1.1

Unsettling to realize that Ellisburg is only a few hours drive from Brockton Bay. Convenient for me, but unsettling nonetheless. If Nilbog ever decided to leave his fucked-up little refuge, Brockton Bay was at real risk from him.

Of course, that's part of why I'm here.

Right now I'm standing on way too many legs outside the wall around Ellisburg, or more accurately out in the forest surrounding the cleared area illuminated by spotlights, in the dead of night. I'm looking at the wall, trying to figure out if there's anyone or if it's as unmanned as it appears: I haven't seen anyone since I stopped following the interstate highway, just tons of signs warning people this is a restricted area, leave, turn around, go back, this is for your own protection, etc. That, and chain-link fencing through the woods with more of the same on it, but it was trivial to hop over that fence. Probably meant to prevent people from wandering too close to Ellisburg while hiking, or lost in the woods, or whatever. Not a serious barrier.

The reason I haven't made the leap already isn't that I'm concerned about guards. Information on Ellisburg is ridiculously thin, but I have an advantage: I can sense human presences, like an itch or uncomfortable warmth on the back of my neck, worse the more people are nearby. There's nobody in the area, or at least nobody on this side of the wall, not even Nilbog. Guards aren't a concern. I'm not even concerned about Nilbog's monsters... well, okay, a little concerned about them. It is possible my power won't be sufficient protection from them, but at this distance I'm almost confident they don't qualify as human.

Which is kind of the problem, really.

The thing is, I came out here expecting... I dunno, two dozen Protectorate capes, or rows of tanks. Or that Nilbog's minions would be sufficiently close to human to count, disturbing as the thought is. Either way, I was expecting... well, to have wasted my night, disappointed and relieved all at the same time, and returned to Brockton Bay having done nothing. Which sounds dumb, I know. But the plan is dumb, crazy. It won't work. It should, by all rights, kill me, accomplishing nothing except maybe provoking the king of monsters to war. So having an excuse to turn and leave? Tell myself I've done my due diligence? I actually kind of wanted one.

But I'm here, and the plan is looking disturbingly plausible.

I've been sitting here for... probably twenty minutes trying to psych myself up to actually go in. It's hard, harder than I thought. I just can't motivate myself.

Let's... try again.

I don't actually have unlimited time. (No sense of urgency)

That this needs to happen. (Well, yes, but does it have to be me?)

I want to improve the world, if I can. (There's other things I could do...)

Fuck the bitches, they haven't broken me.

I leap to the wall and climb it in near-total silence.

So here's the plan.

Step one: Enter Ellisburg.

Step two: Kill everything in Ellisburg.

Considering the Protectorate, the army, and everybody else -including some really overconfident villains- are scared to come within fifty miles of the place, you can maybe see why I'd have liked an excuse to not attempt this plan.

But here I am, perched on top of the wall.

First impression: what the fuck? The city looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, everything colorful and curved. It takes me a moment to shake off a conviction Nilbog's power somehow "cartoonifies" things. No, these are painted and shaped naturally. The wall is even painted to resemble a view of the horizon, as if the city isn't walled in at all. Even the trees are tended to, made to grow in curlicues and weirder.

Second impression: ugh, this city is big. It's a small town. Or it was, I should say. I'd been expecting it to be smaller. It's small enough I can see the wall at the far side of the town, but it's still bigger than I was really expecting, on some level. Big enough I'm worried this will take too long.

Third impression: People? Wait, what?

But then one of the 'people' looks at me and nothing happens. No sudden chill, no return to Taylor Hebert, ordinary schoolgirl, no drop from my perch. It's not human. One of Nilbog's monsters, wearing clothes and chewing on a bloody, feathery mass. It (she? Wearing a dress, anyway...) shrieks an alarm, and I boggle at how many things come boiling out of buildings, from under buildings, and even some right out of the ground.

But I'm not Taylor Hebert, The Bullied Girl. I'm the monster, and instincts suiting the descriptor uncoil, like a snake waiting to strike. And like a snake, I strike faster than the eye can follow. One moment I'm clinging to the top of the wall, the next I've punched holes through a dozen gribly nasties. One of them sprays some bizarre fluid all over the place, sizzling and scorching everything it touches, griblies included. It slides right off the lubricant covering my skin, which is a relief because I'd never even thought to test my protection against chemical attacks.

