The River King 3

The River King 3 Taylor Hebert It was time to pay Tahm back for all that he’d done for me. Or as he claimed, to fulfill my end of the contra

The River King 3

Taylor Hebert

It was time to pay Tahm back for all that he’d done for me. Or as he claimed, to fulfill my end of the contract. That was how he was, kindness masked by professionalism. Maybe it helped him feel as though he had more control over his circumstances.

I stoically commanded over a hundred pounds of insects, my body weight and then some. They formed neat, meaty clumps atop a crate in an abandoned warehouse we found. I didn’t even flinch as Tahm’s thick, gelatinous tongue lashed out, grabbing everything in range with his adhesive spit. Gross, but I was used to it by now.

“I don’t see why this is bothering you so much, Taylor,” Tahm said in his usual, southern drawl. “A name is a name, no more than that.”

“A hero’s name is special, Tahm,” I insisted. I hopped onto another abandoned crate and kicked my feet. “It’s supposed to be imposing, but also make people feel safe, you know?”

“Maybe I don’t have the right frame of mind to appreciate such a thing. I’m ol’ Tahm Kench, and I’ll always be me.”

“Y-Yeah, I guess you don’t get to take off a mask… Sorry…”

“It’s no trouble. You meant no offense. Every man’s problem is big to them,” he told me with a patient smile. “Now, surely a bright lass like you has an idea or two.”

“I… I don’t know. In the old days, people could get away with calling themselves generic names like ‘Legend’ and ‘Hero.’ Those are all taken now though and it’s really rude to take on a name that belongs to someone else.”

“What if that person is, how shall I say, no longer in the business?”

“D-Dead? That’s even worse, Tahm! Can you imagine how much crap people would give me if I called myself ‘Hero?’”

“Now, I didn’t say they had to be dead, Taylor. Don’t heroes retire?”

“W-Well… I guess?” I searched for an answer. Now that he mentioned it, I could think of only a handful of heroes who could be considered “retired.” “New Wave. Their older members. Lady Photon, Manpower, Brandish, and Flashbang. I think there was another guy? Maybe their little brother but I can’t remember. They’re pretty much retired, but I can’t think of anyone else.”

“Perhaps that is because retirement is a far-flung dream for many in your profession,” he rumbled. His tongue snaked out to lick his chops and I got a glimpse of his triangular teeth. “It is a dangerous path you walk, my friend.”

“I know. But it’s my path to walk, right? I… I need to matter, Tahm. I need to change things, one life at a time.”

“In you beats the heart of a true hero. Yes, perhaps you are right. A worthy hero deserves a worthy name.”

“Yeah, that’s the idea. I just… Why does everything bug-themed have to sound so damn villainous?” I complained. “Stinger. Venom. Spider. Widow. Chitin. Ugh, they all make me sound super edgy, like I’m about to rob a bank or burn down an orphanage.”

“How about Ladybug? They are not scary nor ominous. Or perhaps Butterfly? There are plenty of nice insects.”

“They go in the other direction though. They’re too nice. No villain is going to be intimidated by a hero named Ladybug.”

“Do they need to? It strikes me that being defeated by a young slip of a girl who calls herself Ladybug would be rather humiliating. Perhaps you will dissuade villains from a life of crime through the power of shame.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think I can pull off the Mouse Protector act. I don’t have jokes and quips to make it all seem like a Three Stooges skit.”

“Hmm… How about Dragonfly?”

“That’s better. Great, actually, but it might remind people of Lung. I don’t really want someone to mistake me for an ABB cape, or for Lung to decide I’m ruining his image and start targeting me or something.”

“That sounds unlikely, but very well. Monarch?”

“Monarch?” I rolled the word around in my mouth. “Like the butterfly?”

“Indeed, Taylor. Monarch is a name that commands respect without being ominous. And, you’ve yet to dye your mask,” Tahm pointed out. He was always so helpful. 

I glanced down at my mask. I’d been so busy that my mask was still the same, off-white color. “You’re right… It wouldn’t take too long to dye my mask a different color. Black and orange? And with some white spots along the edges. Thanks, Tahm.”

“You are most welcome, Taylor.”

X

I stopped a robbery today. It wasn’t racially motivated for once, both the mugger and victim were Hispanic. That was a breath of fresh air, what with Brockton Bay being the way it was. Then again, maybe that was my fault for deciding to claim the outskirts of Empire territory as my patrol route.

