A/N: Finally back to Amy's point of view! I've also made a few corrections and edits, including fixing some dialogue in chapter 1.2.
Thursday, March 24 2011
The first thing Amy noticed upon crawling, sore and battered, back to consciousness was the mud.
Specifically, she was laying nearly face-down in the stuff.
The 'nearly' aspect of her current predicament was on account of her head actually being turned to the side, so instead of her lungs being filled with mud and muddy water, it was her left ear and part of her eye. Of course, the mud was full of all manner of living creatures, plants, and fungi, so Amy was perfectly aware of the bugs that had surfaced from the muck to perch on her immobile form.
Feeling insects ineffectually pecking at her reinforced skin with their proboscides (thanks, biology textbook) would have brought a grin to her face if smiling did not run the risk of introducing mud into her mouth.
Well, what now?
Amy seriously considered just staying the current course and simply waiting in the ditch until something interesting happened. Despite lacking a clock or indeed any other way to determine time, she was nevertheless quite sure that it was too early for this shit, which under more normal circumstances would mean retreating to the dark embrace of blankets, pillows, and/or girls.
Speaking of, where was Taylor? Or Lily? Or, gods forbid, Emily?
It was only upon wondering what situation her fellow sisters-in-sinfulness might have found themselves in that Amy refocused her attention back on her own rather unenviable condition. She couldn't even put her head back under her pillow-substitute unless she wanted a face full of the mud. 'Waking up in a ditch' was definitely not going on the list of 'acceptable date activities,' which prodded the much more important thought into the front of Amy's consciousness: why was she (mostly) face-down in a ditch?
There was nothing for it except to stand up and ascertain just what the hell was going on. Amy stumbled unsteadily to her feet, disturbing both the mud and the insects that had not yet realized that she was not edible. Cleaning the mud off her skin and Circe costume (not that her power really made much of a distinction between the two) was simply a matter of consuming free biomass; Amy put the additions to work powering the bioluminescence in the cloak. Her goggles, on the other hand, had to be removed and worked over with tentacle fingers before they were clean enough to wear.
Unfortunately, even with clean goggles, Amy found that she still didn't have the foggiest idea where she was.
The broad strokes were easy — she was in a park or other similar green space near a run-of-the-mill New England town. The architecture was distinctive, which Amy had known even before Elle had enthusiastically included Amy in her hobby, but she had not paid enough attention to place the buildings more accurately than that. If anything, the faint whiff of salt on the air was more indicative.
"Right," she said, talking out loud mostly to break up the monotony of smelly mud and offensive sunshine, "let's figure out where we are."
Amy made it all of fourteen steps before plopping herself down in the first park bench she came across, upon which she discovered that her situation was much more dire than originally thought: she was out of purple plant. Extruding a thin vine from her fingertip let Amy work her powers on the topsoil beneath her feet, and soon enough she had a pocketful of purple plant… and no blunt wraps.
In fact, she didn't have much of anything in her pockets. No phone, no ID, no wallet, and somewhat distressingly from the point of view of breakfast, no money. Oh, and no grinder, but an easy workaround was to convert her fingertips into chitinous-edged horrors and grind the buds in her palm. Amy was certainly not above using leaves from her creations as impromptu wraps; it wasn't long until she was smoking peacefully and thinking about the plant whose fruit was pre-packaged blunts.
Designing such a plant had been a pipe dream almost since Taylor encouraged her to use her powers that way, but as Amy let her imagination wander, she came to the surprising and somewhat distressing realization that she didn't have much else in the way of more practical objectives except 'avoid the authorities' and 'have fun.' Even the recently standardized upgrade packages had mostly come about by accident and experiment instead of an intentional plan.
Of the two of them, Taylor was definitely the schemer. The Tinker was always working towards her eventual goal of establishing herself as a heroic-leaning rogue, which involved a dizzying array of tasks that Taylor was only partially willing to explain. Copying Amy's power was a big fucking deal, so Amy wasn't too upset that Taylor didn't want to tip her hand in case her experiments didn't work.
