In her dreams, she sits at a table, talking. She's accompanied by a man and a woman: her father, quiet but friendly; Annette, talkative and empathetic. Both of them adults, yet the discussion is almost laughably juvenile: light, changing subjects constantly.
She gets the feeling it isn't really her, that she's just along for the ride. That it's a strange clone of her that's sitting there and chatting. Enjoying life.
Enjoying life?
She wants to enjoy life, too. What is that saying? 'Stop and smell the roses.' I want to find the roses.
A silly thought.
Her father says something: Annette laughs, she joins in. It's a bittersweet music. A song she hasn't heard in a long, long time.
She remembers her mother to be dead. Her father... gone, perhaps, in a different sense of the word. This scene makes her lonely, but they're both worlds away. Distanced in so many more ways than one.
I want to make new friends.
New relationships, new opportunities, new life.
She pictures those more recent memories in her mind. Dreamlike, the scene changes. Talking with Sarah over tea, discussing parahumans and powers with Gregor. Slowly experimenting, safe and easy ideas morphing to become more radical.
They're far away, too. But she can remember more. Being here before. Dreaming, imagining.
Waking up.
"She's not breathing, she's not breathing!"
"Would you like me to call an ambulance?"
"Calm down, Newter. Gregor, not yet."
Clearing her throat, quietly: "What's going on?"
Then three voices, clambering over one another.
"Whoa!"
"I suppose that I will not call an ambulance."
"Good to see you again, Taylor." Sarah's there, holding a notepad, her expression a strange mix of its normal intensity, concern, and excitement.
"Glad to be back... I think?" She looks around the room. Gregor's there, and so is Newter, also looking conflicted. He's standing over a prone body, alternating between staring at her and the limp form. She doesn't feel the need to look much closer. "What happened?"
"What do you remember?"
"We were..." What had they been doing? She scratches her head, watches as Sarah writes something down into her notepad. "Talking? Testing things."
"Good, that's good. What's the last thing you remember?"
She thinks about the question, but nothing comes to mind. "I don't remember anything concrete."
"I understand. Well, we were testing your power to see if we could tease it out. We thought it was maybe some kind of regeneration - so we tried giving you some of Newter's, er, hallucinogens." She purses her lips. "It's always been non-lethal, but you still somehow appear to have died. Which I should say sorry for, by the way. We should have considered that there might be a strange interaction."
"It's okay." Being dead doesn't feel that bad. ...didn't?
She concentrates, closing her eyes. She had been somewhere else, somewhere dark and quiet. Where was that place? Vague memories of dreams, distant creatures roiling in the darkness, recognizable people speaking. Cautious happiness, lonely conversation.
Pitch black, yawning void, cold emptiness.
A vast being, larger than imagination.
Minuscule, from this perspective.
"Are you okay?" Newter, snapping her out of her concentration.
"Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking."
"That's fine, there's a lot to take in, here. Taylor, would you be all right if we tried this again? I have a few ideas."
"What?" Newter chokes out, turning to Sarah, a strangled look on his face. "She literally just- just died, in front of me. I don't really want to see that again."
Sarah sighs. "We'll collect some of your drug, then Gregor and I can help Taylor with testing."
A few minutes later, they sit around a table, Sarah's notepad angled so that all three of them can read it. She's laying out a plan; Taylor tries to follow it, but fails miserably. There are a variety of tests to attempt to figure out what she can do: everything from giving her miscellaneous objects to 'take with her', to measuring the exact amount of time between her 'dying' and reappearing.
The discussion is somewhat uncomfortable. Taylor goes to inspect the dead version of herself.
There's something a little unrealistic about her. Well, it. She tries to dehumanize it mentally; she doesn't want to make that connection to her own mortality. Instead, she distracts herself with the inanimate parts - the sweater, for example. It's the same as the one she's wearing, but something about it brings her back to her original thought. It doesn't look quite real. There's something off, a combination of microscopic tells that combine into an disconcerting aura of fakeness.
She pulls at a loose thread, and a full corner of the sweater frays, white stitches taut cords across a broken grey background. Her glasses come off; she tries the others on. Blurry, like looking through plastic.
The smell isn't as disgusting as she'd expected, or remembered from the previous time. There's no aroma of feces or sweat. Instead, it's just a strong burnt odour, like ash.
Sarah is watching her. "Find anything interesting?"
"Odd. It's different."
"What do you mean?"
She runs her hand lightly through its hair. Disgusting. "Worse. Like... a cheap knock-off." Looking back to where she'd played with the corner of the sweater, it seems even more damaged than it had before, like it had never stopped fraying after she left it alone.
Now that she's looking for them, she can see the differences everywhere: its clothing's colours are subtly weaker, washed out; its skin is chalky and ashen; its hair stringy and thin.
"We noticed that with the other one, too. Gregor thinks it might be how your power deals with the clones, sort of like a much slower version of- well, you wouldn't know of them. But it falls in line with a theory of mine. Parahuman powers rarely seem to be particularly... practical, outside of fighting. So there's no need for it to make a quality copy of you, I suppose, if it's just going to be discarded. Like some sort of subconscious resource allo- never mind. Let's get back to work."
Taylor just nods, not really listening. There's something more interesting about the body, a slowly growing morbid allure to inspecting it. She idly wonders if it's special, in some way - there's certainly a draw to it, like she just can't quite resist looking for more blemishes, now that she knows of the façade.
No matter. Sarah beckons her, and she returns to the table, back to reading complicated to-do lists and theories. They're going on a job next week, and she does want to be ready.
If only she knew what 'ready' was, that would be a fair amount easier.