Archive of Our Own

July 20th, 2009

There were so many stars above the summer camp that Taylor wondered whether she'd found herself in another world. 

Her neck ached from lifting her face towards the sky for so long, but there was just so much to see that it was impossible to stop. So many colours... bright specks and distant smudges. 

The more she looked, the more she saw, but each time she blinked some stars disappeared creating a strange dance of cycle of discovery, observing, losing, and rediscovering.

“Taylor, aren't you going to come in, it's cold out there!” a voice called out to her, snapping her out of her thoughts. 

“Can I stay a bit longer?” she asked, glancing behind her to see that it was Annie, one of the camp counsellors, who had come out to check on her. 

“Officially? No.”

Oh.

“... And unofficially?”

“Well, most of the other kids are out toasting marshmallows, so as long as I sit with you, you're fine,” the older girl said, taking a seat on the log beside Taylor. “Gives me an excuse to not have to sing that toasting song for the fifteenth time this week.”

Yeah, Taylor was kind of sick of the sing songs and storytelling sessions around the campfire that they had every night now. 

In silence the two of them sat for a good few minutes, both looking up to the stars high above them.

There were so many more here than in Brockton Bay.

“I wish I knew more about the stars...” she murmured, and Annie chuckled.

“I have a book if you want? I mean, it's kind of the camp's book, but I don't think anyone but me has read it for years.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Sure, just as long as you give it back before you go.”

She nodded, and after a few seconds, Annie pointed upwards and to the side. 

“You see that smudge up there? There's six stars there, they're called the Pleiades.”

“Um-hm?”

“Well, there's a story that they are seven sisters who had to run away from a hunter,” Annie explained, leaving a pause for Taylor to fill. 

“But you said there's only six?”

“Yup! One of them had to hide away from the hunter and never rejoined her sisters, so that's why there's only six of them now... and you want to know the coolest thing? That story is found all over the world. Like, the ancient Greeks, Australian tribes and Native Americans all have some variant of that story, so like... there's an idea that the story is so old that it's from a time before humans split up and went across the world, you know? I think that's kinda neat, a story that's as old as humans have been telling stories, and now it can be found all over the world.”

“That's so cool...”

Annie laughed and clapped her on the shoulder lightly. 

“Anyway, we need to be joining the others now, before they get worried and send out the national guard!”

Reluctantly, she did so.

Taylor ended up reading the astronomy book over twice in the couple of days she had left at camp, and spending entirely too long up trying to find things in the stars, reading from the book with a flashlight and then looking up into the sky. 

It was fun. 

More fun than a lot of the activities they did during the day, but those were still entertaining enough in their own way. 

On her last night, though, she saw something strange. 

Looking to the sky, trying to find the star Algol, she noticed something odd. 

There was movement between the stars, but not of the glowing motes themselves. Instead, her eyes twitched as she swore that the very darkness between them was moving, oozing with an incomparable slowness like cold molasses or tar. 

A current within the stars themselves.

Perceiving it made her eyes wibble and wobble strangely, but she also couldn't look away.

The strange current grew and grew until it became the entirety of the space between the stars, a vast, cosmic stream flowing between them, a fabric that held the brilliant embroidery of the heavens in place---

She blinked, and like that, it was gone.

Rubbing at her eyes, she couldn't escape the sensation that she'd seen something truly unique. 

Above her, the stars twinkled, apathetic to her wonder.

January 5th, 2010

Brockton Bay, like so many cities across the world, was inimical to the pursuit of astronomy. 

The harsh streetlights drowned out the stars with ugly amber light, depriving the humans within of their beauty of the cosmos, blinding them to the view that their countless ancestors had been able to delight in. The same stars that humans had gazed upon in wonder a hundred thousand years ago still twinkled about them, and yet the majority of people in Brockton Bay would never pay them a second thought, ignorant to them because of the lights pointlessly turned on.

Taylor wasn't fond of artificial light, as might be surmised. 

But there were places that she could still enjoy the stars, which had become something of a hobby and distraction in the time since her friendship with Emma terminated. 

After all, stargazing was a hobby you could partake in without others. 

It helped to distract from the grind of her life, studying the stars even if they were mostly obscured from her view. 

They were always there, even if invisible, but also consistent and mysterious. 

Above her head, the stars twinkled. 

The same stars that had watched the lives of countless others now watched her, and would continue to do so throughout her life until she died, indifferent and unaware of her. And perhaps that was morbid, but it also added a certain... grim timelessness to it all?

Sitting in the back garden of the Hebert house, Taylor carefully set down a recent project of hers on a small table. 

She'd made it in art class, or a prototype of it at least, and then brought it home and refined it further of the course of several nights.

Astronomical instruments were expensive; Taylor couldn't really afford a telescope, and didn't want to bother her father about it. He was still so... well, off, since her mother died. 

So she'd tried to make something herself. 

Not a telescope, that was far beyond her, 

The block of clay from art class had been cut away at, and with a bowl she'd pressed and shaped one half of a hemisphere into its side. In this curved depression she'd carefully gouged lines that expanded out from each other, similar to those on a globe. A large nail sunk into the clay of the top served as the nodus for the rudimentary hemicyclium, and even if it was crude, it was something she'd made and gone to the effort of getting fired.

In truth, the device was useless at this time of night. 

It was basically a form of sundial.

Still. 

Taylor set down the pillow and the thick blanket she'd brought out with her,  lay down, wrapped herself up like a silkworm in a cocoon. It was childish perhaps, but stargazing on a cold night in early spring required you take measures to keep warm. 

Staring up, so many of the stars were dull or obscured...

At summer camp, she'd been able to see so many of them. 

She'd gone back to school two weeks ago, and nothing had changed. 

It was depressing. 

There'd at least been a grace period of sorts before the little digs and tricks and bullying began again. 