That being said, Amy was slightly concerned how Taylor was now involving the Wards in her experiments.
Amy had no such schemes, and as she exhaled a serene cloud of smoke while sitting on a random bench in a mystery town, she started to wonder if maybe she should rectify that shortfall.
Maybe that could happen after she figured out just where the hell she was.
Which, in turn, could happen after she finished smoking.
To Amy's own surprise, she had barely finished crushing the ashes of the first blunt between her fingers when she leveraged herself up from the bench and surveyed her poor choice of sleeping arrangements. Subsequent blunts — the sum total of her current possessions — were tucked away discreetly in the pockets lining her cloak, leaving Amy with two free hands to fidget nervously as she swiveled her head around.
The scene encompassing Amy was so staggeringly out-of-context that she almost had to wonder if last night's escapades had included dimension-hopping to other, less awful worlds.
The sun was shining,
The birds were chirping.
The winds were blowing… and the people were staring.
Apart from that last bit, whatever-today-was morning in the unnamed park was almost painfully
mundane. A brief wave to the gawking civilians set them mostly back to whatever they were doing before, but parents kept shooting her worried frowns while the kids snuck surreptitious smiles and the occasional wave back.
Wherever Amy was, they were not nearly as comfortable around capes as the citizenry of Brockton Bay. Back home, a new cape in the park would be approached immediately by curious bystanders, and would go home to discover that the entire encounter (even if they were merely having lunch) had been filmed and uploaded to PHO.
The curiosity of kids was a constant, of course — Amy and Vicky both had learned that quickly at the hospital — but the parents were considerably more wary. Their silent judgement had apparently come down on the side of 'watch disdainfully,' which Amy belatedly realized was probably due to the smoking.
And her costume, if those two teenage boys were any indication.
Still, no-one stopped their activities to accost her. Balls were thrown, books were read, and grass rolled upon while Amy simply stood and observed, and to her mild intrigue, she found the unfolding mundanity soothing nerves that she hadn't realized were agitated.
For as often as she saw death and things like it in her line of work, watching kids run around freely was a balm on Amy's tired soul. Unfortunately, it did little to help her current predicament, so she pushed the thought out of her head and meandered out into the town. An extravagant sign carved from marble declared 'Whitacre Park;' something so nice would have been defaced immediately in the Bay.
She reached the town center in less than five 'blocks,' not that Amy could deduce any rhyme or reason to the road layout. In fact, she was pretty sure that one of the side streets must have intersected
itself somehow, in order for her to have walked over it twice. Or maybe that was the residual effects of whatever she had done to her brain over the past few days — it was hard to tell with New England city 'planning.'
At least the houses and buildings were cute, and Amy soon found herself wandering under the shady trees of the commons in the middle of the town square. Based on the various hanging placards and signs for the shops surrounding the square, the name of the town was called Salisbury… unless the proprietors of those shops were pulling a practical joke with their 'Salisbury Jewelers,' 'First Salisbury Bank,' and so on.
Despite only being conscious in the town for at most an hour, Amy was once again surprised to discover that the ambiance was growing on her. Salisbury was quiet in a way that encompassed more than just the lack of background noise. Even beyond the lack of obvious damage due to gang violence or cape fights, Amy had the distinct feeling that the town was not host to much in the way of Interesting Times.
Some part of her wondered if that was such a bad thing.
Oh, she wasn't going to abandon Taylor and just go to ground in a small Massachusetts town (the state was obvious from the license plates) with absolutely no preparation or warning. In fact, Amy had no plans to even stay longer than was needed to find a way back home.
But… this sort of idyllic peace and quiet made for an alluring retirement option. If there were local capes, they were certainly more palatable than literal Nazis or sex slavers. It wasn't like Salisbury had much in the way of resources to plunder or population to lord over, although the flip side of that statement meant that there was not likely to be a Protectorate presence, either.
