4.4
One of those flickering assholes turns a corner, shrieks in delight, and charges me. I'm so fucking tired, come the fuck
on. I turn to jog away as best I can, also thinking about getting out of reach of the Simurgh dust -I don't know what breathing in Endbringer flesh is liable to do to the human body, but I don't want to find out by
testing it with my own lungs.
An explosive shriek of agony erupts behind me, startling me so badly I almost fall
again, and I glance behind me only to spot the flickering psycho has stopped flickering and is instead clawing at their body, coughing up blood. Uh? Their eyes meet mine, they shriek, they flicker, they shriek again (in pain) and hit the ground.
I stare blankly for a minute, Simurgh dust whooshing past me, before it occurs to me that
maybe the Simurgh dust is somehow at fault. Bad interaction with the power? Being no-sold by even
disintegrated Endbringer flesh, somehow hurting them?
It feels logical, but I'm in shit condition at this point. I can't make myself jump through the mental hoops. Too tired. Need to just... hope people can kill the Simurgh now, find myself some place to
sleep. My workshop?... no, that's... not really very defensible, and I can't expect loyal assistance from the ABB because Simurgh.
Something in the sky -no,
about the sky- catches my eye. I stare blankly, partially obscured by the dust, mostly obscured by my brain fog. It takes a while for me to parse that I'm seeing unnatural motion from the clouds. Then I notice the Simurgh, visible again as clouds suck in toward it...
glittering?
Glittering??
I squint, confused. It's only when Alexandria smashes into the Simurgh with the sound of cracking ice that I pull together the thought:
the Simurgh is forming armor of ice from the clouds.
… super-ice, from the look of things, as it's
meaningful armor against parahuman assault. That's... a pretty bullshit use of TK, but as far as I'm aware is basically reasonable physics otherwise. I kind of resent that she's still jobbing. She could be pulling the water out of people's bodies to simultaneously kill most of her attackers
and armor herself, but noooo, Endbringers jobber to the bitter end.
I flinch away from an explosion and abruptly remember I was trying to get away from the fight, get to safety, start establishing some place safe for me for the quarantine. More immediately, get out of the Simurgh dust. Breathing this
can't be good for me.
Right. It's... not higher than two stories, I think, so... get to a building taller-
I fight the urge to slap myself on the forehead. No, I just need to get inside a building at all and
close the door.
I do exactly that, half-expecting to be faced with a lunatic trying to kill me. Or a completely reasonable citizen assuming
I am a lunatic trying to kill
them. Instead, I find myself faced with a mess, as of people hurrying out with as much as they could carry. Dropped dolls, abandoned phones -I scoop one up, on the off-chance I'll be able to call someone- and scattered papers. I note blood stains -they look to me like someone hurt themselves smacking into something and kept going, ignoring the injury. Not like someone was attacked here.
I think I'm in an apartment building again. People fleeing their homes, I guess. Makes sense, anyway.
I don't hear anyone inside, yet. A glance out one of the windows shows the screaming flickering psycho is not only not any better, but is looking like a cancerous mass of body horror. I'm... surprised they're still screaming, honestly. I wander around inside the building, trying to see if there's anyone hiding here. The doors are mostly open, and the exceptions show no signs that anyone left them at all. Unused tenements?
The lights flicker, but don't die. I find myself wondering if Brockton Bay has a local power supply -and whether it will continue operating after the city is sealed off, if it has one. Pretty sure I can supply my own power, though. Tinker. I'm more concerned about clean (fresh)water and, you know, food. Also, a
defensible shelter, which this is
not.
My mind drifts to the Best Buy I tinkered in earlier. I... have serious doubts I can retrace my steps to find it again. Might be able to find it anyway, but I really doubt I could retrace my steps per se. Always a pain to do that in a city. Not enough real landmarks. Unfortunate, as it's a ready-made source of tinker supplies and is relatively defensible, with only... two entrances? Maybe not two. Fire escape entrances are probably involved, for one. But not a
ton of entrances, and in particular not a ton of easy-access windows. Has bathrooms, for what that's worth. Ovens sitting around, just need to plug them in somewhere to use them. Probably possible to convert an office or break room or something into a bedroom of sorts.