But now, she could just look up at the distant stars, and escape all the thoughts of her bad day earlier.  

Nice and cosy in her blanket. 

Under the stars. 

Comfortable despite her tiredness.

She came to later, wondering why she was so cold and the ground was so hard. It took her a good minute of squirming around in her bed to realise that she'd fallen asleep in the garden. 

Honestly, how stupid of her. 

She could have frozen!

Well, not really.

What time was it? Probably super late, and she should be getting back into the house, before her dad got up and saw that she'd been sleeping outside like some sort of crazy homeless person.

... But the stars were so pretty right now. 

Had there been a power cut that had turned off a load of streetlights? They were all so very bright, and so numerous, compared to earlier. 

There was a strange blue glow to her side, at her hemicyclium. 

Getting up, she approached it curiously. 

At the base of her creation was what could only be described as a pool of blue light, faint, weak... and yet, it was undoubtably there. 

Wondering if she was hallucinating, she reached out and tentatively poked at it. It was soft, ephemeral, its outer edges like gas or mist, surrounding some impossibly fragile core that felt like spun glass, and yet wasn't. Carefully she raised the strange thing upwards, gazing into the blue shard within her hand.

The various gouged lines of her creation were glowing so very faintly with the same material she held in her hands... as if condensing the light of the stars above.

It sounded ridiculous, but it was much easier to believe what you saw before you, wasn't it?

Between her fingers, she snapped the strange, condensed light. 

Her vision wavered for a moment, the stars seemed so much brighter overhead as her body filled with the sensation of something wonderful, of strength and vitality and... something else. 

The stars twinkled above, watching her confusion and wonder idly.

January 21st, 2010

In coming nights, Taylor experimented more with her hemicyclium. 

Some nights, when the heavens were obscured, it barely did anything, on others when the weather was clear, she delighted in the results.

The pooling light, which she could only presume to be starlight or space dust, was a strange mystery, and when she tried to look it up online she found nothing at all. 

A part of her wanted to bring her discovery to others, to see what she could find out. Another part... well, it was her discovery, and it was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in ages. 

The badness of her days faded away with the distraction of her nighttime research.

If only she could access more starlight.

The light pollution slowed down her efforts. 

And she was only fourteen and couldn't drive.

Buses only went outside of Brockton Bay at certain times of the day, and this astronomical research of hers kind of needed starlight. So instead Taylor had to be patient, watching as her little homemade device slowly collected the strange, hazy blue shard of concentrated starlight. 

At least, that was what she presumed it was. 

She tried making a second, improved version of her device. 

A proper scaphe this time, not a half-hemisphere but a true bowl shape, with a central depression and the same lines descending down by which to collect the starlight. She tried to make it as large as she could, only to then have it shatter in the kiln when she tried to fire it. 

It took three attempts before she managed to get it right, leaving her with a somewhat ugly brown bowl about a foot and a half wide covered in gouged lines she'd made with a protractor.

Taylor placed it in her garden, and when she checked the next morning, bright and early in her pyjamas and slippers, she found another shard of starlight much larger than before. 

So she left it another night... and the night after that was a truly clear night in which she could barely sleep for excitement, occasionally getting up from her bed to glance out her window to her scaphe. 

Within, she could just about see the faint glow, only visible when she focused on it. 

When she checked it the next morning, it was to find something new. 

Rather than the thin shards from before, like the one currently below her hemicyclium, the scaphe instead contained a much larger crystal of condensed starlight. 

Gingerly, she picked it out from the pool of hazy blue in which it sat. It was rough in nature, a piece of vaguely blueish-green crystal that seemed to have its own glinting light and energy within. 

Her hand felt just a little tingly holding it. 

The coalesced stardust had such a feeling of potential about it, if only she could work out what said potential was.

A tentative hope was forming in her mind, the notion that maybe, just maybe, she'd either discovered something amazing or that could allow her to do something with her life. Something beyond just being a girl bullied at school and struggling to find her way in the world, somebody who mattered and who had made an amazing discovery. 

So she didn't share her condensed starlight and the crystal with others. 

And she didn't want to risk breaking her small crystal and killing the proverbial golden goose.

Instead, every morning, she checked on her creations and their small harvest. 

She left the scaphe to do its work, not harvesting it for a few days and finding a new crystal forming, even if its growth was getting slower the bigger it got. 

It was like magic, watching it form from basically nothing.

Of course the notion of 'magic' as a possibility in this world wasn't something Taylor was keen to indulge in, but increasingly forced to consider. 

Magic implied mystery, some sort of power or ability that was beyond explanation, but could still be harnessed in some way. Then again in this day and age, one could increasingly indulge in the notion of magic being real. 

After all, how did Legend fire beams of light, or Lung transform into a gigantic fire-manipulating lizard? 

People didn't like to imagine that Parahumans used 'magic' because magic was impossible to truly understand; they tried to understand it with science. 

And despite decades of progress, Parahuman science was still rudimentary and couldn't really explain most powers... at which point whether it was science or magic, it was all the same. 

Taylor preferred to imagine that her research was a form of science or sorcery, rather than just 'magic.'

And so, a week after her first stone formed, Taylor decided to test something. 

The stone of stardust left her hand feeling numb whenever she held it, which rather made it difficult to review it for a long time. She needed some medium by which to grip it.

Taylor raised the stick she was holding, eyeing it critically.

Even if she didn't like the idea of 'magic'... well, cool magic staff and all that. 

Sure, said staff was just an old tree branch stripped of its bark with the crystal of condensed stardust glued into a bole at the end. This was for research, and even if it looked ridiculous, no investigator of these oddities could be expected to start with everything they needed!

She raised her impromptu staff, holding it to the light. 

Within, the soft, faint blue glow of some remaining energy of captured starlight sparkled within. It was faint; the terminal energies that had conveyed this light to the planet across so many light-years of space.