As much as she wished otherwise, Amy knew that a peaceful retirement in a sleepy New England town was probably not in the cards. She was simply too powerful and useful to up and vanish like that, and the powers-that-be would descend on Salisbury like dogs on a Salisbury steak. Except those dogs could shoot lasers out of their eyes or turn into dragons, and responsibility for the resulting mess would fall squarely on Amy's shoulders.
Moreover, that plan didn't consider Taylor, or Lily, or Crystal and Eric… or even Vicky. Amy had a sneaking suspicion that Lily wasn't as firmly in the Protectorate's pocket as her superiors might think, but Taylor had strong ties to the Bay despite how horribly it had treated her. Still, neither girl would probably want to abandon everything they knew for a small town in Massachusetts.
But, Amy could dream, at least a little bit.
Maybe this was the future that she should be working towards?
The sudden sight of an incongruous beach paraphernalia shop jogged Amy's memory — right, there was a fairly popular beach to the east of where she was currently standing. Some of Vicky's friends at Arcadia would take the train down here in the summer to do all of the traditional beach things that were not really possible in the Bay.
Eureka! She was halfway to Boston.
And… her hair lit up noticeably brighter.
Why had that happened?
Why the hell was she in Salisbury of all places?
All thoughts about 'retirement' and 'the future' were unceremoniously defenestrated from Amy's brain as she tried to remember the series of events from last night that culminated in her waking up one state over, face down in a ditch. Her memory was mildly foggy at best, which mostly concerned… trees? And a bar? The only thing she could remember (using the word generously) from the murkier bits was… fish.
Amy had the distinct feeling that she was not going to like what she found, provided she could remember anything more.
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
At least she was making progress on remembering anything at all. 'Fish' wasn't exactly the most useful starting point for, well, much of anything, but it was more than she remembered upon waking up this morning.
"Um, ma'am?"
Amy's stomach rumbled at the reminder that, as she had not yet had breakfast, it was still technically 'morning.' She knew from past experience that 'smoking a blunt' did not constitute breakfast, along with the fact that it was possible for morning to stretch for more than a day if she forgot to eat. Taylor had made a point of coming by their workshop slightly more often after that particular episode, not that Amy was complaining.
"Hey, mystery cape!"
"Huh what?" Amy asked, finally pulled out of her reverie.
She turned to find a young man with styled brown hair, early twenties at most, wearing what was obviously a costume. The jumpsuit was done up in a hodge-podge of greys, greens, and blues, which looked random and amateurish at best until Amy noticed the too-uniform bulk of a bulletproof vest underneath. Between that and the opaque green visor hiding the top half of the cape's face, Amy suspected that the green behind his ears was mostly his visor strap.
The globes of water circling his hands would have been much more threatening if not for his obviously unsure posture. With his left foot slightly behind, it seemed more likely that he would turn and run instead of actually fight, although Amy did note that, depending on his control over that water, retreating to range might be his best tactical position.
Still, she wasn't looking for a fight herself. "Want a hit?" she asked, taking the blunt out of her mouth and gesturing with it.
Whatever the cape was expecting, it wasn't that. "Uh, no thank you?"
"Suit yourself." Amy took a long drag from the blunt to distract herself from the way the other young cape was examining her body. "So, are you the local hero?"
"Yeah, I'm Marsh," he said, snapping back to attention. "Who are you?"
"I'm Circe. Rogue, from up north a bit."
At that, Marsh's posture finally relaxed. "Ok, great. I was worried that you were a new villain, scoping out the place or something. What brings you to our humble little town?"
Amy shrugged. "Honestly, I don't really know."
Though she couldn't see his eyes, Amy imagined that he just blinked in confusion. "You don't know?"
"Nope. I woke up maybe an hour ago, face-down in a ditch over in Whi… Whisky park? Something like that. Then I wandered around for a bit, and now I'm here."
