- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yes, she totally is!
So is Stefanie (in the absolute most technical sense of the word.)
Wolf Spider (Worm) (Complete)
- Thread starter The Laurent
- Start date
Yes, she totally is!
So is Stefanie (in the absolute most technical sense of the word.)
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Cassie shows up as WagTheDog in PHO interludes in canon, and also in the epilogue, where she's in Rachel's team. She wears a little Patch that says WagTheDog (rachel has never understood the joke inherent there) and seems like her most loyal team member.
Pelter exists! As a name. And that's it.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Actually, she also shows up in... one more chapter, I think? Besides the epilogue?
Two, actually! So in total, she has four appearances in story, but none of them are major.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Nope. WagTheDog was a random fan of Bitch online who gets recruited in the PHO Interlude. If it wasn't for her, I never would have thought of the BitchZone and this whole, like, sub-side-plot.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
She liked Biter more than Barker, I think. Mostly because Barker ran his mouth more. And she did get with a guy on her team in the end, but that's not Cassie obviously.
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
- Location
- A Valid Location
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Imago 21.6, the one with the Butcher fight, during the aftermath. CITATION!
Cassie knows how the cook asparagus, apparently.Imago 21.6 said:
- Location
- Usa
Really enjoyed this chapter for its outside POV of the two MCs. It also gave a broader look at the camp situation from a "peace" perspective, as opposed to Taylor's more conflict-oriented POV. It was a nice breather chapter that allowed things to generally regroup before the next big event.
Which is hopefully dealing with the Merchants and their frankly absurd ability to project power. Seriously, being able to spam dozens of parahumans in an assault is a high-potential asset limited only by the fact that it's the Merchants employing it.
Also, I find Pelter's power really interesting. It's like a more subtle/flexible/usable version of Ballistic's. Apparently it's partially governed by the projectiles' properties (hardness = impact/penetration?), allowing it to scale to different threats. But just the fact that she can, in general, throw stuff (distractions, explosives, sharp objects) superhumanly accurately and quickly is low key OP. In true Worm fashion you've taken an understated/subtle power and given it lots of room for potential growth.
Which is hopefully dealing with the Merchants and their frankly absurd ability to project power. Seriously, being able to spam dozens of parahumans in an assault is a high-potential asset limited only by the fact that it's the Merchants employing it.
Also, I find Pelter's power really interesting. It's like a more subtle/flexible/usable version of Ballistic's. Apparently it's partially governed by the projectiles' properties (hardness = impact/penetration?), allowing it to scale to different threats. But just the fact that she can, in general, throw stuff (distractions, explosives, sharp objects) superhumanly accurately and quickly is low key OP. In true Worm fashion you've taken an understated/subtle power and given it lots of room for potential growth.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A thing to keep in mind about the Merchants is that in canon, they were using vials to build up an army, and Taylor sort of fought them but had to run to get people out, and then... she did nothing. Right up until the Slaughterhouse 9 came through and killed not only all their capes(Except Scrub) but a lot of their unpowered members too.
They're in a weird position where canon put them right on the edge of becoming a credible threat and then had the OCP smack them down instead of actually showing them as a threat that really needs taking care of.
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- Location
- Australia
Through it out and put something decent in the pot?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
You take that back. Well-cooked asparagus is delicious. Have a little of it with a pasta that's made for it.
- Location
- Here
Grilled (or broiled) asparagus is hard to mess up, really. Just don't steam it.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Grilled with Prosciutto is a really easy way to add flavor into it, if you're not a fan of the asparagus taste? The salt soaks in, there's a meat side, and you're usually grilling in some char too.
Rabid Arc Timeline
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Rabid Timeline
Rabid 4.1 - Still Thursday, Taylor convinces Rachel to come with, and heads out to join up with everyone. Then, BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.2 - BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.3 - BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.4 -BEHEMOTH, and then Taylor and Rachel go to find shelter together. The next morning Taylor has some regrets.
Rabid 4.5 - Still the morning after, Friday the 27th. Taylor wants to find her Dad, so they head to the Docks. But Greg interupt! He's found a ruined snack falcon and he wants to being harassed by merchants. They end up getting sidetracked, a little, but find Pelter and her camp. And then, on Saturday, the Merchants attack!
Rabid 4.6 - Fending off the merchants, at least until the protectorate arrives. Legend shows up personally. Taylor wants to recruit Stef. Another protectorate patrol comes by, and Flechette is there!
Rabid 4.7 - Sunday, the 29th, and Lisa arrives with news about Coil, and his evil villain plotting. And Danny finds his way to the camp, and we finally have that dinner.
Rabid 4-A - An analyst looks back. Saturday, June 4th.
Rabid 4-B - Pelter reflects, and Arachne moves forward. Monday, June 6th.
Rabid 4.1 - Still Thursday, Taylor convinces Rachel to come with, and heads out to join up with everyone. Then, BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.2 - BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.3 - BEHEMOTH
Rabid 4.4 -BEHEMOTH, and then Taylor and Rachel go to find shelter together. The next morning Taylor has some regrets.
Rabid 4.5 - Still the morning after, Friday the 27th. Taylor wants to find her Dad, so they head to the Docks. But Greg interupt! He's found a ruined snack falcon and he wants to being harassed by merchants. They end up getting sidetracked, a little, but find Pelter and her camp. And then, on Saturday, the Merchants attack!
Rabid 4.6 - Fending off the merchants, at least until the protectorate arrives. Legend shows up personally. Taylor wants to recruit Stef. Another protectorate patrol comes by, and Flechette is there!
Rabid 4.7 - Sunday, the 29th, and Lisa arrives with news about Coil, and his evil villain plotting. And Danny finds his way to the camp, and we finally have that dinner.
Rabid 4-A - An analyst looks back. Saturday, June 4th.
Rabid 4-B - Pelter reflects, and Arachne moves forward. Monday, June 6th.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@The Laurent Mind if I make a small request for a cameo?
My old boss's oldest dog, Inka, died today. Bone cancer, basically, all I'd like is a white Great Pyrenees named Inka running around in Bitch's pack. Nothing fancy.
My old boss's oldest dog, Inka, died today. Bone cancer, basically, all I'd like is a white Great Pyrenees named Inka running around in Bitch's pack. Nothing fancy.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I'm pretty sure that in canon they had access to an extremely limited supply of Cauldron vials. Ie less than four. Which is not an 'army' though it is a sizable improvement in their parahuman forces.
They were also experimenting in causing deliberate triggers though making people suffer and fight each other to the death, which, as anyone with half a brain could have told them would have eventually ended very poorly, even if it had some moderate success early on.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
I didn't know Cassie played video games.
- Location
- Usa
Coincidentally enough, canon Bitch had a dog named Ink (or maybe Inky, but I'm pretty sure it was Ink). This change wouldn't even shred my suspension of disbelief (much).
Feral 5.1
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Feral 5.1
'Day 4--' I'd written a few pages back. There were a lot of notes to make, and it wasn't going to write itself. The apartment smelled bad, but the original owners weren't anywhere around, and we'd moved stuff in there, made sure the lock worked, and otherwise made it the perfect place to serve as an observation station for Coil… and potentially for Accord as well.
At the moment, I had my head in my girlfriend's lap. It was silly, but it felt warm and safe, just… relaxing with her. She was running her fingers through my hair, and I didn't tell her to stop, even though it was distracting me. She was warm, and I was used to the way she smelled by now. She took a bath every day or two, but with the plumbing still in the works, it wasn't something that was easy to take every day, let alone twice.
I didn't need it. You got used to other people… and more than that, you grew to sort of…
Either way, I'd been more distracted before. The apartment was cozy, and there was a bed, and I felt way too safe.
I was two and a half blocks from Coil's base, which meant that it'd be pretty safe, and so it was a lot like the tent, and the shelter. Another place that we could be together, in different contexts. This one the most private and the most personal.
"Huh," I said.
"What?"
"More of Accord's men."
The base was actually pretty secure against bugs. It was as much as I could ask to get a few in, and Coil clearly did regular pest-disposal, one way or another. I could slip flies in, but in order to see the whole base at once, I'd need far too many bugs. He'd notice it, I knew he would, because he had to be sharp to get where he was. I mostly monitored the entrance, and occasionally listened into some of his men.
They were professional, well-trained, and knew nothing of his plans. But I had figured out the layout of the base, more or less, and I also knew that Coil was not the sort to confide in others.
Dinah was there too. Miserable and addicted to drugs, huddled, with nothing I could do to comfort her, not before I was ready to strike. I almost wanted to attack now, but… I had to think that Lisa knew something about what was going on, and until I was sure what the plan was, then attacking would just give me away.
But every time I watched her be hauled out to answer more questions--when she wasn't asked in Coil's office, which I'd never felt confident enough to bug--about capes and what would happen if thus and thus was done, I had to force myself to keep from acting.
"Fucker," Rachel said.
I agreed with her, honestly. Accord's men were creepy, and very insistent. They were talking about alliances, about trading answers from Dinah for unspecified goods and something called a traveler. Or maybe someone who traveled? I wasn't sure yet.
"Yeah. Another hour, then we go back and check up on stuff?" I asked.
We had a lot to do. Between this, and the patrols, and trying to run the camp, though Pelter really helped make it all easier… there was no free time that we didn't make for ourselves.