She swung the staff through the air, following some unspoken instinct, and all research started with instinct or beliefs that then had to be verified, after all---

A strange, ringing sound that filled the room, the head of her impromptu staff glowed, leaving a wake of green-blue light behind it as it swung, and at the terminus of the swing---

Schting!

A tiny pebble or mote of light shot from the glowing crystal at the staffs end, shooting across the room and obliterating the alarm clock beside her bed.

Fuck.

Her irritation and losing the faithful clock was counterbalanced by the concern that the loud sound of her creating this small projectile of light would wake her father.

But it accompanied the giddy joy in having discovered something new, something big.

Was she a Parahuman? Or was this just some new, mysterious thing that she had chanced upon? And did it really matter what title she gave it, so long as it was hers alone?

The tentative seed of hope she'd been ignoring in her chest grew a little more. 

That night, the stars watched in curiosity her experimentation, and one decided to take a closer look.

January 22nd, 2010

A loud notification woke Armsmaster, head of the Protectorate ENE, early one morning. 

Of the seven different alarms he had set up, this one was by no means the most serious, but still something that required his attention. The hero took a moment to assess the situation as he rubbed at his eyes to help them adjust to suddenly being awake again. 

He silenced the alarm and stood from the small bed he used when he stayed the night at the Protectorate Headquarters, and moved swiftly to the monitoring station at the desk across the room. The screens on it were lit up with notifications, casting a harsh glow over his face, and he squinted for a moment to make sense of what he was seeing.

A tremor. 

One unusual and oddly directed, more similar to that found in a bomb blast than tectonic movement. 

Oddly, it came from underground, rather than the surface?

His immediate assumption was gang activity. The fact that the epicentre of the tremor appeared to be some underground location in the trainyard immediately made him suspect of some abandoned warehouse with a basement. One perhaps used for creating drugs, and a chemical reaction had gone out of control and exploded. 

For the reading, it would not doubt have obliterated whatever building it was contained within. 

Taking a seat, Armsmaster silently placed a headset over his ears to best hear what was going on as he continued to look into the matter. 

This would likely be a matter for the police to investigate. Unless evidence of Parahuman involvement was discovered then it was not the PRT or Protectorate's jurisdiction to investigate, but until that point all he could do was listen in to the various early reports feeding through. 

Already a number of on duty PRT staff was discussing the matter.

“This is Armsmaster, I was woken by an alarm,” he said after joining the voice call. “What are we looking at?”

“We're not quite sure, sir,” a member of staff, the one manning the console for the night, replied. “Some early reports said gas explosion, but a number of police officers on the scene are reporting a big hole in the ground and a crater, like something fell from the sky.”

That was...

“The chance of a large meteorite striking any point on earth is very low, let alone in a built-up area.”

To the Agent's credit, he didn't let the matter go there, humming in response to Armsmaster's statement. 

“I believe so, but the chance is also never zero.”

Collin clicked his tongue, but nodded.

Frankly, he would continue with his exploded warehouse basement theory before he'd consider a falling star. But at this point in his career, he'd been surprised more than often enough that the incredibly small possibility of Brockton Bay as the site of a meteor fall was not difficult to imagine. 

“... Look's like the police are feeding more back. There's a hole in the middle of the road. Looks like our potential meteorite crashed through the ground to some sort of basement or cave system below?”

Hmm...

“It would explain some aspects of the tremor; if it wasn't immediately stopped then the fact I am getting readings of it being close to the surface underground make more sense,” he conceded. 

There were a few oddities about that notion; but then again, Brockton Bay was one of the older cities on the East Coast, so perhaps some old basement or hollow space long forgotten had been opened up?

“Well, I guess we won't have a slow news day tomorrow,” he chuckled, his tiredness perhaps contributing to the somewhat flat delivery. 

But despite this, there were a few chuckles at the attempt at humour. 

“Seeing as there is nothing more to do here, I am going to get some more rest,” he announced, and stepping away he heard a number of the staff members wish him a good night. 

Of all the things to be woken up for, a freak meteorite strike in an otherwise abandoned part of Brockton Bay was not one he had expected. Still, he supposed he could scratch that one off the bingo card of life. 

He really must be tired to be thinking of jokes like that. 

January 23rd, 2010

The question of putting her 'power' to use was one that increasingly weighed upon Taylor's mind. 

It wasn't much, but she could fire homing balls of light with her new stone, and her research into the cosmos was yielding more and more questions, but her small little starlight-gathering tools were slow, and she needed more resources to actually do this properly. 

Much as she may want to make dozens upon dozens of them, she'd rather have proper tools to do so, rather than using a kitchen knife and a pudding bowl to shape clay...

But did she want to be a ward?

No. 

Did she want the resources of the PRT, both material and knowledge, to improve what she could do?

Yes.

This was probably a problem that a lot of Parahumans faced, right? Like, Tinkers and stuff who needed rare materials and all that. Currently, her creations were just clay, but imagine what she could do with the proper materials or designs...

It would also provide a way out of her problems with school as well; the PRT could probably offer favourable terms, right? There was even a section on their website appealing to 'young Parahumans with difficult circumstances' that provided an exhaustive list of things they could help with. 

Taylor wasn't trying to get away from domestic abuse or a difficult home life, just several kids who had tried to make her life hell. But it was still the same; a potential opportunity. 

... Unfortunately, she was also more than stubborn enough to continue as she was for now. Maybe if the resource limitations became too great, she could make that call. 

But she'd much rather avoid all that teenaged drama, after all. 

And she was doing fine by herself for now. 

Taylor had made her tools and starstones without help from anyone, because that's how she'd got used to living her life at this point. 

There was no need for others in this until she absolutely needed them. 

Instead, she focused on her work, listening in to the news over the radio that there had been a meteor that had fallen on Brockton Bay, to the north of her, last night. 