Amy was only feeling about half of the nonchalance that she forced into her statement, because while she was definitely concerned about whatever series of events had transpired to leave her in Salisbury (and why said events involved fish), it wasn't like she had a schedule to keep or school to attend.
"Whitacre Park," Marsh corrected. "Well, no one called me, so you couldn't have been doing anything too dangerous."
"Just smoking and thinking," Amy agreed. Had Taylor been nearby, she might have quipped about Amy being more dangerous when she was using her brain. The girl could be surprisingly witty when she tried.
An awkward silence stretched as Amy focused on finishing her not-breakfast while Marsh did his best to look anywhere but at her costume. He did end up breaking the silence, but only after Amy finished the blunt and crushed the flaming bits of the roach between her fingers. "Are you going to be here long? Is there anything I can help you with?"
Thoughts of a peaceful retirement bounced around in Amy's mind, but she shook her head firmly. "I don't think you would appreciate what would happen if I stayed, so I just want to figure out how to get a train ticket and I'll be on my way home."
"A train ticket? I can —"
Marsh's offer was interrupted by the sound of breaking glass, and to Amy's surprise the hero was moving almost immediately. Water swirled out of a cleverly-concealed backpack, dashing down and around the cape's boots. Once lifted onto the pockets of water, he started skating with surprising speed.
Amy caught up to him with three bounding steps. "Want a hand?"
"I won't say no to some backup," Marsh replied with a grin.
It occurred to Amy that being a hero in a small town like this would be a nightmare at first, if only due to the nonsense city 'planning' making it hard to figure out where things were happening. Marsh received a text message as they ran, prompting him to almost bowl Amy over in an attempt to shortcut down an alley at high speed. She managed to keep her footing, however, and they darted out of the alley just in time to cut off the apparent source of the commotion.
Amy's brain almost locked up at the sheer cliché density in the scene before her.
Jewelry store with broken window? Check.
Old-fashioned alarm bells ringing? Check.
Supervillain in dark, edgy costume? Check.
Canvas bag with dollar sign on the side? Che—huh?
Was this guy for real?
"Deadzone! You are under arrest!" Marsh called, apparently unfazed by the situation. They had barely come to a halt on the other side of the street before another torrent of water exploded out of Marsh's backpack, forming into variously-sized globules that orbited the hero at arm's length.
The would-be thief turned around at the accusation, and Amy's brain crashed for a second time. Dark jumpsuits and goggles were perfectly acceptable villainous attire — bright red stripes notwithstanding — but was it really necessary to include the evil moustache? Seriously, she could tell that he waxed the thing from across the street!
"Well if it isn't Salisbury's very own upstanding hero, Marsh! And he has even brought an assistant!" Fuck, even his voice was annoying.
Luckily, Amy was saved from the indignity of having to deal with this 'villain' (she couldn't take him seriously any longer) when Marsh fired a pair of orbs through the hole in the glass. Amy watched as the watery projectiles lengthened into spear-like shapes, only to crash soundlessly into a thin and rectangular field of red energy that materialized a few feet from the 'villain.'
Once in the field, the projectiles slowed down to a crawl, as though they were trying to penetrate a window made of molasses. Marsh fired several more from another angle, but the 'villain' stepped into the field himself and rocketed along its length at high speed. The new water spears missed, only to get caught in a new field when the 'villain' was repositioned. The whole battle was like the world's most boring game of Pong.
Well, there was no reason to let this poor town suffer the indignity of hosting this moron any longer than necessary. While Marsh redirected his next round of water constructs towards their target, Amy took off at a dash, ignoring the panicked, "Wait!" from her heretofore ineffectual companion.
Then Amy ran hand-first into one of the glowing fields, and promptly discovered why Marsh was keeping his distance from Deadzone.