Moments later I've diced my way to what vaguely resembles a grotesquely fat man, shoving griblies onto the caustic liquid and also flames a different creature has vomited up as I go along. The fat man's reflexes catch me off guard, grabbing me out of the air when I leap, talons aimed at its face instead caught by an enormous hand. I respond by bending my body until my rear limbs can reach it, and tear at its guts. This doesn't accomplish much, beyond provoking it into trying to crush my limbs, but the dim sense of pressure I experience is like a pillow sitting on a hand. I twist and pull limbs out of its grip to give myself more maneuvering room, intending to slit its throat.

Unfortunately, something yet larger rams me before I can get the appropriate leverage, ripping me from the fat man's grip and sending me skittering through a mob of little child-monsters. In passing I punch holes through eyes, tear out throats, and snap limbs, and the instant my tumbling is manageable I leap at some kind of sheep/dragon hybrid. Unfortunately, its coat is tough and its scales tougher, its head is too high for me to jump at, and it isn't stupid enough to lean down into my reach, instead opting to vomit some kind of reddish goo all over me. Like the acid and fire before, it slides right off me with no apparent effect, but this stuff doesn't seem to do anything to the other creatures, either.

I abandon attacking the sheep-dragon in favor of grabbing a quadruped whose claws ooze green fluid, hurling it legs-first into the biggest concentration of creatures I can see, and then sprinting toward some hideous mother-creature that is eating the dead -one screams before its skull is crushed between outsized molars, so not just the dead- and unleashing fresh horrors from its nethers. Twenty more smaller creatures are killed or maimed as I run, but a tremendous worm with eyes set inside its tooth-lined jaw bursts out of the ground in front of me, too large for going around to be quick, big enough I don't want it ingesting me. If its insides are as tough as that sheep-dragon's outsides, getting back out might be a real problem.

So I shift gears, simultaneously pulling back and striking a charging whatever-the-hell so that its course shifts to the right and brings it directly into the worm-monster's mouth, rather than safely to one side. What appears to be orange blood spatters from the impact, though I can't tell which one is injured. It doesn't matter, I need to stop the recycler, and anything else like it, or else this will be impossible. To that end I scramble back to the worm and the charging creature, both still reeling, and successfully climb over them, incidentally producing dozens of puncture wounds and fending off smaller creatures trying to intercept me. The recycler is still at it, but this time I charge halfway and abruptly jerk to one side, dodging what appears to be a gargoyle swooping down from the sky from behind me, and then do my best to leap or climb over the tide of new monsters pouring out.

One of them explodes like a bomb, directly adjacent to me, and I'm launched into and through the wall of one of the surreal buildings, I think it used to be a house. I'm annoyed. I wasn't injured by that either, I don't even feel warm, but it's still an obstacle. For attempt number three I approach by impaling and then throwing the newborn griblies straight back at momma horror as I approach at a relatively sedate pace. In short order flesh is melting and spines have punched holes into her brain, but she doesn't stop, and I can see flesh filling in the worst of it already, so I abruptly close the remaining distance and cut, and cut, and cut until head separates from body and hits the ground, still chewing on a detached arm.

I don't have time to look for another recycler before something has pulled me into the air, gripping under a pair of my 'armpits', again coming in from the relatively small blindspot behind me. Is this luck, or canniness? Regardless, I flail while it attempts to tear at my carapace, but its claws find no purchase on the lubricated surface where mine stab, gouge, encircle and crush. I can't reach its wings, but eventually its grasping limbs are in no condition to hold me and I drop back to the ground level.

A gang of child-like gribblies move toward me as a coordinated group, faltering for a moment when six are dead before the first corpse has hit the ground. Then they literally dogpile me, focusing on getting a grip on me, trying to immobilize me, ignoring the injuries I heap upon them, ignoring how quickly they're dying. When other dangers approach, I slip limbs from their collective grasp, kill a few more, and leap aside as something huge falls on the entire crush. My focus is on a second recycler, this one resembling nothing I could name, scooping up bodies in what appears to be a sack made of skin while no obvious output occurs. I puzzle over its strangeness for a moment, and then rush it, ducking through an alley instead of taking the straightest route, scything through more little creatures, impaling one with a swelling head of fluid through the chest to hurl at the sack-thing, whereupon the swelling head pops, spraying the sack-thing to no effect. Grass shrivels where the fluid lands, and so does one of Nilbog's other minions caught in it, but the sack-thing just shoves everything into its sack, uncaring.