It’d been two weeks since Tahm shared his power with me and I’d dyed my mask, two weeks since “Monarch” became an official hero. This past week alone, I’d stopped a handful of assaults, intervened in a bar fight, and even took down a sex offender.

I couldn’t patrol every night, but I tried to be as consistent as possible. I read that heroes were supposed to build a community presence. Sounded like a bunch of PR nonsense, but then again, how else was I supposed to make the city better if I didn’t actually get out there?

I had a reputation now. Monarch was a low-level brute who seemed to always know where to be. No matter the crime, no matter how well-hidden the scumbags thought they were, I’d find a way to be there. That was the kind of hero I wanted to be, an ever-present protector who’d never let someone slip through the cracks.

Things were going… good…

I snorted at that. How fucked was my life that nothing happening made me paranoid?

I paused. It felt nice, being able to poke fun at myself, in however small a way. I’d never have been able to do that a few, short weeks ago. I chose to see it as a sign of growth, a sign that I’d moved beyond being just the helpless, bullied girl. I was making a difference in people’s lives and building a name for myself.

“Shit, it’s Monarch!” I heard a thug say. He turned and fired without hesitation. The bullet whizzed past my cheek, close enough that I felt the wind.

“How the fuck does she always know?” another shouted back. He shoved his mugging victim to the ground, a young man around my age, and tried to bolt out of the alley.

It felt good to be recognized, but that was no reason to let them get away. I could have ended it with a tide of insects, but I preferred to do things personally.

I hadn’t used my bugs in combat since Alabaster. It was a tactical choice I’d made after some careful thought. The Empire capes would probably learn that I had a secondary power eventually, if they didn’t already, but the everyday thug certainly didn’t. 

They’d figure it out eventually, especially when I started using butterflies to put civilians at ease, but the longer I could keep my bug control out of their minds, the better. It allowed me to pretend I was omniscient. People on PHo thought I might be a combat thinker, or just have a “luck-based” power.

I dashed forward, brushing past the victim to shoulder-check the fleeing criminal. Lower your center of gravity. Tuck in your head and strike with the point of the shoulder.

I’d been practicing. Stuff like karate or muay thai seemed like it’d take a ton of practice, but a classic football tackle? I could do that.

He flew with a yelp of pain and surprise until he crashed into a mostly hollow dumpster. I’d gotten good at holding back. Now, I could make my tackles feel like they came from an NFL lineman without completely snapping their ribs like matchsticks.

The second thug, the one who pulled a gun on me, didn’t get off so lightly.

I grabbed his forearm and twisted, dislocating his elbow. He screamed in pain and the gun discharged once more, firing into the brick wall I’d pointed at. He still wouldn’t let go of the gun so I kneed him in the kidney and wrenched the gun from his fingers when he bent over.

I hated gunmen. Not because I couldn’t regenerate from a gunshot, Tahm was awesome, but because I was running out of money for new jackets. I hadn’t finished more than a silk t-shirt yet so my costume was still very bare-bones.

I glanced back at the teen. He was wearing an Immaculata uniform, that preppy, Catholic school in the rich part of town. They had a reputation for being almost exclusively white, but that didn’t make them Empire wannabes. As I understood it, most Catholic schools were like that.

I tried to sound gentle. It would have been nice to show him a butterfly, but those weren’t around in the middle of January. “Hey, are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”

“N-No,” he replied shakily. He picked up his backpack with a weak grin. “Thanks for the save. You’re that new hero. Monarch, right?”

“That’s right. Do you mind calling the police? My phone got broken a while back,” I lied as I tied up the muggers with zip ties. I’d yet to find a burner for myself. That’d have to change soon.

“Yeah, I can do that,” he agreed. He also agreed, more reluctantly, to stay and give the cops his statement.

That was another thing I’d found: Being a hero was a lot more procedural than I’d expected. The cops needed to be spoonfed evidence. Otherwise, it was my word against the people I’d just tossed around like ragdolls.

Even when they had obvious gang tattoos or other identifying marks, if there was no proof of a crime in that moment, it was hard to prosecute. I learned that from experience. It was frustrating, but I guessed the law was the law.

Good deed done for the evening, I continued on my patrol. Dad didn’t even notice when I left anyway, and I’d found that Tahm’s gift came with increased stamina in every way that mattered, sleep included.

X

School was a downer. If being a hero had me riding high, Winslow reminded me that my life was shit in every other respect.

I took a seat at the back of Mr. Gladly’s class. World issues could have been the most interesting class in the school, but he managed to kill any enthusiasm I might have had for the subject.