Taylor, had she been here, would have shaken her head in dismay upon seeing Amy make such a tactical error. Marsh's water projectiles stretched and distorted in the field, and the 'villain' himself obviously got some benefit, so it would have been a reasonable hypothesis that Amy's own body would be just as negatively affected by whatever the rectangular redness did.
Amy's powers fed her a constant stream of information about herself, one she was perfectly capable of ignoring under normal circumstances. The sudden compression on her arms and shoulder barely registered to her power compared to the baffled, metaphorical squawking due to having sections of those arms experiencing different rates of time. Though the wall was thin, there was a noticeable gradient in how fast fluids were moving and how often nerves were firing, and it was all Amy could do to get her head in the game and stop herself from face-planting into the energy field.
Naturally, she did this by extending her other hand.
The energy field vanished a moment later, leaving her to pinwheel her arms as she tried to avoid falling on her face. "Oh no, Circe, this is bad! I'm sorry, I should have —"
Marsh actually managed to catch Amy before she fell over, but she shook off his hands immediately and pointed towards the escaping 'villain.' "What are you waiting for? Get him!"
The hero stared at Amy's completely normal and functional hands for a second longer than was really necessary, but before she could physically shoo him away, he maneuvered the water back under his feet and took off after the would-be robber. Marsh was quite capable of moving and shooting his water globules, firing salvo after salvo of smaller orbs and forcing Deadzone to move erratically.
Amy had no intention of being left behind, however, so she uncoiled her legs like springs, launching herself towards the fleeing 'villain' with quite a bit more speed and color than she expected. In fact, the surprise momentum was enough to send her flying past Marsh and prompt Deadzone to detour down an alley, requiring Amy to backtrack on normal legs to catch up.
The confined space was making it much harder for Marsh to maneuver around the slowing fields, but similarly Deadzone didn't have a clear path to retreat due to pipes, dumpsters, and other obstructions. As Amy ran up, yet another red wall vanished, suddenly freeing a whole rainstorm of droplets that immediately resumed the chase.
"He's such a pain," Marsh grumbled as Amy stopped, but she politely pushed him aside and unfurled her right arm. Marsh leapt back in surprise and/or horror as a glowing (?) tentacle shot forwards, lancing towards the escaping 'villain' and —
Smack dab into the red energy wall, just where Amy expected it.
Now that Amy was expecting the strange effect, she was able to tune her biology to compensate. While it would be rather dangerous for normal people to be caught in the field, her earlier tryst with the power had been more disorienting than damaging. Better, the 'villain' was not expecting
suddenly tentacles, so he paused at exactly the right time for Amy to fire off one of her paralytic bone spines.
It wasn't until the recoil from the eight-inch long projectile leaving the tip of her 'arm' that Amy realized that she had failed to compensate the other way.
Luckily, her aim was true, and the spine blasted into Deadzone's stomach with much more force than Amy had intended — enough, in fact, that the man was thrown off his feet and sent sprawling on the ground. He twitched once, spraying a few droplets of blood, and then the field vanished when he fell still.
Amy didn't retract her newly-freed tentacle immediately, of course. Instead, her attention was fixed on the extended appendage, wondering why it was threaded with the same bioluminescent whorls that covered her costume. It looked
awesome, but Amy had not intentionally modified her limbs to do that. Was it some sort of uncon—
"HEY!" Marsh yelled, kneeling over Deadzone. When had he moved? "Call an ambulance unless you want a murder charge! You hit him right in the gut!"
"Serves him right for being so ridiculous," Amy muttered, recoiling her arm. She flexed her fingers and rolled her shoulder, then stalked over to the fallen cape and put a finger to his forehead. A moment's thought dissolved the spine, using the mass to repair the damage to his gut while doing nothing for the paralytic coursing through his veins. "See? He's fine. No lasting damage."
Marsh looked at Amy, then back to the 'villain,' then back at Amy; he repeated that twice before his gaze came to rest on the ridiculous dollar-sign bag. "Oh, well, that's good, I guess. How are you still able to use your arms? Deadzone occasionally gets people caught in his field, and they are often hospitalized for some time."