Maybe not the Best Buy per se, but it's the right
kind of building.
I grab some food -unopened, minimize germs- from the abandoned apartments, load it into a kid's toy wagon I run across. A shopping cart would work better, but there's none of those lying around inside here. I poke around for other stuff, find a tablet, a handful of DSes, some other electronics that seem worth holding onto that are relatively compact, load them into the wagon too. I also grab a plastic shovel. Then I look outside, see how the Simurgh dust is looking.
Screaming lunatic is unrecognizable and silent. There's just a lump of white where I last saw them, like a slightly higher pile than the rest of the white. I note that the amount of dust in the air seems to be pretty low -it's mostly settled on the ground, on buildings, on cars, etc. Yeah, I think I can go out without the dust being a problem. I also see the fight with the Simurgh is still ongoing, bright flashes lighting up the sky intermittently. The sun is most of the way set, too. I'd rather be vaguely secure before dark.
I maneuver my toy wagon down the stairs without losing its crap as best I can. This involves a fair amount of losing stuff, putting it back, losing it again, putting it back again...
Once I'm outside, I use the plastic shovel to grab a few shovel-fulls of the dust. Maybe I'll be able to somehow tinker up something using it. If nothing else, being able to analyze it should be informative when it comes to creating a proper Endbringer killer. Or at least a Simurgh-killer. I'm a lot shakier in my original confidence that the Endbringers are essentially the same with this bizarre "Simurgh made of feathers" thing.
Wandering the streets vaguely in the direction I
think the Best Buy is in, I keep an eye out for trouble. An ear, too. More the ear than the eye, really. Whatever.
I'm tired, basically as close to helpless as I'm going to get without being unconscious. Don't like wandering around like this, but for whatever reason other people -the ones still here- seem to be inclined to just... hole up. I see people watching me from windows again, but at this point pretty much any time I see someone on the ground it's a parahuman. The exceptions seem to be mentally unhinged hobos. So it strikes me as the
safest time to be moving around, in spite of being in the middle of an Endbringer attack.
I notice some of the parahumans move to intercept me, stop, and deviate. I guess my persona-non-grata status is being passed around. Could be worse. None of them has tried to put a hole in my head. Yet.
I'm wondering why the Simurgh hasn't left yet, honestly. It's still hanging around, ice armor cracking and melting in the face of the assault, ripping buildings apart occasionally, mostly just collecting existing junk. I hadn't even seen it construct a tinkertech device yet, which just seemed
strange now that I thought about it. Like, okay, Squealer apparently died in short order, but
I'm still around, if nobody else.
… though I have that too-good-to-be-true theory that I'm unhackable for some reason.
On the other hand, the Simurgh had
layers of deception going on in Golden Morning, with a weapon designed to fool
Scion and
also somehow set up some
other thing that Teacher may or may not have derailed. Well, people acting at Teacher's behest, anyway. Now I'm wondering if the Simurgh has been, like, building something underground, out of sight.
…
or, I think as I glance toward the ocean
underwater.
Awww fuck. That could
easily break loose from the quarantine, even with parahuman assistance. Blocking the ocean is
way harder than building a wall around a city is. That would let the Simurgh do
who-knows-what to pretty much any arbitrary location on the planet. Any location near a shore, anyway. Point is: this could do something in
Russia, in spite of having been assembled on the East Coast.
Fucking
fuck.
I try flagging down a cape. Several times. They ignore me or shake their head and
then ignore me.
Fuuuck. I don't have any tinkertech on me! I'm
too tired! Somebody needs to go check this out!
I hang my head for a moment and then divert myself to follow the ocean breeze. I'll do... something, I guess. Figure something out. Maybe I'll somehow have tinker knowledge bounce into my head for how to ruin the thing, if there is indeed a thing. Maybe I'll have the time to assemble
something destructive on-site.
