AN: Thanks again to my beta Grey Raven 09 for his assistance!

Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Worm. If I did, I would be FAR more productive.

Please enjoy and let me know what you think in a review if you feel like it!

Mmm, tasty.
You think? I kinda feel like it could use some barbecue sauce.
Nah, salt. Salt is where it's at, Taylor.
Karen's salty enough for this, QA.

Interlude 13.x

Karen Stone - also known as Doctor Mother - had had enough of sitting idle. She had tried to avoid getting up and leaving the office. She had tried to avoid going down the stairs. She had tried to avoid confronting the creature formerly known as Taylor Hebert. She had tried and she had failed.

Karen knew she was not a pleasant person. She knew she was a hard woman, making hard choices. But it was all for the best. She'd chosen her course and stuck to it for decades. The Entities came, they saw, they seeded, they destroyed. Karen had decided long ago that she would do whatever was required to ensure that they failed. She'd convinced her co-rebels that the ends justified the means. She knew, without a doubt, that the path to Hell was paved with good intentions.

She'd made peace with that.

And now, this trumped up, haughty little bitch, that Contessa herself supported, had the gall to show that Karen's entire life's work was utterly pointless?! Less than pointless, but needlessly cruel and horrific?! Taylor Hebert with her morals and her public achievements tore Karen's group apart in the blink of an eye. Without even meaning to!

And now she was being given the grand tour by every senior Cauldron member minus Eidolon. Specifically to eat Eden!

Karen's lips twitched and it took a colossal effort to maintain her normal, stoic expression. She had not worked for nothing. They would never have reached this point if not for her efforts. She corralled the herd, she led the sheep, she pushed the parahumans towards the right path. She was not pointless. And she was going to show Taylor Hebert why humanity still mattered.

If you were going to supplant humans, you needed to be human.

The door hissed shut behind her and the clack of heels on tile accompanied her as she walked. She would make certain that Taylor Hebert remembered where she came from. Or she would rally the troops and cut down the new Entity before it could grow further. Dealing with one had been horrifying, dealing with two was a nightmare, dealing with three would be impossible.

The Garden of Flesh spread out before her as the final door opened. Karen's eyes grew as wide as saucers as she stared out over the balcony. Eden's form was moving and shifting. The multiple arms and faces were dissolving, being pulled back into the body with great squelching noises that echoed across the room. The titanic mass writhed as it shuddered. Parts of it let out gouts of flame before the flesh closed back up and shrank further. The central face at the front of the Entity was locked into a perpetual scream. Worst of all, at the center of it was Taylor Hebert herself, a scowl on her human-seeming face, her hand pressed firmly against Eden's visage.

"No," she whispered. "NO!" Karen kicked off her shoes and sprinted down the metal stairs. "STOP THAT CREATURE YOU FOOLS!"

Legend had his hand half lifted towards Eden while Alexandria was standing next to him, her hand on his elbow. Insight and Darwin were standing to either side of Taylor Hebert; Insight's hand was clutching a small revolver while Darwin had her arms crossed and was eyeing the mass of shifting flesh with a frown. Contessa and The Number Man were just standing idle a few feet separate from everyone else.

"Don't just stand there! Stop her! Kill her! SHE'S WAKING IT UP!" Karen sprinted the last few feet, her heart thundering and her breath wild. She was reaching out for Legend when the blonde stepped in front of her scowling.

"Cool your tits lady. Taylor's got this covered."

"EDEN IS MOVING YOU STUPID CUNT! ALEXANDRIA, LEGEND KILL HER!" Karen tried to run around the child, but the girl just held her arm up and Karen slammed right into it, falling down on her ass as the air rushed out of her.

Legend spoke without moving his eyes from the Entity. "That was unnecessarily harsh, Miss Wilbourn. Doctor Mother is concerned. There was no need to clothesline her. I'm not above admitting to being a bit worried myself."

The teenager shook her head and turned away from Karen, crossing her arms in a mirror of Darwin. "Yeah, well she shouldn't have run into me. And you really don't have to be worried."