He was the “cool” teacher, the kind that inserted himself into teenage popularity contests despite being in his mid-thirties. He always let the popular kids get away with murder, turning a blind eye so he could keep being “Mr. G.”

I hated him. He was so damn pathetic, kissing up to children half his age. He peaked in high school, fine, plenty of people did. I just wished he wouldn’t keep making it everyone else’s problem.

“Hey, yo, how’s it going, class?” he said as he strolled into the room with what he probably thought was a “gangsta” swagger. It just made his potbelly stand out. “We’re going to be doing our weekly survey of local news. Get in a group, four at most, and decide on a current event to present to the class.”

I groaned. We did this every goddamn week. It was a good idea on paper. It gave kids a reason to keep up to date on the news. In a city like Brockton, that could genuinely save our lives.

Problem was, most kids only read the headline from the Sunday paper, whatever it was. Only one group got to present on it and obviously, Gladly only chose the popular kids. That left everyone else stumbling around for anything to talk about for two minutes.

“Taylor, do you want to work together?” Greg asked. The bowl cut blonde was already shoving his desk next to mine. His friend, Sparky, barely looked up from his desk. I was pretty sure he was on something, not that Gladly ever gave a damn.

I guessed that made us a team of three, as usual. We were the misfits who had nowhere else to go. “Sure, Greg… What happened on the news last week?”

“The big one was that Hookwolf almost killed Vista,” Greg told me with a conspiratorial whisper.

“Really? What happened?” I asked, curious in spite of myself. That was one of the few positives to sitting with Greg: He was such a cape-nerd that I could expect him to know things like this.

“PHO was talking about it on Friday. No one’s sure what happened, but Hookwolf went after Vista. People are saying he caught her, too. Armsmaster showed up and bailed her out but I think she might have gotten hurt.”

“Huh… That’s rough,” Sparky said. He was barely paying attention, with one earphone in his ear and the other hanging from his neck.

“Yeah, right? Like, how dumb do you have to be to be a shaker-9 and still get tagged by Hookwolf?”

“Hey, she’s like twelve,” I snapped.

And this was one of the many downsides of sitting with Greg: He wasn’t just a cape-nerd; he was a battleboarding cape-nerd, the kind who thought he could “jailbreak” every power better than the parahuman who had it.

I used to think that was fine; everyone had their hobbies. But lately, he’d been grating on me more and more. Powers came from triggers. Capes who got them… we weren’t people who woke up wondering how to best “min-max” our power like we were characters in a video game.

Greg didn’t get it. How could he? He’d never fallen so low that something fundamental broke inside. He’d never fought anyone, never put his life on the line to change something.

“So what? She’s using her power all wrong,” he insisted. “All she had to do was step onto a roof and make a spatial donut. She could have had him running circles, probably forever.”

“If she didn’t do that, have you considered that maybe she can’t? Maybe her power doesn’t work that way?”

“Be serious, Taylor. Everyone knows how Vista’s power is supposed to work. She’s a shaker-9. She’s not even supposed to be catchable by anyone who can’t teleport.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t know about this until he told me, but I could imagine the scenario. Vista probably intervened in something, maybe an Empire lynching like I had. Her body might have moved before she could think, only for her brain to catch up and realize she’d stepped between Hookwolf and his latest chew toy.

That was how things went sometimes. Sometimes, the gravity of the situation caught up to you and you had to take a second to process. I figured out I could regenerate when I turned my back on the regenerating brute with a knife. I couldn’t throw stones from my glass house.

Greg had no fucking clue what he was talking about. Fighting was very different from bitching about powers on PHO. He was like an old, fat man in his fifties watching the Superbowl and yelling about how he “totally could have caught that pass.”

“Well, you can stand up and talk about Vista and Hookwolf, then,” I told him. I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. “You know more about it than me.”

“We need to talk about current events, not fight theory,” Sparky said dryly. Even stoned out of his mind, I liked him better. At least he was thinking about the assignment.

Greg flushed. “O-Oh, well… I guess I can talk about it. I mean, the heroes might finally crack down on Hookwolf. He almost killed a Ward. That’s a huge deal.”

“Did he? Weren’t you just saying how you weren’t sure if she actually got injured before Armsmaster showed up or not?”

“That’s my point though. If Armsmaster hadn’t shown up, she would’ve been screwed.”

