AN: Hello there! Ladies and gentlemen of the internet. Gather around one and all for the next installment of everyone's favorite slime girl adventure. Wyvern and the Warhawk proudly bring to you Social Anxiety: The Story!

AtW: Again, work life balance got in the way. And we wrote a lot of other stuff. But the spark for Flask just wasn't there. Too tired, too busy, too just plain worn out. HOWEVER! We are dedicated to this project. We want it to be all it can be. Plus Taylor is just adorable when she's smashing people.

In short, life sucks, people ended up in the hospital, and my muse took a nap. With the fishes. But she's back! And not just for lemons. So expect more regular updates. Ok?

Wyvern: And more lemons. This guy is like a machine!

So, without further ado, get reading! And don't forget to leave a comment or criticism!

Chapter 14 - Brockton Asunder

One of the first things Taylor had learned about her powers was that, no matter how much she moved or what she did, she was incapable of losing mass in the sense that normal humans lost weight. She was capable of consuming matter and adding it to her mass, but all that did was increase her overall size, and density, while giving her more material to shuffle around whenever she had to switch shapes.

During her tests, however, she found out one sure way to get rid of her added weight.

A very painful one.

If she couldn't burn mass the same way a human could, then all she had to do was literally burn it. As in get exposed to high enough energy discharge that it causes her mass to sublimate and break down.

That meant she didn't need to drag herself around every time she accumulated mass. But on the other hand, getting it removed hurts like a bitch and a half.

And she'd just lost most of what she'd gained during the evening. It wasn't the super heated ash, Taylor had figured out how to ablate the outer layers of her "skin" quickly enough. It hadn't been the burning skeleton of the building she'd been punching holes in, that had only caused mild annoyance and slightly less mild injuries when the flames had overcome her.

No. What had hurt the most had been swallowing a girl made of fire. Inside the core of her being, the heat had directly damaged a large proportion of her "body", so to speak, and that meant she'd had to give up mass to keep intact.

Blessedly, her powers had still worked.

Touching the child, because it had been a child, returned the Breaker to her human state. Unfortunately it also meant the room had literally exploded, the fire now freed from her, even moderate, control had swallowed everything. The building came down on them and so Taylor did the first things that came to mind.

One of the hundreds of tendrils she'd sent out finally found air. Having been buried alive, she'd lost her orientation and so contracted her omnidirectional excavation and began eating "left". More unfortunate was the fact she'd had to temporarily let go of the kid to make sure she wasn't crushed by the debris all around them. Fire was a bit harder to break than bone, after all.

Pushing out of the hole, she used chunks of cement to lift the girl up behind her, having sealed the child inside of her body, and climbed out.

It was a delicate situation, even now the young girl burnt away at the mass within her core, angry bubbling and sizzling coming from her body as she lost mass. Which she had to replace by eating through the wreckage.

It had been… disorienting, but Tailor finally managed to excavate her way out and triumphantly plopped out of the ground.

"Hello! I am here!" She quickly formed a few mouths, calling for help vibrating through her form as she struggled to keep the younger cape from being injured.

There was no way she would be able to keep an humanoid form, not while getting burnt from the inside by the tiny furnace of a girl, who was still scorching her mass into non existence. And god did it just, it was All Taylor could do was keep her contained and crawl along the ground calling for help.

Thankfully the firefighters were quick to respond and only gawked for a few seconds. Fire extinguishers were turned on Taylor's seemingly molten mass, the chemicals giving her enough time to grab the kid's ankle again, and soon enough she was stumbling to her feet, a small girl, maybe ten or eleven, shivering in her arms.

"Help, please, she's a cape. Breaker I think. I need a blanket or something for her!"

Looking like a six foot tall bubblegum pink barbie doll was probably worse than coming off as the Blob or a demon out of Hell. Way more chance of hitting the uncanny valley. But this was Brockton Bay and these firefighters were just glad they hadn't had to pull the charred, blackened, broken corpse of a small child out of the ruined apartment building. In other words, they complied.

Not that any of this slowed down the formerly hysterical woman. She was still crying, silently now, slowly walking towards Taylor with a look caught between pure horror and utter relief.

When the slime held the girl out for the firemen to wrap her in a blanket, that seemed to be some unspoken signal.

