Exploding Canon (Worm SI)

[IvanDead]

Oh. That's good to know ahead of time. I've already run into a spoiler while trying to look up stuff for Wild Hunt writing because I figured there was no way that particular topic would be both touched on by Ward and then have people decide to shove any Ward spoilers right at the top of the page. So now I know not to look at that page until... I'm done with Ward, I guess.

... though really I should probably just not look at the wiki at all until I'm done with Ward...

Click to shrink...

If that makes you feel better, I recommend Ridtom's Worm - Ward Feats and Source Thread, as he at least took the trouble to separate into spoiler blocks the Worm's quotes from Ward's. So the chance of you stumbling across some of the Ward spoilers there is as low as you can get.

 

[astergremlin]

in which case why doesn't it target non-capes?

Click to shrink...

it does target non-capes.

Her mom didn't notice her. Nobody ever noticed her, and they noticed even less ever since she'd gotten her power. It was like a dark joke, a grim comedy. Just when she'd started to figure things out, grow up and catch people's eye, the world went to hell and she got her powers. Now she became invisible if she lost her concentration

Click to shrink...

 

[astergremlin]

If I'm invested, I'm invested in the world and/or the characters within the world, and want further context on them.

Click to shrink...

This seems perplexing. If you read, say, a fantasy novel - the world is whatever the author decides it is. Trying to think of third person omniscient since I most often run into third-person limited but it sounds like you're saying that 'The Wizard of Earthsea' shouldn't provide exposition except through the point-of-view of a character.

(excerpt below)

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.

Click to shrink...

If such info is legitimately delivered as an in-character opinion, it's hopefully giving further context on character personality, which ties into understanding their decisions and motives and how people react to them and so on. But if it's not... it's just the author letting their own opinions show through, largely or entirely unrelated to the story.

So it's not just filler, it's filler pulling you out of the story:

Click to shrink...

Feels like you're assuming the conclusion (legitimately delivered = in-character opinion, anything else = authorial rant). It sounds like your personal preference runs towards everything being made explicit re: the protagonists thought process but I don't see why alternate ways of providing exposition are less legitimate.

 

[Terrabrand]

This is only true if imp's power is "edit the brains of nearby hosts and remove certain bits of information".
We know, thanks to "Sting" for example, that powers can behave in ways that we would consider impossible in the real world.
If Imp's power primary effect wasn't on people, but on information (i.e. that it makes specific bit of information harder to understand/easy to forget as a primary effect, and that people can't think about that information is a secondary effect. in a similar manner to Lovecraftian memetic hazards) Then imp's power is just always targeting the idea of shards and targets the idea of Imp unless she turns it off. No need for an overactive power, no need for wierd communication,, no need for an Eden equivalent.

Click to shrink...

A hypothesis that gives no answers as to why Capes can't remember/see it but everyone else is fine with depictions of entities.

it does target non-capes.

Click to shrink...

Yes, Imp's power, not the 'not recognizing Entities' thing that's under discussion and theoretically justified by Imp's power.

 

[astergremlin]

Yes, Imp's power, not the 'not recognizing Entities' thing that's under discussion and theoretically justified by Imp's power.

Click to shrink...

I... ignore the exact implications there, because it's both more simple for each shard to manage its personal host's memory instead of assuming Imp's shard is an intrusive busybody mindreading literally every cape at all times and jumping in to interfere as appropriate, and because there's an issue of canon wanting to have its cake and eat it, too; Worm and especially Ward want us to think spatial distances matter heavily to Entity plug-and-play behavior, except when the plot wants to make an assertion like this that completely violates such limitations.

Click to shrink...

Ah I misrecalled (Or got confused by fanon) Imp's power and thought it was that when it's active you simply can't think of her and forget that she exists.

 

[Xared]

Is the Si forgeting about the STING?

 

[Ghoul King]

Any thoughts on Third Person Limited?

Click to shrink...

That's what I was referring to when I said 'over-the-shoulder' -a view that's not delivered using the character's own words, but is clearly delivering only the information a particular character has, with an undertone of reflecting their priorities and opinions. I've always thought of those as 'over-the-shoulder' views, because it calls to mind the difference between first-person video games and video games where you're still following a single specific agent and are seeing the world from roughly their view, but in the form of a camera hovering somewhere above and behind them, rather than inside their skull. (Or, put more succinctly: first-person-shooter vs third-person-shooter)

This is only true if imp's power is "edit the brains of nearby hosts and remove certain bits of information".
We know, thanks to "Sting" for example, that powers can behave in ways that we would consider impossible in the real world.
If Imp's power primary effect wasn't on people, but on information (i.e. that it makes specific bit of information harder to understand/easy to forget as a primary effect, and that people can't think about that information is a secondary effect. in a similar manner to Lovecraftian memetic hazards) Then imp's power is just always targeting the idea of shards and targets the idea of Imp unless she turns it off. No need for an overactive power, no need for wierd communication,, no need for an Eden equivalent.

Click to shrink...

First of all, an essential conceit of Worm is that Entities are operating off of real physics, not magical rules, where a lot of fantasy-acceptable theories are off the table. 'Targets the concept using magical bullshit' is an example of a theory that's off the table because you can't directly do any such thing in reality, it just plain doesn't work that way. There's a lot of elements of Worm that instantly break down if you try to push the framework in a more overtly magical direction.

Second, and related to the first, as Terrabrand pointed out trying to theorize 'Imp's shard is targeting the info, not people' has the extremely conspicuous problem that such a theory has no built-in tools for explaining why it wouldn't include regular humans in the effect. You can't even, in such a magic-type model, assume that targeting the info so it effects non-parahumans is somehow more energy-intensive than having it only blocked in regards to parahumans, and indeed in fantasy settings that have such capabilities it's often assumed to be harder to constrain such an effect than it is to just unleash it in full force. And on that topic, you'd have to also include an explanation in your model for how targeting the information per se doesn't cause the Entities to have the info about themselves blocked!

Third, Imp's power isn't to remove certain bits of information. It's to prevent hosts from access that information so long as the power is active. Which demands a constant, ongoing connection to every single affected individual.

Um. I feel like this might be more you (or the things you read) than a general thing about other writers? Though I certainly haven't categorized every occurrence of this in every story I read, I feel like descriptions like that are more often either about the setting ("this is a low-income part of town") or the characters ("this character doesn't have the money for a better store, or doesn't have the time to find one, or is used to better places"). It very rarely feels like the author finding an excuse to talk about real life, which you seem to be saying is the norm?

Click to shrink...

I'm not saying most authors are looking for excuses to talk about real life. (Though I do think more authors are doing so than is typically acknowledged) I'm saying most authors construct the writing in a manner that says more about them and their opinions than about the characters they're ostensibly writing about, or the world they're ostensibly living in. Probably unintentionally, in most cases, but unintentional or not it's something that ends up making for an experience I have trouble sticking out.

Jumping apparent topics a little, a point that's been discussed elsewhere is that Wildbow's initial visual descriptions of newly-introduced characters have a tendency to be mildly to moderately sexualized if the character is a woman, and flatly uninterested in such points if they're a man. Having seen him do this across more than three stories (It's been... less thoroughly consistent a problem with Ward, but it's still notably present, which has been very jarring in part because the protagonist is Victoria and you'd think she'd be extremely hostile to the idea of finding women sexually attractive given how thoroughly her relationship with Amy is being played as a major painpoint where anything even tangentially related to it gets her upset) with protagonists who are ostensibly very different (And, in Sy's case, explicitly spent a notable fraction of the story deliberately altering his thoughts so he would have zero sexuality... during which the descriptions continued to be horny at woman and not at men), and indeed at times this issue has shown through in Interludes on still other characters, it's become extremely obvious this is Wildbow leaking into the story: that on some fundamental level Wildbow is always doing the male gaze up-and-down checking-the-girl-out thing with his imaginary female characters, and has zero interest in the same with men.

However, while I'm quite certain this is just Wildbow leaking an element of himself into his writing that really isn't supposed to be there, it's perfectly legitimate to interpret Taylor as bisexual, more interested in girls than boys, or otherwise explain what we see as an organic element of Taylor's personality and then run with it in fanfic. The plot doesn't suffer any serious breakdowns from this leakage, after all, and the first-person view makes it perfectly valid to interpret it that way. It would be perfectly reasonable for someone who only read Worm, out of Wildbow's works, to believe that this was even an intentional, if low-key, depiction of a non-straight protagonist in a story that didn't put much focus on relationships per se.

Conversely, if the story had been written in third-person omniscient, we'd have almost certainly still gotten descriptions mildly salivating all over the female characters and not the male characters, but now it would've been an unavoidable conclusion that this was just 'Wildbow finds women sexually attractive and not men' leaking into the narration, no possibility of interpreting it as in-universe characterization or the like.

By a similar token, my point is that as narration gets less grounded in actual characters it becomes harder to avoid having the author's own perspective leaking into the story. 'This is a shabby store," as thought by the protagonist, is an in-character value judgment that may say nothing more about the author than that they believe someone could hold such an opinion, possibly by virtue of having met people who did. "This is a shabby store," as delivered to you by the omniscient narrator, is likely a direct outgrowth of the author holding such an opinion about a store of that sort, entirely unaware of the underlying reasons why they, in particular, would hold such an opinion, and how telling holding such an opinion might be. ("I notice," thinks a random middle-class reader on some level, "That this is an excellent store I would love to shop at, going by everything other than the narrator's purely opinionated statements, and that the only people I've seen describe such a great store to be a shabby store are extremely wealthy assholes who are used to being served like kings and think anything less is terrible service. I WONDER IF THE AUTHOR IS AN EXAMPLE OF SUCH? HMMM.")

One major caveat I really should've added in the prior post, though, is that some stories use third-person omniscient, but very deliberately make the omniscient narrator a strongly-characterized individual in their own right (I'm given to understand the Lemony Snicket series is a famous example of such? Though I never got around to reading them myself, so this could easily be wrong), and while author leakage can still be noticed in such a case, it mostly functions similarly to first-person in this regard. (ie a strongly-characterized narrator declaring the store shabby could be the author leaking through, or it could be the author deliberately writing the narrator as having a personality and viewpoint that would naturally hold such an opinion. Or just having the narrator say something that seems obviously absurd in an attempt to elicit laughs, either/or)

Feels like you're assuming the conclusion (legitimately delivered = in-character opinion, anything else = authorial rant). It sounds like your personal preference runs towards everything being made explicit re: the protagonists thought process but I don't see why alternate ways of providing exposition are less legitimate.