But I wanted to make free time, eventually. Because I felt as if I was changing, and things looked a lot different now.
People knew of me, through their love of Bitch.
...their sometimes untowards love. I'd remembered the feeling of watching Cassie, when I'd went to visit Rachel last week, early on in her work. It was so obvious that she was eyeing Rachel. That she was looking at Rachel's arms, strong and thick, or her stomach, which had meat on it besides the strong muscles when I pressed my fingers against it.
That she was looking at the strong legs, and perhaps imagining what it'd be like to…
Yes. Yes. It was jealousy. I could hardly blame her, since I shared that same fascination.
Despite that, and despite the discomfort I felt around Cassie, it seemed like I was finally getting somewhere, and not just with Rachel, like I'd felt before. It felt like I was finding my place in the world, and that this place came with something else.
I'd always asked my Mom why she wasn't a writer, or a poet, because she understood books so well. And she'd said, "There's never time."
It was true.
But this city, and this situation, and this world, it felt like something that I could write about, or read about or… something.
******
The press of flesh upon flesh as people went through the camps, brushing past each other, connected in ways that they couldn't know otherwise. At some point you had to start ignoring certain things. At some point you got used to baths being a thing that happens a few times a week, rather than every day. Once plumbing came, people would bathe more often, of course.
The way you ignored things extended beyond that of course. Life went on, and as my own experiences told me, life included… well. Sex. Going to the bathroom. Painful rashes. People having arguments with their best friend over some petty nonsense that ends in the two not talking for four days straight until you finally get to watch them make up with each other.
Rather more sex than you expected from a refugee camp. Of course, at a certain point, ignoring it sort of lost its luster.
Besides, in its own way, without being too much of a voyeur (when I saw sex coming, my bugs got out of there as fast as possible… if I saw it coming) it was probably a good thing.
It gave me a different view of the world. You got used to it, you just learned to accept it just like I accepted that my bugs were sometimes gross, weird things. Bluebottle flies and black widows and creepy crawlies of all kinds had a sort of fascination, and so did people.
If I wanted to write a novel, or make a poem, the camp could make ready material for a hundreds of characters or feuds or situations… however novels were written. I didn't really know how I'd even start, if I had the interest, but I felt like I could do it.
Of course, practicality was another thing that all of this drilled into you. Practicality and even more willingness to get dirty because that's where your bugs were all the time anyways.
Rachel was right, for instance: unhappiness meant unhappy poop. Just not only in dogs. And you could tell a lot about someone by how they felt or when they grouched or complained. We didn't have medicine enough, but I tried to help people to deal with that.
But of course, whatever fascinating revelations of human character there were (like the people who tried to grow a garden in the corner of the camp, which seemed doomed to failure) there was also the landscape.
The business district, all shattered steel beams, grey at one end and black as a burnt steak on the other, twisted and ugly things. Glass littered the streets at the outskirts of the business area, where it hadn't been totally leveled into a flat, black-grey hellscape, which still by the time two weeks had passed had begun to sprout green at places. Where all of the concrete was broken, a few strange people had actually planted soil and seeds, just out of… I didn't even know what.
The camp and its environs, which had once perhaps been one of the dingier parts of town, but now in the face of the chaos, the camp as a place looked less hodge-podge and more… varied. More like something alive and breathing. If smelly at times.
There were the territories under the Merchants, who seemed to be going for something so post-apocalyptic that some of their capes had leveled buildings that got in their way, and so the whole thing was crumbling, a warzone that we could only pierce carefully, because they had the numbers and force to at least make it tough.
But we'd find her, and we'd beat them back.
*****
Of course, honestly, all of this visceral stuff also included the overwhelming desire to try to find something sappy or erotic to write. To fill pages with Rachel's scent, and the feel of her body beneath mine, or on top of mine, of her legs splayed out, or wrapped around me, of her lips on my lips, her hands in my hands. Her throat in my mouth as I bit and plied it with kisses, the feel of her in the palm of my hands and the rough, thoughtless way that happened: it was only afterwards that it seemed…
Worthy of poems was the wrong word. It was only afterwards that poems were worthy of it. A thought that, when I had it, made me realize I was absolutely, insanely smitten to a degree that probably disgusted everyone around me, slightly.
They'd never say it, though, or comment on us holding hands, because I was Arachne and she was Bitch, saviors of the camp.
And what people from afar saw, especially those not from Brockton Bay, was a set of heroes. I sweated so much I had to take my costume off and clean it after the interview with that journalist. I was just… I hadn't ever talked to someone before who would not only give a shit about what I said, but would convey it to a bunch of other people. Except Emma, and that as an insult.
But my mask hid all of that, and I tried to be like Rachel was… only a little more talkative. I think I… okay. My instinct was that I clearly failed. My hope was that it worked out okay. Be cool, confident, and in control: it was how Coil managed his men, and Lung going after the Undersiders had turned out to be a giant mistake. Then he'd died.
And Rachel? Rachel didn't seem as if she ever doubted anything, even though I'd seen it before.
They didn't see the gross, visceral details.They didn't see the imperfections, and they didn't want me to see the imperfections.
Heck, they couldn't even see the rage building inside.
By the fourth day, I'd decided a few things. First, Coil needed to die, not merely "face justice." What justice would that be? The justice of a Protectorate that sends a person guilty of involuntary assault to prison for the rest of their life while making a fucking murderous psycho (and I'd decided that all of the bad stories about her online were probably true) into their hero, their symbol. She showed up in photo shoots, and if she'd not managed to die, she'd probably be on merch when she got older, as some sort of cool anti-hero. I'd been fooled by Shadow Stalker, if not by Sophia Hess.
I didn't trust the Protectorate and the Wards. People in it? Sure. Flechette seemed alright, Legend was an ideal hero, and there were probably plenty of people. But I couldn't trust it as a whole, as a body without its members, not after Canary and Shadow Stalker, two different shades of the same sorts of problems.
So, I was going to murder Coil. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to lay maggots in his eyes, I wanted him to die slowly when I saw the way Dinah clearly needed the drugs, the way she was helpless and desperate and afraid, and couldn't even know that I was there, that I cared. That I gave a shit about her. She was trapped in a goddamn locker, and there was no door.
When I thought about Dinah, it felt as if my range might as well be infinite.
Maggots in his eyes and spiders crawling down his throat. I wanted him to die screaming, and I wanted it to be known: I knew I wouldn't get what I wanted. I knew that torture was wrong, especially just to work off the frustration that a man like that had ever been alive in the first place. Maybe I wouldn't even get to kill him. But him, Skidmark and that weird tinker who made all of those pseudo-parahumans… they were on the list too.
Slavers and monsters who took people and chained them up, in different ways. People who collared what shouldn't be collared, who trapped what shouldn't be trapped, and thought they were taming it.
The bastards deserved a lot more than they'd get. Would Coil even be sent straight to the Birdcage, or Skidmark? As far as I knew, neither of them had ever been charged with anything, because they'd been too clever or lucky to get caught.
...not that the Birdcage was a good idea, but I understood it slightly more when I listened to the seething rage inside of me when I thought of some of the people out there. Just not the way it was being used.
*******
That's where I was, that Thursday, angry and frustrated in one sense, and yet happier and more content than I'd been in a long time. In three days, I would be sixteen. And sometime once the city was a little less broken, I'd get that GED and never look back. I had a plan, I had goals, I had ideas, and I had a future.
And I had a girlfriend.
All in all, I had an idea of where I was, where I was going, how I'd reach it, and what I'd find there.
That was Thursday, ten A.M, on June 9th, 2011.
Take a snapshot.
******
"Well," I said, looking at Greg. "You're certainly inspired."
"It's a GameBox. Of course I am! Once I get it, we can play together again," Greg said, firmly. One of the new families that had moved into the camp, what with the increasing prevalence of enough electricity to make sleeping in the apartments a little less of a chore, had a GameBox. And Greg wanted it.
I'd been watching him go from asking politely to begging to trying to gather enough things through hard work to trade them as if it were a video game.
Bartering was going to be hard, considering how rare a working one, with games, was in the camp. People got into big rows for less.
I wasn't going to tell him that the kid had offered to let me play it for a few minutes a day, when he'd somehow heard from someone that I liked playing games. Because then Greg would probably think of the clever idea of convincing the kid to donate it to me and then hoping he could beg me more effectively.
He'd probably be right, too. As it was, I did hope he succeeded. He'd been somewhat inept at most of the tasks, but he was learning. Slowly, but surely. He was easy to get distracted, so I had to hope that once he had a task, it'd…
Yep.
I had my mask off--by this point somehow the two identities had blended together so thoroughly that despite the fact that almost nobody knew my name was Taylor, there was no point in keeping it on--and so I offered him my best attempt at a smile and a thumbs up like he would have given me.
"Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Not sure how much spare time I'd have, but."
"You have tons," Greg whined, looking at me. I frowned at him, because of course, it wasn't free time. It was time with my girlfriend: it was freeing time, but not free time I could just change around the order on.
"Okay, no you don't, maybe. Stefanie told me that there can't be any compromises, or something like that. But I don't even know what that means," Greg said.
"I'm not sure either. Was it referring to Rachel?" I asked.
"Ehh, I think so."