Nothing leaps out before I reach the sack-thing, and it only takes a couple stabs to the head for the thing to collapse, releasing a black-green cloud of something that billows out and downward. It's hard to see through, but I can hear hissing and crackling, seemingly from within the expanding cloud. More tellingly, the monsters closest to it are turning and running, which is the first time I've seen anything seriously scare any of them. So. Something really scary. And it's spreading, airborne. Given it's something Nilbog made...

Fuck, did I just release a plague?

Not a problem I can stab to death. Not a problem I can ignore on the assumption it can't touch me. It's a plague, it can go out beyond the walls. Fuck, there's a reason Alexandria hasn't come in swinging, why didn't I see that? I need to deal with this immediately, and I need to deal with it with what's on hand. Great.

I tear my way toward the last place I remember seeing fire, punching holes in more critters along the way, a few by simply stepping on them, until one of the child-like goblins screeches something and spits some kind of napalm at me. It slides right off the fluids on my skin, and the fire feels like a dim warmth anyway, but that's beside the point. I stab it through the chest and pull off a full-body spinning throw, hurling the thing straight into the cloud, and then pause (gutting three more critters lunging at me) to watch. After a few seconds I see an orange glow through the black cloud, largely obscured, which is probably doing something to the plague, but I'd been hoping for something more like an explosion, the entire cloud setting ablaze. Something fast.

A quick look around doesn't provide a lot of inspiration. Monsters are fleeing, there's a particularly large creature standing so tall only the lower part of it is within the cloud, and the flesh I glimpse through the cloud has been stripped to the point I can see chunks of white -bone?- but I'm not seeing anything useful. No acid, no fire, no exotic chemistry that I can see. Even so, I charge into a cluster of small, throwable gribblies, stabbing and tossing into the cloud, keeping an eye on how the cloud reacts. Ominously, nothing seems to be coming out of the cloud, in spite of how durable and persistent these things are. Is it a fast-acting toxin once breathed, in addition to being, apparently, a literally flesh-eating plague?

I resolve to stay out of the cloud's reach, in any event. I don't seem to breathe, but don't seem to isn't the same as don't, and there's no saying what a flesh-eating plague is going to do to my body. Maybe nothing, maybe exactly what it's doing to everything else. So I back off some more, stabbing gribblies and throwing them into the cloud.

Then something enormous swoops overhead and rakes the cloud with green flame, a good third of the cloud vanishing to reveal nothing but a dusting of grey-black ash coating everything previously obscured. I think I can see bones, here and there, but otherwise there's no sign anything ever lived in the area, not even grass. Unfortunately, the enormous thing -which looks entirely too much like a dragon, if a dragon from a children's cartoon, for my comfort- loops back around and tries to strafe me with the green fire, and I suddenly realize it was targeting me earlier. For the moment I'm too fast for it, but more of the little guys are dogpiling onto me, and so are some of the bigger ones, slowing me down, limiting my mobility.

Oh, and now there's another recycler, resembling an enormous blue-black bipedal pig -or something thereabouts- covered in warts and licking up the ash with a ridiculously long, flexible tongue. The warts are gestating gribblies, expanding until they abruptly pop, releasing a torrent of yellow-green fluid and still more bizarre creatures. It takes me a moment to notice the recycler is wearing overalls, distracted as I am generally, and the half-second I spend agog at this is immediately taken advantage of, two dozen fanged midgets simultaneously slamming down on me, followed immediately by reinforcements dogpiling onto me, everything chewing, clawing, or slamming into me while doing their best to pin me down. My initial assumption that the risk of friendly fire means I won't be targeted again is proven naive -the dragon-thing makes another strafing run on me, and while some of the gribblies are very obviously dead, others seem to hold up under the flame, and more alarmingly others start multiplying when ignited, making the problem of being buried in bodies worse.

As slippery and strong as I am, this is still a nightmare. I don't have leverage, reversing joints only helps if the limb has somewhere to go, and my second skin of fluid isn't much help when there's this many determined creatures holding me down with raw mass. Every time I get one off me, three take its place... or a single one four times its size. I'm having enormous difficulty even stabbing them under these circumstances, especially since they're finally taking the threat my limbs pose seriously.

