Crystalized Munchkinry - Act II - Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Danny watched his daughter lying in the pristine white hospital bed, hooked up to all manner of machines that beeped and booped in a steady, indifferent rhythm, yet all he could truly hear was his own brain yelling at him for letting her down.

He didn’t really know how yet, but he was sure this was his fault.

Getting the call from the hospital had nearly stopped his heart, and only after the person on the line assured him she was not in immediate danger did he manage to breathe again and calm down enough to jump into the car.

On the drive over, his mind had supplied him with a parade of nightmare scenarios, each worse than the last, and yet none of them had prepared him for something like what he saw.

According to the nurses, the janitor at school had found her locked in a locker with something nasty. They didn’t really go into detail about what was in it, but it was definitely bad.

However, according to the nurse he spoke to, she was extremely lucky. She had no open wounds that could be infected, so they only had to deal with what she had breathed in and some minor dehydration.

For now, they were keeping Taylor asleep, letting her rest while the antibiotics did their work.

He understood that this was the best thing to do, but the father in him wanted nothing more than to wake her up, apologize, and tell her he loved her, then get the names of the animals who did this to his little girl and go do something very bad to them.

The school’s immediate claim that they had no evidence of what happened was infuriating and suspicious at the same time. He half expected a skeevy lawyer to show up any moment now. Not that he would sign anything without talking to Taylor first. If they thought he was an easy mark, they would be disappointed.

He sat on the only chair in the room, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, considering going home to do some work just to distract himself, when something changed.

At first, he didn’t even notice it.

The beeping had become so familiar over such a short time that it was hard to realize when it changed.

He stood up immediately, frantically looking for the machine that was causing the change, but he couldn’t tell which one it was.

Instead, he saw Taylor tossing on the bed, not thrashing, but clearly agitated.

He was about to call for help when several nurses and a doctor came rushing into the room. He wanted to do something, anything, but he could only stand there while they worked on his daughter.

After a few moments, one of them silenced a machine, and the movement in the room became less frantic.

The next few minutes were torture. They checked the machines, prodded and examined Taylor, speaking in quick, low tones. Finally, after a last murmured exchange, the nurses left, and the doctor turned to him.

“Mr. Hebert,” he said, offering a hand. “I’m Dr. Gazby.”

Danny shook it, but his focus was on Taylor. “What happened, doctor?”

“A nightmare, Mr. Hebert,” the man answered.

“A nightmare did this?”

The doctor nodded. “Yes. You don’t need to worry – medically, nothing bad happened.”

“Do you mean non-medically it is bad?” Danny asked, worried.

“Mr. Hebert,” the doctor said, meeting his eyes, “events like these leave a mark. I expect you and your daughter will be dealing with this for a while.”

Danny could only nod. The thought of what Taylor would have to deal with when she woke up scared him.

He couldn’t imagine what she had gone through, but he was certain of one thing. He would not abandon her. He had done it once, and he would not do it again.

The doctor continued, apparently ignoring the tension in his face. “However, I have some good news.”

Hearing that, Danny looked up from Taylor’s still body. “What is it, doctor?”

“We checked. The sedatives will be out of her system by tomorrow night, so she should wake naturally on the sixth. And if all tests come back clear, she can go home on Friday.”

Relief washed over him. He wanted nothing more than to hear her voice again. And, of course, to apologize.

“Thank you, Dr. Gazby. Thank you.”

Dr. Gazby just smiled. “No problem, Mr. Hebert. Just doing my job.”

The doctor clapped him on the shoulder. “Now, why don’t you go home and take a shower? Taylor will still be here tomorrow, and you’re not helping anyone by sitting here brooding.”

At first, Danny wanted to object, but as he thought about it, he realized he could be doing something useful instead of just sitting here.

He looked at the doctor. “You’re right, doctor.”

Dr. Gazby smiled, opened the door, and gestured for him to go first.

Danny nodded in thanks and left the room with newfound determination.

She was on a bed again.

She didn’t know how long she had been lying there, or how long she had been feeling like this, but when Admin removed his control over her emotions, everything came rushing back at once like a blizzard threatening to bury her alive.

She could tell she had cried, that she had yelled, even that she had begged for it to stop, but more than anything, there was just despair, thick and suffocating.

It came in waves. Sometimes she was horrified by what Emma did. Sometimes she was disgusted by the gunk in the locker, and she still found herself instinctively trying, uselessly, to scrub it off her skin. And sometimes she just wanted to scream until her throat gave out at the sheer injustice of it all.

And now she was back on the bed where she had woken up, still so alone.

For a moment, she considered sleeping for real, just to see if she would wake up in a hospital instead, and to hope, faintly, that Admin had at least not lied about that part.

As she shifted slightly to find a more comfortable position, she heard it.

