#I'm starting to wonder if adding all the other worm tags is worth it

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

Insinuation 2.7 Live Reactions

(This is me, writing reactions as I read, because why the fuck not. They're not complete, mature thoughts taken after I sit back and evaluate what I've read. Consider them as such)

I really need to plow through these faster. I'll be at this all summer and more at this rate.

 I felt a touch guilty, for acting under false pretenses.   I also felt pleased with myself, in an irrational way.

What false pretenses? :P Taylor, why you always lyin' to yourself? :P

That regret quickly turned to a pang of anxiety.  What would they think when they saw the real me?  Brian and Alec were good looking guys, in very different ways.  Lisa was, on the sliding scale between plain and pretty, more pretty than not.  My own scale of attractiveness, by contrast, put me somewhere on a scale that ranged from ‘nerd’ to ‘plain’.  My opinion of where I fit on that scale changed depending on the mood I was in when I was looking in the mirror.  They were cool, confident, assured people.  I was… me.

A year and a half of some of the most intense bullying will fuck you up.

I stopped myself before I could get worked up.  I wasn’t regular old Taylor, here.  In the here and now, I was the girl who had put Lung in the hospital, accidental as it was.  I was the girl who was going undercover to try and get the details on a particularly persistent gang of supervillains.  I was, until I came up with a better name to go by, Bug, the girl the Undersiders wanted on their team.

Ayyyyyy! There's that brain Taylor! :high fives her:

 I rationalized it by telling myself that I was already in this wholesale.  Being truthful about that one thing might well save my hide if any of them decided to do some digging on me, or if I ran into someone I knew while in their company. 

This isn't even a bad rationalization, like some of your others. Just sound logic.

 Lisa, though, put one of her arms around my shoulders and gave me a one-armed squeeze of a hug.  She was a little older than I was, so she was just tall enough to be at the perfect height to do it.  What caught me off guard was how nice the gesture felt.  Like I had been needing a hug from someone who wasn’t my dad for a long time.

Oh god you poor touch starved girl. We need to get you some emergency kittens, STAT! Maybe an overexcited puppy or two.

Or just Kara Danvers. She's huggy enough to cure even the worst touch-starvedness

It wasn’t an area that had been kept up, and kind of gave off an impression of a ghost town, or what a city might look like if war or disaster forced people to abandon it for a few years.  Grass and weeds grew between slats in the sidewalk, the road had potholes you could hide a cat in, and the buildings were all faded, consisting of peeling paint, cracked mortar and rusty metal.  The desaturated colors of the buildings were contrasted by splashes of vividly colored graffiti.  As we passed what had once been a main road for the trucks traveling between the warehouses and the docks, I saw a row of power lines without wires stretching between them.  At one point weeds had crawled most of the way up the poles, only to wither and die at some point.  Now each of the poles had a mess of dead brown plants hanging off of them.

Ah yes. The deadsville. Every fictional Urban Dystopia has one. :rofl:

Our destination was a red brick factory with a massive sliding metal door locked shut by a coil of chain.  Both the chain and door had rusted so much that I expected that neither offered any use.  The size of the door and the broadness of the driveway made me think that large trucks or small boats would have been backed up through the entryway back in the factory’s heyday.  The building itself was large, stretching nearly half the block, two or three stories tall.  The background of the sign at the top of the building had faded from red to a pale orange-pink, but I could make out the bold white letters that read ‘Redmond Welding’.

The convenient abandoned warehouse/factory.

Someone should set up an evil lair in an abandoned coffee shop. Just for a change of fictional pace.

I supposed they might have a TiVo, though I’d never seen one.

For some reason, some name-brands just feel... weird to see name-checked in fiction. TiVo is one of them.

“I’m jealous,” I admitted, meaning it. “Dork,” Alec said, “What are you jealous for?” “I meant it’s cool,” I protested, a touch defensively. Lisa spoke before Alec could reply, “I think what Alec means is that this is your place now too.  This is the team’s space, and you’re a member of the team, now.”

Cut her some slack Alec. She's still getting used to the idea of belonging/being wanted/welcome anywhere.

Also, like, I imagine Lisa doing that has *got* to get infuriating sometimes.

“Last time he went up against Shadow Stalker, he came back here and bled all over a white couch,” Lisa groused, “nine hundred dollar couch and we had to replace it.”

You shouldn't have gotten a white couch then :P

I blinked a few times, then hedged, “For other local capes?  I’ve done research online, read the cape magazines religiously for a few years, more since getting my powers… but I dunno.  If the past twenty four hours have taught me anything, it’s that there’s a lot I don’t know, and will only find out the hard way.”

Information is the greatest weapon in the Wormverse, that's for sure.

I stared at her, a good part of me horrified that I’d gotten into an undercover situation opposite a girl with superpowered intuition. Taking my silence for awe, she grinned her vulpine smile, “It’s not that amazing.  I’m really best with concrete stuff.  Where things are, timing, encryption, yadda yadda.  I can read something out of changes in body language or routine, but it’s less reliable and kind of a headache.  Enough information overload without, you know?” I did know, her explanation echoed my own thoughts regarding my ability to see and hear things through my bugs.  Still, her words didn’t make me feel that much better.

Alert! Danger Will Robinson Taylor Hebert

“And,” Brian said, still glowering at Lisa, “Even if she knows a lot, that doesn’t mean Lisa can’t be a dumbass sometimes.”

Everyone who has valid (even if not always correct) reason to think they're the smartest person in the room has a remarkable ability to also be the biggest dumbass in the room.

2.7 - not quite knocks it out of the park, but definitely very good.