I zoned out after that. Greg gave some half-assed presentation about the consequences of attacking a Ward. It was a nice summary of the unwritten rules, until he went on a tangent about how the Wards were crap and they only got to be “heroes” because everyone was too afraid to hit them back. That got us a solid B-, mostly because Gladly refused to fail anyone and thought spelling our names right was an achievement.

Just about the only good part of this weekly news update was that I got to keep an ear out for any mentions of me. So far, there hadn’t been any except a few PHO posts talking about a combat thinker with a grudge against the Empire. None of the real news channels thought I was worth reporting on so none of my classmates decided to present on me.

I had mixed feelings about that. On one hand, I knew that being considered a minor vigilante meant I was less likely to meet the likes of Hookwolf. On the other hand, it probably meant I could be doing more. I had to up my game if I wanted to be a real hero that changed lives.

We broke back into individual seats after that. We were halfway through the class when I felt pencil shavings fall into my hair. I whipped my head to glare at the culprit.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Taylor,” Madison, the petty bitch, said with a saccharine smile. “I’m so clumsy. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Piss off, Madison,” I growled under my breath. I glanced towards Greg, only to watch him avert his eyes.

Of fucking course he did. I wasn’t sure why I expected anything different. Shit like this happened every week. He saw it all and never spoke up, all the while acting like he gave a damn, like we were friends.

More like I was the only girl he thought he had a chance with, someone just as pathetic as him.

He was a coward, the definition of a keyboard warrior. And he thought he could use powers better than the heroes. Yeah, right. And maybe Kaiser and Lung would put aside their differences to open a charity for homeless black people.

I took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to shove Madison. She’d fly like a kickball. As satisfying as that would be, the momentary catharsis wasn’t worth outing myself.

I was a hero. I was Monarch. This wasn’t worth it.

X

I ate alone, like I always did. I found an abandoned restroom and spent most of lunch brushing the pencil shavings out of my hair. Then, I claimed the furthest stall and sat down on the toilet seat. Eating my cold, bologna sandwich on the toilet was pretty sad, but it was the best way I knew of to be left alone.

My bugs helped. I used them to keep an eye on the three bitches no matter where they were in the school. Right now, Sophia was in the athletic office, getting her knees taped. There was a track meet coming up so I’d been left alone for a bit. Emma and Madison were in the cafeteria, surrounded by their usual court of sycophants.

I took a bite of my sandwich and sighed.

This was stupid. My bug control power had proven itself to be much more useful than I’d first expected even when I wasn’t drowning someone in cockroaches. I’d already used it to subtly avoid ambushes, both by the Empire and my bullies.

But I couldn’t help but feel that I wasn’t using it right. It’d been two weeks, and a few people recognized Monarch, but was that enough? Had I really changed anything? Was I leaving the impact I wanted?

The answer was a resounding no. My power, not Tahm’s, was used for running away, for avoiding trouble. It was like nothing changed. I ran from my bullies. I ran from the Empire. I ran from the emptiness of my house.

The feeling of accomplishment I’d felt during my patrols vanished. It was replaced by a yawning emptiness. I couldn’t help but feel inadequate, like the things I’d done so far were so minor compared to what I could do. If I were a queen, then I must have been the saddest queen in the world, one who ate on a porcelain throne. 

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like me right now. Maybe I couldn’t confront my bullies without outing myself, but that wasn’t true for Monarch.

Monarch was a hero. Monarch was proud and confident, the kind of figure who always knew where criminals could be found. I’d been using that awareness to pick and choose my battles, but that wasn’t right. Heroes didn’t run. Heroes didn’t hide. And heroes definitely didn’t only take fights they knew they could win.

No, that was what cowards did. I was behaving like Gladly, like Greg. If I wanted to truly become a force for good in this city, then I’d need to step outside my comfort zone. Just like when I rushed Alabaster without even knowing who I was up against, I’d have to take a leap of faith.

It was time to find another villain.

Author’s Note

Highs and lows. Taylor remains her own worst critic even in a world with Tahm Kench. Nothing really happened, but she’s managed to twist her own reasoning into finding a villain to fight. 

Such is life, eh?

Animal Fact: Mustelids get dumber in the winter. Well, kinda.

Some mustelids, certain shrews and least weasels, undergo brain shrinkage during the winter months. Their brain literally loses volume and their braincase, the part of the skull that houses the gray stuff, noticeably shrinks.

This is because the brain is the most energy-expensive organ in the body. In winter, with food scarcity and cold conditions, the mustelids’ brains shrink a bit to conserve energy. It’s thought that this is an adaptation that came about because mustelids do not hibernate.