Greg had been… well, pining after Stefanie for a while now. A week. It was moderately uncomfortable to witness, but at least she seemed to be letting him down gently… or. Actually, she seemed to be ignoring his crush, like I'd done. I wasn't sure if that was the smartest move, but what could I say.
"Well, then…" I began, only to pause. My bugs were spread out everywhere. Including large numbers of them in those fishbowls. I had a ton of bowls now, and of course plenty of the bugs died every time I went to sleep. Of course, they could also breed, given time and the right conditions, so I didn't think I'd have any limit on them.
Still, when you had three, three and a half blocks to cover, it did mean that you were…
There was this saying: strong everywhere, weak everywhere. I think Greg had quoted it at me once in reference to this one video game he'd been playing. If it actually came down to a fight, it'd take longer than expected to gather a huge swarm of bugs, and the greater my range, the harder it was to monitor everything and everyone within it.
But I was getting better at it, and so I did notice the girl approaching at the same time I noticed that two of the people in the camp were getting into a fight. I focused on these two events, as my bugs buzzed between them, breaking them up by sheer startelement.
People were getting used to bugs being around. I was even practicing a little with talking through them. I'd had this silly idea involving the dogs, Rachel, and my bugs. I did know that some sort of box, if it could be attached to the dogs, could be interesting.
We had the harnesses now, and the saddlebags, but a bug box? A mobile bug carrier? A lot of ideas occurred to me, far more than I had time to pursue.
But even though people were used to it, bugs getting in between a fist-fight meant that it was over.
I had to weaken my grid elsewhere, but it didn't matter that much.
I was working on interpreting sounds and smells even better now, so here is what I saw. She was white, with red dreadlocks down her neck, dressed in clothes that smelled as if they hadn't been washed in a week. She had on no jewelry, and her purse and her clothing both spoke to, if not being an adult, at least being very mature. It was the kind of purse you carried when you wanted something practical, and her clothes too were somewhere between practical and stylish.
She was silent as she moved, but her movements were slightly jerky, and she favored one leg a little bit. She was pretty, though not beautiful, and too thin. A little like me, and that wasn't a compliment.
From the way she was moving, she was definitely headed right for the camp, and from the way she wasn't darting around or carrying a backpack, she clearly had a purpose. She was too well-dressed to be a refugee in the sort where she fled without looking back or grabbing anything. We were seeing more of them, from the Merchants, and, it was said by some of them, from the Teeth.
She didn't look scared enough. If I could have somehow smelled through a dog, I could have probably told whether or not she was scared from that too. But bugs weren't designed to smell those kinds of things, even if I could have interpreted it.
"What is it?" Greg asked.
The two men broke up, swearing at each other, backing away with yelled insults, ones that I could just almost hear with my real ears. "Someone's here for me. Or for Pelter or Bitch."
"Oh! Uh, um, we can talk about this later? Can you figure out what he'd trade for it?"
"Maybe, sure. Hope things go well for you," I said, calling back as I ran to grab my mask and pull it on. I had a feeling that she wasn't searching for Taylor, but someone confident, someone whose face didn't give anything at all away, because it was hidden.
"Thanks!"
*******
I met her at the outskirts of the camp. Everyone saw me moving, and everyone had swollen over five hundred people, and looked to keep on heading upwards. As long as they stayed in range of my bugs, that was just fine. But nobody said anything, because they all assumed that I was cool and in control, rather than what was really going on, which was quite a bit of curiosity.
I wanted to see what she was here for.
The girl stopped in surprise when she saw me walking out to meet her. Girl? She was definitely older than me, now that I was looking at her eye to eye.
"Greetings, welcome to the Camp." There was no clever name, and I hadn't had the time or inclination to think of one.
"You're Arachne, right?" the woman asked. "I came here to ask for your help. And the help of any of the other capes here. I've heard there were a few of them?"
"Help? With what?" I asked, suspicious.
"My brother was taken away by the Merchants. But that's not what I thought you'd want to know."
"What is it? Also, you seem to have the best of me," I said. "What's your name."
"It's Sierra. But I've been listening to the street, and they've planned for a big party, this huge event, on Friday. A slave auction and everything." Sierra looked horrified and disgusted by that, and my own stomach churned. This was a chance. A chance to fulfill a promise and get someone back that the camp had lost.
This was a chance, and I nodded. "So, where is it?"
Already, an idea was forming, and it wasn't one that would be easy… but I think it'd work.
"You're going to help? You just met me."
"I'm a hero. Plus… once you hear the idea, you might not like it quite so much."
*******
Step one, borrow spray paint and people who know how to use it.
Step two, go on an ad hoc patrol in which we came in force, and then found each and every group of Merchants within four blocks of us and beat them to all hell and then tossed each group, naked, above a spray-painted sign that said: 'If you keep on coming here, you'll keep on coming back naked.'
This was what was known as a trick, a way to explain away what we were actually doing, which was getting clothing to infiltrate them tomorrow. It would mean going through all of the clothes we got and mixing and matching until we hadquite a few costumes.
******
"Really? This is what they wear?" Sierra asked, frowning at it.
"Yes. It is. So, tell me about your brother?" I said, glancing over at her, and then at Rachel, who was frowning even harder as she picked through it. I had to admit, none of it really fit her all that well.
Not merely physically, but as a style. I supposed she could go in the form of some greasy street punk who happened to be female, but--
"I'm not wearing any of this shit," Rachel said. "Unless I have to."
"You can… oh, that'd work. If you stuck close to where the big party was, you could burst in when we called you." I nodded at Rachel, adopting my plan as quickly as possible to her needs. It was what should be done, I thought. Sometimes. Maybe. "But, Sierra?"
"Things were normal, just a few weeks ago. I was in college, Bryce was in High School, and things were just going along like they normally were. But then the attack happened. I went with my brother, and we tried to stick together. But the Merchants were grabbing up everyone… and not just girls."
She frowned at that, not sure what it meant.
I had my suspicions, actually. It could be someone to use as a test-dummy for powers, or for the weird tinker things that were going down. It was as plausible as everything else. After all, they were restarting slavery and holding a huge party to celebrate how horrible they were. This was already crazy enough.
"Huh. Well, can you pretend well enough in this stuff?" I gestured to the pile of women's clothes. "You, me, and Pelter are all going to have to be dressed like this."
"And then who is… leading us?"
The plan was, some of us were going to be slaves for trade, that sort of thing, and some of us would be, uh. "Bitches" was the phrase a Merchant would probably use. Hanger-ons. One guy, three girls. We go in, find your brother, find Kayla and then get both of them out. And then we come back and attack them. Fuck them up. You can leave before that, with your brother and the girl. No need to get involved in a cape fight."
"Sounds good," Sierra said.
I just needed to tell Franky about it.
******
The teenager frowned at me. "Really? This is going to be rough…"
"Just, you know how to talk, right?" I asked, glad that he couldn't see my face.
"I guess I do… but it's sorta fucking disrespectful. But if it's for a good cause." Franky stretched a little. "And you're sure they'll buy it?"
"We have the bracelets. Pelter and I sexed in. But Sierra's going to be a slave you're going to sell off."
"Sierra?"
"We're going to save her brother," I said. "And you? You fought in. Red bracelet."
"Oh…" he said, wincing. "Well, fuck it." He gave an expansive shrug. "But please don't tell my parents what this involves. They wouldn't understand."
"I get that," I said. I wasn't going to tell Dad that I was going to be pretending to be a drugged up gang groupie who'd made her way in through having sex with a bunch of guys.
I wasn't going to tell him about any of that. Dad had actually showed up once more, to tell me about how things were going at the docks. We'd exchanged information as if we were both issuing reports to each other, and then we'd hugged, a little awkwardly. I'd invited him to dinner, and he'd told me 'next time.'
It was better than we'd interacted before, but it wasn't exactly the height of father-daughter relations. I was unsure about what to do to make it better, but maybe with more time apart we'd get more used to it and find ways around it.
"So, tomorrow…"
"Yes."
*******
They'd set themselves up in an old mall, actually. It was a mall even closer to death than the one that I'd always gone to. That one still had life, this one? I didn't know why it'd been made in the first place. It'd always been in a part of town that wasn't great, but apparently once it'd seemed like a good idea.
It was a squat, ugly building, the mall, and yet it was perfect for their purposes. There were only so many bugs I could use, but I still got a decent picture of the inside.
Hundred and hundreds of people, and in the center, the food court, they'd set up this giant stage, and they'd taken over two of the nearby food courts as the storage space for the slaves. One could tell who was where by the stage. Anyone behind it was either a slave, a helper, or a member.
Dose was with Skidmark and Squealer. Mush had been captured, and they hadn't gotten him back yet… no doubt it was a matter of time. But there were two others with them that seemed to be wearing costumes, and I couldn't quite place who they were. One of them was a fat woman with red hair that I hadn't seen around.
Maybe she was a new trigger? Either way, it was a packed crowd, and each store had been turned into a gallery of drugs, clothing, sex, weapons… anything you could possibly want if you were scum of the earth.
The place stank like an open privy, and the toilets were long since overflowing, as my bugs had determined.
So in a way, it was an open privy, though it had all the lights on, probably thanks to Squealer. There were car engines here and there, running off gas, that somehow, impossibly, hooked up to the electricity without any actual connection to anything. Which made no sense, but tinkers were bullshit.