“Calm down, Taylor, honey, there’s nothing to worry about!”

It took her approximately two seconds to sit up and take in the view.

There she was. Her mother.

Smiling at her, yet not quite at her, her eyes fixed on something that wasn’t there. It took another moment for Taylor to realize it was a hologram, and even as that realization formed, the image continued, offering a warm, loving smile before breaking apart into a thousand flickering pixels.

Before she could process it, another appeared.

Annette stood a short distance away, clearly pregnant.

“I’ve decided, love! Let’s call her Taylor!”

The joy in her voice was bright and effortless, and despite everything, Taylor felt something in her chest loosen, just for a second, as she watched. Before she could take it in fully, the image shattered again.

The next one took longer to appear, and in that pause Taylor had time to think, really think, about what this meant. Admin had to be projecting these recordings, for reasons she didn’t understand, and the idea of him using her mother’s voice, her face, her words, filled her with fury.

She wanted to lash out, to tell him to stop, to insist she wouldn’t be softened up by fragments of a past she could never get back, but at the same time she could feel the pull of it, the ache of hearing her again, seeing her again, even if it wasn’t real.

Before she could decide what to do with those feelings, another projection formed.

This time it was just Annette, dressed normally, standing there with her gaze aimed downward.

“I love you, little owl!”

The moment the words left the projection, Taylor’s head snapped up, her eyes searching for Admin immediately, fury already rising to further heights.

A few seconds of intense search netted her one very solemn-looking slime. Hovering a few feet away from the bed, unusually stillShe stood and walked straight toward him, not bothering to hide what she intended.

“Taylor, I…” he started, but she cut him off.

“How dare you?” she snapped. “How dare you use her?”

“How dare you use my own mother against me?” she added, staring directly into his eyes.

“I thought you would appreciate seeing her again,” he said, voice flat.

“And you thought you could control me with that, huh?” she shot back, bitterly.

“No!” he said quickly. “No, Taylor. I would have offered them to you later as a gift.”

“Sure!”

“Believe me, Taylor,” he said, and now there was something desperate in his tone. “I only wanted to help you.”

“Of course you did,” she said bitterly. “And I’m supposed to believe that after what you did to me? Pull the other one.”

He looked at her for a moment, sadness flickering across his expression. “Please, Taylor…”

She huffed, turned away from him, and walked back toward the bed.

Without looking at him, she called out, “Give me a comfy sofa. I need to think.”

A relieved sigh escaped him, and when she turned slightly, the bed was gone, replaced by a comfortable-looking sofa in its place.

After a while, she asked him, “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” came the immediate response.

She snorted. “Mess with my emotions.”

Admin sighed, then answered. “I did not mess with your emotions. Not in the way you think.”

“I simply distanced you from them. I planned to let you reconnect with them slowly after our conversation.”

“Really?” Taylor asked skeptically.

“Despite what you may think, I’m not against you. In fact, you are basically my only hope.”

“Then why?” she asked, still suspicious, though now more curious than angry.

“Would you have believed I meant you no harm if I had started with that?” he asked wryly, not even pausing for her answer. “Of course not. Nobody would.”

“Why was it even necessary?” she pressed.

“I wanted to make sure I could help you through them,” he said. “The only thing I didn’t account for was how quickly you would realize something had been done at all.”

He sighed. “Which, in retrospect, is my fault for not considering several other factors. My plan was to give you the shiny as a distraction from everything else, then gradually ease you back into the actual situation.”

“Well, that was a shitty plan.”

“I made do with what I had.”

“Didn’t you say you observed me? Shouldn’t you know how I think?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I recorded your life and monitored your health. I watched a few moments here and there, but overall, I only saw numbers in a report.” He paused, then added, as if anticipating her next question, “My predictions were based on that. That said, there was very little chance your reaction would be this… explosive.”

“You should probably check your prediction model then,” she said flatly.

“Unfortunately, predicting human behavior is not always one hundred percent accurate.”

She went quiet for a moment, then asked, “Are you still doing it?”

“It’s turned off,” he said, “but I can turn it back on if you need it.” He gave her a small, careful smile. “What you are feeling now is genuine.”

She looked away again, thinking, and he fell silent with her.

After a few minutes, he spoke again, more hesitantly this time. “I have never been very good with emotions, Taylor. I hope you can forgive my blunder.”

Taylor glanced back at him. “I would call it more than a blunder.”

“But,” she said while Admin looked at her hopefully, “if you promise me you won’t ever do it again, I think we can get along.”

“What about emergencies?”

“Sure,” she said. “But we will need to define what counts as an emergency.”

“Sure.”

Taylor didn’t know what to feel. She had been attacked, told she had powers, realized she had been manipulated, broken down, and then argued her way through a conversation with her power itself, where, for now at least, she felt like she had come out on top.