Rushing forward, she began blubbering again, this time in unabashed joy, simply holding her swaddled child to her chest and apologizing over and over again. For what, Taylor didn't know. But she didn't need to know either. Smiling, she double checked the anklet of slime she'd left on the new cape, no sense risking a flare up of the kid's powers, and began to run off.

A large, burly man in a hat and uniform, an officer of the fire brigade perhaps, approached her, trying to say something. Taylor just shook her head. He nodded, somehow understanding what she was trying to communicate. Instead, he just nodded towards the mother and her child.

Again, Taylor was struck by how oddly familiar both of them seemed, but in the end, didn't stick around to talk. She did notice the girl waking up though, soft brown eyes seemingly barely opening, just in time to catch her final glance.

The slime waved goodbye before she was off again.

Lashing out with a tendril like arm, she let the limb extend for several dozen meters, slightly eating into the structure of her target building, before Taylor contracted the new organ. Yanking herself forward several hundred feet, the teenager flew for a second before she splattered against the building she'd been aiming for. Not even bothering to reform, she launched another out and kept moving.

It was in this manner, slowly getting better at not exploding her body against whatever she was aiming for, that she cleared a huge portion of the Docks. After all, she'd been messing around for too long already and she had another kid, plus a friend, to save!

Dinah flinched as she heard another bottle break, more screams in angry chinese coming from the front of the run down house. There'd been a lot of that in the last thirty minutes now.

Not that she didn't know what they were talking about. With her power, it had taken her two questions to guess it was about a missing ride. And that said ride was a pickup for her. More disturbingly, that if that pickup did arrive her cousin and aunt, Sarah and Mary respectively, would end up dead or worse.

She was a bright girl.

On the other hand, her power was… unsure. Hesitant. Percentages kept getting wobbly sometimes and shifting around as, Dinah assumed, people made certain decisions. Right now her chance at survival was climbing, but so was the chance that every single one of them would be dead.

And that didn't bother her. No, she was far more concerned by the fact that the chance of Aunt Mary being seriously injured was climbing too.

"Momma…."

Sarah was whimpering again, her stained nightie smeared with snot and tears and dirt.

"Shh, shh baby, it's gonna be ok. I promise."

Dinah never hated her powers as much as she did at that moment. Contrary to what her aunt promised, the chances of something terrible happening to them climbed higher and higher the longer it took for whatever it was the criminals outside waited for to happen. It didn't take parahuman abilities to infer from their slurred screaming and the shaking of the walls to know that things hadn't gone according to plan.

Was there even a plan to begin with?

The timing seemed to indicate so. Dinah wasn't particularly known to the public, and there were even fewer who knew she had powers.

The exact same powers which predicted that they had come for her and that her cousin and aunt were merely collateral, gotten caught in the crossfire of whatever misbegotten kidnapping those outside had planned.

Collateral damage meaning they weren't needed.

Meaning the probability of them being 'not needed anymore' was particularly high as it was.

The young girl bit her lip, unwilling to say anything about it.

What would be the chances of them being rescued?

She'd asked the question more than once since they'd been taken. But as frustrating as it was, the probability seemed to shift and warp without her ever being able to get a solid result. As if her powers couldn't grasp all the variables.

Whatever was causing her powers to spazz out like this, it was starting to mess around with her other predictions.

Making her less reliable by the minute.

And that was what was making her scared, not the screaming. She still pressed into her cousin, letting her aunt hold both of them close, as they tried to pretend the world wasn't about to end. Because quite frankly that's what it sounded like.

They'd heard the fires and the violence and even their captors weren't stupid enough to ignore the warnings to stay off the streets. But perhaps… her headache returned.

Violent and pounding, Dinah saw spots and she knew she was pushing her power too hard. Even if the nose bleed hadn't been a sign, the fact she was starting to skip small periods of time was. And that meant she needed to stop or she'd kill herself and then her family would suffer far, far, far worse.

Of course, that might just be the panic.

Or cold logic.

Either way, it would be dumb.

