Locker Incident

Locker Incident Conflict: Bullying Campaign Date: January, 2011 (First day back from winter break) Location: Winslow High
Outcome
Taylor goes through her trigger event and gains powers Taylor undergoes a mental breakdown and is transferred to a psychiatric ward
Participants
Taylor Hebert Emma Barnes Sophia Hess Madison Clements
Event Navigation
Previous: Boston Games
Concurrent: N/A
Next: Taylor vs. Lung

The Locker Incident is the euphemistic name for the culmination of a long string of abuse that ended up causing Taylor Hebert's trigger event.

Prelude

Following Emma Barnes' assault by ABB thugs and her rescue by Shadow Stalker, Emma started a campaign of harassment against her former friend Taylor in an effort to prove to herself that she was stronger than Taylor.<ref>If she’d experienced her first real taste of fear when the gang members attacked the car, her first real taste of terror when Lao proclaimed he’d cut her face, then it was the thought of Taylor, of becoming Taylor, that gripped her with panic, a whole new level of fear.

I won’t become Taylor.

I’m not-

I’m not strong enough to come back from that. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref><ref>Emma had fought in a moment of desperation, as if fighting could make her stronger than Taylor, set herself apart. Except she’d failed. It was unbearable. She hated herself. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref><ref>Before, Emma suspected she’d have been offended, aghast at the idea that this girl would leave her to suffer, leave her life at risk, just for an answer to a question. Now? Now she could almost understand it, oddly enough. “Who was I?”

“There’s two people in the world. Those who get stronger when they come through a crisis and those who get weaker. The ones who get stronger naturally come out on top. There’s ups and downs, but they’ll win out.”

“Who was I?” Emma asked, again.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” The girl smiled.

Emma didn’t have an answer to that. She shut her mouth, all too aware of the people walking past them, going about their everyday lives, overhearing snippets of their conversation and yet failing to pick up anything essential.

“I want to be one of the stronger ones.” - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref>Together with Madison Clements, they formed a trio that harassed Taylor since the beginning of high school, tormenting her while manipulating other students into socially isolating Taylor or even participation in the bullying.<ref name=":2" /><ref name=":3" /> One day, they decided to escalate things further than they usually did.<ref name=":0">“There’s three girls at school that had… have been making my life pretty goddamn miserable.  Doing pretty much everything they could think of to make school suck, humiliate me, hurt me.  Each of the three had their individual approach, and for a good while, it was like they were trying to outdo each other in how creative or mean they could get.”

[...]

“It went on for almost a year and a half before things quieted down.  Last year, around November, they… I dunno.  It was like they got bored.  The pranks got tamer, then stopped altogether.  The taunts stopped, and so did most of the hate mail.  They ignored me, left me alone.

“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized.  Not one of the major bullies, more like a friend of a friend of the bullies, I guess.  She asked me if I wanted to hang out.  I was too gun-shy, told her no, but it got so we were talking before and after classes and eating lunch together.  Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending.  I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it.

“And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing.  They were leaving me alone.  I was able to relax.” - Excerpt from Shell 4.3</ref>

The trio started off their plan by temporarily stopping their bullying efforts for most of November and December. During this period, Taylor was approached and tentatively befriended by another student, who had participated in the bullying prior but was seemingly remorseful. In the absence of any bullying, with someone she could almost call a friend, Taylor allowed herself to let her guard down and relax.<ref name=":0" />

Some time before winter break, the trio laid a trap in Taylor's locker, almost filling it to the brim with used sanitary pads and tampons. The locker's contents were then allowed to ferment over the course of winter break, developing a revolting smell over the weeks.<ref name=":1">I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break.  I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact.  I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it.  I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker.  Almost filled it.”

[...]

I swallowed, feeling a flush creeping across my face, “It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone.  I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching.  Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.”  It had been Sophia, I was almost positive: She was the most physically aggressive of the three.  But these guys didn’t need to know her name.

[...]

I couldn’t leave the story unfinished, after getting this far, as much as I really wanted to. “They shut the locker and put the lock on it.  I was trapped in there, with this rancid smell and puke, barely able to move, it was so full.  All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out. - Excerpt from Shell 4.3</ref>

The Incident

On the morning of the first day back from winter break, Taylor arrived at her locker. At the sight of the locker's contents, she began to throw up before being roughly grabbed by the hair and shoved into the locker by Sophia Hess, with the door being shut and locked shortly after.<ref>[Sophia] was Emma’s best friend.  The person who had shoved me into the locker, back on the day I’d gotten my powers.  On countless occasions, she had pushed and tripped me, often several times a day.  She’d knocked me down the stairs, when I was near the bottom of the flight, even got others to do similar things.  Given that she’d been suspended after my last meeting with her, I somehow didn’t think she’d walk away without confrontation if she saw me. - Excerpt from Buzz 7.5</ref> Taylor was trapped in her own locker, locked inside the cramped space surrounded by tampons and her own vomit.<ref name=":1" /> As the other students had been cowed by intimidation or manipulation in part by Emma Barnes and the trio, no one rendered any assistance.<ref name=":2">I believe it comes up again towards the end of the arc. Emma pressured others to avoid the situation, not interfere or help or befriend Taylor. What Taylor took to be apathy on the part of the larger student body was actually more orchestrated behind the scenes. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref><ref name=":3">“Enough!” I shouted, suprised at my own temper.  The group of teenagers who were having drinks by the bathroom turned to look at us.