Click to shrink...

I'm not saying they're less legitimate. I'm saying there are trends in the final result, influenced partially by the method of delivery.

Let's jump completely randomly to video games, because it has comparable examples I've thought about a lot.

Back when the Nintendo DS was a thing, the overwhelming majority of games that got released on it went out of their way to incorporate touch screen controls, and a much smaller fraction also attempted to make use of other features more or less unique to the DS at the time like the microphone or the ability of the system to do in-game things in reaction to folding the DS closed. Only a small handful of games ignored all that when being released onto the DS, even if one generously counts some of the games that had touch screen controls but had them completely optional, or counts games that had touch screen controls but restricted them to some irrelevant minigame, etc.

In a lot of DS games, the incorporation of touch screen controls was harmful to the gameplay experience, to the point that if you divided all DS games into a 'touch screen controls included' pile and a 'touch screen controls not included' pile, and then randomly grabbed a game from each, you'd have extremely high odds that the game you pulled from the second of those two piles was a more consistently enjoyable experience than the game you pulled from the first pile.

So a lot of people -myself included, honestly- ended up pretty wary of touch screen controls being touted as part of a game. Betting odds were that such an addition was more negative than positive, going by prior experience, after all.

However, this wasn't by virtue of touch screen controls being fundamentally a bad idea. It was because touch screen controls were a new, untested type of experience, and many devs clearly had no concept of what touch screen controls were good at vs what they were bad at. The longer the DS was around, the more developers got a handle on what things touch screen controls were good at (Menu navigation including touch-based options became very standard, for example), what things they were bad at, and how to incorporate them in a manner that isn't metaphorically or literally painful to deal with. (Early examples were really prone to needing you to pull out and put away the stylus on a moment's notice, like Dawn of Sorrow's boss sealing gimmick. Later games were more likely to either design themselves so you stuck to one mode of operation, or to make it so you always had no time pressure when switching was called for) Even from early on, there were some quite good games that might've been possible to do without using the touch screen controls, but which would've been much worse experiences (eg Kirby's Canvas Curse), and furthermore late in the DS lifecycle people became less adamant about incorporating touch screen controls into an otherwise-traditional game, so each wave of games had on average fewer cases of 'why did you tack on touch screen controls to this game that has little or no use for them'.

So jumping back to style of storytelling: my point is that eg third-person omniscient is really easy to have it really obvious that author bleed-through is occurring, where the narration asserts things in a manner that is a clear outgrowth of rather significant biases the author carries rather than because it's somehow story-useful to assert them in that way. A strict first-person story doesn't jar me out as readily, because first-person delivery should have biases, and it's not necessarily obvious the difference between 'the character narrating the story thinks poor people are all morons, and the author does not but chose to write such a character for some reason' vs 'the author thinks poor people are morons, and thinks this is so obviously true that having an ostensibly-objective narrator agree with such a sentiment is perfectly acceptable writing'.

And so the final result is that I've found it easier to stick out first-person writing than third-person writing. Not because it's necessarily superior, but because the illusion of real characters doing real things for real reasons tends to hold up a little better, all else being equal.

Is the Si forgeting about the STING?

Click to shrink...

I'm not sure what you're asking.

 

[Axel]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Click to shrink...

Sting, Flechette/Foil shard.
ability to grant unstoppable perforation power to projectiles.
Used in GM to break through Zion dimension

 

[Xared]

Sting, Flechette/Foil shard.
ability to grant unstoppable perforation power to projectiles.
Used in GM to break through Zion dimension

Click to shrink...

Yeah pretty much asking is the SI forgot about it since i don't remenber any try's with a STING bomb

 

[M.Hatter]

Yeah pretty much asking is the SI forgot about it since i don't remenber any try's with a STING bomb

Click to shrink...

So devil's advocate time let's say the SI remembers [STING], how would they know that a [STING] bomb works? Testing it potentially kills millions as the shrapnel passes through every obstacle and every accessible dimension for however long the effect lasts, if the effect lasts long enough said shrapnel will hit and destabilize the Earth's core in at least one dimension possibly all of them (or more horrific it opens a portal to every dimension simultaneously in the exact same spot).

The way [STING] functions is horrifying if you think about it outside of the Entity killing ability, Flechette has most likely killed hundreds of people in the many accessible dimensions, and the claim of "Oh the projectile only affects ShardSpace" is a cop out that makes it worse because then she's been killing Shards by the dozens that were connected to who knows how many people, which means even the Golden Idiot would have had to notice and she would have been killed long before GM.

[STING] is a Deus Ex Machina that was designed to get rid of something that couldn't be destroyed, but because of it's description the fact that it exists makes it questionable if that shard would ever actually be distributed even if Scion gets depressed.

 

[Ghoul King]

Oh. That.

Tinkers have to actually study powers in some vaguely-defined way that requires they actually see the power in use. I think Bakuda in canon managed to rely on just video clips of the power in action for some of her bombs? But Exploding canon Bakuda has never gotten to see Sting in action, doesn't have access to recordings of it, and it's not like making requests of Cauldron has accomplished anything so she's not going to ask for recordings of Flechette fighting even if she thinks of Flechette in particular.

(Also, Sting's description doesn't actually explain how it's a concept hax 'ignore all defenses' attack, so even if Bakuda could draw inspiration from just the canon description of the power's mechanics, she'd find it extremely likely that she'd get a completely different result. Probably one more along the lines of 'my Sting Bomb I tested far away from any people in Earth Bet actually killed hundreds, thousands, millions, maybe even billions of people, because it ripped through anyone that was, in their alt-Earth, in that area')

 

[Xared]

Wasn't the siberian eden sting? I thought sting was more like Displacement effect hence being able to undo the space shenanigans entitys do to keep planets worth of shard mass on their avatars

Because i honestly thought that when they say hit all dimensions they we're just talking about other entitys (that are multy-dimensional by Nature)

 

[Ghoul King]

Siberian being Eden's version of Sting is an intriguing theory, but unless I missed something subtle in Entity narration or something, the topic isn't addressed. A fanfic running with it would get a thumbs-up from me, but unless there's a WoG on it it's not canon that I'm aware.

Khepri claims, when killing Scion, that Sting prevents things from being 'contained'. I've... never been entirely clear what that's supposed to mean, other than 'this particular FU effect cancels out the FU effect Scion is using to prevent the tinkertech gun from firing on his real body'.

The other thing we've got is...

A female, standing just outside another time distortion, walked around the effect, charging objects with energy. The entity could see as the small pieces of alloyed metal unfolded, taking shape in not just this world, but all realities, at the same space and time, bristling with an effect that would sever their attachment to most physical laws.

Click to shrink...

... this bit from Interlude 26.x (The second one. Because Wildbow labeled two different Interludes 26.x), which doesn't tell us anything Flechette's original introduction of 'I charge things so they ignore physics temporarily' didn't already tell us except the bit about it forming in every dimension at the same time. Really, Flechette's Interlude is vastly more informative in a meaningful sense...

... point being, no, Scion doesn't specify the multidimensionality was only important to fighting other Entities. It's just... mildly implied that somehow the multidimensionality is a useful art of the power. And even then, looking at it in detail again, I could buy that Scion observing it unfold into every dimension is a whole other property and we're just not being told anything of use by this comment.

Basically, you either string these together in a way that applies meaning and get 'existing in all dimensions while being a physics-ignoring projectile means you ignore all defenses in Worm', or look at them as disconnected statements and arrive at the conclusion that Scion giving us Entity insight into a power was 100% useless info.

I, uh, wouldn't be surprised at this point if the latter way of looking at things is the more correct one, but it's not the natural way of trying to read a story and understand what's happening in it.

 

[Mechasaurian]

Sorry, what's this "Sting" thing being discussed? Is it Fletchette/Foil's power or something else?

 

[Callmesalticidae]

Probably one more along the lines of 'my Sting Bomb I tested far away from any people in Earth Bet actually killed hundreds, thousands, millions, maybe even billions of people, because it ripped through anyone that was, in their alt-Earth, in that area')

Click to shrink...

It's times like this that I wish there were a [horror] react between [insightful] and [funny].

 

[Mizu]

Sorry, what's this "Sting" thing being discussed? Is it Fletchette/Foil's power or something else?

Click to shrink...

Sting is the name of the shard/power Flechette has, which allows projectiles she 'charged' to pierce any object no matter how durable they are, courtesy of phasing through multiple dimensions at once.

 

[Infinite Eyes]

Wasn't the siberian eden sting?

Click to shrink...

Siberian being Eden's version of Sting is an intriguing theory, but unless I missed something subtle in Entity narration or something, the topic isn't addressed. A fanfic running with it would get a thumbs-up from me, but unless there's a WoG on it it's not canon that I'm aware.

Click to shrink...

Since Scion let Siberian stand inside of him without caring while bothering to dodge Fletchette's shots, I don't think that works.

 

[Qwertystop]

Since Scion let Siberian stand inside of him without caring while bothering to dodge Fletchette's shots, I don't think that works.

Click to shrink...

Yeah. The difference seems to be – Siberian can ignore the durability on Scion's golden-man-avatar, but Flechette's shots do that while also breaking through whatever it is that keeps attacks from reaching Scion's actual body. I've seen the latter described as a "one-way portal" replacing the avatar using main-body mass reserves, with Flechette breaking the "one-way" barrier, but it's possible that that particular detail was fanon, I don't remember where I saw it.

 

[Xared]

Hmmm don't really remember were i read it or who say the siberian was eden sting...

Now that it think about while Fletchette shard nerf and control what the sting affect and does't a sting bomb from the SI might end up collapsing all dimensions if her shard isnt paying attention

 

[Cyan Snake]

Bakuda could test the anti pre-cog ability of the dust by making a relatively harmless bomb, coating it in the dust, put it inside something useful that Cauldron would take, and see if they actually take it. Set it to go off 5 seconds after leaving the planet or w/e.