So, instead, Dinah let her aunt hug her as hard as she could and kept thinking. Because they needed to know what was going on. Well, a much as possible. And that meant using her eyes and ears as much as she could. Obviously they'd searched the laundry room for a possible escape, finding only a single window that had been painted shut. She had suggested they try to pry it open, but the closest thing to a tool they'd found had been an old, rusted screwdriver.

The handle had snapped off when they tried to use it to scrape the paint clear and Aunt Mary had cut her hands trying to use the broken bits to try and work it through. When the gang members had sent someone to check on them, he'd slapped her and laughed, telling them in as crass a way as possible not to try to escape again.

His threats didn't bear repeating, especially since she knew he'd honor them.

Frankly, Dinah had been expecting this. Well, not this exact kidnapping attempt. But the fact that someone would try.

She was an intelligent girl, intelligent enough to know just how rare Thinkers with precognitive abilities were. Not that she knew what those words meant before she'd gotten powers. But once she had them, it was clear that she would have to make a few decisions.

And she'd chosen wrong, it seemed.

That was something that deeply frustrated her. Her power had clearly indicated that choosing to only tell her parents, aunt, and uncle posed only a seven point zero, zero six percent chance of leading to someone being hurt because of her power. Of course that was still a non zero chance, but it was incredibly minor!

But that… made her think. What if she'd asked the wrong questions back then? What if she had allowed it to include her potential deaths, captures, or worse? In that case, it would skew the chances of her… power… hurting… someone.

Dinah grunted in frustration, her brown eyes screwed up in frustration as it just now occurred to her that not only had she asked the wrong questions, but she asked them in the wrong way too!

Of course that was a moot point now.

A ninety nine percent chance of failure if she and her family tried to escape was… damning.

She just prayed that whoever or whatever was on their way made up its mind!

Taylor surged through the streets of Brockton, gelatinous body bounding and rebounding through alleys and avenues as the young parahuman turned prisoner turned temporary hero did her level best to leap her way towards the ongoing hostage situation, pinkish blob rippling and warping as she pushed its malleable form to its absolute limits.

She just hoped she wasn't late.

When that PRT commander left her knowing of the situation, the young woman hadn't spared a second before taking to the streets. She'd been forced to take detours constantly as entire streets had been wrecked by the worst of the fighting.

Fires and ruined vehicles blocked her path, likely left behind by vandals at the start of the fighting. Buildings had been left ruined, storefronts wrecked as criminals and anarchists ravaged the city looking for whatever loot they could get their hands on before the gangs hit the streets en masse.

Brockton Bay was falling apart at the seams and there wasn't much Taylor could do about it.

At least not as it stood. And that frustrated her to no end.

When you're sitting in a cell all day, left with nothing but your thoughts and a single friend who's as scared as you, then it's easy to slip into melancholy. To let your memories take over your days. To remember only the good times and let that bleed into your reality. Sure, it might seem weak, but it can be the only thing that keeps you sane during those long, long hours where the only thing to do is eat paint scraping off of your cell wall to try and see which brand was the tastiest.

And the thing that kept coming up were the old sleepovers she and Emma had, had.

One in particular came to mind.

They were young, probably only eight or nine, and loved playing superheroes. Because of course they did, it's what all kids did. Emma scraped her knee and Taylor had been the one to put a bandaid on it. She'd done it poorly, at a bad angle, and put one that was way, way too tiny onto the scrape… but it had worked, somehow, and they'd both calmed down.

It was a stupid thing to fixate on, of course, but she first remembered this after they'd had a talk. A talk where Emma had been the one to comfort her, keeping Taylor from breaking down at least three or four times. Things had changed so, so much. But now… those happier times, well, maybe….

Just maybe

Stretching forward, the slime girl pulled herself over the flaming husk of a bus, grabbing onto a lamp post as she pulled her body off the ground and vaulted over it. The heat licked over her mass, a rather unpleasant reminder of her encounter with the young parahuman girl with fire powers. It had been her first experience with such a powerful Blaster, something she hadn't had a chance of trying previously.

'Yeah, not going to do that again.' The feeling of being charcoaled from the inside was far from pleasant.

But at least she'd helped save the girl. Her first successful rescue as a… sorta hero? Parahuman Trainee Irregular? She hadn't exactly asked that man, Calvert wasn't it? Yeah, he was the commander who'd… recruited her? Bribed her? Bribed her.