Seeing my burst of anger, the girl did a complete one-eighty, from awe and surprise to desperate apologies.  That didn’t necessarily improve things.  “Oh god, I’m sorry.  You know, I didn’t think about how it would bother you, saying that.  I really did want to help, you know, to do something back then, but-”

“But you didn’t,” I growled at her.  “Just like everyone else, you left me in that locker.  You didn’t go get help.  You didn’t report the people who did it, not even anonymously.  You felt bad?  You wanted to help?  Is that supposed to mean something to me?  Is it supposed to be some consolation? You were too lazy or cowardly to step up and do anything about it, but hey, at least your heart was in the right fucking place, huh?”

“No, that’s not…” there were tears in her eyes, and she was having trouble stringing words together.  I should have felt bad, for going off on someone who was probably in a pretty delicate emotional state, but I wasn’t feeling particularly gentle.

“You obviously heard the story about me being hospitalized, you probably helped spread it.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.  She startled as Brooks passed Minor and Senegal and approached us with a brisk stride.  It threw her off her stride, and she stumbled over her words as she tried to pull her excuse together.  “Um.  It, um.  It was Emma Barnes, she-”

Brooks had reached Lisa’s side and informed her, “Found him.”

“Emma Barnes what?” I asked the girl, trying to bring her focus back to the conversation we’d been having.

She looked from Brooks to me, and I could see how lost she was.

“Nevermind,” I cut her off before she started stumbling over her words again. - Excerpt from Infestation 11.5</ref>

Taylor, unable to move within the locker, began to panic. Over the course of about an hour of entrapment, she realized that no one was coming to help her, and within the mixed feelings of disgust and despair, she triggered.<ref name=":4">“I panicked, freaked out.  My mind went someplace else, and it found the bugs there.  Not that I knew what they were, at that point.  I didn’t have a sense of proportion, and with all the info my power was giving me then, my brain didn’t know how to process it all.  As far as I knew, all around me, in the walls of the school, in the corners, and crawling around the filthy interior of the locker, there were thousands of these twitchy, alien, distorted things that were each shoving every tiny detail about their bodies and their fucked up biology into my head.

I sighed, “It’s hard to explain what it’s like, having a new sense open up, but you can’t understand it all.  Every sound that they heard was bounced back to me at a hundred times the volume, with the pitch and everything else all screwed up as if they wanted to make it as unpleasant and painful to listen to as possible.  Even what they were seeing, it’s like having my eyes open after being in the dark for a long time, but the eyes weren’t attached to my body, and what they were seeing was like looking into a really dingy, grimy kaleidoscope.  Thousands of them.  And I didn’t know how to turn any of it off.”

“Damn,” Lisa said.

“When someone finally let me out, I came out fighting.  Biting, scratching, kicking.  Screaming incoherently.  Probably putting on a good show for all the kids that had come out of their classrooms to watch.  The teachers tried to deal with the situation, paramedics eventually came and I don’t remember much after that. - Excerpt from Shell 4.3</ref><ref>Taylor's classes are an hour and a half long, or an hour and fifteen minutes long, IIRC, with a bit of extra time for homeroom announcements and whatnot. She arrives at the start of the day and goes to her locker, she gets shoved into her locker and she has time to get a glimpse of people looking - and enough time passes that she realizes that those same people who saw didn't take any action on her behalf. She's not really in a position to bang, facing in, too cramped to turn around.

Not so much time passes that the next class starts - or it's as the class opens that people realize what happened and that's when she's let out. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref> With the sudden development of her power came a sensory overload from the surrounding bugs in the area, with the overwhelming amount of information causing her already fragile mind to fracture, leading to another consecutive trigger.<ref>"But I'm afraid that power you're digging for is out of your reach, Weaver."

I looked at him.

"Or it's already in your reach. You can't have a second trigger because you already had one," he said.

I blinked.

"Given the signature, it's very possible you had two trigger events in quick succession. Not uncommon. The horror of manifesting your power, it prompted another trigger."

"No," I said. "There's got to be something."

"If there is, a second trigger event isn't it," the Number Man said. - Excerpt from Venom 29.7</ref> After the end of the first class, Taylor was noticed and let out. She came out scratching, kicking, and screaming incoherently, and had to be taken away by a group of paramedics and cops.<ref name=":4" /><ref name=":5">“Yes. You’re the locker girl. I almost didn’t recognize you without the glasses, but everyone at school knows who you are. You’re with the Merchants now?”

“You’re thinking of the wrong person,” I said, with a note of irritation in my voice.