I pause and pick up a discarded (wooden) baseball bat. Looks like some kids were playing baseball in the street, to me. Teens, really, going by the size of the bat and the gloves that aren't completely buried. Whatever. Need to be able to defend myself
somehow if another one of those messed-up flicker-zombies shows up. Incidentally, trudging through Simurgh-dust is like trudging through snow, only less slippery and wet. But heavier.
Heavy dry snow. It's a pain to walk in, and a pain to drag the wagon through. I keep having to fight a temptation to leave the crap I collected behind to make the walk easier.
After trudging for several more minutes, it occurs to me to kick over one of the lumps I'm passing by. It's a human corpse, body horror stuff going on. I
think it's another flicker-zombie, though there's always the much-more-disturbing possibility that Simurgh-dust just
does this shit to people. I try a few more times to wave down a cape after that, when they happen to pass vaguely nearby me, but it's still a no-go.
It gets worse.
Once I've got line of sight on the beach, I see they aren't sealing things the way I was expecting. For some reason, I was thinking in terms of the quarantine radius cutting through the water. Boats, netting. That kind of thing. What I'm seeing is them building a wall cutting the city off from the ocean. That's... alarming in its own right, even though I can see the logic of it. (I guess they have parahumans who are both suited to building walls rapidly
and protected from the Simurgh?)
Naturally, not long after I spot the wall, somebody on a loudspeaker calls out "
Code confirm or leave!" Whatever code they want, I don't know it.
Arrrgh.
I turn around without responding, looking for a building to fire the mortar from. It's been a while since I thought about it, but I haven't actually left it behind. It's... even in serviceable condition. Barely. Wouldn't want to risk firing it more than once, but that's okay. I should only need one shot.
--------------------
After a sloppy tinker session in which I limited myself to building one neutronifying bomb (I had a harder time staying awake than I did preventing myself from going overboard with tinkering. I find this alarming, in terms of how badly I need rest) and an awkward... twenty minutes? Longer? I spent a while trying to find an apartment that was unoccupied and unlocked while being close enough to the ocean. It was a lot more difficult than my earlier luck led me to expect. (Are people prioritizing beach-close property?) Anyway, after all that, I'm set up on a rooftop, struggling to get the mortar set up. It's not in good condition, and neither am I, so it takes way longer to get done than I want.
On the plus side, the Simurgh is like on the other side of the city from me right now. Should be safe.
After taking entirely too long to get set up, I glance around, half-expecting Alexandria to drop down and either tell me "No." or just break my face. It's not like I'm aiming at the Simurgh, but... still expecting it.
I eyeball the angle again, guess it's right or close enough, and arm the grenade, load it, fire it.
It arcs, and there's nothing unnatural about its angle. Not a perfect parabola, but wind, gravitational variation, whatever. Not unexpected. I watch it the whole way, partly because this is
important, and partly because I'm just... tired. I should be dragging my thoughts to the next thing, but it's
hard.
The grenade hits the water. I can tell not because of the splash, but because there's suddenly a bowl of no water, before the surrounding water rushes in. More disturbingly, I caught a glimpse of black surfaces and dim red lights. I only saw it for a moment, but it looks like I
did catch
something tinkertech in there.
Concerning. While there's evidence of an uproar from what I can see of the vicinity of the wall, I don't see any
investigation of the water. If I did damage, it wasn't much, I don't think. If there's not a follow-up, the Simurgh can probably just stall, replace what was lost, finish
whatever it is, and launch it. (What even
are the tinkers in Brockton Bay? Me, Armsmaster, Kid Win, Chariot if he triggered early and still as basically canon somehow... though the possibilities are endless if there's no policy discouraging tinkers from helping defend against the Simurgh, which is a horrifying thought)
So. I need to deal with it or... somehow cut through this bullshit and get someone to
listen.
I wait another minute to see if anyone investigates the impact point, but see nothing. I double-check the mortar and... yeah, it's fucked. Fracture that could lead to it killing me if I tried to fire it again. I throw it over the edge of the building, retreat into the building. I think there might be fliers looking for where the grenade came from. Not sure.
Okay...
now what?