I had no idea where Bryce was. Even after having heard him described, that didn't help as much as it should have, because of how thick the crowd was. My bugs couldn't get a good view at times, without being squashed or swatted away.
I was probably going right over him. But her description was… not bad at all. Just not enough that there weren't about four or five people who would fit it, and more than that if they'd shaved his head or done any number of things to obscure who he was.
And they did seem to be shaving a lot of the men they'd captured back there, chained up like galley slaves. It was disgusting, absolutely vile, and there were people who had OD'd and died, right on the premises, though nobody noticed, or if they noticed… nobody cared.
And into that, we were going to walk in, and then walk out. Use stealth and cleverness to free at least some of the slaves, and any that weren't freed? We'd hold them off while the innocents left and the guilty could get mauled for all I cared.
Rachel was waiting a way off, with three or four dogs. She was going to keep them ready for the attack. We weren't going to take any risks. Because I'd noticed a lot of drug patches around. Even more than they'd had before: if they got all of them on people, then we'd lose. It was that simple.
So we had to stop that Drug Tinker from ever starting with this bullshit in the first place. It was the only way.
So there I was, swaggering forward in a top with a push-up bra, that also showed my flat stomach, and ratty cast-off jeans that showed off my legs… not that there was not much to show off. I'd been too busy to shave my legs, and so it wasn't a pretty sight. But there was a lot of leg, and combined with the ratty faux-hippie jewelry and the look on my face that Stefanie said I got when I was focusing too hard on my bugs, I'd pass.
Franky was dressed in a dirty, disgusting hoodie, with jeans almost falling off his butt, with a knife that he had no idea how to use. Sierra had tried for something a little different, stained and faded clothing that looked like it'd been dragged through the mud just a little while ago. She was glaring at everyone, clearly ready to escape at any moment, but too scared to do so.
And Stefanie, even more out of place than Frankie, had stepped up to the plate with this tattered skirt and tank-top combination which honestly impressed the hell out of me, when paired with the fishnet stockings and the high heels. Impressed me with how very trashy and tasteless it was, that is.
But she looked good in them, so there was that.
We looked like real Merchants, which was the smallest compliment you could ever give a person.
Franky swaggered ahead of us as we went to the mall door, where a burly man who had one of the drug patches on his sleeve. Ready to be taken off and slapped on.
"Yo. Got the bands?" he asked when he saw us.
Franky held up his, and I held up mine. Stefanie hesitated and held up hers.
The man leered at me for a moment, and then reached out to grab my chest. I had to force myself not to punch him or cover him in bees, as he started to--
"Hey, back off. That's my bitch," Franky said. He didn't sound all that convincing, but the man stopped.
And now my chest hurt, because he'd basically just pawed at me. And I wanted to find somewhere and hide. God. Was this going to be a repeat theme when I was dressed like this?
"And what about the white bitch in the middle?"
"Slave. Thought I'd get in the market, y'know. Fuckers taste their own medicine and shit." Franky was slurring his words horribly. It sounded like something out of a stereotype of a gangster rap video, and that's probably where he'd gotten that accent. Though he wasn't exactly peppering the conversation with slang, which probably meant that he was too worried about using something the wrong way.
"Well, fair enough. Get in before I change my mind and fuck that tall white whore's mouth for payment t'let her in."
… when it came time to attack, I'd break my usual rule and make sure to sting him everywhere. I would replace his hopes and dreams with spiders.
"Nah, she'd…" Franky began, trying to think of something good, or rather bad, to say. But he took one look at me, and I realized I was baring my teeth and had to stop. After that one look, he just shook his head, and I tried to go back to faking being out of it as we stepped inside.
Stefanie coughed as smoke wafted over from a booth, and there were people just lying on the ground, high as heck. Everyone was badly dressed, whether on purpose or because of what had happened with Behemoth, and it was loud. Very, very loud.
"My sister here?" Franky asked.
"Is Bryce?" Sierra said at the same time.
"Don't know if I've found Bryce yet," I whispered, as we began to make our way through the mall. We needed to get behind that stage, and then maybe wrap around to that food court. I didn't know how we'd free them without drawing attention. None of us had hand-to-hand superpowers. "But your sister, Kayla, she's naked, with a bunch of the other girls."
Actually, the other girls were all comforting each other, trying to keep each other's spirits up. I wanted to save them, of course I did. Not all of the girls were naked. It seemed like the ones that had fought back had been stripped… and worse, for that matter.
"Oh god," Franky said, looking like he was going to be sick.
Hopefully everyone would think he was just overdoing it on the drugs, rather than that he was disgusted. Even though anyone and everyone should be.
"It's okay," one of them said, a tall white girl with blonde hair. "I'm sure…"
But the one they were all looking towards was a girl in the back, who wasn't moving much now. She was just staring at her hands. She had dark hair, and even my bugs could see that she was… well, beautiful.
"Stop saying that," Kayla said. "She said that, and look what they did to her."
The dark-haired girl looked up slightly, something dead and cold in her eyes, and then stepped forward. "We…" she began, her voice sounding as if it were hoarse and unused to words. It sounded, in fact, as if she'd screamed her head off just the day before. I could guess how. She was naked like many of the others, but she didn't seem to care. "We… we can do this together. We just have to wait for the right moment and.. and…"
Her words didn't even seem to be convincing her, but she looked around, and I could see through the bugs the looks of a person trying to pull themselves together. I… I wanted to help her. Whoever she was. Because she was trying. She walked around, and she whispered nothings, almost literally nothings, to each of them. How they'd get out of this together, and they'd need to find their time, how when the time came, they needed to listen to each other--
"A, are you okay?" Sierra asked.
"Why?" I asked.
"You're staring straight ahead, we've had to make you walk…"
"Just… distracted. So, do you see your brother?"
Stefanie was looking around. In her outfit, she'd made sure to put as many steel pellets as she could. Her goal was to clear the chaff in case they tried to rush us with such great numbers that I didn't have enough bugs on hand to disable them.
"Not yet," Sierra said.
The stage was ahead, and the girls were caged up and under watch to the right. People with clubs and guns were there, so they wouldn't have a good time if they tried anything.
There was a microphone on the stage, and room for dozens of people to stand, but right now it was empty. There were musicians here and there in the crowd, singing off-tune, but none of them were going to be up there. No, that was for Skidmark.
"I… see him."
I turned to see where she was pointing. A group of Merchants was stumbling out from around back, just where we'd been going to sneak. Now that I saw them, I knew which one it was, by her briefly pointing finger.
They'd shaved his head, but what was more important was that he was dressed in cast-offs, and… had a knife. And he was laughing, holding a bottle of alcohol in one hand, with a red bracelet on his arm.
"Oh," Sierra said, disappointment and fury both warring with each other. Of course she was disappointed, who wouldn't be?
I didn't know what she would have done, but instead the boy froze. he looked so young, and when he saw his sister, he looked even guiltier. He waved off his new friends and stumbled towards us, and as soon as he was close, he hissed, "Sierra, what are you doing here?!"
"No. What are you doing drinking? And palling around with Merchants."
"It was me or them," Bryce said, and then realized what that told me. "They… gave me these patches, and had me fight this other guy. I… won. And so they let me live. And I have power. More power than I ever had before."
"Power? Power? Joining the Merchants?" Sierra asked.
Franky looked like he wanted to punch the guy, but the young man bit his lip. "Maybe, but have you tried the power patches? It's just… amazing. It's like being a God. You don't have to listen to anyone else, because you… I won't turn you in if you leave now and don't ruin this for me, Sierra."
"Ruin it?" Stefanie asked. "Your sister came here to save you from raping murderers. She cared for you enough to risk a lot, and you're going to throw it back in her face?"
"Hey! I didn't ask her to come here, whoever you are. Yes, I was stolen away, and yes, some of the Merchants are assholes, but I've found friends, and I can leave whenever I want."
"Then leave now," I said, voice hard, aware that people were starting to glance at our group.
"No…" he said, shaking his head, his eyes pleading. "Listen, you know, Sierra…"
"I know? I don't know what the fuck I know," Sierra said. Stefanie winced at the language, but she wasn't going to correct it.
I was feeling betrayed, and wanted to just punch him in the stomach and drag him off to jail, or off to something other than standing here justifying what he was doing.
"You know what you should do instead?" I asked.
My bugs were starting to buzz, those that could. The fury gripped me so strong that I knew I had to either speak or punch. And if I bottled it up for even five seconds later, it wouldn't be a choice. This place stank of drugs and booze, the air was filled with smoke, it was loud and frustrating and my senses were almost overloading from just how many people I was having to track, and just how nauseating all of it was.
But what made me most sick was this boy in front of me.
I leaned in, my lips sliding against his face, as if I were going to kiss him. "Turn Sierra in," I whispered into his ear.
"What?"
"She's just some bitch, right? Like all of those other girls here that are going to be sold off and raped? She doesn't matter. You could rape her yourself, because what the fuck are the limitations of society? Have you raped anyone yet? I bet if you went over and asked, they'd beat one of those girls until they stopped crying and resisting, and then you could--"
"What, no?!" he insisted, trying to pull away.
"Maybe strangle her once you're done? Because why not? Then you can shoot up, or murder someone else. Who cares, what does it matter? Why do you care about your sister, she's just holding you back. Isn't that what power is about? To you, at least, you sick fuck."
