using my bugs and see where to go from there. And if along the way criminals get stopped from committing crimes because a fly went into their mouths, or a cockroach entered their various other orifices…well…all's well that ends well.'

As for how she'd contact the PRT or New Wave…well using a public phone booth while blocking the cameras with her bugs was a valid tactic. Really it was surprising how well suited her Power was for covert operations.

Maybe going full Thinker wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Looking into the bright shining Sun in the sky, Taylor couldn't help but smile and feel that the future was going to be bright…for her at least. She had a feeling that she was going to be ruining a lot of people's days in the future.

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Author's Note:

Hehe he, that's right! Taylor's gone on a complete Thinker route with her powers!

For now, she'd still in the stage where she believes that Bug powers are weak and doesn't believe she would stand a chance against other capes. Cannon Taylor ended up fighting Lung despite thinking herself weak, and mostly disregarded her Thinker capabilities for a long time, always preferring getting into direct fights and conflict. And even when she did use her Thinker aspect, she was always out in the open and part of the action.

This Taylor? She's thinking of her bugs as a completely supportive power with amazing Utility!

Let's see where that takes her!

Sorry about the long wait, Grandpa basically got sick again, to the point of hospitalization. Really high fever, chills, etc. Docs haven't figured out what's causing it entirely, but he's got a whole host of problems including both his Liver, Heart and even medicinal side-effects that are causing Skin problems and Lesions in his mouth.

We even had a scare where one of the doctors was considering that Tuberculosis might have been a misdiagnosed and that it was actually freaking LUNG CANCER! Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case, but it was still a scary couple of days.

Now he'll hopefully get discharged soon, since his Cough that had been troubling him for the past couple months is finally subsiding. Not that the TB is gone, buy hey, silver linings and all right?