"Powers," Amy said as a non-answer. "So, what are we doing about this guy?"
---
"Do heroes come here often?" Amy asked as she slid into the diner booth across from Marsh. He had started by politely interrogating Amy while they waited for the PRT to pick up Deadzone, only to switch to bribing her with breakfast when she tried to slip away. After action reports and interviews were really not what she wanted to deal with, well, ever, but her hunger won out against her distaste of paperwork.
The Kleos never had that problem, but neither did they often get to fight other capes. However, even the abbreviated scuffle with Deadzone had been surprisingly fun, and Amy made a mental note to see if Taylor wanted to go beat up Neo-Nazi capes when she got home.
A waitress brought them coffee almost immediately, and Amy noted with some amusement that Marsh savored an exploratory sip before answering. "Often enough. It's just me and another hero who works closer to the beach towns around Salisbury, but we both like the food."
Amy took another sip of painfully ordinary coffee (a far cry from her custom stuff back home) while glancing around the diner. As a Brocktonite and parahuman, it was hardly strange to her to see a cape in a restaurant like this; surprisingly, both the restaurant staff and patrons appeared only mildly perturbed by their presence this morning.
It was, of course, still morning, and would continue to be so until their food arrived. Coffee didn't count.
"So I have to ask," Amy said, breaking the awkward silence that had settled over the table. "Is that Deadzone guy new? He seemed a bit… incompetent."
"That's… um," Marsh started, lips twisting in displeasure. "No, there's a few villains that rotate between the towns near the border with New Hampshire. I know his antics —"
"And that the fucking cartoon sack."
"— don't paint a flattering picture, he's actually one of the more dangerous and slippery criminals that we have to deal with."
Amy opened her mouth to say how ridiculous that was, only for Marsh's dignity to be rescued by the timely arrival of the waitress to take their orders. Restricting herself to a normal human's breakfast was almost painful, but Amy didn't want to take advantage of the clearly young-ish hero. She still ordered the breakfast platter, but only one instead of four.
"So yeah, I wanted to thank you again for your help," Marsh continued. "I'm just glad that you didn't get hurt when you stuck your hand through his field. People have nearly lost fingers and hands due to ruptured blood vessels."
"Well, you're paying for breakfast." The hero had been surprisingly willing to provide food when Amy revealed that she had misplaced her wallet and phone.
Marsh nodded absently. "You said you were from up north?"
"Yeah, from Brockton."
"And that you were a rogue?"
The last word had a slight inflection that Amy definitely did not appreciate. "Yeah. What of it?"
"Have you ever thought about becoming a hero?"
Amy choked on her coffee.
"Sorry, sorry," Marsh said, sounding much younger in his contrition. "It's just… you were so great today, and rogues are supposed to avoid fights."
Quick use of her power cleared her airways of coffee, letting Amy focus an annoyed glare on the hero. "Trust me, I would vastly prefer to be home, relaxing on my couch." Though, if she was being completely honest with herself, it had been a lot of fun to thrash such a ridiculously over-the-top villain. Amy still couldn't believe he had that cartoonish sack.
Marsh's response was a confused squawk. "On your couch?"
Amy forced down her first three vitriolic responses, reminding herself that the young hero (though he wasn't much older than her) lived and worked — heroed? — in a tiny Massachusetts town, and likely never had to deal with things like entire gangs of white supremacists and supervillain corporate conglomerates.
"Look, I've been where you are. Full of life and energy, a power that lets you help people, and all that heroic jazz. Maybe you had a rough start, maybe not — but you appear to have hit your stride, so now you go out in costume to beat up villains in your free time." Amy pretended not to notice the shocked expression on the visible portion of the other hero's face. "Dunno about you, but where I come from, heroism never seems to accomplish very much at all. You work and work and work for even scraps of praise, making no progress despite your struggles."