A shame that she'd not gotten to see it... oh well. 

When she checked the bottom of her scaphe that morning, she was delighted to find that the slowly forming stone within had taken on a new colour. Rather than the blue-ish of before, it was now a rather rich turquoise. 

Had the meteor last night in some way affected the stone? If so, then that was another thing to consider in the future.

February 17th, 2010

It was to a scene of devastation that Dauntless of the Protectorate arrived. 

With the benefit of flight, he shot over buildings and streets as the first responder for the PRT following... whatever had just happened. 

He had felt more than he had heard the crash from afar, and had been rushing to get his helmet on when the first reports had come in about a fireball in the sky smashing into the earth. 

Whether it was some manner of Parahuman doing, or a natural event though, what mattered was that people had been injured and buildings damaged. Even if there was nothing Parahuman about it, they needed to know what was going on. 

His helmet had a video feed that could grant vision to those back at base to make a call about what was going on. 

Hopefully, it wouldn't be anything too bad, although for 'fireball from the sky' the list of 'not bad' options was likely rather limited. 

From afar, he could just about see the location where, evidently, whatever that fireball was had crashed. Ceretainly judging from all the smoke and dust. Car alarms blared loudly, creating a din of noise that overwhelmed almost everything, and in the street was a crater.

He could just about pick up the forms of people in it, and something else as well, although quite what that was, he couldn't tell from this far away. 

Something large and dark, that much was for certain.

“Another meteorite?” somebody in his ear questioned.

“Even a single meteorite landing in a city is a one in a billion event, for a second to happen is almost statistically impossible.”

“Potential new Parahuman? One who can call down meteorites?”

“Isn't there a Hero in New York who can do that?”

Dauntless frowned behind his visor, slowing down on his approach. He may not have the same fancy technology of Armsmaster, but the various enhancements he had directed into his helmet and the improved perception it gave him picked out the colours of the individuals present.

Whatever had happened here, it had occurred in Empire territory. It seemed that some of the gang's Parahumans had come to investigate it, and were actively engaged in a fight. 

Hookwolf, Cricket and Rune. 

With the benefit of being closer, he could pick out what it was they were fighting.

“---What the hell is that?”

“No clue, it doesn't match anything I've heard of before...”

An oxen-like body of jagged black stone stood several metres tall at the shoulder, supporting a large, powerful-looking white head tipped with enormous spurs or mandibles of the same blackened stone. It looked like no creature he'd ever imagined, but he'd always had a somewhat weak imagination... 

Whatever it was though, it was fast for its size, charging across the ground with a sound like thunder, narrowly avoided by Cricket and sending the crumpled form of a car flying like a rag doll when it collided with it.

As if anticipating the Parahumans dodge, the beast skidded on the spot, turned, and charged again, this time changing its target for Hookwolf, who had just come charging into the crater.

The beast's impressive mandibles slammed into Hookwolf and drove him backwards, tonnes worth of mass colliding and driving the Changer into the ground with ease. Metal blades and limbs flowed over the beast, scraping and seeking purchase in its craggy form, but whilst the Parahuman could normally maim just by flowing over somebody, the rocky beast gave no indication of concern at all. 

Instead, like a bull casually tossing an unlucky matador, the beast lifted Hookwolf from the ground and threw him. 

Hookwolf's was sent tumbling, the brief exchange taking barely more than a few seconds.

Several stones slammed into the creature's flank from above, launched by Rune, sizeable boulders that forced it to take a step sideways and broke some of the rock that made up its flank. 

It turned its head in the direction of Rune. Its mandibles clicked together as it took a step for two forwards, as if considering, with a degree of malign intelligence, exactly what it would do next. 

And then, the beast turned, its long, spiked tail brought close and then whipping out---

Dauntless dived forward, bringing up his shield as, with his accelerated perception, he realised what would happen next. 

He'd just about dived in the way, when the half a dozen spurs of rock the length of a sword smashed into his shield. Others, less well aimed, shot past himself and Rune 

He'd just protected a Neo-Nazi super villain... he was going to get so much stick for this later. Perhaps it was just a moment of foolishness, but against whatever this thing was, he'd take the allies he could get. 

“Hey! What're you---” Rune shouted, clearly just as caught out by his save.

“Do you know where this thing came from!?” he demanded as, below, Hookwolf charged the creature again. 

“Just fell from the sky or something!” Rune said with narrowed eyes, floating away from him for a moment; salvation not leading to trust. Not that he would have expected it to, either.

Well, that rather confirmed the suspicion, at least.

The sensation of weightlessness, of suddenly being suspended in the air not by his boots, but by some other force. Cricket, Rune, and Hookwolf were caught up in the same effect, the non-fliers suddenly floating in the air ten or so metres away, various rocks and bits of detritus all caught up in a field of faintly pink-purple energy. 

Below them the beast was rearing up on its back legs, some unearthly noise filling the air as gravity around it warped.

“Dauntless! Get out of there!” somebody shouted in his ears.

He tried to push and direct himself, but in the moment of confusion he lost a vital second, and by the time he attempted to push away and out of this gravity field the creature had created, it was too late. 

In a rush, they were brought smashing downwards to the ground, gravity both reimposed and also accelerated several times over. 

He landed hard, the sensation of being driven into the bare earth and shattered concrete of the crater leaving him stunned. 

It was only a desperate, last-second addition of a charge to his breastplate that probably saved him from breaking something

But even then, as the team in his ear shouted and called out, Dauntless had just a moment to see the beast looming over him before a hoof the size of a dinner plate landed on his breastplate and several dozen tonnes of force imploded it and his chest cavity inwards.

February 21st, 2010

Taylor had reached the natural limit of her ability to explore her newfound abilities and research. 