 

[Rhodes]

So I just found/caught up with this story, and man, I have to say I'm really enjoying it - even the more introspective parts from this arc. I normally hate this kind of stuff since it tends to be a bit trite and shallow, but you manage to make it practically useful for Bakuda's decision making process and generally interesting to read through (in my opinion, anyway).

So yeah, keep up the great work!

 

[Ghoul King]

5.4

I don't really get the opportunity to think too deeply on this for a bit, because Taylor still has no idea what I'm looking at, is still just kinda confused, and even when I try wiping away part of the image she manages to rationalize away some of the stuff ending up on my hand -note to self, why the fuck am I not wearing gloves already, I'm a tinker- as it just being dirtier than she thought, and she still can't acknowledge the image itself. I'd like to keep rubbing away parts of it until she can see it, for a variety of reasons, but I think she's getting actually upset and I do kinda have this long-term goal of recruiting her or something I dunno whatever.

As such, I give up way earlier than I'd have preferred, and when she asks again why I was 'being so weird' I lie and claim I was being distracted by tinker thoughts. She either buys that or is willing to pretend to buy it, it's really hard to be sure which through bug-texting, and from there she... goes back to trying to interrogate me about Eidolon.

… fanfic and canon did not prepare me for how much of a cape fangirl Taylor actually is. What the hell.

Was he as generous as the news says he is?

Oh god come on Taylor, how am I supposed to answe- huh. I actually do have a relevant datapoint. Two, even, though, uh, not wanting to share one of them.

… I'm still not sure how I'll explain my Cauldron-provided supplies to her if I do get her to move into my lair.

Anyway, relevant thing! "Well, he did credit me on the news for helping him come up with the idea. Even called me Bakuda instead of Oni Lady, like I asked him to." I try to not sound like I'm making a pointed remark, as I really am mentioning it primarily as a relevant datapoint on 'generous y/n', but... not sure how well I succeed, given I would, in fact, really appreciate it if she stopped calling me Oni Lady.

There's another middling-length pause before Taylor responds. You have a working TV?

Ah, shit, right. Um. Well. I suppose the TV is tinkertech. It's... not exactly a lie to admit its existence. Just... you know... really misleading... "It's a tinkertech TV. I dunno if regular TVs work." I suspect they don't, but it's not like I've gone around manually testing every TV. I also wouldn't be surprised if it depends on... like, maybe satellite TV is still functioning, while cable TV has been cut? That would make sense to me, mechanically...

So you have news access?

I kinda blink at that, not entirely sure why Taylor is commenting on it. Like... yes? That's what I said? "Yeeesss?"

Have

That just hangs there, the one word formed and the rest of the bugs circling about and whatnot in what I'm just going to start calling an agitated state instead of hedging my terminology every single time. I'm... not sure what to make of this.

Have you heard any news about the Undersiders?

… oh. Huh. I'd sort of assumed she knew better than I did. "I thought you knew."

The message breaks up into agitated bug motion for a bit, long enough I start wondering if I should ask if she'd mind me coming upstairs to harvest more tinkertech fodder from this building, but before I can firmly decide either way she spells out, I saw one of them lose an arm. I don't know if, here there's a pause before the rest of the sentence forms, like Taylor's working to decide how she wants to word it, any of them are in here.

I almost comment on Bentley before remembering that's out-of-context knowledge and no, bad Bakuda, don't be a moron. But okay. Well. I shake my head. "Sorry, that's not cropped up that I've seen. I've mostly been following, uh, national-scale news." And cartoons, but let's not admit that. Taylor has always given me the vibe that she's one of those people who thinks cartoons are something you stop watching sometime in high school or else you're an immature loser.

There's silence, and of course there's no body language and all so I can't tell if Taylor is fidgeting nervously, or depressed, or about to irrationally blame me for not having good news, or... what. And since I kind of suspect that Taylor is going to be quiet for a while, I just go blunt: "Do you mind if I scavenge some tinkertech fodder from this building? Like, just grabbing some things from the second floor."

The bugs do the agitated thing, so I'm pretty sure this probably falls under the banner of 'rude', at least as far as Taylor's concerned, but I've still got that goddamn smiley face on my mind and don't have a lot of patience with people being... emotional, I guess, in general. To my mild surprise, Taylor's response is reasonably quick and is, Knock yourself out.

I mean, I have to wonder if the wording is indication she's a bit pissed off, but hey, she agreed to it.

Taylor doesn't talk to me while I'm raiding the second floor. I wasn't expecting her to, so whatever.

When I've finally gotten my wheelbarrow loaded up to the point that adding more seems liable to have some falling out, I say to the air, "I guess I'll be going now, glad to see you're actually okay," and start making my way to-

Wait, is rapidly drawn on a nearby wall. I hear more gunfire noises to the north, which has me wondering if she's maybe warning me about an incoming attack, so I'm pretty quick to come to a stop and stare at the area appropriately. There's a long pause, which is confusing and slightly concerning, before Taylor writes up, Can I come with?

I blink several times at that, start to move a hand to rub at my eyes because what the hell but then I remember the mask and abort that motion, and after licking my lips (Minor nervous habit), I say "If you like?" I'm really confused and kinda don't want to fuck this up, so prevaricating it is.

Please give me minutes. I raise an eyebrow at that, but then bugs stream in between me and minutes so it now spells out Please give me 5 minutes.

"Sure," I respond, trying to make it an easy response like it's no big and probably failing but who knows how well Taylor can see my body language or parse my tone?

Okay, I guess I'll just take this bit of time to think about the... smiley face.

Thing is, I don't have a hax Thinker power like Tattletale does to 'work around' the mental block. And even if I did, I didn't try. I just casually looked at the thing, acknowledged the thing, and was confused when Taylor didn't know what the hell I was talking about. If I did have a hax Thinker power, I would've either glossed right over it without thought like any ol' parahuman, or had something nag at me for a bit before finally having a breakthrough. Something in those veins.

So, uh, first of all this is big points in favor of me being an Abbadon missile of some kind. Like, I don't think canon explicitly established anything regarding Eden's 'broken' shards still enforcing such a cognitive block, but my recollection is vial-produced trigger events still involve a suppressed memory as part of the connection (I certainly don't recall Battery asking Doctor Mother about her trigger vision), and canon would be a lot less plausible if such a non-trivial fraction of capes would casually bypass the block.

Also, the idea of Bakuda being a Cauldron cape is a pretty big stretch to me, for a lot of reasons. I'm pretty sure she's a natural Scion trigger, and then I got shoved in here by Abaddon doing... whatever happened here.

Point being, I can buy that Abaddon is fine with me not having such a mental block, or... was operating on limited time and didn't prioritize it? Whatever, I can see a few ways for this to make sense in the context of me being an Abaddon missile.

So: big points for that theory.

I'm briefly distracted by the overwhelmingly cool bit of the bugs making up the 5 shuffling about into a 4, roughly a minute after the message first formed the 5. Nice, Taylor. I give her a thumbs-up, though she doesn't respond to that.

Anyway, the bit I'm really not sure what to make of, though, is Cauldron doing this. The series of emoticons, by themselves... um... might mean Cauldron is implying they did something to prevent Taylor from running away from me? Or some such? I guess? (Like maybe Taylor was fleeing, and Contessa did Shenanigans so Taylor changed her mind and just got food like she claimed to me?) But the bigger part here is that it sure looks like Cauldron drew an Entity depiction targeted at me, implying... what, they wanted to test how it would affect me? Did they suspect I'd be unaffected? If so, why? And also if so, what conclusions might they draw? Like, Contessa, in canon, seemed.... probably immune to those shenanigans? Her power was initially not even prevented from mapping out a plan to kill Eden, that was apparently something Eden added in at the last second as Contessa was trying to kill her. But she's the only canon cape where I'm reasonably confident it was... heavily implied, I guess, that she's casually immune to the memetic effect. And fanon didn't touch on the topic at all, I literally can't remember a single fanfic that acknowledged this plotpoint. In fact, I think there were a few that had people straight-up recognize Entities from their trigger event dreams, like the writer didn't remember the memory suppression being a plotpoint at all.

So, uh, if that line of reasoning is remotely close to correct, Cauldron would be... guessing I was something akin to Contessa, accessing a shard that had minimal limits put on its core functions?

God, I dunno. It makes me nervous as all hell, though, because whatever is going on here, it implies Cauldron was suspecting me of something for some reason, and were fishing for results, and my lack of reaction may well have confirmed whatever their theory is in their minds, and I don't have enough info to guess whether they're going to be pleased by these results and metaphorically pat me on the head down the line or if they're going to shiv me and dump me in an interdimensional ditch as soon as they think they can get away with it.

The other, rather more unbelievable scenario I'm nonetheless keeping in mind, is that somehow the memetic smiley face is supposed to constitute help in deprogramming Taylor or derailing Simurgh plots.

This seems dubious as all hell, and more importantly is probably a lot more worrying of a scenario since it means if Cauldron was monitoring that situation they're going to be confused as all hell by me- but then why a smiley face exactly like the one in my lair? This theory just doesn't make sense, but I'm too frightened by it to completely dismiss it.

Fortunately, I'm distracted from my musings by the number switching to 0, followed seconds later by audible footsteps coming down the stairs. After a second, the message vanishes, the bugs scattering to... places I can't see them. Okay, I'll admit that seeing that in action it's slightly creepy. Very, very cool, though. I'm abruptly reminded that Taylor's aesthetic as Skitter really was a notable fraction of why I enjoyed Worm, in spite of it being a textual medium where you'd think that wouldn't be that important.

So I turn around to look up the stairs, and... yeah. It would be an exaggeration to say the person coming down the stairs looks exactly like what I'd imagined, but she's close enough that if I'd seen her without proper context I'd probably still have thought something like, 'oooh, that looks so much like Skitter'. The helmet makes me think a bit more of... Ultraman, of all things, than I was expecting, if you ignore the color being black with yellow eyes, but otherwise yeah, black costume, curly black hair shrouding the back, etc...

… though, uh, as she approaches it becomes obvious there's hundreds of bugs clinging to her costume's surface and each other. I spend a second wondering if she's trying to make herself seem larger than me -I think she might actually be taller than me, though I just realized I have zero clue how tall Bakuda was in canon and I've never bothered to measure my own height so maybe I'm just shorter than I think it's not like I've spent a lot of time face-to-facing with people- but I start hearing a buzzing and see a lot of bugs flying, visible through the window and realize she's taking her swarm with her.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of that, and before I can decide on a response Taylor gives me a stiff nod -it's hard to say why it's stiff, given it could just be about avoiding hurting the bugs or carry actual emotional content the way that would usually mean- and says, "Lead the way... Bakuda."