Then they bring chains and rope and I realize I'm fucked if I don't get out now. Worse, they're talking. In English. I think they have been the whole time, at least some of them, and I just filtered it out, though their accents -yes, accents, plural- are so atrocious there's times I'm only guessing they spoke an actual word. Naturally, most of what I'm hearing is coordination among the gribblies, which explains a lot and now I feel like the stupidest person ever for thinking I could sneak in and assassinate Nilbog, like his creations weren't even a factor.

Intensifying my struggles just gets one of the bigger nasties slamming a fist with spined knuckles into one of my eyes. Not that it really hurts, but neither is it me escaping the dogpile. Then the first chain starts going around a limb and I try my damnedest to take advantage of an opening, but I'm so ineffectual it doesn't even piss them off. In way less time than I'd prefer, I'm trussed up and being dragged toward the center of town.

Apparently, they're taking me to "god-king" ("good king"? Their accents are atrocious) Nilbog.

Which is exactly where I want to go. Reach the source, kill the source. This... might actually be a good thing? If I'm fast, being seen by Nilbog turning me human might even be my opportunity to escape my bonds. Might get me killed, but... the gribblies have no idea I turn human when seen by a human. They won't be prepared for it. So, as long as I don't waste my chance...

I turn my focus on the dragon. It's watching me. I get the distinct impression that half of its attention is on the still-spreading death cloud, but it's watching me.

I stop struggling, go completely limp.

After a few seconds, it snorts, a burst of green fire appearing maybe a second afterward, and turns its attention to the death cloud.

Oh thank god.

1.2

I find myself wondering, briefly, where they got the chain. Then I decide I very probably would not like the answer and focus on my surroundings, keeping some focus on getting the chains a little less tight without being obvious about it. Don't want to distract the dragon from torching the plague.

In addition to the gribblies actually dragging me with the chains there's an ever-growing escort of yet stranger things, a good portion of them hopping from rooftop to rooftop to follow. Now that I'm not focused on simply killing them, I find myself surprised at what I'm seeing, in particular how many of them are a girly pink color, given that Nilbog is a man in... uh, his fifties? Forties? Sixties? Dammit, I didn't do enough research on this. They're girlier than I would expect of nightmare monstrosities, anyway. Though... maybe it's because he's an older man, alone aside from his creatures? An attempt to get some balance, mentally? Food for thought.

There's something more sinuous paralleling the group dragging me, moving via a road one block away. Between the distance, the buildings, and the gribblies between me and it I never catch more than a glimpse of it at a time, making it difficult to get the complete picture of what looks like, but it makes me think of a snake out of a herpetophobic's nightmares. That one concerns me. If it has the kind of strike speed actual snakes have, scaled to its size, it could hit me from a block away the instant I'm returned to being Taylor by Nilbog's sight.

I note that there doesn't seem to be any of the recyclers with this group. In fact, I'm pretty sure I see one lurching its way to where the death cloud was. I wonder if that's a sign of overconfidence. Maybe stupidity. Or maybe the recyclers are too valuable to risk being near a potential fight? Though they rushed right into the fight earlier, so maybe not. Or it's possible I'm overestimating my ability to tell the recyclers apart from the rest of them. There could be one mixed into this group and I just don't recognize it.

Finally we break into a clearing of a sort. There's ridiculously large tables that instantly put me in mind of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, in sheer scale but also in the table's shape and the whole layout's similarity to the ending, where the Grinch is cutting and serving meat. Chairs that look like someone took an ordinary, functional chair and then added Dr. Seuss bits to it and painted it a new color to obscure the hodgepodge nature, but not very well. It only occurs to me, seeing this now, that the entire town's distinctiveness is odd. Previously I'd half-ignored it, maybe assumed that Ellisburg was just a colorful place before Nilbog took over, but I wonder again if this is something he made happen. Something his creatures made happen? Now I'm wondering what the inside of his head looks like, that he's a parahuman who can create monstrous armies, a man of whatever age he is, and this is the aesthetic he chooses.

Or did he not choose it?

I'm also wondering where Nilbog is. There's an enormously obese man-creature at the head of the table, exactly where I'd expect Nilbog to be given his creatures seem to think of him as their king, but the man himself is nowhere to be found. I might be inclined to think the creature is him, but it's looking directly at me and I'm still the monster. I can feel him somewhere in the area, there's some human presence here, but it's not the fatman.

Then the fatman creature speaks, and it's the first thing that's sounded genuinely human here. The fuck.