My lips went down to his throat, as if I were about to give him a hickey. But if I bit his throat, it'd be to try to tear it out with my bare teeth. "Now's your chance. Now's your chance to justify raping women and murdering people as power. And if you're doing that, what does your sister matter? What does holding onto anything matter. You're not a parahuman, and I'm glad of it, you're just someone with a stupid little patch. So here's your chance. If you want to actually make a choice. Then turn us in, or leave with us. Because if you just choose to glide along, I'll count you the same as the rest of them."
Bryce looked torn, the utter nobody, and I pulled back a little. If he did try to turn us in, I'd make sure he was the first one to go down in a shower of bugs. I knew that Sierra was glaring at me, but she was also glaring even harder at him.
Franky looked like he was just as close to the edge.
Stefanie, Stefanie looked horrified, as if Bryce were a maggot who had just crawled out of her nose.
Bryce hesitated. "I--"
"Alright! Fuck-faces and snot-noses alike!" a voice yelled over a microphone. Everyone, not just us, turned straight to look at the stage as Skidmark slithered onto it, flanked by Squealer and the drug tinker. "It's your hosts! Skidmark, Squealer, and Dose! Stupid fucking name, but if you've been trying out some of the party favors, they're his!" Squealer shot him a look of jealousy.
Skidmark was carrying a large briefcase, which he set down on the ground. "So! Welcome to the first ever MerchFest! All you pieces of shit want money, you want fame, you want power! Well we have it for you! We're going to be starting out with a few… competitions. And the prizes are great. Some of Dose's little power doses for those who do something fun… or who enter a fight to the death! Free access to those whores over there if you pay a fee… or ownership of one if you win one of the fights!"
The fight? I realized what he was going to do. Some sort of parahuman gladiator games, using the patches to give powers. At least that meant that many of them were out of the way, and not in the hands of everyone around.
We were still badly outnumbered.
The Drug Tinker, Dose, was a tall, willowy haired man. He was white, and his dreadlocks looked very, very greasy. His costume was a stereotypical doctor's outfit, but with a strange pump attached to one of his arms, and a pocket almost spilling out with the power patches.
Him, Squealer, Skidmark, the two other Merchants, and anyone with a dose package. This was starting to seem like a bad idea. But… I had to save them.
"But there's a bigger prize if you shit-stains can earn it! A few lucky winners will be getting!" Skidmark held up the briefcase and opened it. There were eleven metallic canisters there, to fill twelve slots. One of the slots was empty, and on the inside of the stainless steel briefcase, I could see a strange symbol that looked a little like a horseshoe. It was… what?
"Perma-powers!"
I stared in blank horror. How the hell had Dose managed to make something like that? Was it true? Was it not? If it was true, then Dose was one of the most powerful Tinkers I'd ever heard of.
If it was true, then within a very short time, there might be eleven more Merchants… and dozens and dozens of more addicts to the mix.
Unless he was lying… I needed to act. And fast.
*****
A/N: Thanks to @NemoMarx .
Indirect mentions of rape, murder, and sexual assault. Indirectly depicted drug use. Brief, but directly depicted, sexual harassment. Murderous ideation.
'Day 4--' I'd written a few pages back. There were a lot of notes to make, and it wasn't going to write itself. The apartment smelled bad, but the original owners weren't anywhere around, and we'd moved stuff in there, made sure the lock worked, and otherwise made it the perfect place to serve as an observation station for Coil… and potentially for Accord as well.
At the moment, I had my head in my girlfriend's lap. It was silly, but it felt warm and safe, just… relaxing with her. She was running her fingers through my hair, and I didn't tell her to stop, even though it was distracting me. She was warm, and I was used to the way she smelled by now. She took a bath every day or two, but with the plumbing still in the works, it wasn't something that was easy to take every day, let alone twice.
I didn't need it. You got used to other people… and more than that, you grew to sort of…
Either way, I'd been more distracted before. The apartment was cozy, and there was a bed, and I felt way too safe.
I was two and a half blocks from Coil's base, which meant that it'd be pretty safe, and so it was a lot like the tent, and the shelter. Another place that we could be together, in different contexts. This one the most private and the most personal.
"Huh," I said.
"What?"
"More of Accord's men."
The base was actually pretty secure against bugs. It was as much as I could ask to get a few in, and Coil clearly did regular pest-disposal, one way or another. I could slip flies in, but in order to see the whole base at once, I'd need far too many bugs. He'd notice it, I knew he would, because he had to be sharp to get where he was. I mostly monitored the entrance, and occasionally listened into some of his men.
They were professional, well-trained, and knew nothing of his plans. But I had figured out the layout of the base, more or less, and I also knew that Coil was not the sort to confide in others.
Dinah was there too. Miserable and addicted to drugs, huddled, with nothing I could do to comfort her, not before I was ready to strike. I almost wanted to attack now, but… I had to think that Lisa knew something about what was going on, and until I was sure what the plan was, then attacking would just give me away.
But every time I watched her be hauled out to answer more questions--when she wasn't asked in Coil's office, which I'd never felt confident enough to bug--about capes and what would happen if thus and thus was done, I had to force myself to keep from acting.
"Fucker," Rachel said.
I agreed with her, honestly. Accord's men were creepy, and very insistent. They were talking about alliances, about trading answers from Dinah for unspecified goods and something called a traveler. Or maybe someone who traveled? I wasn't sure yet.
"Yeah. Another hour, then we go back and check up on stuff?" I asked.
We had a lot to do. Between this, and the patrols, and trying to run the camp, though Pelter really helped make it all easier… there was no free time that we didn't make for ourselves.
But I wanted to make free time, eventually. Because I felt as if I was changing, and things looked a lot different now.
People knew of me, through their love of Bitch.
...their sometimes untowards love. I'd remembered the feeling of watching Cassie, when I'd went to visit Rachel last week, early on in her work. It was so obvious that she was eyeing Rachel. That she was looking at Rachel's arms, strong and thick, or her stomach, which had meat on it besides the strong muscles when I pressed my fingers against it.
That she was looking at the strong legs, and perhaps imagining what it'd be like to…
Yes. Yes. It was jealousy. I could hardly blame her, since I shared that same fascination.
Despite that, and despite the discomfort I felt around Cassie, it seemed like I was finally getting somewhere, and not just with Rachel, like I'd felt before. It felt like I was finding my place in the world, and that this place came with something else.
I'd always asked my Mom why she wasn't a writer, or a poet, because she understood books so well. And she'd said, "There's never time."
It was true.
But this city, and this situation, and this world, it felt like something that I could write about, or read about or… something.
******
The press of flesh upon flesh as people went through the camps, brushing past each other, connected in ways that they couldn't know otherwise. At some point you had to start ignoring certain things. At some point you got used to baths being a thing that happens a few times a week, rather than every day. Once plumbing came, people would bathe more often, of course.
The way you ignored things extended beyond that of course. Life went on, and as my own experiences told me, life included… well. Sex. Going to the bathroom. Painful rashes. People having arguments with their best friend over some petty nonsense that ends in the two not talking for four days straight until you finally get to watch them make up with each other.
Rather more sex than you expected from a refugee camp. Of course, at a certain point, ignoring it sort of lost its luster.
Besides, in its own way, without being too much of a voyeur (when I saw sex coming, my bugs got out of there as fast as possible… if I saw it coming) it was probably a good thing.
It gave me a different view of the world. You got used to it, you just learned to accept it just like I accepted that my bugs were sometimes gross, weird things. Bluebottle flies and black widows and creepy crawlies of all kinds had a sort of fascination, and so did people.
If I wanted to write a novel, or make a poem, the camp could make ready material for a hundreds of characters or feuds or situations… however novels were written. I didn't really know how I'd even start, if I had the interest, but I felt like I could do it.
Of course, practicality was another thing that all of this drilled into you. Practicality and even more willingness to get dirty because that's where your bugs were all the time anyways.
Rachel was right, for instance: unhappiness meant unhappy poop. Just not only in dogs. And you could tell a lot about someone by how they felt or when they grouched or complained. We didn't have medicine enough, but I tried to help people to deal with that.
But of course, whatever fascinating revelations of human character there were (like the people who tried to grow a garden in the corner of the camp, which seemed doomed to failure) there was also the landscape.
The business district, all shattered steel beams, grey at one end and black as a burnt steak on the other, twisted and ugly things. Glass littered the streets at the outskirts of the business area, where it hadn't been totally leveled into a flat, black-grey hellscape, which still by the time two weeks had passed had begun to sprout green at places. Where all of the concrete was broken, a few strange people had actually planted soil and seeds, just out of… I didn't even know what.
The camp and its environs, which had once perhaps been one of the dingier parts of town, but now in the face of the chaos, the camp as a place looked less hodge-podge and more… varied. More like something alive and breathing. If smelly at times.
There were the territories under the Merchants, who seemed to be going for something so post-apocalyptic that some of their capes had leveled buildings that got in their way, and so the whole thing was crumbling, a warzone that we could only pierce carefully, because they had the numbers and force to at least make it tough.
But we'd find her, and we'd beat them back.