That was to say; she was at risk of demolishing more of her bedroom, and shooting blue bolts of starlight and stardust was bound to draw attention to her from others. 

So she was at a crossroads in terms of doing more. In the two months since she'd first noticed this cosmic influence she'd poked and prodded, collected more of her star stones and even gotten quite accurate when it came to launching those little blue projectiles. She'd even worked out, through that new turquoise starstone, how to create multiple projectiles at once that would shoot in quick succession like a star shower at a target!

And no doubt there was more to be achieved... she just wasn't sure how to do so.

Trying to keep it all secret rather made it difficult, and that being said...

“So what are those two things in the garden, Taylor?” her father asked one day as he stood at the kitchen window with a cup of tea in hand.

“Astronomy stuff,” she explained between bites of toast, her heart giving a little flip at the fact she could be found out. “They track the sun and stuff, you know, I said after camp I wanted to learn more about the stars and stuff?”

Her father nodded and took another sip of his tea, the excuse simple to accept.

“Kurt's got an old telescope, said it was something he was looking to sell. He's got a big list of stuff he's taking to a sale but gave us all at the Association first choice. Want me to see if I can get hold of it for you? I can't promise it's the best in the world, but it's still a telescope, right?”

“Sure, that'd be really nice, actually.”

And a lot cheaper than most other options; telescopes could be expensive! She'd taken a look online and in a number of astronomy magazines she was now subscribed to, and rapidly realised that the chance of her owning a good telescope was slim to none any time soon. 

Well, without assistance...

“Oh, did you hear about the meteorite?”

“Hm?” she hummed, confused. “What, that one that hit the trainyard a month ago?”

“No, no, there was another one that hit downtown yesterday. Apparently it caused a big fight and a couple of Capes died.”

“Huh... did it, like, hit a building then?”

She did feel that tremor; it actually set off a car alarm outside of Winslow. But Taylor had been rather distracted and focused on something else at the time, specifically trying to ensure that her homework didn't get ruined between her hand and reaching the front desk.

“No; there was some sort of monster. A hero and an Empire cape or two died.”

She really should keep up with the news more, but recently, her obsessive investigations had caught her attention far more, and she'd been rather distracted and divorced from things going on. 

“Wait, so was the monster in the meteorite?”

“I don't know, I just heard about it on the news,” her father shrugged in a matter almost nonchalant, as if the notion of a meteorite containing a monster from outer space (and potentially being an alien!) wasn't overly notable whatsoever. But that was the sort of man Daniel Hebert was; down to earth, focused on the things that affected him rather than the grander topics he could never hope to influence.

If another meteorite had fallen, would the starstone that had been growing for the last few nights be changed, just like last time? Turquoise and able to conjure the alternate form of the projectiles?

It turned out, yes it could. 

Cosmological phenomena affected the types of stones she could harvest, and with them, the nature of their powers, and she began to seriously look ahead through her magazines for future events. In a few weeks time there would be a major meteor shower from a passing comet, and she couldn't wait. 

A few days later, she got her telescope courtesy of her father. 

She gave him a hug, the first in a while. 

February 25th, 2010

Winslow High School had several clubs that its student population could join and partake in. Football, soccer, baseball... even a few things that didn't involve stuffed spheres! 

But it didn't have anything like an Astronomical Society. 

But what Winslow High lacked, Brockton Bay made up for. The city's small population of casual and lay astronomers banded together for events and to discuss the hobby, meeting on the first Tuesday of the month for presentations or to organise sojourns out of the city to observe the sky. 

“Are you comfortable, Taylor?”

“I am, dad,” she promised for the fifth time in the last two hours, looking away from the moon to glance up at her father. 

He was sitting with a thermos of warm tea beside her, taking the occasional sip whilst sat warm and cosy in an extra thick (if quite ugly) sweater from the back of his wardrobe. The last time she remembered him wearing it was before her mother died.

Taylor had joined the local society, and her father had been kind enough to bring her out on one of their stargazing trips out of the city to the local hills, where the light pollution was not so severe. 

It was a chilly night made comfortable by her father's preparation. 

“So, how are the stars going? Still there?” 

“Yes dad, the stars are still there.”

He chuckled.

A few minutes later, the head of the society, a Mr. Jacobs, waddled up, a cheery smile on his round, ruddy face as he looked over the two of them. 

“How go things with our newest member, then?” he asked. 

“Not bad, I'm looking at the moon,” she replied, fully aware that it was a slightly empty answer given how little she really knew about astronomy, even with her recent efforts. 

Mr. Jacobs nodded enthusiastically. 

“Can you see the dark spot on the moon, at about the upper-mid point?  That's one of the lunar seas. It's called the 'Mare Criseum', meaning Sea of Crises.”

“Well, that's rather ominous,” she murmured, delicately turning the old telescope towards the feature in particular. 

She over did it, and had to spend a good ten seconds adjusting to try to focus on the feature. 

The older gentleman chuckled.

“Oh yes, a lot of the lunar mares have rather dramatic names The Sea of Tranquillity, Sea of Nectar, Ocean of Storms... most of them were named on the assumption that they were ancient seas and oceans. But actually, they're just plains where basaltic lava flowed following meteor impacts, cooling off and darker because of their rich iron content---” The man was a veritable font of information, and keen to share it... he rather reminded her of an older, more learned Greg.

Several other members of the society sent wry looks their way, evidently used to the man.

She hummed along to his impromptu lecture, and adjusted the telescope a little, not looking towards the moon, of which only a thin sliver was really visible. 

The moon was neat, but it would be better to wait for a full moon, and even in Brockton Bay, you could see that clearly on a cloudless night anyway. Right now, she'd rather focus on other things. 

With so little of the moon visible, the rest of the stars were more visible. 

Unbidden, the memory of that night at the summer camp sitting with Annie stargazing. The conditions were similar; the moon was dimmed in its early phase, which made the rest of the cosmos all the more accessible without its radiance. 

