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10:37 am
Hebert had gone silent, and Sophia had suddenly blacked out.
It was an unusual turn of events, one that Emma Barnes had not expected to occur at all. The locker was one of the biggest escalations that she and her friends had performed against the girl in the last year, but even then, this was odd. She had rather expected that there would be a lot of screaming and shouting, they would all have a good laugh and eventually Hebert would get out.
That was what she expected.
The reality was different.
“... Taylor?”
Silence.
Emma glanced at Sophia as the girl picked herself up off the floor, Madison had taken a step away to stand closer to Julia and some other girls. There were glances between the locker and the two ringleaders behind this entire affair, questions being asked silently of each other.
Something poked out of the trio of small, slit like vents in the top of the locker.
“Huh?”
Soft, white strands, it took a moment for Emma to realise just what it was that was slowly pushing out of the locker
“Look's like feathers...” she said, reaching out slowly.
“Emma, don't touch it!”
The redhead pulled her hand back.
“Huh? I wasn't going to,” she lied, and unnoticed by most of the surrounding crowd, her raised voice was responded, the feathers suddenly pushing out fasted during her exclamation, only to slow once more once she quietened down.
“Listen, something's gone down,” Sophia said, glancing again at the feathers.
There was still no noise from within the locker, the shouting and banging had come to a stop, it was utterly silent.
“Maybe she fainted?”
“There wasn't feathers before, she's probably is a cape or something.”
“Huh? Taylor?” Emma asked, sounding almost a little indignant at the idea, even as her eyes snapped to the ventilation slits once more.
“That's not possible, she can't be a cape.”
Emma made it sound so iron clad that a few people relaxed.
As the voices raised, with her still stood right beside the locker, the feathers stretched once again, reaching out suddenly for the source of the noise---
The redheads skin brushed against the white down. For just a moment or so, she thought that they were truly very soft indeed... at least, until the sensation of prickling struck and venom was injected---
Emma screamed, a scream akin to that of a mythical banshee than any scream of shock or surprise. Within a moment, her hand had reached up for where the feathers touched, and she had stumbled forward and away from the locker. Collapsing to the floor and thrashing, within seconds the sounds of the wailing girl echoed down the hall.
“Emma, shut up!” Sophia said, glancing towards the feathers still stretching and pushing out of the narrow space, faster now.
Creak.
The hinges were struggling, there was a bulge in the metal, whatever was within the locker was pushing out. No, wait, it was too big to fit inside the locker---
The weak piece of metal that held the locker shut gave way, the door burst as it struggled to contain the mass within.
It all happened in a second, and with a sound of the metal door slamming against its neighbour an avalanche of wings adorned with hundreds, if not thousand's of feathers burst forth from the confined space.
They stretched for the first time after being confined in their metallic cage, folding and bending at angles seemingly impossibly for limbs possessing normal bones.
Within a second or two, the gaggle of girls was overwhelmed, struck and enveloped in the mass of seemingly pure white feathers.
The barb of each wing, the tiny little spurs at the end of each feather, were sharper than a needle, piercing easily through skin and clothing to inject the potent cocktail within. Stimulants to activate every pain receptor in the body, combined with others to forcibly keep a person awake... awake and screaming in utter agony.
The sound devouring wings enveloped each of the girls, as if cradling them close, and with each little sound the wings grew larger. New feathers burst and extended from the wings already present, new wings began to branch off from the larger ones or emerged from whatever thing lay at the centre of it all.
A shadowy figure burst from the mass of screams and feathers.
Sophia Hess fled a good way down the corridor before she returned to human form, glancing back at the rapidly expanding mass of downy white wings
Hebert had triggered. There was no doubt about it.
Everyone on Earth Bet knew to avoid anything with more than two wings.
There was only one thing to do.
Get the hell away from the scene and call in with the PRT.
10:54 am
Robin Swoyer, aka Velocity, was the first on the scene for the Winslow incident.
He was faster than the emergency vehicles and the PRT's unpowered staff, that much was for sure, and the first few minutes were a rushed and at times panicked evacuation of the premises.
The tannoy system of the school was blaring, telling people to evacuate and avoid a particular corridor... unfortunately, it was one of the main ones in the school.
By the time he arrived at the location, leading a teacher and her frightened class along... he was able to see exactly what it was that needed avoiding.
There was no other way out of the school for these kids but along this route, and at one point a corridor met the one he was one in a T-junction. Down the connecting corridor, just ten metres to the side, close to cutting the path off, was the cause of this crisis.
It was, to his eye, a great mass of wings that stretching and reached ever closer, but by no means quickly. It took up almost the entire corridor, and the way the wings moved and reached and for him unerringly.