That sounded bad. Like really bad, but Taylor just had to save this kid, grab Paige, and then they could get out of here.

Easy!

As scared as she'd been after her break out, the young woman knew what she went through was nothing compared to half of the horror stories she'd heard about the Birdcage. If those were true, then protecting her friend was worth risking her life. Even so, Taylor shivered. She had to pray it was worth it, at least.

Otherwise her escape, her fighting as well as everything she'd done up until now would be meaningless.

Forming another set of tendrils, she quickly latched onto wall, lamps, buildings. Everything she could reach for, that could keep her airborne and moving. The city blurred around her, eyes forming along the surface of her body, watching for the street signs that would tell her she'd arrived.

Even in that half zoned out state, simply letting her body expand and contract, devouring what she could as she stayed in constant motion, that Taylor's mind drifted again.

When she'd played superheroes, she'd always wanted to be Alexandria or Armsmaster and sometimes one of the New Wave heroes. And that was because of how she felt about them. It was… a childish reason, obviously, but it wasn't just because of how strong or cool or powerful they were. It was because everyone knew how hard they worked.

Armsmaster slept two hours a night, Alexandria was flying across the entire world, and New Wave had a charity event every single weekend. Every. Single. Weekend.

These people didn't sleep, they didn't rest, they didn't take time off. No. They had power, they had responsibilities, and they acted on them. They chose to take the mantle of Hero upon themselves and would not set it down, no matter how heavy it grew. That was what was inspiring about them. And even right now, even as she was trying to help a scared little girl, Taylor was doing it for selfish reasons.

She felt like shit, honestly.

But that didn't matter.

There was a job to do. Steeling her metaphorical spine, Taylor cast out her tendrils for a particularly large jump and pulled. Soaring through the air, she flattened her body to better glide on the wind currents. She wasn't very good at it, not yet at least, but the more she practiced the better she was getting. So with steel in her dozen eyes, the pink slime rocketed towards the next intersection.

A name caught her eyes and she took a sharp turn, releasing her hold and letting her body crash into the ground.

She checked the street's name again, and the number just to be sure before relaxing into a puddle.

She'd finally arrived.

'Alright, now all I need to do is find…'

There was a scream, a girl's voice calling for help, by a woman's scream of pain echoing through the empty streets below.

Dinah was really, really worried now. Time was starting to run out and it was clear that the chance of her family getting out of this fully intact was starting to approach zero. Another loud shout, this one partly in slurred English, filled the small house.

Their odds just hit zero.

She… didn't know what to do. Her power was purely passive now, mostly serving as awareness that the odds were shifting, and that was probably more to do with the sheer stress she was under, while her brain felt like it was going to split apart. In fact, just moving hurt at this point and the only reason she wasn't whimpering was because making that much noise would hurt too.

There was more shouting again and this time it was clear someone was hit too, the thud of something hard striking someone, the sound of glass hitting the floor.

And finally, the sound of the door being kicked open and hitting the wall behind it.

One of them men who'd taken them strolled in with wobbly steps, the side of his head was bleeding and in his hand he carried a gun. He slurred something to himself, Dinah's power supplying that the likelihood of him being concussed was around eighty three percent, and blood poured over his left eye.

She clutched tighter onto her aunt.

The possibility of something terrible happening had just peaked.

One hundred percent.

"Stupid gaijin, we shouldn't have taken this job."

He crouched down, alcohol thick on his breath.

"Lung doesn't pay well you see. He kills you if you actually want to live like a man." The thug turned his head and shouted something over his shoulder, another man bringing him a green glass bottle. "So you live like a dog and maybe he kills you. But we were offered a lot of money for you."

Tilting the bottle back, he took a long, long pull of the alcohol within.

"Now little gaijin. You tell me why someone was willing to pay seven figures for you, yes?"

None of them spoke, none of them even dared to breathe. This just pissed the man off more and he waved the gun in their faces.

"Tell me! Tell me now or I shoot!"

His accent was coming in thicker and thicker the angrier the man grew.

"Stupid fucking whores."

Snarling, he pulled the gun back and slammed it into Aunt Mary's head.

She screamed, head snapping to the side, but didn't fall over. Instead, she pulled Dinah and Sarah closer, shielding them with her body as best she could.