Stargazing through a telescope was a lot of looking at distant dots of light without much context unless you already knew what you were looking at. 

She tried to find the Pleiades, and failed for a good few minutes until, with patience, she found them. 

As time passed, though, she found herself increasingly looking into darkness, rather than the features within it. 

Her father huddled up as the cold grew more pronounced as the night grew late, the other astronomers discussed, chatted, and conversed in low murmurs their observations. 

And then, she found it again, just like that night back at summer camp. 

Her eyes twitched as, in just some small part of the vast fabric that was the void between the stars, she saw movement. Slow, near imperceptible, except the more she looked, the more she saw it; the same oozing, flowing current of darkness filled with miniscule specs of light. 

She dared not blink, in case it should compromise her ability to see it again, but she watched, fascinated as the molasses like current of darkness and stardust continued. The longer she gazed, the more she saw, until the entirety of the darkness between celestial bodies was full of it, all slowly flowing and moving in one direction. 

Dry-eyed, she reluctantly blinked, and then had to spend more time finding the strange current once more, tracing it back slowly, steadily, to try to find where it was going. 

It was silly, but she was sure that she was onto something. 

This strange current fed back through an endless distance, flowing slowly yet never slowing, a fabric of the heavens all leading back to one place, to some source that acted as some founding or primeval source of it. 

And in that void---

She saw an endless origin in which the shattered husks of dead stars lay, their broken forms becoming stardust that congealed in innumerable eddies of the current to form new stars. And those nascent stars that glittered and watched back, like eyes, a thousand points of cognition all staring back at her. 

Break.

Taylor teetered in place for a moment as a sense of vertigo unlike any she had ever experienced struck her like a sledgehammer to the face. 

“Taylor?”

Her father reached out to steady her shoulder as she almost fell from her seat, her mind numbed by the enormity of what it was that she had seen. 

That primordial current between the stars was alive, and in it lay other things, endless things all with eyes, all staring back, all responding to the act of being observed.

They were all eyes. 

As the rest of the astronomical society and her father reacted to her near collapse, the stars twinkled above, and their amber of congealed stardust began to fall on Brockton Bay.

February 28th, 2010

Collin Wallis had not been overly fond of Dauntless as a Parahuman.

The casual ease of the man's power, which provided steady improvement over time without any real effort was the antithesis of his own; he'd spent years and vast amounts of time and resources to achieve notability, and Dauntless's power did the same with only a few seconds of effort a day. 

In the years that Armsmaster had his power, he'd strived every day to improve himself; Dauntless had spent a good portion of time before he became a hero enhancing random objects in his house.

Dauntless the hero frustrated him on a professional level because of how easy he had it. 

And yet, despite all this, he had not hated the man beneath the armour; Shawn Smith had been a good man, one who left behind a wife and a son he'd adored. 

The man's funeral had been yesterday. 

The state of the body following the battle with the meteorite beast had meant it wasn't open casket. 

Dauntless, Rune, and Cricket had been killed, and it was only the coordinated efforts of a half-dozen heroes and the appearance of Purity that had managed to deal with the creature. 

One of the city's most hopeful future heroic prospects, killed so easily. Two notable Empire members, also dead. Vast amounts of damage done to local buildings, and finally, numerous questions as to how and why something had fallen from the sky and come to life. 

It was Parahuman in nature, of course.

There was no other logical explanation... unless it was an alien, of all things. The labs were still trying to dissect what was left of the thing to find out more.

With his chin resting on his knuckles, Collin heard the approach of somebody to his workshop door before they paused to knock. 

He'd been expecting it for a good twenty minutes at this point, and had been dwelling on the negative events of the last few days rather than anything productive. It was not what he should have been occupying himself with, but even a man in his position could take a moment to reflect and mourn a colleagues' death. 

Standing, he walked to the door and opened it. 

A member of PRT staff was standing there, and with little wasting time on explanations, she raised the heavy looking briefcase that she was holding.

“Sir, the samples you requested.”

“Thank you.”

Taking the briefcase, he nodded and then turned, closing the door and locking it behind him. The code to open it was already flashing in a corner of his visor. 

Striding over to a desk, he opened it. 

Inside were a dozen glittering pieces of crystal, ranging from the size of beads to a fist, glittered innocently back at him. 

Last night, this material had rained from the night sky over Brockton Bay, which increasingly seemed to be acting as the epicentre for strange astronomical phenomena. The majority of them had shattered upon smashing into the concrete and asphalt that constituted the majority of public architecture. But enough had landed that people had been able to collect them, and discover that if you broke them, there was a curious effect...

Carefully picking one of the smaller, dimmer specimens from the case, Collin turned it over in his hands. 

The crystal had an unusual property in that it was faintly glowing. 

It didn't do so as much as some other, larger specimens, but as he turned off a nearby light, the faint luminescence within became more apparent. He watched for a few minutes, analysing changes in intensity.

It wasn't changing over his brief observation, indicating that it was constant, an ambient property of the stone rather than natural phosphorescence. 

But Collin was not a mineralogist; they already had experts examining the material, and these samples he had commandeered for his investigations were more for tinkering purposes.

A ping in his ear.

“Armsmaster, front desk here.”

“Yes?” he replied, not pausing in his examination.

“We have a visitor who wants to talk to somebody about the stones last night, she says that she's been researching them.”

“I see."

Plenty of people had thoughts or things they wanted to discuss in the wake of thousands of crystals suddenly falling from the sky. Collin was pretty sure that Director Piggot was having to speak with the Mayor about it on the off chance it was Parahuman in origin. 

The morning news had been filled with discussion about the event, 'experts' pulled from the woodwork to speculate and make uninformed takes that would only confuse the public further.

“Do they have any credentials?”