"You trust your girlfriend that much, Insight? Even after she said the monster was still alive?" Alexandria said, slowly dropped her arm from Legend's. Karen, wheezing, finally managed to get herself back to her knees. She could only stare at Alexandria's lack of action and gape.

"I do." Insight nodded once.

"You also can't hear the screams," Darwin murmured. "Thinker is dying. It's not happy about this."

Karen finally got enough breath back to gasp as she whipped her head towards the brunette. "What? What did you say?!"

"I said it's dying. Try to keep up. Lisa, can you hear this too?"

Insight held out a hand and wiggled it back and forth. "Bit. I heard a scream at the beginning when it started flailing around, now, not so much."

"It's still screaming," Darwin said.

Legend pointed to the face that Taylor Hebert was touching. The face that was slowly forming into a more human analogue under her hand. "Can either of you explain why Eden is doing…that? That is what I am more worried about at the moment."

Contessa smiled and sat down, folding her hands into her lap. "It's being overwritten. It's being co-opted. She is making a backup and taking over the framework as she goes."

Alexandria twisted her head to eye the precog. "You can't Path Entities. How do you know that? I have the general idea thanks to my Thinker power working around the blanks, but yours doesn't work that way. Not for straight answers instead of simulations."

Contessa shrugged. "The Eye is quite happy with this new setup apparently. The Path to understanding was simple. 'Ask.' It answered."

The Number Man frowned. "I prefer to place my stock in concrete proof. There is of course, more than enough data here to draw a reasonable conclusion. However, I don't fully understand why the human avatar is taking the shape of an older Miss Hebert."

"Probably QA thinking she's being funny. She has Taylor's bad sense of humor," Insight murmured.

Karen shifted her gaze from one person to the next, finally ending up staring at the floor with her hands in her hair. "Are all of you people insane?! Is that what powers do to you?! Why aren't you panicking!?"

Insight looked over her shoulder at Karen, the sadistic grin that the teenager had been wearing in every camera view was gone. In its place was a horribly twisted scowling frown and narrowed eyes. Eyes that seemed impossibly deep and old and…a shudder ran down her spine as Karen dropped her gaze. "We aren't worried because we know Taylor. We trust her. We believe in her. She's reckless and awkward and a bit of a sappy idiot, but she's ours and we're hers. And if she needs us, we are right here for her whenever she asks."

Insight crouched down, letting the revolver in her hand vanish into smoke and laying both her hands on her knees. "You don't have friends - not real ones. You don't know what it's like to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that someone has your back. You have colleagues. Coworkers. People with similar goals, but no real connection. I should feel sorry for you, but honestly…I'm not nice enough for that. Go back to your hole, Doctor, the grown-ups have work to do."

Karen dropped back to the floor shaking, her eyes locked on Taylor Hebert as Insight stood and turned back around.

"I thought your power changed when you Second Triggered," Alexandria said. Karen ignored her, the cold in her chest spreading. It was hard to breathe.

"It did."

Eden had stopped shuddering. All of the human elements had vanished, drawn back into the form's central mass. The body itself was still just as massive as always. Except now, there was a pink skinned humanoid offshoot. Karen took short gasping breaths as the last vestiges of the connection between the avatar and the body dropped away.

The older form of Taylor Hebert cracked her neck and held out a fist. The younger being smiled, brought her own fist up as well, and bumped her mirror's hand.

Fanfic Rec: 'Taylor Has a Strange Hobby' by BlueNine. On SB. Taylor loves to be bullied, but only by unaware bullies. It has to be intentional. It's sort of a weirdly twisted masochistic thing. Emma knows and gets highly amused when Taylor decides to make Sophia her newest target. Taylor also easily resolves Madison's bully problems through hilarious intimidation and ropes the poor girl into their group. Then she proceeds to get Gavel's power in a sadly futile attempt to become involved in Sophia's cape life and let her bully her there too lol. This fic is so off the wall it's beyond funny! It should be crack, but it's too serious to be that!