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Now the man was screaming too. "Stop screaming or I shoot

girl!"

Enraged, he started grabbing for Sarah. Dinah had a choice to make. In that moment she knew what happened next was up to her. She didn't bother consulting her power, instead, she pulled Sarah closer and shifted her body so the drunken, enraged man would be able to grab her instead.

It hurt when he grabbed her hair, jerking her head back. The precog finally let out a whimper as he roughly wrapped his arm around her throat and put the gun to her head.

"You talk now." His voice was low and dangerous, angry. "Yes. You talk now."

Aunt Mary tried to help her, but the cock of the hammer on the revolver was enough to stop her. They locked eyes. Dinah tried to let her know it was ok. Instead, the woman's face just grew hard.

"I-that is-my husband… he took money. He took money from the Empire and didn't help them. He was supposed to make sure they could raid the Police Evidence Depository for a shipment of cocaine, instead he took the money and did nothing. That-you don't need the girls. Just please, let them go. He'll pay you so long as you just have me, I swear!"

This got a laugh from the thug, one that was cold and cruel and hollow.

"Stupid bitch. You no think I know who hired me?"

Dinah was thrown to the floor, cracking her head on the cold linoleum as the enraged man strode over to Aunt Mary. Shoving his gun into her mouth, he laughed again.

"I give you one last chance. I know the children special. I no know which girl special. You tell me truth, tell me what her power is too, I let you and the other one go. Otherwise you die. They both get sold as fresh meat. Understand?"

Mary swallowed, Dinah could see her throat working, her eyes narrowed to the hand and handle of the gun inside of her.

"I… I… don't know."

She closed her eyes and the man snarled, pulling the trigger once. Dinah's first thought was that guns were loud. The ringing in her ears covered up even the screaming of her and her cousin and her aunt. A second later, she watched as he raised the gun and fired it again, this time into the window. He just laughed as the three scared women lay there and screamed, Dinah crawling back over to her aunt and cousin when something heavy pinned her down, pressing against her back.

The man gurgled a hacking laugh. It was clear that he was either drunk or scared or simple enough out of fucks to give that hurting them didn't matter anymore. That hurting them was what he wanted right now. And that meant there was probably nothing she could do to save them. Not so long as her head was on fire, ants were crawling in her skull, and hammers were slamming into her ears. In fact, it was all she could do to just keep conscious through the haze of pain and sound and fear.

Likelihood of being shot had just been raised to a hundred percent.

She closed her eyes, cheeks stinging with tears as she thought of her parents.

There was a loud crash,and her world faded into… pink?

Likelihood of being saved had gone up to a hundred percent.

Taylor exploded through the wall like a battering ram, zero resistance being put up by the thin wall of cheap plaster and half rotter wood. Her undulating, writhing, pulsing, surging mass dissolving a path through. Consuming every molecule of resistance, the blob crashed over the room like a roaring wave, terrifying, if slightly less so due to the fact she was bright pink.

She'd wasted no time on climbing the building, opting for the direct approach, considering someone was shooting a gun. There was no way she could allow someone to get hurt when she could do something to help them, regardless of whether they were the person she was here to rescue or not.

Because that's what heroes did, right?

Fortunately, it seemed the slime girl had hit the jackpot. Not only did she find the mayor's niece, she also did so just as the man had been about to put a bullet through her head. Lucky for both of them, considering how frayed her nerves were getting.

However her twelve eyes, those were the ones pointed into the room, told her all she needed to know about the mayor's wife and daughter. And judging by the blown out hole in the older woman's cheek? She would need medical attention. Meaning Taylor simply could not afford to waste time with the mook.

Flask felt her body ripple and shift around the shooter, her mass carrying him off the ground only to slam him against the ceiling with a thunderous impact. She did not stop there either, wrapping around the man like a vice and pulling him out of his full body print, only to spin around and throw him through the door like a ragdoll.

Her gaze remained locked on him, four eyes watching as he splintered the faux wood, embedded himself in the walls of the hallway, and then slid to the ground.

Laying there, limbs twisted up, looking like a puppet with its string cut… he looked… odd.

'I… may have gone overboard.'