He was not equipped to deal with the problem, according to Shadow Stalker just making contact with the thing did... something. Something to make people scream, which just encouraged it further. Was it purely responsive to sound? Some manner of rapidly growing Changer or Breaker that could only hear, but not see?
Interposing himself where the other corridor joined this one, he frantically waved the teacher along to bring the kids behind him and past to safety
The conversation, the talking and panic was a crescendo of noise that only seemed to encourage the wall of feathers and wings to grow closer and closer by the moment. It grew slowly, but inexorable, a wall of soft looking down that every second was taking up more space, stretching and reaching forwards, like a sped up recording of a growing plant reaching for sunlight.
But all that mattered was that the kids were all evacuated long before the hostile Cape got anywhere close. They managed it, the mass of feathers and wings was just a few metres away when the last frightened teenager raced past, and Robin was able to bring along their rear and check other classrooms at speed for any stragglers.
As he did so, he reached up to his ear to contact the person who had first called the issue in.
“Shadow Stalker, what the hell do you know about that thing?” he asked, wanting details beyond the hurried call she placed earlier.
“Makes people scream when they touch it, and it grew bigger the more they did and shit, got no idea beyond that! It was in a locker or something,” the brusque girl said.
It grew in response to sound? It was a strange notion, but Parahuman powers were rarely so logical as normal beings, and especially dangerous ones that would go out of their way to kill multiple teenaged girls. It was lucky that Shadow Stalker had managed to get away and place the call when she had or else they could have been facing a real crisis, dozens of kids all trapped screaming--- wait, that was it, wasn't it?
If the feathers did something that made people scream, and the threat grew in response to sound...
What a horribly fiendish design.
However, it did mean that if they could get everyone away from it, then it would stop growing, right? No sound to eat, stuck there.
He escorted the kids and teachers out of the building, leaving behind a horrible, surreal silence.
Shadow Stalker had said that a number of girls had been caught by the Parahuman, but whether they were alive or something more horrible had happened he could not say. He hoped for the best, but assumed the worst, and until the big guns arrived who could do something about it, there was only so much he could do.
And then---
A loud sound pierced the air.
It had been a few years since he had been in school, but the sound stayed with a person for life.
A bell, a perfectly standard school alarm bell, of the sort used to indicate the end of a class period. It was perfectly normal that it should go off, although frankly he was rather surprised that it had not been sounded to indicate an emergency. Instead, Winslow had made use of a tannoy system for the purpose of getting all the kids out.
But now that it was eleven in the morning, it was going off to signal the end of classes that had already been ended.
The only thing was, there was a strange sound, over the bell---
CRASH!
Something shot into the air above the school, a great mass of white, hundreds of disorganised limbs moving and flapping, a veritable ball of wings.
“It's making a move!”
There were shouts all around him, and as he looked up, focusing on the strange sight ascending into the heavens, he could see something at the fore of it. A humanoid figure, to which all the wings connected, desperately reaching upwards into the sky.
The effort and force was clearly too much for the warped Parahuman, feathers and segments of wing were breaking off mid-air, and with the reduced mass, it was climbing faster and faster into the heavens---
A wing crashed down not far away, several falling feathers landed on people, and the agonised screaming began.
They were still potent.
“Get under cover!” he bellowed
People scrambled to do so, hundreds, if not thousands of feathers were drifting on the wind, which was pushing them further into the city.
“Don't let people touch the feathers!”
But of course, the higher the many-winged angel climbed, the longer the feathers would remain airborne and be carried by the gusts of wind striking the Bay. They would be carried further inland, people would chance upon them and perhaps grab the pretty and unusually large feathers.
It was an absolute disaster just waiting to happen!
He watched, unable to help himself, as the angel climbed higher and higher into the sky. With each great flap hundreds of feathers were dislodged, wings broken and torn, ascending high into the sky, until it was little more than a dot.
Eventually, though, it reached a point where clearly its wings could hold it aloft no more.
Perhaps they were too broken and ragged from the effort, but the creature began to fall.
Down, down, getting closer and closer by the second, until it came crashing through the roof of some other part of Winslow High from which it had burst barely a minute before.
A silence fell over everything, at least for the first responders, as the dust began to settle.
Around them, and over the city, feathers continued to fall... and in the distance, more screaming began as they landed and the curious reached out to grab them and swiftly regretted it. A chorus of agony filled the air, and only growing worse as the gentle rain of feathers fell further and further in radius.
Some began to black out with the pain, a dozen or more new Parahumans gained their powers that day, and for most of them, that power saved them from falling into shock and dying.
Watching the feathers fall, one thought came to Velocity's mind.
The thing grew in response to sound... and right now, the city was filled with it.
It was time to call in the big guns.
And silence that accursed bell.