I startle slightly, partly because Taylor sounds a lot more like an awkward and shy teenage girl from a high school story than the bug-covered technically-a-supervillain standing in front of me was getting my brain to expect. Intellectually I understood that Taylor is an awkward teenage girl, but I'd never really given a lot of thought to her voice. I'd sort of vaguely assumed she sounded like... I dunno, kind of like Raven from Teen Titans? But less gravelly. That's not at all how she sounds, and it makes me wonder if the degree to which people refused to take her seriously, and to which she increasingly turned to violence and whatnot to make people listen to her, had to do with her voice. It's easy to imagine someone hearing her voice and immediately dismissing her even though she's a cape and that's stupid.

Also I startle because hey she used my actual cape-name instead of that PRT garbage!

After a delay that's probably long enough to be inappropriate somehow, I remember to grab a hold of my wheelbarrow and comment, "Uh, yeah, this way."

----------------------------------------------------------------------​

Taylor has a fuckton of bugs. I'm not sure whether she's intentionally intimidating me or what, but if so, it's working. It's not actually 'blot out the sun' levels of madness, but it's still kind of like being inside the eye of a hurricane, because Taylor is considerate enough to at least keep the bugs from entering an area immediately around us, but everything more than five or ten feet away is being seen through hundreds of little bodies. It's insane, and it has me spooked on a number of levels in conjunction with all the other stuff I've seen, like Taylor having possibly fed a human body to her bugs. That bit seems a lot more probable an explanation with how fucking many there are. My only consolation is I catch enough glimpses of individual bugs to know that plenty of these are the sorts of things that don't actually eat human flesh, not even rotting human flesh. Though admittedly there's those deer that turned to biting off bird heads to get their calcium needs met...

I've also got in mind how in canon Taylor increasingly ramped up how many bugs she kept on hand, where she started out just wandering around 'unarmed' and only really pulling whatever was locally available and eventually had spiders in compartments of her costume and whatnot at all times. I remember something about centipedes acting as hair extensions, for example. Which, uh, backtracking that pattern to this is... concerning. Even considering we're in a post-Simurgh zone, this seems... rapid of an escalation.

So in spite of my vague plans to try to broach some kinda topic, I end up quiet for a while, thrown by the situation and spooked by it and also just having a hard time thinking with the thousand-fold buzzing of little bug wings in my ears.

Thus, Taylor ends up speaking first a couple minutes after we've set off. "Is it far?" The buzzing makes it hard to be entirely sure, but I think that's... polite interest? Maybe? I'm not sure I should be trusting Taylor's tone of voice to be representative, and I've always been bad at reading this kind of thing, but that's what it sounds like to me.

I take a second to run through my mental list of landmarks, plot out how much walking that works out to.... "Uh. Twelve blocks? I think?"

Taylor's helmet turns ever-so-slightly toward me, reminding me that every part of it aside the yellow 'eyes' is covered in bugs as several of them adjust their positions, presumably trying to stay on. "You've been walking that much every day?" Yeah, okay, that's mild shock/disbelief there. Probably... other emotional texture I'm missing out on thanks to the buzzing and my general shit skills at that. Thanks Abbadon, I'm just going to assume my bad social skills are your fault until proven otherwise.

I'm a little confused by the degree of disbelief given I distinctly recall canon Taylor did a decent amount of walking about the city... though then again she started out thinking she was out of shape. Ugh, I dunno, whatever. I shrug. "I've been combing the city most days for weeks, scavenging supplies of all sorts. It's not a long walk."

There's a pause of a decent length, and then Taylor visibly tenses up, costume and bugs failing to hide the tension. "Trouble."

Ah crap. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised the biblical plague drew attention. "Exploding, phasing lunatic-type trouble, or regular human-type trouble, or cape trouble?"

"Not sure," is Taylor's terse response. After a second, she adds, "Probably not the first."

"Alright," I say, putting the wheelbarrow down and digging in my purse. Uh, no, that's a pain bomb. No, that's a regular ol' explode-y bomb. No, that's a fire bomb. Mmmmmaybe this freeze bomb?... no, I'd rather not kill unnecessarily, and I've seen already it's not actually non-lethal. Shit, did I bring... okay, there's a Super Depression Bomb. That's... not ideal, but I have that. It might even not meaningfully affect Taylor's bugs, depending on power mechanics stuff. Or bugs might not be able to get affected by it in general, either/or. Christ, why did I switch back to more lethal munitions once Taylor stopped seeming so hostile... Aaand... yeah, last grenade is a phasing shrapnel bomb that... I still haven't tested yet because it was something I made after inspiration struck one day where I passed relatively close to one of those fucked-up building the lunatics exploded on. A bit worried the phasing shrapnel will inflict fates worse than death on people, instead of just killing them through walls. Keeping it in mind, not using it for the moment, though.

Okay, out comes the Super Depression Bomb, and... uh. Hmmm. I think I just recognized another reason why canon folks found Taylor creepy: I looked her way out of habit to get a cue for where the threat is coming from, and Taylor is just rigidly looking straight ahead, which is distinctly unhelpful. Probably focused on her bug vision. "Uh, which way?"

"That way," Taylor says with a slight tilting of her head to our left and a bit forward. Huh. That's vaguely in the direction of the ocean, and tilted away from the area people are crowding, with the supplies and presumed-therapy and all. People scavenging, stumbling on us? People who live that way? I wonder.

There's incomprehensible yelling from that direction shortly afterward, pretty well confirming Taylor's statement. Sounds masculine, I think, though it's a bit hard to tell through the buzzing. "Got any info for me? Signs of power usage or the like?" Kinda important, and she's got eyes on them.

I can hear the grimace in her voice when she speaks, thank goodness I can hear her tone like this. "No, but I recognize them now." Uh. That's a little worrying, that Taylor knows them but they apparently reacted to a bug swarm by coming this way. That's not just curiosity. That... sounds like a grudge, or something. Before I can fully process that and pick out a response, Taylor continues, "They're Merchants, pretty sure they triggered after the attack, and they've staked out an increasingly large part of the city as 'their territory'." Her tone gets low and angry as she adds, "I'm pretty sure they're hoarding food and stealing from drops."

Okay, uh... if Scrub is in that group for some damn reason, that'd potentially be convenient? I could try doing what Tattletale did and bust a portal out into another dimension to get out of Brockton Bay, and maybe even get to tinker in... relative peace until I'm ready to do... stuff. Just study Scrub's power and... combine it with a portal-blocking bomb? Not sure what would happen if I put those together, but hey, possibilities.

I eyeball my Super Depression Bomb, wondering if maybe Taylor can contrive for her bugs to carry it, but this is... probably lighter than a hunk of steel and all of its size has any right to be, but I'm having doubts it's light enough. So I table that thought in favor of asking, "Details? Just a quick sketch, if they're closing fast." I hear more yelling. Yeah, that's a man's voice. Probably a big man, from the... timber or whatever is the correct term.

"They've got guns." Wait, what? "Pulled them from BBPD storage, and they're willing to use them." Ahhh... shit. I'm not meaningfully protected from bullets at all right now. "Two men, one woman, plus at least a half dozen non-capes. The woman is some kind of speedster, keeps trying to touch me, so probably a striker power that needs skin contact." I mentally catalogue my own outfit. It's, uh, got a lot of exposed skin now that I'm thinking about it from that angle. Short sleeves because I hate long sleeves even when it's cold, pants actually go down to nearly my ankles and I've got boots on so that area's protected well enough, but my mask is face-covering but not head-covering and the beanie I'm wearing still leaves the lower-back of my head exposed, and I've got my belly mildly exposed-

…

… has Taylor been hostile to me this whole time in part by virtue of thinking I dress like a slut? This was an ongoing issue with Taylor in canon, that if she felt a woman dressed in a.... sexually promiscuous-signaling way, I guess, she took a particularly dim view of them, and her definition of such seemed to be pretty wide. And I tend to prioritize comfort over coverage, which my Omicron memories indicate is a point of friction with women, where you get women who'd rather dress casually and hate how much flak they get for 'dressing slutty'. Meanwhile, I-as-a-dude could wander around shirtless while delivering trash to the dumpster, and instead of people questioning my moral fiber it had them asking if I joined the military, wondering where the six-pack had come from because surely it hadn't come from just doing grocery and trash runs on foot? I mean, the cold has meant I've been bundled up a bit anyway, but maybe Taylor thinks a Good Girl would bundle up more in this kind of weather, ergo I must be a trashy slut?

Ah, shit, Taylor was still talking while I was distracted. "... other man is the bigger one, has some kind of effect where I haven't been able to get bugs past it onto him." She sounds particularly put out by that. Alright. I... should probably be careful about trying to hit that guy with my grenades.

Wait, why aren't we just leaving? "Why aren't we just running?" I ask, because Taylor has just kept stiffly walking a little behind and beside me, following me as I continue walking the path toward my lair, instead of, you know, fleeing at speed.

Voice tight, though I don't think from anger at me, just stress, Taylor bites out, "Mover woman makes it pointless. She can share the effect, and running from her charges her faster."

Well. That doesn't sound like any power from canon I recall. Sounds... obnoxious as well. Taylor's being light on details, but I'm willing to assume for the moment that the easily-observed details line up with this. Canon Taylor was pretty good about that, and... even fanon Taylors were pretty good about using reasonably concrete data to infer reasonably clear and plausible rules, instead of just assuming things.

"So, uh, any more details on the first man you described?" Usually I'd admit I wasn't paying attention, but that might provoke Taylor, and having her yelling at me would be less than ideal... hey, maybe I should hide nearby. Maybe these guys won't expect Taylor to have support?

Taylor's helmet tilts a little in my direction, silent, and initially I think she's doing that silent judge-y mad thing at me, but then something catches my eye and goddammit that looks suspiciously like some kind of tinkertech drone flying over there, hovering just inside a window. Bugs are swarming it moments later, dragging it down with sheer weight and possibly doing damage other ways I can't see, but that... may well be busting any plan to catch these guys off guard by hiding myself. Then Taylor answers my question, quietly enough I have to strain to hear her over the buzzing of insect wings. "He's been linked to his drones since our first encounter. I think he might've gotten inspiration from my power. They already know exactly where we are."