He was breathing, though, and frankly she couldn't be bothered to care right now. Taylor knew what she looked like though, so didn't waste time trying to comfort the civilians. Instead, she simply vibrated her body to communicate.

"I'm here to rescue you. Let me clear the rest of the building and then we'll get you out of here."

She got a shaky nod from the woman. Good enough.

Not that she was comfortable leaving them alone. Not when one of them was bleeding like that, but there was no way she was going to put them in danger when there could be more of those goons all over the building. This was the mayor's family, so there was no chance just two men had come up with this idea.

And even if they did, they would need the hired muscle.

"I'm gonna need you to stay up here and hide, okay?" Her form shifted, becoming more humanoid, as close as she could manage under these circumstances, and pointed to the door adjacent to the room.

"Stay inside, there could be more of them downstairs. I will come pick you up when this place is clear."

With that, Taylor felt her body come apart and seep through the floor, her pink mass corroding the building's innards as she took the fastest route to the lower floor. Whoever said there weren't advantages to becoming a ball of slime certainly had never tried being one.

Even so, Taylor was starting to grow weary.

She would beat the gangsters and save the family, there was no doubt about it, not when there was nothing they could do to hurt her. The problem is what came next.

Could she trust Calvert? Would he keep his side of the deal?

And even if he did… what should Taylor do?

'Save Paige, of course.' The answer was obvious. It was why she had broken out of the Rig to begin with. Why she threw away any and all possibility of escaping being imprisoned for life. All so she could save a friend from the same fate. It felt like the right thing to do and she wouldn't regret it. Couldn't, or otherwise everything would be for nothing.

But what next?

She could fight her way through the whole city, find Paige and then take her back to the hospital. Or whatever safehouse the two of them could find. It wasn't like the slime girl was in any danger. But what about Paige? What about her father? Both had been so worried for her, encouraging her that she still had a chance of getting away without having to be Caged. Yet here she was, fresh off having broken out of prison and carrying out a raid on the ABB.

However, that was for later. Now was for fighting.

Sitting in the ceiling, a thin covering of paint all that separated her from the hostiles below, and Taylor took a deep breath. And then she struck. Lashing out with almost thirty tentacles, she rapidly struck out, thirty eyes guiding a tendril each.

She really did need that much firepower too. There were three men standing next to the stairs alone, firearms pointing up to the next floor as another three took posts at the windows, near a kitchen area, and behind a couch. Frankly, even as damage resistant as she was, Taylor had to admit the sheer variety of weapons took her aback.

Shiny rifles, shotguns, handguns, what looked like a PKM, something she only recognized because of CoD. It was strange. Because all the PRT had come at her with her handguns.

Or, she supposed, Brute tasers and foam sprayers. But these thugs were packing more heat than them!

Slamming into them, she used a tentacle to grab their weapons, snapping fingers and wrists with the sudden, violent jerking motion, wrapped their heads with her tentacles, and squeezed.

They screamed. Fought and clawed and thrashed and jumped and kick and bit and spat and did everything they could to throw her off. Taylor simply dropped her body to the bottom floor, a loud thump announcing her arrival, and slammed the thugs into the nearest wall of floor she had available. And frankly… she couldn't even be bothered to spare a second though for the people she was rather severely injured.

These men were rapists and slavers and drug pushers and murderers. The ABB enslaved women, killed men to harvest their organs, and slaughtered everyone who stood up to them. A concussion or two was a small price to pay compared to cutting a man open and yanking out his kidneys, leaving him to drown in his own blood.

Of course, that wasn't the end of things. Another man, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and flip flops and with a massive, sprawling oriental dragon tattooed across his torso, stepped out of a kitchen area.

Racking a shotgun, he screamed something in a language she didn't even recognize and opened fire.

At first, she wasn't concerned. It wasn't like a gun could hurt her, right?

Then whatever he shot turned into a wall of fire! Flames licked at her skin, drawing a horrific, inhuman screech from Taylor, before she lashed out with a long tentacle. slamming into the side of the man's face, she sent him to the ground with a shattered jaw. Just to be sure, she also made sure to drag his gun over to her body and ate that too. No sense in taking chances after all.