"No," Marsh said emphatically, cutting her off. "That's not right. We made progress today. Deadzone might not have a body count, but he's stolen all kinds of stuff and hurt quite a few people in the process. And given that we don't have that many villains around here, even getting rid of one is a big step forward."
Amy was surprised enough by the intensity of the young man's outburst that it took her several seconds to collect her thoughts. Unfortunately for the tension at the table, the waitress appeared in that time; the presence of food and coffee refills distracted both of them long enough that there wasn't much heat in Amy's reply. "Correction: you made progress today. I don't live here."
"Welllll…" Marsh said, only stopping to take a bite of his pancakes. "If you wanted to, you know, relocate down here, we could definitely use the help. I, um, wouldn't normally be so insistent, but you were a lot of help today and the PRT told me that they got reports of what is probably a new villain moving into the area. People up north a bit saw some monster riding on top of the train, and there have been some suspicious people in too-nice suits seen around here in Salisbury."
A disjointed memory of wind, sound, and speed whispered through Amy's mind.
Whoops.
That probably answered the question about how she ended up in Salisbury, if not why. The suits, on the other hand, were a foreign element that she was not particularly interested in examining. Staying here was simply not feasible, no matter how the heroic voice whispering in her brain wanted her to make like her sister and save the day for everyone.
Amy was
far too sober for this, but her flask did not suddenly materialize when she patted down the pockets in her cloak.
"So, yeah," Marsh said sheepishly, unaware of Amy's thoughts. "If you want to move down here and set up your rogue shop… and maybe help out a bit? We could use it."
"You have no idea what you're saying," Amy muttered around a mouthful of bacon.
"What? I'm just asking —"
Amy slammed her hand onto the table, rattling the cutlery and almost spilling her sad excuse for coffee. "Your town is cute and all, and maybe one day I could retire here, but right now it's not my problem. Even if it were my job to run around solving everyone else's problems — which it isn't — you have
no idea the hell that would rain down upon this place if people found out I was here. I'm not just saying no because I don't particularly feel the need to hoist a bunch of unnecessary responsibility on my shoulders, but because I rather not turn Salisbury into a battlefield."
She was being hyperbolic, of course, but that only helped drive home the point to a suddenly very lost and confused Marsh. His mouth flopped around like a fish for a moment, and Amy was struck once again how young he appeared. When he finally got his jaw under control, he mouthed 'unnecessary responsibility' a few times before visibly deflating.
"Ah, okay. I just…" He trailed off under Amy's baleful glare, but regained some of his poise after a few bites of pancakes. "Alright. Thank you for your help, then, and I guess it's better to get you on a train home sooner rather than later."
"Yeah," Amy said, focusing on her own food. "Thanks."
The rest of her breakfast passed in silence.
---
Salisbury's train station held an uncommon sight for a native Brocktonite: a working payphone.
Marsh had happily given her a few quarters to operate the antique device in addition to a one-way ticket back to the Bay, which Amy had planned to use to leave a message in Taylor's voicemail. The colonial-style clock in the station happily proclaimed that it was a bit past noon, leaving a pit in Amy's stomach when Taylor picked up on the first ring.
"Amy! What the hell!? Where have you been? Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. I woke up in a ditch in a small town right across the border in Massachusetts, and a friendly hero bought me a ticket home. I'll be back in the city in an hour or so."
Amy could easily imagine the long-suffering expression on Taylor's face when the other girl heaved a long sigh.
"You know, after last night, I'm not even surprised. At least you managed to leave your phone and wallet in the loft instead of losing them somewhere in the forest."
Forest?
Well, at least
someone remembered what happened last night.
However, that conversation was probably not compatible with a public telephone (not that she thought that Taylor would let the issue rest anyway), so Amy changed tracks. "Uh, sure. Go me. Why are you not in school?"
Pause.
Goddamnit.
"Can we talk about it when you get back?"
"Sure. Want to hear about the most embarrassing villain I've ever seen?"