Not the kind of details I was hoping for, but alright. (Note to self: see if I can study Taylor's power for inspiration of... some kind) "Any nice, defensible positions you know about?"

Taylor shakes her head, which seems a bit unbelievable to me, and then quietly remarks, "Walls hurt us more than her." Oh- come on, she phases or something, too? Also, why is Taylor being so quiet now? Is she worried about being overheard? Why, if so? If not, what is that about?

That's when a big guy comes stumbling around a corner ahead of us, cutting off our forward route. And not, like, human big. He reminds me distantly of Hyde from the League of Extraordinarily Gentlemen movie, arms long enough he can move on all fours like a gorilla, upper arms seemingly made huge by tremendous amounts of muscle, and even doing the gorilla walk he's still tall enough his head is visibly passing just below second-story windows. I'm not sure how he has clothes to his scale, but he does, with combat boots that fit his huge feet, fingerless red gloves on his alarmingly large hands, and what looks like Army fatigues for the main clothes, though with some tearing. His hair looks to have been gelled and combed into that slicked-back look I see used on 'pretty-boy' characters a lot, and for some reason he's wearing sunglasses sized to fit on his face. Power shenanigans?

I side-eye Taylor, because she did not indicate the big guy was this big, but she mutters, "Must be a new formula." Must be- what? Wait, is she implying- what is this tinker's specialty?

The huge guy in front must be lighter on his feet than I'd expect (Or backed by power bullshit), because I can only really hear his footsteps in the form of gravel and other debris scraping against the road. There's no feel-it-in-your-body boom with his footsteps or anything like that. The effect is pretty unsettling -if we have to run, I'm not relaxing just because he's out of sight and we can't hear him. Taylor and I come to a stop, and the huge guy plants himself in the middle of the road, long arms spread wide and legs in a crouch as he looks... vaguely in our direction? His head seems to be looking at a point somewhere above our heads, simply pointed straight ahead, but I can't see his eyes so I don't know where his attention is actually at.

Uh. Okay. Should I-

"Are you seriously-" I whirl around to get a look at the voice suddenly coming from behind us, angled so I still have the big guy in the corner of my eye. I'm pretty sure I hear Taylor moving too, but she's now behind me and I'm not turning far enough to check. "-is that fucking Oni Lady?" Uuuugh fine we're in a quarantine zone you have decent excuses but goddammit that's not my name.

I am now looking at three people -well, three capes, as I can see probably-non-cape stragglers a couple blocks away, moving to catch up. The guy talking is... probably the 'big guy' Taylor was mentioning before, as he's taller than either of his compatriots even though one of them is in pretty bulky armor that's probably adding at least a few inches to their apparent height. He reminds me vaguely of my mental image of Jack Slash, though to be fair I think it's mostly because his beard clearly hasn't been shaved in a couple weeks-ish, and he's wearing that plaid shirt I see as a stereotypical logger thing for some reason and I have that in my mental image of Jack Slash, even though I think the actual canon description was of a completely different kind of shirt?

… and it's probably because he was smiling a probably-fake friendly smile when I was initially turning, only dropping it when he... got a look at my mask, I guess. Now he looks kinda stupefied, like Bakuda being in front of him is a shocking, unbelievable scenario. In any event, I'm not seeing weapons on him, and the only visual evidence of power usage is that I can see Simurgh dust conspicuously shoving itself away from him as he leans a little forward. Fuck, now I want to study his power, it might help against the Simurgh. He also doesn't seem to have tried to cobble together a costume, just... wearing pants and the plaid logger shirt, no mask, no flourishes that leap out to me. Which. Fair, in a post-apocalyptic environment like this, though it seems a bit -does his power protect from the cold? Is that it?

I note that he's standing as the point of the arrow the three are forming. He was also speaking, so... leader? Maybe? Or does his power protect others somehow, so that being in front is better?

Off to his right is the armored individual. The aesthetic of the armor is odd, calling to mind some anime thing I can't quite recall -it makes me think a little of Mewtwo's armor, but that's not really it- with everything rounded and the bits expanding into ball-ish endpoints at the hands, feet, and the forehead, where I can't see their face at all. Meanwhile, the central body is almost completely unprotected, just some red gem-looking diamond of some kind hanging in front, with black rubber tubes of some kind connecting the gem to the armor bits. The armor is all a stark white, which stands out given, you know, post-apocalypse, and the other two capes are showing signs of having trouble getting washed and so on, colors a bit faded, slightly darker patches suggesting old stains that never got fully removed, the beard thing with the talking guy, and so on.

My first thought is the armored individual is the tinker, but my eyes immediately catch on the man on the left, who could probably cosplay as a female character convincingly without a ton of effort in different circumstances, being on the short side with a page-boy haircut (Frayed, right now, but clearly something he's been trying to keep in that look even after the Simurgh hit) and a generally androgynous figure... but here and now he's got, you know, stubble, and no chest, so I'm pretty sure he's a man. He's also wearing a trench coat (Unbuttoned up top, where I can see his bare chest... I'm not sure why. It's pretty chilly right now, enough so even I have bundled up, however grudging it might be. Points in favor of the other guy's power protecting from cold and extending to allies?), the pockets festooned with twitching bits of plastic and metal. He shoves one back in its pocket as I'm watching, face irritable, and then grabs at a different pocket and lobs the sphere into the air, where it deploys a little helicopter blade and takes off pretty much directly up. So, uh, probably the tinker, who Taylor said was a man.

… okay, so I guess the anime armored person is the speedster woman? She's just standing there, extremely still. Not very mover-like.

After the obligate staring and studying is done with, I call back, "My name is Bakuda. I'm not a goddamn knockoff. I don't even teleport! Or clone! Or anything Oni Lee did!"

The talker smiles nervously, says something quietly enough I can't hear it over the buzzing, and then raises his voice to be heard. "Okay! We don't want trouble with you, our business is with the girl!" His eyes dart nervously to Taylor. Why is he so nervous? He seemed pretty confident earlier, before he... noticed me...

… do I have more of a reputation than I thought?

Taylor doesn't say anything, so there's a bit of an awkward pause before it dawns on me that I'm up for doing the talking here? I thought Taylor was going to be doing any talking, she knows these people and also I'm -well. Crap, only maybe Oni Lee had any idea how shit I am at face-to-face interaction, and now he's dead. Okay, uh, god... I really thought they were just going to attack, honestly, and now I feel slightly stupid just holding out my Super Depression Bomb-

-it finally clicks talking guy isn't really looking at me, he's looking at my grenade-

-like I'm ready to throw it any second now. Or. Not stupid, exactly. Embarrassed, I guess, like I decided to go to an event, arrived in a tuxedo, and it turned out everyone else is in super-casual clothes because it wasn't a formal event of any kind.

I... keep holding onto it, though, because the stragglers are getting close enough I can see pistols clenched in hands. Nothing heavier than a pistol, no rifles or shotguns or anything, but they not only have pistols but are carrying them like they expect to use them any second now. Or like they're morons who think you should just keep your pistol in your hands with no regard for trigger safety, which is arguably more dangerous.

Okay... um. I'm not handing Taylor over to them, because she's probably important to Abbadon's plans I'm maybe going along with and also I'm predisposed to like Taylor from having seen her view in canon heavily and her coming from a pretty sympathetic situation so these guys would need a really good sob story to overcome that. I'm... not sure I should just openly and explicitly tell them to go fuck themselves, though? I'm not sure why they haven't just attacked, it could be... cape politeness, where they're totally confident they can kill me but aren't wanting to fight me gratuitously. The nervous eyeing of my grenade doesn't jive with that, but people often confuse me, and you can be trying to be polite, confident you'll win, and still be a little nervous about an unknown explosive. They could be confident they'll win and just nervous about long-term harm...

The tinker pulls out another sphere-drone of some kind and blows on it, at which point it pops out a pair of wings that flap like mad and starts slowly circling us. I'm not thrilled with that. It makes me wonder if they're willing to talk because it buys time and their powers give them an advantage as time goes on. Maybe the speedster has a shaker thing going on, like Labyrinth but somehow letting her give herself and buddies enhanced speed in the zone, that kind of thing. Taylor mentioned something about charge earlier, so that's... concerning in that direction.

Okay, fine, I gotta say something, I guess. "Why are you even after her?" It occurs to me that Taylor is at my back and so I can't see her reaction at all, nor see if she decides to attack me if I'm hostile. So, uh, this might be a dumb thing to do? Too late, me!

The talker visibly relaxes, which is a pretty big drop in tension given he's pretty far from me and yet I saw it anyway. Because I didn't go straight to hostility? Because they're getting assets in place? Because a power of theirs has a cooldown and it just finished? "Girl keeps raiding our territory, injuring people, stealing food. We want justice." There's a slight pause, and he adds, "Friend?" in a questioning way, while his smile widens, nervous bent gone entirely.

One of the stragglers apparently overhears him, because I can hear them distantly yelling, "Yeah! Justice!" Pretty sure. Difficult to be entirely sure through the buzzing.

Okay... on the one hand, that sounds plausible. Post-apocalypse situation, I'm not clear how much food is being dropped into this place, scavengables have definitely been running out everywhere I've been looking lately, and, well, Taylor had a low opinion of the Merchants in canon and once she was administrating her territory people got pursued by stinging bugs if she felt they were adequately criminal. Fits the situation, plausible to Taylor's personality.

On the other hand, I don't know this guy, and the fact that he's visibly nervous about me and yet being friendly makes me twitchy. I'm a known villain with a pretty awful resume, looking at things from any kind of external viewpoint, part of a racist gang that probably has a bone to pick with white folk like himself, and if they know Bakuda is the Cornell University bomber they have every reason to think of me as... irrational, unstable, quick to blow big places up for small reasons. This guy trying to make nice with me really feels... suspicious, especially on top of the original nervousness. I killed PRT people. It was on accident, but nobody else has any reason to believe that and honestly I was pretty careless, one might say criminally careless. Under a lot of pressure, not thinking clearly, not used to the situation -plenty of reasons why I handled that poorly, basically, but nobody else has any reason to guess 'some dude suddenly woke up in a fictional story as a villainous character and didn't handle it very well' as an explanation. Is he approving me killing enforcers of law and justice? Being nice because faking it costs him nothing now, and nobody else will mind if he kills me without warning down the line? Something else entirely that's still kinda awful?