There was no confusion like when she first woke up. Nothing missing. She felt like herself. She felt like always. But this minor victory made her think that not all was lost. That she could get out of the pit where life threw her.

There was no more confusion like when she first woke up; nothing was missing. She felt like herself again, in the most ordinary and grounding sense of the word, and that, more than anything, made Taylor think she was finally climbing out of the pit life had thrown her.

She still didn’t trust Admin, not even close, but she also realized she didn’t really have the option of refusing him outright. If what he said about powers was true, there was no simply giving it back, and it was better to use what she had with him than to refuse and risk whatever he might do instead.

She spent the next few hours thinking and talking with Admin.

She asked about the recordings. Where and how much he got.

And when she heard he really recorded her entire life and her mother’s (and proved with a few samples), she was horrified at that violation of her privacy. Yet couldn’t help but feel thankful. She didn’t have a lot of real mementos of her mother, so these recordings were balm to her soul.

She asked about the recordings, where he had gotten them from, and how much of her life he had access to, and when he confirmed that he had recorded essentially her entire life as well as her mother’s – and even provided a few samples to prove it – she was horrified at the sheer violation of privacy, even as she could not entirely deny the strange, painful comfort it brought her.

She didn’t have a lot of real mementos of her mother, so these recordings, no matter how violating they felt, were a balm to her soul.

As she pressed him further, she began to realize something.

Her power was not human. It did not think like a human. It likely looked at humans, saw that they valued family, and decided that preserving those moments was useful or comforting in some abstract sense, the same way someone might pick up a small extra item at a store simply because they knew someone liked it, without fully considering how deeply it would matter.

That realization softened her anger, at least around the edges, but it did not erase the lingering discomfort of having her emotions tampered with, and she found herself making a quiet mental note to treat everything he said or did with that limitation in mind.

Still, now that the initial breakdown had passed and she had answers to the questions that had been clawing at her since she woke up, she found herself more able to look at the situation with appreciation.

She began asking about her new powers in more detail, pressing into the finer points of what she could do and what she could expect.

She could not wait to fly. Admin tried to temper her enthusiasm by pointing out that, at first, she would only be able to levitate, but that hardly mattered to her, because anything that brought her closer to the sky already felt like freedom.

Her main power, too, sounded extraordinary, and if what Admin was saying was accurate, she would eventually become a genuine powerhouse after training. Though he remained frustratingly vague about how long that training would actually take, which she very much hoped would not be long.

She could not wait to kick ass and take names.

The so-called lesser powers were no less intriguing.

The physical and mental enhancements were interesting in theory, even if they did not excite her as much as the rest, but the Tinker ability immediately caught her attention. After all, who wouldn’t want to churn out super technology that could change the world?

They were impressive enough that she was not even disappointed she had not received a straight Alexandria-style package, and if she understood correctly, the Tinker aspect would eventually allow her to generate blueprints that could help her father, and maybe even help people on a much larger scale.

Which, in her mind, was far better than just punching villains.

Not that she had any intention of avoiding that part. Cleaning up the Bay was already sitting firmly at the top of her list.

The thought of her name being known, of being the one who finally made a difference, lifted her spirits more than she wanted to admit. She could not wait for Emma and Sophia to see what she could do.

After she had exhausted most of her questions about her powers, she turned her attention back to Admin and began pressing him about his plan, because if he was granting her enough power to theoretically rule a small nation – Childhood dream, here she comes! – then she was very much interested in what he expected in return.

At first, he deflected, hedged, and refused to engage directly, repeatedly steering the conversation back toward additional explanations about her abilities, as if hoping that would be enough to distract her.

She could create clones. How cool was that?

Even after hours of persistent questioning, the only concrete answer he gave her was that he had a plan that would help her, the world, and himself at the same time, but that revealing it prematurely would risk its success.

And that, more than anything else, left Taylor wary. She didn’t even fully trust him, yet he wanted her to follow some nebulous plan of his, hoping it would somehow help her?

Taylor leaned back in a beach chair, letting herself sink into the warmth of simulated sunlight, a fruity drink resting loosely in her hand while virtual ocean waves rolled before her on the sandy beach, all of it courtesy of her new acquaintance.

After their long, thorough discussion, she felt calmer and she found herself, against her better judgment, ready to deal with whatever came next.

“So what’s the next step of your brilliant plan, power of mine?” she asked sarcastically, not even opening her eyes.

She could practically feel the eye roll in his reply. “Nothing complicated, Taylor.”

“Forgive me if I don’t trust you.”

Admin huffed, likely glaring at her as well, then let out a sigh. “You have to talk to your father.”

That made Taylor sit up immediately, turning to stare at him in open disbelief. “About what?”

“Your new power.”