“No sir. Just some paper notes and some of the stones she said she's made in the last few weeks.”

Collin frowned, leaning back in his chair. 

'The last few weeks.'

“Can she prove it?”

“I am not sure sir, I'll... sorry, would you say that again? Yes, she apparently knows how to make create or use them to do things... What do you mean by that, miss?”

There was a several second long pause at that, the indistinct chatter of conversation. 

Collin rubbed at his eyes, vexed. 

'Things.'

So anywhere from using one to crack an egg to blowing up the world; what a wonderfully lacking description.

His lack of sleep was getting to him; a young Parahuman or even member of the public being vague about these things wasn't unusual. A willingness to approach them to discuss the matter discretely spoke greater volumes about character than hiding or disguising it.

Or at least, that was what he told himself. 

“Sir?”

“Yes, I'm still here.”

“She says that she can create projectiles with them, and different sorts as well, and that the crystals depend on celestial events that change what sort of ways she can use them.”

He only considered the matter for a few seconds, and then stood, push his chair away from his desk. 

“... I'll be down in a few minutes. Please escort the young lady to one of the meeting rooms that isn't booked, and let her know that she isn't in any sort of trouble.”

He made it halfway across the room, then paused.

“Oh and something to drink as well, make sure she's comfortable.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was every chance that it was just some crackpot or crazy person, but he could hardly ask the receptionist to demand a demonstration by the girl in the entrance of the building. 

No, he would get verification for himself and see whether there really was more to this matter than met the eye here. 

Heading down to the ground floor, Collin passed offices in which meetings were taking place in voices both raised and quiet. There were multiple people who had been working for twelve hours straight to try to handle the falling crystal situation last night.

“---throwing them and creating explosions---”

“---preliminary reports suggest that some of them might even be comparable to nuclear fuel in terms of the energy density---”

“---could just be an astronomical event, but we can't ignore the possibility that it is Parahuman in nature.”

He had little doubt that there would be a long, comprehensive, and headache inducing report on his desk later in the day. 

He made his way to meeting room three, as directed, and opening the door he found that the young woman who had come to speak with him was nothing more than a teenager. 

Her hair was messy, there were bags under her eyes and her fingers pressed down on top of a ring-bound page of paper as if worried it could be blown away at any moment. Resting in her lap was what looked like a stick or branch, from which had been peeled the bark, and in a hollow near the top was a glittering turquoise stone. 

He didn't need the various information from his helmet to pick out the obvious signs of tension and stress as he entered the room. But what he did pay attention to was the fact that the stone atop the stick was unlike any of the examples he had seen previously. 

“Good morning, miss,” he began, voice a little clipped but doing his best to smile. “Sorry for taking a while, but it's been rather busy recently. Have you been offered something to drink?”

“Yeah, um, just some water,” she indicated, redundantly, towards the small plastic cup half-empty before her.

It was a rather mundane conversation opener, but one that served to get the proverbial ball rolling. But dealing with nervous visitors was a skill that even a man such as he was required to build up with time. 

“Good. Well, in case you do not know, I am Armsmaster, the head of the Protectorate for the city.” 

She nodded, evidently recognising him. 

“I'm...” she paused, evidently wondering whether she should give her name. She had turned up without a mask, so either she wasn't a Parahuman, or hadn't thought to bring one. “Taylor.”

No surname provided. 

“Well, Taylor, the front desk mentioned that you'd been looking into these stones for a while?” he said as he took a seat, keeping his tone measured. 

“Yeah.”

A pause, the girl was reticent. Hiding something? Or nervous? 

“For how long, if I may?”

“Almost two months now.”

His programs were picking up plentiful indications of honesty. 

He nodded. 

“Well, we first encountered them last night, so why don't you tell me more?” he asked, opening his hands as if to indicate for her to take the lead. 

“Well, I kind of made my own stargazing instruments, kind of, out of clay. I got into it a year or so ago at a summer camp,” she began, not meeting his eyes for a few moments before managing to do so. “And I noticed that they were collecting starlight? I'm not sure how to explain it, but I brought this.”

Reaching into a backpack, the girl took out a jam jar with an old screw top lid, inside which was what looked to be some amount of blue liquid, with the rest of its volume filled with a haze of the same colour.

“If you crush it in your hands, then it made me feel better, or more energised, perhaps. I collected more, and if I left it for a few days it kind of condensed into these stones?” she raised the stick. 

“I see. And would it be possible to see some of these instruments?” he asked, indicating with his hand to examine the vial.

She pushed it closer to him as she replied;

“They're at my house, they're kind of heavy, but I could try to bring them in. I didn't think to do so, sorry.”

“It's quite alright, and when did you start doing this?”

“About two months ago.”

Much ahead of last night's shower of crystals last night. 

Looking over the jam jar closer yielded little immediate result, moving it from side to side showed that the liquid flowed easily, a little more viscous than water.  There was some sort of semisolid mass within as well, one faintly luminescent in the same manner as the crystals, albeit less bright and more diffuse... or perhaps less concentrated?

“This is very interesting. And leaving it for multiple nights led to the formation of crystals?”

She nodded. 

“And if you don't mind me saying, none of the stones that we've collected so far from last night were the same colour as that one,” he indicated, open palmed, towards the crystal crudely taped to the end of the branch. 

The girl, Taylor, glanced down at it for a moment.

“Yeah... it turned this colour the night the meteorite hit Brockton Bay. Both times, actually. I mean, the first time one hit up in the Trainyard I had one like this, this one's the second stone. I think... well, I speculate, that astronomical events influence them, I can use this one to create different effects from the others.”

She grabbed her journal and opened it, showing a crude table of lines and dates, with observations of the colour and size of crystals formed.

He would give credit where it was due; for a teenager, she had evidently been pursuing this with some seriousness.