So I ask, "What about me?" while doing my best to sound very interested in the answer.

The talker looks confused, like he's not sure how to respond, maybe not sure what I'm asking, but I deliberately don't clarify. "You're... fine?" he says, like a teacher called him up to answer a question and he's hoping that's the answer the teacher wants but isn't really confident it's true.

His tinker buddy pulls out another little drone, this one a sphere with four legs, holds it near his face for a second, and then carefully sets it down, at which point it slowly starts crawling off to his left. Really don't like this, especially how the stragglers are starting to catch up. The first one to catch up passes their pistol to the talking guy, and there's some kinda awkward moment I don't properly parse visually that I'm guessing is that bug-blocking effect Taylor mentioned making the passing process harder?

"I thought you said you wanted justice, though?" I call back, trying to sound innocent and, uh, probably failing given people haven't ever thought I sounded innocent since I hit puberty- wait. Different body, different voice. Hmm. I don't think we ever got a description of how Bakuda's non-filtered voice sounded in canon, either...

… I'm not sure what to make of it, but the buzzing of the swarm around us intensifies, too. Is Taylor flying more bugs? Somehow getting the existing bugs in the air to sound louder? And, uh, why? In any event, it clearly unnerves the talker and tinker, and even the woman in armor adjusts her position in a manner that might be nervousness. Some of the stragglers also stop walking temporarily, like they're not so sure they want to be a part of this. The talker is looking nervous again, licking his lips and fiddling with the pistol like maybe having a weapon is comforting him, though he's idiotically got it pointed at his chin so I'm a bit amazed he can be comforted by this process. He shouts, "Look, just... hand over the girl, alright? We don't want no trouble with you, friend."

Okay, I'm not at the point of 'if this guy dies I'mma count that as probably a good thing', but broadly speaking I'm upshifting my 'suspicious' quota a few points. And re-considering my earlier rejection of the pain bomb. Uuuugh, fine, fight time it is. Instead of bothering to give a response, I reach into my purse with my free hand, which doesn't seem to alarm anyone initially -do they think I'm pulling out money or something?- but almost immediately after the pain bomb I'm pulling out becomes visible I can see the talker's eyes widening, he's trying to point the pistol my way while beginning to shout something, and the tinker recoils as if slapped.

Though I'm not sure they're reacting to that so much as the way Taylor's swarm of bugs has stopped politely delineating a wall and has gone on the attack.

So I'd intended to toss the pain bomb at these guys, but instead I turn around and toss the Super Depression Bomb at the way-the-fuck-too-huge guy, who has started to advance, though oddly still crouched with his arms held wide. He... totally ignores the grenade as it sails his way, but when it goes off his jaw goes slack, and after a bit of a delay he starts slumping to the ground. Slower than I'd like, but problem solved, maybe?

So I turn back to focusing on the actual capes. Taylor seems to have the gun situation under control. I can't make out the details, but I can already see one pistol having been pulled into the air, dangling from seemingly nothing, so, uh, maybe I should have raised the possibility of bugs delivering a grenade, but anyway I'm assuming that's dangling from spider silk? The pistols still held by people are-

BANG

-oh jeez that's loud but I don't feel anything and I'm pretty sure that was a pistol discharging toward the ground? Anyway, Taylor is mobbing those people with bugs, I think I see bugs mobbing hands and people are screaming a lot though that could be panic instead of pain I suppose, and she seems to be contriving for the pistols to be pointed away from our general direction.

Exception: the three capes are not similarly impaired. The talker cape is holding his pistol pointed directly at me and is shouting to be heard over the swarms of flying bugs, something about 'shoot' and 'bitch' and 'give up', so probably something about how he'll shoot me if Taylor doesn't give up, and I'm already dropping to the ground even as I'm taking in the others. The tinker is crouched down a bit, fiddling with another one of his drones and ah shit I don't know what his other drones are doing. The armored cape, meanwhile, is starting to glow, some kinda blue aura concentrated on the gem (Well, maybe for the gem, it mostly just looks purple, but color theory so I'm pretty sure that's just the blue aura on the red gem) and each of the stark white armor bits. Oh, and there's blue aura going along the cables, I think?

Taylor, meanwhile, has -she's thrown herself in the way of the gun. Uh. I mean okay canon indicated her costume is basically bulletproof, but this is still more than a wee bit surpri-

BANG

-sing okay that was his pistol, I'm pretty sure, as Taylor flinched back and I can hear talker cape cursing loudly and ah shit I see a drone pulling itself out from Simurgh dust to go after Taylor it's in her blind spot and just as I'm pulling myself to my feet it gets mobbed by bugs. Oh. Right. Taylor basically has local omniscience. Holy shit, I just realized I'm The Load for Taylor here. Well.

I look back, and shit, the really big guy is still moving. Not... fast, but he's hauling himself our way in this odd, sorta... jerky, I guess, manner? He'll move an arm for a bit, and then stop, and then kinda startle and continue moving it like he just remembered he's supposed to be doing that? So for some fucking reason he's not actually down.

I kinda don't want to kill that guy because I'm starting to suspect he's basically the tinker's puppet and so might be, like, completely innocent, so I jog away from there to behind Taylor and look over her shoulder at the capes. Talky guy is snarling to himself, I think, though it's a bit hard to tell through all the audio and visual noise of the swarms of bugs, the tinker has just released another drone and then startles when a fairly sizable beetle dive-bombs it seconds later, sending it careening along the ground a foot or so, though it doesn't look damaged to me, anyway the armored cape is sorta putting her arms together fist-first or as close as she can approximate with her armor, and I can kinda see some kinda visual distortion in front of the talker? Like if there was a sheet of some transparent material being stretched by him standing against it. His power? Her power? Both?

Then Taylor tackles me and I notice she's not covered in bugs anymore though I probably should've guessed that earlier and I spend a half-second starting to mentally catalogue which of my bombs can protect me from her without killing me (Or her, I barely remember to keep in mind) but we hit the ground before the thought can go anywhere and-

That's when there's some kinda snapping noise I don't understand, why did I hear it so clearly, followed by Taylor grunting into my chest while I get a partially obscured view of a blue blur overhead and a staccato sound I don't understand followed by a crack as my face gets hit by something I didn't even see and holy shit my forehead hurts at least my nose probably isn't broken?

Then Taylor drags herself to her feet, kinda clutching at one arm, though it's not dangling or anything so I'm pretty sure it's not broken, and I haul myself up too and take a look around.

Talker is swearing loudly, and him and his fellow two capes are walking backwards, still maintaining that V-formation pointed at us with him as the point. Definitely significant. He lost his pistol somewhere in there and is brushing a few bugs off of him, while the tinker looks sullen, reaching out to grab a drone as it flies down so he can stuff it into a pocket. The... supposed speedster has what looks like steam wafting off of her armor bits, which are now red in that 'metal heated to the point it glows' sort of way so, uh, not sure what just happened but they clearly don't like it.

They're also already far enough away I'm not confident in my ability to toss a grenade that far.

… fighting parahumans without having information on them sucks.

A glance behind us shows that... the big guy is still hauling himself toward us. Fuck. Fine, okay, freeze bomb, go.

… it only really affects maybe a third of his body, and the results are, uh, gruesome. I avert my eyes so I don't have to watch flesh tearing open where non-frozen flesh meets frozen flesh, torn open by his weight or something I dunno whatever the case I'm just really glad I can't hear anything over the buzzing of Taylor's bugs.

We end up ducking into a side alley to go around him.

--------------------------------------------------------------​

It quickly becomes obvious as we walk that Taylor is not in a good condition. She's limping a little, and I'm pretty sure it's a worse limp than it looks because it really looks to me like she's trying to hide it, and, you know, failing. Similarly, she switched sides for following me, so that the arm she was clutching at earlier is on the other side, and is holding it where I can't get a good look at it with our current respective positions. She's also gasping for breath, in this way I don't know how to describe that, regardless, makes me think she's doing her best to prevent it from being heard and it's bad enough she's not entirely succeeding.

"... you weren't having cramps, were you," I ask in a not-really-a-question sort of way, suddenly remembering that the last Cauldron-provided supply drop including a medical kit. I mean, I did accidentally cannibalize the old one at some point in my tinkering, but that was like over a week ago, so I'm a bit suspicious of the timing regardless.

Taylor is conspicuously quiet, aside the gasping and all.

I sigh mentally, and shuffle the bomb-purse to my left arm. What I'd like to do is ask some questions about what just happened, but if Taylor is, in fact, trying to hide her issues and still ending up gasping for breath a little, she's probably not in a state for a decent back-and-forth. So instead I reach out with my right arm, ignore how Taylor visibly tenses up and gasps in pain in response, and snake it under her armpit. "Lean on me, come on."

There's a second where we're both not walking where I'm half-expecting Taylor to tear away from me or something, but then she audibly bites down on another gasp of pain, cutting it off, and leans into me, and we start walking.

The rest of the walk to the outskirts of my lair are quiet, aside Taylor speaking up at one intersection to say we were heading toward one of the exploding lunatics, 'sleeping' inside a bus stop, so we had to detour around them.

------------------------------------------------------------------​

"Okay," I say, while we come to a halt in an awkward way because we don't know each other's body language-type stuff so it takes a second for Taylor to get that I'm trying to stop. "I need to go disarm the claymore before we can go in, and it'd probably be best for you to... sit down here, I guess."

Taylor nods, but doesn't otherwise answer. I'm still not sure how much of that is Taylor being not very chatty in general vs how much of that is Taylor being in a lot of pain right now. I'm almost completely confident nothing is broken, and I've yet to see any blood, but that doesn't mean it isn't serious. It takes a minute of silent negotiation to get Taylor levered into a sitting position, slumped against what I think is a mailbox but it doesn't look like any mailbox I've seen so I'm not actually sure.

Two minutes later, I've got the claymore deactivated and am helping Taylor walk inside, commenting, "Your bugs should be fine to enter. Even dogs and cats don't set them off. Don't... clump them too much, I guess? But should be fine."