"You know, I don't recognize this one at all." It leans halfway over the table to squint at me, while the procession continues to drag me closer. "Did Bella make this one? She's made so many mistakes lately." What? Then one of the things at the head of this formation speaks up, though I find it incomprehensible. My attention drawn to it, I notice it's got a fresh-looking cut across much of its head, though the bleeding is more sluggish than I would expect from a head wound. A participant in the fight, one that I failed to kill?

The fatman leans back and waves its weird, ugly arms in what I'm sure is a meaningful gesture to it. It just looks to me like it's losing its balance. It speaks again. "Oh, oh." It sounds slightly hurt. "I'm sorry to hear that." Hear what? "But if this isn't one of Bella's?... mayhap Cindy?" The lead thing shakes its head, says something that I'm guessing is a negative. The fatman's eyes turn back to me and narrow. Ugh. Little piggy eyes, the first time I've understood what the phrase means. "Well it has to be someone's mistake, citizens don't just grow on trees." Then it mutters something under its breath, I think I catch the word 'convenient', and then it's back to the projecting tone. "Ask around, find out who made it. We don't need this kind of mistake. Besides, this one is interesting! If we can get it some brothers or sisters, without the madness..." it looks vaguely upward as it trails off. Then it leans forward until its face is against a plate and starts eating with no hands, which honestly impresses me just because I didn't think it could lean forward far enough to get its head to the table like that. No idea what's on the plate, though it puts me in mind of purple gelatin at a glance.

I seriously have no idea what's going on. Did Nilbog have a robot revolution, only with his creatures instead of robots? He's not here, and this... thing is in charge, apparently.

The main thing I'm taking away from this is that this whatever-it-is doesn't think I'm a cape, an invasion from outside. It seems to think I'm... one of these creatures, I guess, but... rogue? Something like that?

I guess if you're creating creations that create creations errors tend to accumulate.

Now what? If Nilbog is dead... I can't kill him if he's already dead. And if they can replace him so readily -the fatman is apparently the good/god king Nilbog- then maybe killing him was never a good answer anyway. Ellisburg is still here. It's still filled with monsters. They're not dying off. Hell, it's the dead of winter right now and there's tons of the things.

... though now that I look around, a large part of the group that was dragging me has left. Most of the smallest, most gremlin-y things are gone, and some of the remainder are bundled up like they're in the arctic circle. So maybe they don't actually like the cold that much.

The fatman lifts away from the plate and looks at me again, frowning. Or I think it's a frown. The expressions are weird. Distorted. Like a cartoon character's exaggerated expressions, where the entire face changes in a completely boneless way, only it's on flesh and blood. Its eyes dart around for a moment. I suddenly have a bad feeling, but I stay still anyway. I need a plan. "They're alive, yes?" They're looking directly at Headwound as they ask. Headwound snaps what looks like an attempt at a salute, bounces over to me, and puts its hand on what could be mistaken for my neck. Then it turns and calls out what sounds to me like, "yuss, greet won. Haz poolse."

Wait, I have a pulse as the monster? Damn. I thought I didn't have blood at all. Something to keep in mind.

Fatman is squinting at me again.

Little gribblies start showing up and conferring with Headwound, before peeling off and entering houses. Well. Buildings, anyway. After twenty or so of them have talked to Headwound, the fatman rears up to its full sitting height -I haven't even seen legs on the thing- while tilting its head back enough that it is literally looking down its nose at us, and says, "Report!" Headwound snaps another salute -or maybe it's the Nazi heil thing, I honestly couldn't say- backs away from me, and calls back, "Noh-" yes, with an h in there, "-clam".

Now fatman is looking very hard at me. So hard it's tilting forward, I suspect unconsciously, getting a better look at me. Fatman starts speaking slowly, somewhat less loud than earlier, but not by any measure quietly. "Not born of any of those twenty. Three are dead. One couldn't have. The other two didn't, witnesses. No citizen did this." There's a pause. Then fatman says, slowly, with careful enunciation, "Organized rogues?" Headwound shakes his head, calls back "Not foh thee faze."

Fatman is looking at me again.

I can see gears grinding, rusty in its head. I can practically taste the rust. It hasn't thought this hard in... years? A decade? How old is this thing?

Then its eyes snap wide open, it rears up, and it bellows, "Intruder!"