Resisting the urge to immediately plunder her notes for information, he nodded. 

“And those effects are?”

“I can use them to create projectiles... I guess it's easier if I give a demonstration?” She raised the stick and focused on it for a moment, the crystal at the top lighting up with a bright light of the same colour as its stone, shining as a sort of haze began to build up around it---

“Not here,” Collin interjected, and the girl paused, an immediate, distrustful glance his way turning into evident concern. “The cleaners would be unhappy if we broke something. And we have rooms where we can set up a target for you that would be better suited,” he added.

Even if the girl wasn't a Parahuman, it was evident that the stone had been about to do something just then, and even if she was a civilian, her observations could well accelerate the process of discovery a not inconsiderable amount. 

Standing, he smiled at her. 

“If you come with me, we can test it out, Taylor.”

After a second, she nodded, and stood as well. 

“Taylor, honey?”

“Yeah?” 

It felt like an effort just to force that single syllable out.

“Talk to me; what's up?”

“Just thinking about everything,” she replied, but didn't add anything else. In her heady, tired state, it was rather difficult to muster the energy for more.  

Taylor heard the long, slow inhalation that followed. 

She'd barely explained what happened the previous night, when they had gone stargazing with the Brockton Bay Astronomical Society, but in the wake of her near collapse he'd been hovering over her almost constantly. 

His fingers drummed against the steering wheel as they stopped in traffic.

“Why didn't you ask me to come in with you?” he asked, after a long moment, glancing down at the paperwork on her knee.

Why not?

It was hard to explain.

“In case something happened, I guess,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. 

With what Winslow had been like, and with everything going on with the PRT having lost a member to the strange meteorite-beast, she'd half expected something bad to happen. Exactly what sort of bad, she wasn't even sure; perhaps a long interrogation with shouted demands and near open conflict? Perhaps accusations that she was behind the strange astronomical events recently? 

That was impossible, of course, no one person could call down stars like that.

... Even if they had stared into her very soul last night. 

The thought sent a shudder down her spine. All those countless eyes, all focusing towards her when she found the beginning of that strange, oozing and primordial current between the stars. 

She could envision it right now; indeed, when she took up her starstone staff this morning she'd thought about the current and promptly created a miniature rain of stars in her room. 

The carpet was scorched in dozens of places now, and she'd found a new form of this sorcery or... whatever it was. She wasn't a Parahuman, of that she was sure

“Something?” her father prompted. 

“Yeah... something. I don't know, I expected it to go badly.”

Perhaps it was paranoia and doubt born from almost two years of every institution she encountered failing her, but she'd expected things to go badly. 

She hadn't expected a visibly exhausted Armsmaster to listen patiently to her stumbling explanations, his face unreadable behind that mask. The demonstrations had gone a long way to support her claims, and the PRT wanted to work with her from here on out to try to find out more. 

Her father was quiet on the rest of the drive home, and without the radio, a strange, heavy silence settled over the car instead. 

She wasn't so blind as to think that it was the end of the matter; her father had just heard that she'd rather risk herself then let him be there for her, and it was probably just going to mess up things between them even more. 

It was only when they parked up in the driveway that her father cleared his throat again.

“Listen, I know the PRT gave you an offer, but you don't have to accept anything,” her father said, doing that thing where he would make his voice extra firm to emphasise a point. “It's not a proper position and is your choice, you know? I know you said that you can help them a lot with this star business, but you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.”

“I know.”

She'd tried to explain the situation on the way to the PRT Headquarters this morning, but how did you explain that your casual astronomy had discovered a new, highly energised form of mineral created from star dust? And that similar stones were now falling from the sky, sometimes alive and utterly destructive?

How did you explain that the stars were alive, and knew about you?

She looked down to the piece of paper in her hands, detailing a quickly drawn up agreement of sorts, and read it over for the umpteenth time to stop her hands from shaking. 

The paper detailed not a contract, but more of an agreement for a paid internship. 

Taylor wasn't a Parahuman, but her backyard research into the starstones had led to discoveries that the PRT and others would value. Now they wanted to investigate how she could use them to create projectiles, and she would be helping them to investigate further. 

The pay wasn't much, but it was also irrelevant.

They couldn't hire a minor as a civilian contractor, but this got around it. She hadn't approached them because of the money, but instead because after what she'd seen last night she couldn't keep silent any more. 

The stars were alive, and now they were taking interest in this city. 

She'd been debating weeks ago whether she should approach the PRT for help with her research, now here she was, benefitting even as she helped them back. In some ways, what a wonderful thing; she was needed, and she could benefit in turn.

Things were quiet for the rest of the day. 

Taylor and her father went about their normal routines, exchanging small talk as they tiptoed around the more painful topics. Such as why she hadn't told him about things sooner, or why she'd not wanted him at her side for the meeting with Armsmaster. 

She just didn't have the energy. 

Ever since last night and that moment in which she'd realised just how small she was, everything felt different.

That night, there was another meteor shower. 

Sitting in her backyard, Taylor looked to the sky and at the countless stars above, some moving and some not. Plenty of them would burn up in the atmosphere, but even as she sat there she felt the faint tremor of one of making landfall somewhere in the city, a big, heavy tremor, and she wondered whether another of those monsters had landed. 

And there were so, so many falling stars tonight... 

Deep beneath the city of Brockton Bay, the first fallen star, which had pierced the ground to some hidden space below, stirred. 

A singular eye blazed with the colours of the cosmos, turning upwards to the roof of the cavern in which it had gestated. Through the earth and foundations of the city above, it felt the impacts of juvenile stars crashing down upon the city. That distant gaze that had first stirred it, far off in the depths of the cosmos, had no doubt attracted the attention of others. 

And now it wished to find that distant gaze once more. 

With long, six fingered hands, the Naturalborn began to ascend from its hollow, seeking the city beyond.