With the house quiet except for the whimpers of the man with the ruined face, the shape shifter grew about thirty ears, pointing in all directions, and listened for any sound at all.

Silence, except for rats and pain, she sent long, thin, eye equipped tendrils into every other room, even as she stretched her body back up to the upper floor. Clearing this one too, she made sure the place really was clear.

"Hey." She returned to her mostly human shape. "They're all taken care of. Are you ok?"

'Holy shit, I'm alive!' Dinah's first thought after being saved had been human, understandable, predictable one could say. And none would even accuse her of being juvenile for indulging in a moment of profanity.

Heart hammering against her chest, the young girl had seen her life flash before her eyes for a second there before her… pink savior had literally crashed through the wall. Almost like some sort of kool aid commercial. And then a wave of tentacles began attacking the criminal and literally eating his gun before sending him flying into the wall, not unlike someone tossed a bag of trash into a bin, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

It had been scary and awe inspiring both at the same time.

Then she had remembered her aunt had been shot and promptly started panicking again.

The three of them had taken to hiding in the bathroom, which unfortunately lacked any sort of first aid kit. The most they could do was make a press with some old toilet paper to try and stop the bleeding. And boy oh boy had she nearly fainted at the sight of it once the sheer, unbridled terror had worn off.

Of course, it was nothing compared to the mass of eldritch wrongness wreaking havoc down stairs.

Just being near it… her… was enough to make Dinah's powers clam up like it suddenly had gone deaf and blind. No matter which question she tried to ask, the answers varied so wildly she couldn't even understand them.

'What is our chance of leaving this place?'

Killer clams will raid florida.

What the hell did that even mean?!

Were her powers drunk or something?

It certainly explained why they were telling her of impending doom until that slime woman had crashed through the building. If her powers couldn't begin to understand her, then it would just ignore her presence altogether and act as if she weren't a factor.

But being so close. There was no way her powers wouldn't try to account for her.

'What are the chances of my aunt's wound getting infected?'

Rubber bands sauced with beetle juice.

Dinah ran her hands through her hair, frustrated.

'Emphasis on try.'

Why was she giving herself a headache when the answers were all useless!? And then, with her aunt's blood covering her hand, she realized that her headache… really wasn't that bad. Five minutes ago it felt like her brain had turned to hot sauce and a family of gophers were having an orgy in there. And right now it just kind of hurt.

Like getting punched in the face a couple times, instead of having soccer cleats stomped into her skull.

'God I have to drop the internet for a few weeks after this.' It was doing weird things to her vocabulary.

Not like she could even use any of the juicy words she learned to describe what must be happening downstairs. She hadn't expected to be rescued by a living bubblegum hero, but she wouldn't whine about it.

Not when the other option would be a bullet through her noggin.

She was allergic to those, thank you very much.

Not that her brain was doing her any good right now.

Everything felt fuzzy, her mind bounced around from one line of thought to the next as the stress slowly leaked her system, adrenaline leaving her twitchy and breathless as she clung to her aunt's T-shirt.

Everything was fine.

She survived. She was gonna be okay.

Her powers couldn't predict her odds, not unless she wanted another brain fart. But she was sure that as long as they stuck to that parahuman girl the same way she stuck to the walls, they would be fine.

'What are the odds she will protect us?' She asked in a reflex.

YESYESYESYEYESYESYESYEYES

Heart hammering against her chest, Dinah couldn't settle on what to feel. She was happy they had been rescued, afraid for her aunt, angry at the gang members who'd taken them for her powers, frustrated with her powers, and terrified by the concept of what was downstairs that had saved her.

These thoughts cycled through her mind unendingly, as if her mind had tied itself into a loop.

She didn't… couldn't know how she felt.

The world felt so small… and she was trapped in her own head.

Eventually, the gunfire and screaming stopped.

Heavy footsteps made their way up to the bathroom, Dinah catching a flash of a twisting, writhing mass of tendrils that made her shudder in involuntary disgust.

"Are you, well, not ok. Are any of you in immediate danger?"

Now mostly humanoid, looking a bit like a bubblegum barbie doll, their savior stepped into the room. Mary's whimper got a frown from the shapeshifter who took a step back and seemed to take a moment of intense concentration.

Finally appearing like a human, except for the pink skin, she walked back towards them and knelt down.