I'm slipping out of the chains and have already cut down Headwound partway through the 'n' in 'intruder', and am actually decently prepared for the gribblies in the buildings to come pouring out. For starters, I hook one limb through a segment of chain and start swinging it like a flail. I partially repeat this trick by hooking into other chains, but arranging to throw them, one of them at the fatman, who shrieks like a two-year-old girl told spiders had laid eggs in her toothpaste and they were now burrowing into her brain. (Fuck Aunt Lyla) I half-expect the fatman to fall over onto its back from the reaction. I'm surprised when it doesn't, instead stopping at a 90 degree angle. Odd.

I'm also mostly prepared for things to come out of the ground. There was the worm thing earlier. As soon as I've removed/grabbed/thrown all the chains, I leap directly to the roof of a building. Nilbog's creatures don't seem to like damaging the infrastructure, so maybe they'll be more careful attacking me, give me space to breathe, so to speak.

I'm not prepared for the dragon -wait, is it pink?- from earlier to belch a cloud onto the building. More precisely, I'm not prepared for what happens when the building erupts into flames: a half dozen gribblies that climbed onto the roof in pursuit start multiplying into a dozen, two dozen, fifty...

I jump to a different building, irritated at forgetting about this breed, ignoring the shriek from the fatman. The fatman seems to be alternating between attempting to cower -badly, given its tremendous bulk- and making incoherent demands to, "Get them!" or, "Protect your king!" The roof promptly collapses under my weight, forcing me to scramble out and through a window, cutting in half what appears to be a worm laying on a couch in passing. The worm's segments both regenerate such that there's two full-sized worms, and I make another jump to a different rooftop, only to be intercepted mid-flight by a dozen harpy-esque creatures, which claw, bite, and defecate on me. I'm left reeling more by the emotional affront than by any physical threat they pose, and the time it takes me to get over myself costs me when another worm-thing bursts up and out of the ground and bites down and around me, taking three of the harpy things too.

I scramble toward the closed mouth, absently punching holes through the skulls of the harpies, and attempt to pry it open. No go. I have a dim awareness that 'down' is changing, and I can hear sounds I don't really want to think about. I attempt to burrow through what I'm pretty sure is the roof of the mouth, but while the flesh gives way readily enough I rapidly hit bone -or whatever- and though I leave marks, they're shallower than I'd prefer. I try the opposite side briefly, just in case I'm simply disoriented, but it has the same outcome. A glance at the harpies shows they've already vanished, apparently dragged by the throat musculature to, presumably, the stomach.

I take a closer look at the... lips? There's no teeth, but there's a crease or seam that's presumably where I can expect a hole to appear when it opens its mouth. I thrust a limb at it, and it penetrates to the outside easily. I jam more limbs through and try again to pry open the mouth, but aside from what I think is a pained grumbling, nothing happens. When I retract the limbs, the flesh seals over nearly instantly. Damn. I'd hoped to at least see outside, maybe plan a little.

I ponder briefly the idea of going deeper down the throat.

I reject it as a dumb plan, only good if I decide I'd like to die. No.

I return my attention to one of the points I've previously cut to bone. I pause when I notice the flesh hasn't healed over, and the gouges in the bone are still there. Excellent. I return to slicing and stabbing with a renewed vigor, or at least renewed focus. The work is slow-going, but after some interminable period I abruptly find a limb buried halfway up through the bone, in the middle of something. The 'room' shakes, but the mouth is still closed. I widen the hole, the room shakes some more. I stick multiple limbs in and spin them around, and watch gray matter and purple fluid spurt out of the hole before the mouth jerks open in a shriek.

I'm out as fast as I can, not wanting to risk the thing dying, mouth sealed shut, with me trapped inside. I'm not so concerned about dying at this point (Mystery plague aside, I've never been in any real danger thus far) but I've provoked Nilbog -or whatever that creature is- now, and I don't want to vanish for some number of hours, digging my way out of a dead worm, only to discover Elisburg has been nuked and half the US has been killed by his army by the time I'm loose. I need to keep his attention on me.

Thankfully, I'm still in sight of the Dr. Seuss table. It's also clear to me that, yes, the griblies have been gearing up for war. I can see griblies picking up haphazard, jagged chunks of metal that could be mistaken for a knife or sword if one squinted, while other griblies seem to be wearing armor now. Even some of the less humanoid creatures have been kitted out, though mostly with a marking painted on that I've been I seeing all over the place, rather than armor or weapons.