*****
Of course, honestly, all of this visceral stuff also included the overwhelming desire to try to find something sappy or erotic to write. To fill pages with Rachel's scent, and the feel of her body beneath mine, or on top of mine, of her legs splayed out, or wrapped around me, of her lips on my lips, her hands in my hands. Her throat in my mouth as I bit and plied it with kisses, the feel of her in the palm of my hands and the rough, thoughtless way that happened: it was only afterwards that it seemed…
Worthy of poems was the wrong word. It was only afterwards that poems were worthy of it. A thought that, when I had it, made me realize I was absolutely, insanely smitten to a degree that probably disgusted everyone around me, slightly.
They'd never say it, though, or comment on us holding hands, because I was Arachne and she was Bitch, saviors of the camp.
And what people from afar saw, especially those not from Brockton Bay, was a set of heroes. I sweated so much I had to take my costume off and clean it after the interview with that journalist. I was just… I hadn't ever talked to someone before who would not only give a shit about what I said, but would convey it to a bunch of other people. Except Emma, and that as an insult.
But my mask hid all of that, and I tried to be like Rachel was… only a little more talkative. I think I… okay. My instinct was that I clearly failed. My hope was that it worked out okay. Be cool, confident, and in control: it was how Coil managed his men, and Lung going after the Undersiders had turned out to be a giant mistake. Then he'd died.
And Rachel? Rachel didn't seem as if she ever doubted anything, even though I'd seen it before.
They didn't see the gross, visceral details.They didn't see the imperfections, and they didn't want me to see the imperfections.
Heck, they couldn't even see the rage building inside.
By the fourth day, I'd decided a few things. First, Coil needed to die, not merely "face justice." What justice would that be? The justice of a Protectorate that sends a person guilty of involuntary assault to prison for the rest of their life while making a fucking murderous psycho (and I'd decided that all of the bad stories about her online were probably true) into their hero, their symbol. She showed up in photo shoots, and if she'd not managed to die, she'd probably be on merch when she got older, as some sort of cool anti-hero. I'd been fooled by Shadow Stalker, if not by Sophia Hess.
I didn't trust the Protectorate and the Wards. People in it? Sure. Flechette seemed alright, Legend was an ideal hero, and there were probably plenty of people. But I couldn't trust it as a whole, as a body without its members, not after Canary and Shadow Stalker, two different shades of the same sorts of problems.
So, I was going to murder Coil. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to lay maggots in his eyes, I wanted him to die slowly when I saw the way Dinah clearly needed the drugs, the way she was helpless and desperate and afraid, and couldn't even know that I was there, that I cared. That I gave a shit about her. She was trapped in a goddamn locker, and there was no door.
When I thought about Dinah, it felt as if my range might as well be infinite.
Maggots in his eyes and spiders crawling down his throat. I wanted him to die screaming, and I wanted it to be known: I knew I wouldn't get what I wanted. I knew that torture was wrong, especially just to work off the frustration that a man like that had ever been alive in the first place. Maybe I wouldn't even get to kill him. But him, Skidmark and that weird tinker who made all of those pseudo-parahumans… they were on the list too.
Slavers and monsters who took people and chained them up, in different ways. People who collared what shouldn't be collared, who trapped what shouldn't be trapped, and thought they were taming it.
The bastards deserved a lot more than they'd get. Would Coil even be sent straight to the Birdcage, or Skidmark? As far as I knew, neither of them had ever been charged with anything, because they'd been too clever or lucky to get caught.
...not that the Birdcage was a good idea, but I understood it slightly more when I listened to the seething rage inside of me when I thought of some of the people out there. Just not the way it was being used.
*******
That's where I was, that Thursday, angry and frustrated in one sense, and yet happier and more content than I'd been in a long time. In three days, I would be sixteen. And sometime once the city was a little less broken, I'd get that GED and never look back. I had a plan, I had goals, I had ideas, and I had a future.
And I had a girlfriend.
All in all, I had an idea of where I was, where I was going, how I'd reach it, and what I'd find there.
That was Thursday, ten A.M, on June 9th, 2011.
Take a snapshot.
******
"Well," I said, looking at Greg. "You're certainly inspired."
"It's a GameBox. Of course I am! Once I get it, we can play together again," Greg said, firmly. One of the new families that had moved into the camp, what with the increasing prevalence of enough electricity to make sleeping in the apartments a little less of a chore, had a GameBox. And Greg wanted it.
I'd been watching him go from asking politely to begging to trying to gather enough things through hard work to trade them as if it were a video game.
Bartering was going to be hard, considering how rare a working one, with games, was in the camp. People got into big rows for less.
I wasn't going to tell him that the kid had offered to let me play it for a few minutes a day, when he'd somehow heard from someone that I liked playing games. Because then Greg would probably think of the clever idea of convincing the kid to donate it to me and then hoping he could beg me more effectively.
He'd probably be right, too. As it was, I did hope he succeeded. He'd been somewhat inept at most of the tasks, but he was learning. Slowly, but surely. He was easy to get distracted, so I had to hope that once he had a task, it'd…
Yep.
I had my mask off--by this point somehow the two identities had blended together so thoroughly that despite the fact that almost nobody knew my name was Taylor, there was no point in keeping it on--and so I offered him my best attempt at a smile and a thumbs up like he would have given me.
"Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Not sure how much spare time I'd have, but."
"You have tons," Greg whined, looking at me. I frowned at him, because of course, it wasn't free time. It was time with my girlfriend: it was freeing time, but not free time I could just change around the order on.
"Okay, no you don't, maybe. Stefanie told me that there can't be any compromises, or something like that. But I don't even know what that means," Greg said.
"I'm not sure either. Was it referring to Rachel?" I asked.
"Ehh, I think so."
Greg had been… well, pining after Stefanie for a while now. A week. It was moderately uncomfortable to witness, but at least she seemed to be letting him down gently… or. Actually, she seemed to be ignoring his crush, like I'd done. I wasn't sure if that was the smartest move, but what could I say.
"Well, then…" I began, only to pause. My bugs were spread out everywhere. Including large numbers of them in those fishbowls. I had a ton of bowls now, and of course plenty of the bugs died every time I went to sleep. Of course, they could also breed, given time and the right conditions, so I didn't think I'd have any limit on them.
Still, when you had three, three and a half blocks to cover, it did mean that you were…
There was this saying: strong everywhere, weak everywhere. I think Greg had quoted it at me once in reference to this one video game he'd been playing. If it actually came down to a fight, it'd take longer than expected to gather a huge swarm of bugs, and the greater my range, the harder it was to monitor everything and everyone within it.
But I was getting better at it, and so I did notice the girl approaching at the same time I noticed that two of the people in the camp were getting into a fight. I focused on these two events, as my bugs buzzed between them, breaking them up by sheer startelement.
People were getting used to bugs being around. I was even practicing a little with talking through them. I'd had this silly idea involving the dogs, Rachel, and my bugs. I did know that some sort of box, if it could be attached to the dogs, could be interesting.
We had the harnesses now, and the saddlebags, but a bug box? A mobile bug carrier? A lot of ideas occurred to me, far more than I had time to pursue.
But even though people were used to it, bugs getting in between a fist-fight meant that it was over.
I had to weaken my grid elsewhere, but it didn't matter that much.
I was working on interpreting sounds and smells even better now, so here is what I saw. She was white, with red dreadlocks down her neck, dressed in clothes that smelled as if they hadn't been washed in a week. She had on no jewelry, and her purse and her clothing both spoke to, if not being an adult, at least being very mature. It was the kind of purse you carried when you wanted something practical, and her clothes too were somewhere between practical and stylish.
She was silent as she moved, but her movements were slightly jerky, and she favored one leg a little bit. She was pretty, though not beautiful, and too thin. A little like me, and that wasn't a compliment.
From the way she was moving, she was definitely headed right for the camp, and from the way she wasn't darting around or carrying a backpack, she clearly had a purpose. She was too well-dressed to be a refugee in the sort where she fled without looking back or grabbing anything. We were seeing more of them, from the Merchants, and, it was said by some of them, from the Teeth.
She didn't look scared enough. If I could have somehow smelled through a dog, I could have probably told whether or not she was scared from that too. But bugs weren't designed to smell those kinds of things, even if I could have interpreted it.
"What is it?" Greg asked.
The two men broke up, swearing at each other, backing away with yelled insults, ones that I could just almost hear with my real ears. "Someone's here for me. Or for Pelter or Bitch."
"Oh! Uh, um, we can talk about this later? Can you figure out what he'd trade for it?"
"Maybe, sure. Hope things go well for you," I said, calling back as I ran to grab my mask and pull it on. I had a feeling that she wasn't searching for Taylor, but someone confident, someone whose face didn't give anything at all away, because it was hidden.
"Thanks!"
*******
I met her at the outskirts of the camp. Everyone saw me moving, and everyone had swollen over five hundred people, and looked to keep on heading upwards. As long as they stayed in range of my bugs, that was just fine. But nobody said anything, because they all assumed that I was cool and in control, rather than what was really going on, which was quite a bit of curiosity.
I wanted to see what she was here for.
The girl stopped in surprise when she saw me walking out to meet her. Girl? She was definitely older than me, now that I was looking at her eye to eye.
"Greetings, welcome to the Camp." There was no clever name, and I hadn't had the time or inclination to think of one.
"You're Arachne, right?" the woman asked. "I came here to ask for your help. And the help of any of the other capes here. I've heard there were a few of them?"
"Help? With what?" I asked, suspicious.
"My brother was taken away by the Merchants. But that's not what I thought you'd want to know."