Taylor still doesn't respond to me, and her helmet is... lolling a little. Yeah, this seems... serious.

Set her down leaning against -fuck. Fuck. I just saw a glint of light off metal somewhere in the sky!

I scramble back to the claymore, and rewire it so it can't be disarmed anymore, just in case the tinker saw enough to replicate me disarming it in the first place. They might still pull Tinker Bullshit to disable it, but I'd rather not give them more opportunities than necessary.

Then I go back and retrieve Taylor from the... I don't know what they call these, it's a pot for a plant but it's big and square, this path has them lining it intermittently because hotels seem to think that's appealing? Whatever, I help Taylor back to her feet, and we drag ourselves into the building, glad for the latest time that hotel doors tend to be designed to swing shut on their own.

I'd originally intended to get us to my workshop area, the foyer proper, but Taylor is struggling enough I settle for ducking into the first room that I've already gotten open by virtue of cannibalizing its lock for tinkertech fodder at some point, and sitting her on the bed, glad I already hit most of the building with scrubbing bubble grenades so this room is actually clean. "If you can get your costume off, great, but I'm going to get a medical kit and be right back."

I do exactly that, more aware than usual of the bugs in the building. Taylor's doing a surprisingly good job of hiding them now that we're here, but I still see bugs crawling into crevices and bugs chewing on what greenery in the hotel is both natural and not already completely gone. It takes a bit, because I left the kit in the room I've been sleeping in instead of my workshop to avoid a repeat of accidentally using it for parts, and that's... pretty far from the entrance we came in by.

When I get back, Taylor's managed to get her helmet off, and has laid on her back on the bed. The rest of her costume is still on, though it looks like she hasn't given up entirely? I'm seeing bugs at specific points, like maybe she's having them... unzip it or whatever. I don't remember how Taylor's costume worked, and it's not obvious at a glance. I vaguely recall that being intentional?

Taylor's face has what looks to me to be a largely-faded bruise around the right eye, but otherwise appears to be uninjured. So that's probably not an injury she got just now. Still can't see any blood. I'm opening up the kit, and looking for instructions because I've never had training and thankfully there are instructions, too bad I have no idea if that's standard or if I should assume Cauldron added it in, but whatever I know that this is the anti-septic alcohol, that is adhesive bandages and what they're for, and... okay, the instructions weren't really helpful otherwise, because the aspirin is in a labeled bottle and I know what aspirin is for, the gloves are obviously gloves (Sweet! I was just thinking I need gloves!), slightly surprised to see tweezers but can tell what they are and guess what they're for (Picking little things out of wounds), and the ointment isn't properly explained by the kit's explanation so actually the manual was kinda bad.

Whatever, I've got medical stuff and some idea how to use it, and the fact that there aren't sewing-type materials is honestly a bit of a relief because I'm not squeamish about much but sticking needles in people to sew them up is one of those things I've never stopped getting heebie-jeebies in response to the idea of. (Circular saw to the skull with Coil? Gross, but not nails-on-a-chalkboard-horrifying. If I'd needed to sew him up afterward? I would've felt mildly faint, hands too weak to do it properly. There's a reason I just shoved the bone back in when I was done) So I'm okay with an excuse to not have to grit my teeth and sew Taylor up anyway!

… a temporary excuse, let's just hope that's so unnecessary I don't have to figure out how to finagle it with my tools. I mean, I've got scrubbing bubble grenades so hygiene isn't a concern, probably, but I still would hate doing it.

… okay, fine, enough stalling.

Taylor has gotten out of the top part of her costume while I was focused on pulling out and identifying the stuff in the medical kit and I'm still not seeing blood, but her right arm is a mess of bruises, red and black and blue making up more of what I can see than any healthy shade of skin.

… this medical kit is not going to be helpful at all, is it.

Her left arm has some bruising as well, but it's light enough I might not have noticed it if I wasn't looking for it. Mildly pink/red patches of skin, of uncertain shapes, like they could be weird rashes or something. It's concentrated more at the shoulder than anywhere else, though even the shoulder is more pinkish-pale than bruise colors.

Then my attention latches onto the crusted blood on the lower-right side of the grey tank top, which I'd missed due to my angle and because I was looking for fresh blood. That's an old injury. Shit. "Please tell me you already used a scrubbing bubble grenade on that injury in your side."

Taylor gives me a look, or, well, tries, but she's looking at a point a bit to my right. I'm not sure if that's because of how much pain she's in or because she's not wearing glasses. "'m fine," she gasps out, and I'd give her a pointed look in response to how obviously wrong that is but I still haven't taken off my mask and even if I had I'm not so sure Taylor would register it in her current condition.

So instead I reach for that part of the shirt and peel it away and oh god that sound is gross, while I ignore Taylor gasping in pain and ineffectually slapping at me. No bugs are attacking me so whatever. Yes, that is a largely-crusted-over old injury... and it's oozing dark blood and, uh, some kinda white shit. That can't be good.

I stand up, go to the bathroom, double-check that the water is running the right color right now -it is, good- and while I'm waiting for it to warm up I go pull on the gloves, and then grab a pillow and pull off its case. (So far, however this building heats its water hasn't broken down. I'm hoping to be out of here before I have to figure out where the water heater is, let alone how to fix it) Once the water is warm enough, I soak the pillowcase, and go over and start gently scrubbing the injury, ignoring how Taylor keeps hissing in pain and so on. When the scrubbing stops making progress, I go wash it at the sink, washing out most of the blood and... whatever that other stuff is, and go back and keep scrubbing.

Repeat until the scab is nearly entirely gone, and the injury no longer oozes dark blood and white shit every time I put pressure anywhere near it. It looks a lot less worrying like this, as I can now see that the scab made it seem something like twice as large as it actually was. I'm not sure what kind of injury it is, but it's not a deep stab wound, anyway. Some kind of slashing wound? Something weirder from the speedster, since Taylor mentioned them trying to touch her and has been hiding how injured she was for days and days? Maybe heat got through her costume, and this is from being burned? Whatever it is, once I've got it reasonably clean, I consider retrieving a scrubbing bubble grenade to get it completely clean -but then decide against it, given Taylor rejected it, I still haven't tested what happens if it gets inside a body, and I've still got other options.

So instead I go grab another pillowcase, soak it in rubbing alcohol, and lay it against the injury. Taylor makes a shocked, pained noise, but she's still not trying to stop me so I keep on ignoring that. I'll swap it out for an adhesive bandage in a minute.

Alright, the bruised arm. Bruises aren't something I know how to take care of. They're internal damage, I know that, so putting bandages on isn't going to help. I'm not sure how much of a concern infection is, but I'm not breaking the scrubbing bubble grenades out for that, either, same reasons as earlier. I end up settling for grabbing a third pillowcase, soaking it in hot water, and gently rubbing the bruised areas, on the vague idea that if nothing else I'm at least cleaning the surface and that's probably not a bad thing. Given Taylor's apparent mistrust of the scrubbing bubble grenades, she probably hasn't used them to clean herself, and I have no idea if she was able to shower or bathe properly in that building, especially given these injuries. The scabbed wound at least suggests she hasn't been taking advantage of water for cleaning, whether or not she had it available as an option.

To my surprise, the bruises get a little better in response. Not a ton better, but the swelling goes down, Taylor stops holding the bruised arm so stiffly, and the colors get a little less vivid. "Ice," she finally gasps out, and I feel slightly stupid, because yeah that is a standard thing for treating bruises, isn't it?

"One second," I say, holding up a gloved finger before heading out. Yeah, there's ice machines in this building, and I haven't cannibalized all of them. The one in my workshop? Yeah, gone. The two indoors? Also gone. The one outdoors? Even in my worst tinker fugues I haven't wandered outside, and I never committed to any concrete plan to drag it in for future tinker plans, so it's just sitting in that outdoors snacks-and-so-on space, humming.

It produces ice when I prompt it, dumping it into the bucket. I... think the color is wrong, like maybe the water used to make the ice had stuff growing in it at some point, so I figure out how to crack the thing open -briefly assisted by my power at one point, thanks power- and uh yeah that's gross.

It takes another twenty minutes to get the existing water supply dumped out, a scrubbing bubble grenade detonated inside the machine, and more water dumped in. Then I wander over to tell Taylor. She's still on the bed when I arrive, the alcohol-soaked pillowcase off to the side, while an adhesive bandage has made its way onto her old injury, which seems likely to have been dragged there by her bugs, but I decided not to make a fuss. "Gonna need like twenty min-"

"I know," Taylor grits out, though she... sounds less bad than earlier. Pretty sure. Mostly sure.

Okay, fine. "Got any other injuries you've been holding out on?"

There's a decent chunk of silence where I'm thinking Taylor isn't going to say anything, but eventually Taylor admits, "Left foot... lacerated... glass on... floor."

It takes me a minute -and some gritted-out instructions from Taylor- to figure out how to get the boot off, but I'm relieved to discover there isn't any glass inside the foot. Just some old, crusted-over cuts. More hot water scrubbing with the fourth and final pillowcase in the room, and I eyeball the shallow, mostly-healed injuries for a bit before saying, "I'm not sure whether bandages make sense for feet, my experience is that doesn't work well. Do you want me to do it anyway?"

Taylor shakes her head in a no, and I notice she's got a sheen of sweat on her skin that wasn't there earlier. Um. Okay, not sure if that's a worrying sign or a product of all this helping. I shrug. "That the only one?"

Taylor nods, and I'm not entirely convinced this is true, but I'm also a bit reluctant to press the point. If there's another, bleeding, injury it's almost certainly not on her torso or skull so unless infection ends up being the issue she's not going to die from it, probably, and I really don't think Taylor had intended to open up to this extent. She's... probably waiting for me to drag her onto my Frankenstein slab and start experimenting on her, or something.

I mean, even if I wanted to do that I wouldn't because her bug control would make that an awful idea, but Taylor's thought process regarding villains was strange at the best of times and if she's entirely clear-headed right now- well. She might be, actually. It was a bit of a canon plotpoint that she stayed functional and clear-headed for longer than you'd expect as some side effect of so much awareness going into her bug control. Though given how I suspect that works that may well be less Taylor being clear-headed and more her shard simulating her heavily and not accounting for her injuries, so, uh, dangerous scenario if you think about it...