“No, I’m almost positive. You were that girl that got shoved in that rank locker with all that stuff they carted away in biohazard bags. The girl who went so mental they had to have a group of cops and paramedics haul you away for the first month of the semester.” - Excerpt from Infestation 11.5</ref>

After being removed from the locker, Taylor was taken to the hospital and interned in the psychiatric ward due to her violent behavior. She was sedated in order to calm down, and was kept under observation in the psychiatric ward for a week.<ref name=":8">It had been hard, too, to go back in January.  I’d spent a week in the hospital under psychiatric observation, and I’d known that everyone else had heard the story. - Excerpt from Agitation 3.1</ref><ref name=":6" /><ref name=":7" />

Aftermath

During the first few days of her stay in the hospital, Taylor was near-catatonic. She was visited by the PRT, intending to do a crisis point check to see if she had triggered, but due to Taylor's insensate state nothing came out of it.<ref>Wildbow:
Generally the PRT will pay visits to likely triggerees - special cases, victims of extraordinary violence or disaster, etc. They paid a visit to Taylor in her hospital room, for example, though nothing came of that.

Discreet:
If she did get visited by a hero, I'd find it odd that she'd never mention it, especially when at one point or another she's fighting them later in the story or stuffing centipedes in their mouth

Wildbow: Taylor was near catatonic when she got a visit. - Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles</ref> Eventually, Taylor became communicative enough to recount what happened to Danny Hebert. In her sedated state she said more than she normally would've, revealing to Danny that she was being bullied by a group of students, though she was still together enough to omit names.<ref name=":7">The second possibility wasn’t much better.  He knew Taylor was being bullied.  Danny had found that out in January, when his little girl had been pulled out of school and taken to the hospital.  Not the emergency room, but the psychiatric ward.  She wouldn’t say by whom, but under the influence of the drugs they had given her to calm down, she had admitted she was being victimized by bullies, using the plural to give him a clue that it was a they and not a he or a she. - Excerpt from Interlude 1.x</ref> Soon, Taylor recovered further, and eventually figured how to use her power and shut out some of the sensory information from her bugs.<ref name=":6">“I figured out what my power was at the hospital, while they observed me, which helped ground me, make me feel sane again.  Bugs are a lot easier to wrap your head around, when you realize they’re bugs.  After a week, maybe, I was able to shut some of it out.  My dad got some money from the school.  Enough to pay the bills for the hospital stay and a little extra.  He was talking about suing the bullies, but no witnesses were really talking and the lawyer said it wasn’t going to be successful without hard evidence to identify the responsible.  We didn’t have the money for it, if it wasn’t going to be a sure thing.  I never wound up telling my dad about the main group of bullies.  Maybe I should have, I dunno.”

[...]

I shrugged, “Basically.  I went back after being in the hospital, and things were as bad as they ever were.  My so called friend wasn’t making eye contact or speaking to me, and they didn’t even go easy on me after seeing my, uh, episode.” - Excerpt from Shell 4.3</ref> After a week, she was discharged.<ref name=":8" />

As recompense for the incident, Winslow High paid for Taylor's hospital bills. While Danny considered suing, the lack of any witnesses willing to talk and the financial burden the case would entail led him to give up.<ref name=":6" /> After spending the first month of the semester away from school, Taylor returned to Winslow. The student that she had befriended before refused to acknowledge her, not making eye contact or speaking, and the trio continued to bully her as usual, not going easy on Taylor despite the aftermath of the locker.<ref name=":6" />

As an indirect result of the incident and subsequent freak-out, Taylor became notorious among the Winslow students, becoming known as the "locker girl". Later, this would be how Charlotte recognized Taylor during a Merchants rally.<ref name=":5" />

Trivia

• Despite the involvement of a parahuman, Sophia, Taylor did not receive a Trump power from her trigger, as Sophia did not use her powers to trap her in the locker and had left the vicinity by the time Taylor triggered.<ref>NameWithheld:
  Maybe if Sophia was phased into the locker and whispering in Taylor's ear the whole time. Or like you said, maybe all it would have taken was knowing it was Sophia and that she was a parahuman.
  
  Wildbow:
  This.
  Sophia's power wasn't actively in use, and doesn't have any general 'background' activity that would factor in or create a chance for it to happen. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref><ref>Taylor doesn’t specify how long she was stuck in her locker, but she does stress that time passed and that nobody came to help. Sophia left to go to her class well before the event occurred. - Comment by Wildbow on Queen 18.3</ref>
• It is ambiguous as to whether the mysterious student who had befriended Taylor before the incident was in on the plan or not. Wildbow's notes indicate that the student is Julia, but he does not hold this information to any particular regard, making its canonicity questionable at best.<ref>IIRC it was Julia in the 'worm bible' notes,who appears in passing, but I didn't really tie that to anything - Wildbow on the Cauldron Discord</ref>
• Contrary to popular belief, Taylor was not sent to the hospital for physical wounds. No mention of any infections or scrapes are mentioned in the text, and her hospital stay was in the psychiatric ward, kept under observation for mental health.

Fanart Gallery

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  Reference image provided by Wildbow on Spacebattles
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  Animated Short by Adaptation VFX

References

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