"What is it? Also, you seem to have the best of me," I said. "What's your name."
"It's Sierra. But I've been listening to the street, and they've planned for a big party, this huge event, on Friday. A slave auction and everything." Sierra looked horrified and disgusted by that, and my own stomach churned. This was a chance. A chance to fulfill a promise and get someone back that the camp had lost.
This was a chance, and I nodded. "So, where is it?"
Already, an idea was forming, and it wasn't one that would be easy… but I think it'd work.
"You're going to help? You just met me."
"I'm a hero. Plus… once you hear the idea, you might not like it quite so much."
*******
Step one, borrow spray paint and people who know how to use it.
Step two, go on an ad hoc patrol in which we came in force, and then found each and every group of Merchants within four blocks of us and beat them to all hell and then tossed each group, naked, above a spray-painted sign that said: 'If you keep on coming here, you'll keep on coming back naked.'
This was what was known as a trick, a way to explain away what we were actually doing, which was getting clothing to infiltrate them tomorrow. It would mean going through all of the clothes we got and mixing and matching until we hadquite a few costumes.
******
"Really? This is what they wear?" Sierra asked, frowning at it.
"Yes. It is. So, tell me about your brother?" I said, glancing over at her, and then at Rachel, who was frowning even harder as she picked through it. I had to admit, none of it really fit her all that well.
Not merely physically, but as a style. I supposed she could go in the form of some greasy street punk who happened to be female, but--
"I'm not wearing any of this shit," Rachel said. "Unless I have to."
"You can… oh, that'd work. If you stuck close to where the big party was, you could burst in when we called you." I nodded at Rachel, adopting my plan as quickly as possible to her needs. It was what should be done, I thought. Sometimes. Maybe. "But, Sierra?"
"Things were normal, just a few weeks ago. I was in college, Bryce was in High School, and things were just going along like they normally were. But then the attack happened. I went with my brother, and we tried to stick together. But the Merchants were grabbing up everyone… and not just girls."
She frowned at that, not sure what it meant.
I had my suspicions, actually. It could be someone to use as a test-dummy for powers, or for the weird tinker things that were going down. It was as plausible as everything else. After all, they were restarting slavery and holding a huge party to celebrate how horrible they were. This was already crazy enough.
"Huh. Well, can you pretend well enough in this stuff?" I gestured to the pile of women's clothes. "You, me, and Pelter are all going to have to be dressed like this."
"And then who is… leading us?"
The plan was, some of us were going to be slaves for trade, that sort of thing, and some of us would be, uh. "Bitches" was the phrase a Merchant would probably use. Hanger-ons. One guy, three girls. We go in, find your brother, find Kayla and then get both of them out. And then we come back and attack them. Fuck them up. You can leave before that, with your brother and the girl. No need to get involved in a cape fight."
"Sounds good," Sierra said.
I just needed to tell Franky about it.
******
The teenager frowned at me. "Really? This is going to be rough…"
"Just, you know how to talk, right?" I asked, glad that he couldn't see my face.
"I guess I do… but it's sorta fucking disrespectful. But if it's for a good cause." Franky stretched a little. "And you're sure they'll buy it?"
"We have the bracelets. Pelter and I sexed in. But Sierra's going to be a slave you're going to sell off."
"Sierra?"
"We're going to save her brother," I said. "And you? You fought in. Red bracelet."
"Oh…" he said, wincing. "Well, fuck it." He gave an expansive shrug. "But please don't tell my parents what this involves. They wouldn't understand."
"I get that," I said. I wasn't going to tell Dad that I was going to be pretending to be a drugged up gang groupie who'd made her way in through having sex with a bunch of guys.
I wasn't going to tell him about any of that. Dad had actually showed up once more, to tell me about how things were going at the docks. We'd exchanged information as if we were both issuing reports to each other, and then we'd hugged, a little awkwardly. I'd invited him to dinner, and he'd told me 'next time.'
It was better than we'd interacted before, but it wasn't exactly the height of father-daughter relations. I was unsure about what to do to make it better, but maybe with more time apart we'd get more used to it and find ways around it.
"So, tomorrow…"
"Yes."
*******
They'd set themselves up in an old mall, actually. It was a mall even closer to death than the one that I'd always gone to. That one still had life, this one? I didn't know why it'd been made in the first place. It'd always been in a part of town that wasn't great, but apparently once it'd seemed like a good idea.
It was a squat, ugly building, the mall, and yet it was perfect for their purposes. There were only so many bugs I could use, but I still got a decent picture of the inside.
Hundred and hundreds of people, and in the center, the food court, they'd set up this giant stage, and they'd taken over two of the nearby food courts as the storage space for the slaves. One could tell who was where by the stage. Anyone behind it was either a slave, a helper, or a member.
Dose was with Skidmark and Squealer. Mush had been captured, and they hadn't gotten him back yet… no doubt it was a matter of time. But there were two others with them that seemed to be wearing costumes, and I couldn't quite place who they were. One of them was a fat woman with red hair that I hadn't seen around.
Maybe she was a new trigger? Either way, it was a packed crowd, and each store had been turned into a gallery of drugs, clothing, sex, weapons… anything you could possibly want if you were scum of the earth.
The place stank like an open privy, and the toilets were long since overflowing, as my bugs had determined.
So in a way, it was an open privy, though it had all the lights on, probably thanks to Squealer. There were car engines here and there, running off gas, that somehow, impossibly, hooked up to the electricity without any actual connection to anything. Which made no sense, but tinkers were bullshit.
I had no idea where Bryce was. Even after having heard him described, that didn't help as much as it should have, because of how thick the crowd was. My bugs couldn't get a good view at times, without being squashed or swatted away.
I was probably going right over him. But her description was… not bad at all. Just not enough that there weren't about four or five people who would fit it, and more than that if they'd shaved his head or done any number of things to obscure who he was.
And they did seem to be shaving a lot of the men they'd captured back there, chained up like galley slaves. It was disgusting, absolutely vile, and there were people who had OD'd and died, right on the premises, though nobody noticed, or if they noticed… nobody cared.
And into that, we were going to walk in, and then walk out. Use stealth and cleverness to free at least some of the slaves, and any that weren't freed? We'd hold them off while the innocents left and the guilty could get mauled for all I cared.
Rachel was waiting a way off, with three or four dogs. She was going to keep them ready for the attack. We weren't going to take any risks. Because I'd noticed a lot of drug patches around. Even more than they'd had before: if they got all of them on people, then we'd lose. It was that simple.
So we had to stop that Drug Tinker from ever starting with this bullshit in the first place. It was the only way.
So there I was, swaggering forward in a top with a push-up bra, that also showed my flat stomach, and ratty cast-off jeans that showed off my legs… not that there was not much to show off. I'd been too busy to shave my legs, and so it wasn't a pretty sight. But there was a lot of leg, and combined with the ratty faux-hippie jewelry and the look on my face that Stefanie said I got when I was focusing too hard on my bugs, I'd pass.
Franky was dressed in a dirty, disgusting hoodie, with jeans almost falling off his butt, with a knife that he had no idea how to use. Sierra had tried for something a little different, stained and faded clothing that looked like it'd been dragged through the mud just a little while ago. She was glaring at everyone, clearly ready to escape at any moment, but too scared to do so.
And Stefanie, even more out of place than Frankie, had stepped up to the plate with this tattered skirt and tank-top combination which honestly impressed the hell out of me, when paired with the fishnet stockings and the high heels. Impressed me with how very trashy and tasteless it was, that is.
But she looked good in them, so there was that.
We looked like real Merchants, which was the smallest compliment you could ever give a person.
Franky swaggered ahead of us as we went to the mall door, where a burly man who had one of the drug patches on his sleeve. Ready to be taken off and slapped on.
"Yo. Got the bands?" he asked when he saw us.
Franky held up his, and I held up mine. Stefanie hesitated and held up hers.
The man leered at me for a moment, and then reached out to grab my chest. I had to force myself not to punch him or cover him in bees, as he started to--
"Hey, back off. That's my bitch," Franky said. He didn't sound all that convincing, but the man stopped.
And now my chest hurt, because he'd basically just pawed at me. And I wanted to find somewhere and hide. God. Was this going to be a repeat theme when I was dressed like this?
"And what about the white bitch in the middle?"
"Slave. Thought I'd get in the market, y'know. Fuckers taste their own medicine and shit." Franky was slurring his words horribly. It sounded like something out of a stereotype of a gangster rap video, and that's probably where he'd gotten that accent. Though he wasn't exactly peppering the conversation with slang, which probably meant that he was too worried about using something the wrong way.
"Well, fair enough. Get in before I change my mind and fuck that tall white whore's mouth for payment t'let her in."
… when it came time to attack, I'd break my usual rule and make sure to sting him everywhere. I would replace his hopes and dreams with spiders.
"Nah, she'd…" Franky began, trying to think of something good, or rather bad, to say. But he took one look at me, and I realized I was baring my teeth and had to stop. After that one look, he just shook his head, and I tried to go back to faking being out of it as we stepped inside.
Stefanie coughed as smoke wafted over from a booth, and there were people just lying on the ground, high as heck. Everyone was badly dressed, whether on purpose or because of what had happened with Behemoth, and it was loud. Very, very loud.
"My sister here?" Franky asked.
"Is Bryce?" Sierra said at the same time.