"Hello. My name is Taylor Hebert. I came to help."

Smiling, the young woman waited for them to make the first move.

Dinah felt her head flash in pain. Just looking at her made her spine crawl with the wrongness of it. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be alive. What was… who was… why did she…

Her vision spun and Dinah felt her knees wobble as he stumbled forward.

Only for a pinkish hand to catch her, causing her mind to finally clear up, as if murky waves had been parted by divine mandate. She blinked, the sensation of eldritch wrongness having completely vanished.

She was… normal?

"Hey… are you okay? Have you hit your head?" Frowning again, the woman set her on the ground, one hand keeping in contact with her. "What's your name? Like I said, I'm Taylor."

Mumbling, she managed to respond.

"Dinah."

"Nice to meet you Dinah. Did you hit your head or your face? Are you feeling dizzy?"

"Headache."

Their savior sucked in air through her teeth.

"Ok. I want you to stay right here and I'll be back. Just need to check up on your family, got me?"

A nod was all she could manage. Despite her headache having cleared for a moment, an odd thickness had lingered in her mind. Like she was swimming in jello. So, when her savior returned, carrying her cousin and her aunt, Dinah didn't really realize they were moving until she felt the wind in her hair.

The three of them had all of three seconds before the girl's human form bulged and expanded over them like a, a strange bouncy mass of slime keeping them safely tucked inside the amorphous parahuman as she dragged herself out of the building and into the street. Rolling down the asphalt like a giant soccer ball.

Dinah rubbed her eyes, still trying to comprehend it all.

One thing she was sure of, however.

'Weirdest. Rescue. Ever.'

Moving like this was fast. Like, fast, fast. Half because Taylor just rolled over any damaged sections of the street and half because the girl really could move. It was almost comedic how she'd swallow debris, fallen power or telephone lines, or really anything in their way, not even slow down, and leave a clean, clair road behind them.

But the journey wasn't long, not for them at least, and the tour of burned out wrecks, half collapsed buildings, and empty streets wasn't exactly awe inspiring.

And even if it would have been, the ocassiaonal explosioins in the distance and the roars of an angry demon would have ruined it. Thankfully, the noises seemed to be moving away from where they were headed.

"Ms. Hebert. Welcome back. My men will take them from here."

Blinking, Dinah realized she must have dozed off, because now there were a trio of costumed heroes and a small army of uniformed PRT personnel standing around them.

"Mrs. Alcott was shot and her niece, Dinah, possibly has a head injury. Mary has some cuts and a bad scrape that needs to be looked at."

Nurses soon had her bundled onto a stretcher, but, before they took her away, the precog gave her hero one last dopey smile and squeezed the tentacle that was still holding her wrist.

Taylor smiled back at her.

'She understands. That's good.'

"Commander Calvert." Taylor's voice was melancholy, a touch regretful. "I've held up my end of the bargain. Where's Paige?"

Nodding, the man didn't waste anytime at all.

"The last contact I had with her escort is that they were enroute to safehouse november four. That is located at number seventy one Smith's and Briar street. Off of Ashton and just south of the Frank and Franks Junkyard."

Taylor's many eyes went wide.

"That's right where Lung is heading!"

Shrugging, the man seemed truly unconcerned.

"He wasn't when we spoke. And it was the closest safe house to where they returned to the city, being in the north west. If the dragon hadn't looped around they'd have been well West of the ABB's insurgency and South of the cape fight. They've been on radio silence since then. For obvious reasons."

A hundred thoughts flashed through Taylor's head, some of them boiling down to killing the man in front of her. In the end, she settled on one question.

"Why don't you care."

Calvert's lips pulled back. A slight tightening of his features.

"I don't like losing men. But I have no way of looking for them and if Velocity is caught by Lung he is dead. In short, no matter how it galls me, I will trade two troopers for a high level Mover if I must. You, Ms. Hebert, have a shot at shaving both my men and your friend."

Inclining his head, his voice actually wavered for a moment.

"Please do so."

Feeling unimaginably guilty, Taylor did just that. Without another word she had turned in place and began launching herself from building to building, the eyes of a hundred people on her back but only one person in her thought.

"Hold on Paige. I'm almost there!"