Never mind, point is, we'll address this depressingly likely-to-exist additional injury later. Maybe Taylor will handle it herself when I'm not paying attention and get to pretend like there was never another injury. I dunno, maybe it's somewhere embarrassing?

As a temporary substitute for the ice, I soak a pillowcase grabbed from another room in cold water and try to kinda... wrap it around the massively bruised arm. Taylor gasps in pain, but relaxes after a second and breathes out, "Thanks," mildly surprising me. I wasn't expecting a thanks as part of this process.

I comment, "I'll swap it out for actual ice in a few minutes," instead of directly acknowledging the thanks. Then I change the subject entirely. "Any bruising that's not obvious from where I stand? Like, it seemed like you got hit in the back?"

Taylor nods again, which is ambiguous but she's still in a lot of pain so fair. I'm inclined to take it as a, 'yes my back is bruised too,' response.

I dither for a minute, not sure what else to do, and then think to comment, "If spelling stuff out with bugs is easier, feel free to make requests that way." If I'd thought of it earlier I'd have raised the point earlier, but was focused on, you know, treatment.

Taylor looks mildly, briefly surprised. Normally I'd be a little weirded out at how mild a surprise it seems to be, but that thing of 'pushing' her feelings into her swarm goes all the way to early canon so I'm kinda suspecting her surprise is greater but being shoved heavily into the swarm. I mean, it could be directly representative... she was in a lot of pain and might've legit forgot... okay, maybe not, then. Not sure.

Regardless, after a minute she adjusts her positions, hisses in pain, and then nods, not looking happy about it. Not... sure why... but sure, this works. I spend another minute unsure what to do -there's no way the ice is ready- and then it occurs to me Taylor might appreciate a low-energy distraction. "You want me to get you the TV?"

It takes me a second to notice, but Taylor has spelled out Yes on the wall. Right-o, then.

I wander off and grab the thing. I've been keeping it in the workshop so I can watch it while working -you'd think I'd be tempted to take it apart for parts, but I have no idea how to open it up and my power is strangely disinterested in it, which has me intensely curious as to what's up with it- so this process is relatively quick, slowed down only by the TV being a bit bulky, and a bit heavy. Lighter than I'd expect of a TV of its size, mind, but still a bit of a pain.

Taylor starts to lever herself up into a sitting position, but I go, "Nonono, we can get you laid on a pillow for support against the backboard." Taylor doesn't say anything, but obligingly holds still while I get the regular TV out of the way, get three pillows piled up against the headboard, and cooperates when I work to get her adjusted so she's laying against that to keep her propped up, wincing and hissing intermittently but not verbally complaining.

Then she clears her throat and asks, "How do I work it?"

I consider repeating that bug-text is fine to use, but she seems... more okay. Less bad. She's no longer gasping in pain with every breath, and she's considerably less tense than when we started. Talking didn't seem to pain her, either. So okay, fine, I'll leave it alone. Instead I answer the question. "It's not got a remote, volume knob is the left bit and it's only got four settings: mute, quiet, hearable, and rock-and-roll." Taylor gives me a look like she thinks I'm joking, but I just roll my eyes behind my mask and say, "I didn't make it that way."

Taylor's eyebrows furrow and I abruptly realize I'd been trying to make it seem like I made it. Whoops. Uh, okay, if Taylor says- "Do you know whose lair you pulled it from?"

… oh. Yeah, okay, the natural assumption would be 'I found it in some tinker's lair and took it home with me'. Crisis averted. I shake my head, saying, "Not a clue." Because seriously I genuinely have no idea who made this. I've been kinda wondering for a bit if it's some bullshit Cauldron-tech made by an in-house tinker or something. It'd make sense for them to have at least one on hand. Then I continue my explanation with, "Anyway, right widget is for flipping through channels, it's got way more channels than just local channels or even just US channels but they seem to be organized by nationality or something? It can be a bit of a pain, honestly, but at least it works." And that ends my explanation. The magical tinkertech TV is actually a bit of a pain... no remote, no ability to input a specific channel, no way to remember a specific channel for easy access... to be honest, part of the reason why I keep watching cartoons and national news is that they're clustered relatively close together.

Taylor takes all that in without responding, and I'm not terribly surprised when bugs are at the knobby bits in short order to manipulate them. Alright, still don't want to ask her about what actually happened in the fight and all just yet, ice still isn't ready... oh. I can work on myself.

The first thing I do is take off my mask, immediately noticing a bit of blood on the inside. Before I can really take that in, I see Taylor looking at me, seeming stricken. "What?" I ask, completely confused.

Taylor gestures with her less injured hand at the mask, and breathes out, "Secret identity."

Oh.

That.

I roll my eyes. "My civilian identity is a matter of public record, I'm Alicia Black-" Though if somebody called me 'miss Black' I'd space on it. And I'm probably going to take a bit to get used to Alicia, since I've only ever been called Bakuda and Oni Lady (jerks) since waking up here. I only know the full name because it was on the birthday card from Eidolon, the family name wasn't in the news where I first learned... my, I guess, personal name. "-nice to meet you anonymous teenage girl who has bled all over my lair after defending me and is not in costume."

Taylor still looks a bit bamboozled, but gives no actual reply for long enough I return to examining the inside of my mask. Seriously, blood? Okay, that correlates to here on my forehead... oh. Huh. That is dried blood I'm feeling there. A lot less than I'd expect of a head wound, though I suppose that's not surprising. It would've run into my eyes earlier if it hadn't clotted quickly. Pressure of the mask preventing much blood from flowing? Side effect of the mover cape? I have had head wounds bleed only a- "I'm Taylor. Taylor Hebert."

I re-focus on Taylor, who is kinda... trying to look solemn? I think? Oh. Yeah, she's holding out her less injured hand for a handshake. "Given how injured you are, let's not do a handshake and just say we did? Nice to meet you, Taylor." I also don't like doing handshakes, as it happens, but even if I did like 'em come on Taylor don't strain yourself like this.

Taylor leaves the arm in the air for a minute, but I can see it's wobbling a little from the strain, and she gives up before I get to the point of thinking giving her the handshake will be necessary to get her to give up. "Nice to meet you, Alicia," Taylor says in this practiced way that makes me think she's dredging up some old routine for greeting people. (I'm not. I'm just kinda... pulling from movies and whatnot. You know, assuming the movies are real, etc etc)

There's a pause for a bit there, where I'm wondering if Taylor is going to push further on this or let us go back to letting her heal and watch -uh, national news it looks like- while I work on myself until it's time to go get the ice. She doesn't say anything, but she keeps looking my way like she thinks I'm going to say something. So okay fine I do. "We cool, then? Because I just discovered I have my own injury to work on and the ice is still not ready."

"We're... cool," Taylor says, wincing partway between words, probably out of physical pain and not psychological pain at my lingo.

"Cool," I say as a final confirmation before heading into the bathroom.

Looking at myself in the mirror... huh. Not sure what to make of that injury. It looks kind of like a cut, but when I carefully clean away the edges of what's dried, trying to avoid having it bleed more, it looks more like a very small s shape, which is... strange. Hmm. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but the injury in Taylor's side was also shaped like an s, just... larger. That's sufficiently weird I'm inclined to suspect it's some bit of power strangeness.

… I should maybe see if I can build a scanner now and get bullshit nonsense tricorder answers out of studying our injuries, like there'll be some lingering S Particles or some such nonsense I can study to get a grasp on the power that did it. Seems... likely to be the speedster woman, given my forehead is where I was hit by her and that's where I've got this injury. Was my mask too thin? Wrong material type? Or... yeah, there's a crack in the mask, and putting it on and then putting my finger where I know the injury is? The crack lines up. Alright, so... mask broken on hit, and this let cape bullshit through to brand me like I'm Harry Potter if he was a girl, on the wrong side of the pond, and had a magic space whale teaching him the ancient mysteries of how to make everything die horribly.

I'm hoping it doesn't scar because I'd be quite surprised if Earth Bet doesn't have some knowledge of Harry Potter and it would be annoying to have people cracking jokes about the Girl Who Lived and so on.

In any event, I'm at the point where I'm pretty sure if I scrape away any more of the scabbing it will just re-open the wound, so I decide to just wash the mask briefly, make a mental note to either do something to fix the crack or see if I can replace the mask entirely, and after a minute pop out and tell Taylor, "I'm going to go get you ice now."

Taylor nods, and on the way to the ice machine I grab another pillowcase from a different room on the way.

I end up having to wait another... five minutes or so before the ice machine gives me results I'm reasonably happy with, but then I dump a bunch of ice into the pillowcase. It's not perfect -it's going to leak- but it's better than risking a tinker fugue and I haven't noticed anything in this hotel that seems like a clearly better answer.

When I get back, Taylor is clearly struggling to stay awake, focused on... a politician or something, I don't care... on the TV, and yeeps when I gently arrange to sort-of-kind-of wrap her most injured arm with the pillowcase of ice, adjusting her position so it will hopefully leak out onto the floor instead of into the depression made by her body.

I've got scrubbing bubble grenades, if this results in a mold problem it's fixable.

Taylor drifts off in less than five minutes, ice apparently taking enough of an edge off the pain that her exhaustion has finally caught up to her.

I, meanwhile, am wide awake and am going to reinforce the fuck out of my defenses.

 

[Ciber]

First step should be to make Taylor some force multipliers. What since she is massively more competent at combat. (Yes. Even asleep.)

 

[Kai Merah]

This has made me seriously crave a Taylor perspective chapter because I'm certain there are great misinterpretations going on, and I'm itching to find out about them. Much as I loved How I Met Your Monster to see the different perspective of what was going on, I'm definitely craving a Taylor interlude now to figure out what's in her head.

Interesting chapter overall, and glad that Taylor is trusting Bakuda now... though I suspect that part of the reason she asked to go to Bakuda's lair is for access to her TV. Can't think of anything else that would have had Taylor changing her mind about holing up alone this whole time.

 

[omni001]

First step should be to make Taylor some force multipliers. What since she is massively more competent at combat. (Yes. Even asleep.)

Click to shrink...

Maybe a mutagenic bomb to make super bugs. Maybe a couple Atlas's and some relay bugs.