"Don't know if I've found Bryce yet," I whispered, as we began to make our way through the mall. We needed to get behind that stage, and then maybe wrap around to that food court. I didn't know how we'd free them without drawing attention. None of us had hand-to-hand superpowers. "But your sister, Kayla, she's naked, with a bunch of the other girls."
Actually, the other girls were all comforting each other, trying to keep each other's spirits up. I wanted to save them, of course I did. Not all of the girls were naked. It seemed like the ones that had fought back had been stripped… and worse, for that matter.
"Oh god," Franky said, looking like he was going to be sick.
Hopefully everyone would think he was just overdoing it on the drugs, rather than that he was disgusted. Even though anyone and everyone should be.
"It's okay," one of them said, a tall white girl with blonde hair. "I'm sure…"
But the one they were all looking towards was a girl in the back, who wasn't moving much now. She was just staring at her hands. She had dark hair, and even my bugs could see that she was… well, beautiful.
"Stop saying that," Kayla said. "She said that, and look what they did to her."
The dark-haired girl looked up slightly, something dead and cold in her eyes, and then stepped forward. "We…" she began, her voice sounding as if it were hoarse and unused to words. It sounded, in fact, as if she'd screamed her head off just the day before. I could guess how. She was naked like many of the others, but she didn't seem to care. "We… we can do this together. We just have to wait for the right moment and.. and…"
Her words didn't even seem to be convincing her, but she looked around, and I could see through the bugs the looks of a person trying to pull themselves together. I… I wanted to help her. Whoever she was. Because she was trying. She walked around, and she whispered nothings, almost literally nothings, to each of them. How they'd get out of this together, and they'd need to find their time, how when the time came, they needed to listen to each other--
"A, are you okay?" Sierra asked.
"Why?" I asked.
"You're staring straight ahead, we've had to make you walk…"
"Just… distracted. So, do you see your brother?"
Stefanie was looking around. In her outfit, she'd made sure to put as many steel pellets as she could. Her goal was to clear the chaff in case they tried to rush us with such great numbers that I didn't have enough bugs on hand to disable them.
"Not yet," Sierra said.
The stage was ahead, and the girls were caged up and under watch to the right. People with clubs and guns were there, so they wouldn't have a good time if they tried anything.
There was a microphone on the stage, and room for dozens of people to stand, but right now it was empty. There were musicians here and there in the crowd, singing off-tune, but none of them were going to be up there. No, that was for Skidmark.
"I… see him."
I turned to see where she was pointing. A group of Merchants was stumbling out from around back, just where we'd been going to sneak. Now that I saw them, I knew which one it was, by her briefly pointing finger.
They'd shaved his head, but what was more important was that he was dressed in cast-offs, and… had a knife. And he was laughing, holding a bottle of alcohol in one hand, with a red bracelet on his arm.
"Oh," Sierra said, disappointment and fury both warring with each other. Of course she was disappointed, who wouldn't be?
I didn't know what she would have done, but instead the boy froze. he looked so young, and when he saw his sister, he looked even guiltier. He waved off his new friends and stumbled towards us, and as soon as he was close, he hissed, "Sierra, what are you doing here?!"
"No. What are you doing drinking? And palling around with Merchants."
"It was me or them," Bryce said, and then realized what that told me. "They… gave me these patches, and had me fight this other guy. I… won. And so they let me live. And I have power. More power than I ever had before."
"Power? Power? Joining the Merchants?" Sierra asked.
Franky looked like he wanted to punch the guy, but the young man bit his lip. "Maybe, but have you tried the power patches? It's just… amazing. It's like being a God. You don't have to listen to anyone else, because you… I won't turn you in if you leave now and don't ruin this for me, Sierra."
"Ruin it?" Stefanie asked. "Your sister came here to save you from raping murderers. She cared for you enough to risk a lot, and you're going to throw it back in her face?"
"Hey! I didn't ask her to come here, whoever you are. Yes, I was stolen away, and yes, some of the Merchants are assholes, but I've found friends, and I can leave whenever I want."
"Then leave now," I said, voice hard, aware that people were starting to glance at our group.
"No…" he said, shaking his head, his eyes pleading. "Listen, you know, Sierra…"
"I know? I don't know what the fuck I know," Sierra said. Stefanie winced at the language, but she wasn't going to correct it.
I was feeling betrayed, and wanted to just punch him in the stomach and drag him off to jail, or off to something other than standing here justifying what he was doing.
"You know what you should do instead?" I asked.
My bugs were starting to buzz, those that could. The fury gripped me so strong that I knew I had to either speak or punch. And if I bottled it up for even five seconds later, it wouldn't be a choice. This place stank of drugs and booze, the air was filled with smoke, it was loud and frustrating and my senses were almost overloading from just how many people I was having to track, and just how nauseating all of it was.
But what made me most sick was this boy in front of me.
I leaned in, my lips sliding against his face, as if I were going to kiss him. "Turn Sierra in," I whispered into his ear.
"What?"
"She's just some bitch, right? Like all of those other girls here that are going to be sold off and raped? She doesn't matter. You could rape her yourself, because what the fuck are the limitations of society? Have you raped anyone yet? I bet if you went over and asked, they'd beat one of those girls until they stopped crying and resisting, and then you could--"
"What, no?!" he insisted, trying to pull away.
"Maybe strangle her once you're done? Because why not? Then you can shoot up, or murder someone else. Who cares, what does it matter? Why do you care about your sister, she's just holding you back. Isn't that what power is about? To you, at least, you sick fuck."
My lips went down to his throat, as if I were about to give him a hickey. But if I bit his throat, it'd be to try to tear it out with my bare teeth. "Now's your chance. Now's your chance to justify raping women and murdering people as power. And if you're doing that, what does your sister matter? What does holding onto anything matter. You're not a parahuman, and I'm glad of it, you're just someone with a stupid little patch. So here's your chance. If you want to actually make a choice. Then turn us in, or leave with us. Because if you just choose to glide along, I'll count you the same as the rest of them."
Bryce looked torn, the utter nobody, and I pulled back a little. If he did try to turn us in, I'd make sure he was the first one to go down in a shower of bugs. I knew that Sierra was glaring at me, but she was also glaring even harder at him.
Franky looked like he was just as close to the edge.
Stefanie, Stefanie looked horrified, as if Bryce were a maggot who had just crawled out of her nose.
Bryce hesitated. "I--"
"Alright! Fuck-faces and snot-noses alike!" a voice yelled over a microphone. Everyone, not just us, turned straight to look at the stage as Skidmark slithered onto it, flanked by Squealer and the drug tinker. "It's your hosts! Skidmark, Squealer, and Dose! Stupid fucking name, but if you've been trying out some of the party favors, they're his!" Squealer shot him a look of jealousy.
Skidmark was carrying a large briefcase, which he set down on the ground. "So! Welcome to the first ever MerchFest! All you pieces of shit want money, you want fame, you want power! Well we have it for you! We're going to be starting out with a few… competitions. And the prizes are great. Some of Dose's little power doses for those who do something fun… or who enter a fight to the death! Free access to those whores over there if you pay a fee… or ownership of one if you win one of the fights!"
The fight? I realized what he was going to do. Some sort of parahuman gladiator games, using the patches to give powers. At least that meant that many of them were out of the way, and not in the hands of everyone around.
We were still badly outnumbered.
The Drug Tinker, Dose, was a tall, willowy haired man. He was white, and his dreadlocks looked very, very greasy. His costume was a stereotypical doctor's outfit, but with a strange pump attached to one of his arms, and a pocket almost spilling out with the power patches.
Him, Squealer, Skidmark, the two other Merchants, and anyone with a dose package. This was starting to seem like a bad idea. But… I had to save them.
"But there's a bigger prize if you shit-stains can earn it! A few lucky winners will be getting!" Skidmark held up the briefcase and opened it. There were eleven metallic canisters there, to fill twelve slots. One of the slots was empty, and on the inside of the stainless steel briefcase, I could see a strange symbol that looked a little like a horseshoe. It was… what?
"Perma-powers!"
I stared in blank horror. How the hell had Dose managed to make something like that? Was it true? Was it not? If it was true, then Dose was one of the most powerful Tinkers I'd ever heard of.
If it was true, then within a very short time, there might be eleven more Merchants… and dozens and dozens of more addicts to the mix.
Unless he was lying… I needed to act. And fast.
*****
A/N: Thanks to @NemoMarx .
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Dr. Mercurious
Strangest Person You Know
- Location
- New England
God. Fucking Damn. Taylor, I really hope whatever you do, it fucking hurts. A lot. Also, you give the best 'Reason You Suck' speeches.
BiasedMendicant
Rogue AI
- Location
- The Moon
Taylor is getting very vicious. I am conflicted, because on one hand, fuck Coil, on the other hand, If you're gonna kill someone just kill them and move one, there is no need for unnecessary cruelty.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Are you implying Rachel is anything less than the ideal role model? Heresy!
- Location
- It's a whole new world we live in
This is a very awkwardly phrased sentence. I think it's supposed to be "so did pelter", but even then it's a bit stilted.
huh, different mall (in Canon, it was the exact same one that she went to with her dad). Wonder what caused that divergence
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Merchants have been doing a little better even before the endbringer fight, and they have more muscle? So maybe they wanted a bigger venue.