It takes me a long, long time to realize the marking -I've actually been seeing it on buildings the whole time- is a meaningful design, an ugly attempt at drawing a pig-like face with a child's crude attempt at a crown atop it, replicated faithfully a hundred times over. It literally looks like a five-year-old had been told what a pig looks like, sat down and drew it with a crown, and then that was photocopied. The result is surreal.

I make my way back to the Dr. Seuss table as stealthily as I can while punching holes in griblies without being noticed, something nagging at me. It's not until I can hear the fatman talking in that weirdly human that the thought coalesces.

Why could I feel a human presence in the area?

I'm feeling it again, that's what's bothering me. I stopped feeling it at some point inside the worm, but my attention was on other things. At some point in closing on the square, the sensation returned, and I'm pretty sure I'm coming from a different direction than the one I was dragged in from.

There is a human being in or near the square. This human has either gone completely unnoticed by all of Nilbog's creatures, even though there's hundreds -thousands?- of the things, they can burrow and fly, and they come in such a dizzying array I'd be amazed if any form of invisibility was simultaneously proof against all of them... or Nilbog is still alive, but hidden.

My first instinct is to think the fatman is a decoy. It's the only creature that's had a voice that wasn't at least vaguely animal, it's the obvious exception, and if it were me I'd take advantage of that assumption, let my foes convince themselves they were clever for figuring out that the fatman is my... puppet? Representative? I'm not sure what's going on there. Whatever, if it were me, it would be a deliberate fake, something that looks like it has to be me but would actually be a decoy.

But I've been through a decent chunk of this city and fought a fair few of Nilbog's creations, and I haven't seen anything resembling camouflage. The creatures are still and silent when they want to be, but they don't blend in, and they don't try to. Listening to the furious speech the fatman is giving-

"... DARE to violate a sacred trust, impugn the name of a king named by God, we will punish them! A holy war is upon them..."

-in conjunction with the city... no, I'm thinking that's Nilbog. There's no subtlety here, no tact or forethought. The city is childish and childlike, and if it covers a lethal truth it's not because the designer is lulling his enemies into a false sense of security. I think... the fatman isn't a decoy, but a security blanket, protection from a scary world.

I haven't seen the fatman move from its position. When it started to fall over, it stopped halfway, abruptly. I'm thinking it's rooted in place.

I'm thinking Nilbog -the man- is inside the fatman. Like someone in a mascot outfit, but made of flesh, maybe even able to move on its own to complete the illusion.

I'm maybe half a block away from the fatman when something rumbles behind me, to my left, and suddenly all eyes are on me. I jolt into motion, determined to get to the fatman and tear it open before I get dogpiled again, and the fatman shrieks out something to the effect of, "Get them!" This time, I'm keeping my head angled so I can pay attention to what's coming behind me, so when a furry, serpentine form lunges out a window not long after I pass, I'm ready and jump straight up. My intention is to land on it, but it's faster than I expect, clipping me on my way up and turning my leap into a flailing rotation, gone and past before I can take a stab at it. Then bullets are skipping off my skin.

It takes me a second to realize that, no, the gribblies aren't holding Tommy guns or anything. The "bullets" are supersonic spikes of bone -I think- being fired by I-don't-want-to-know means from a pair of oversized mantis-like things. I wonder for a crazy second where they're getting their ammunition, but then my focus is on ensuring I land cleanly, which is complicated by the barrage. I'm still not feeling anything resembling pain, but the force of the blows is taking control of my tumble away from me. I land in an untidy heap, three-quarters of the way to being upside down, only barely managing to stab a gribbly through the head before it can do whatever it was intending to do, clearly trying to be where I'd land.

Then its head bursts into a bizarre, flickering lightshow, and I have a stump.

Shit.

I scramble to right myself -there's not actually much of a difference between rightside-up and upside-down for me but there is a difference- stumbling for a split-second when one limb doesn't touch ground when I expect it to. I adjust quickly, more quickly than I'd expect to adjust to losing half a limb, but in addition to that delay, I'm having to pay attention now. Before, I could be a dervish, spot movement, stab movement. Now I need to figure out what's coming, then stab appropriate targets.

I decide to assume if I see one distinctive feature it's probably the gribbly's only distinctive feature. If it spits fire, I'm probably safe. If I don't know what it does, throw other things at it, things I do know what they do. I have no proof this is true, but if it's not I'm pretty sure I'm fucked regardless. I also haven't seen anything display more than one exotic capability thus far. It might be some kind of limit on Nilbog's creations.

I start by ducking, and then impaling the serpentine thing from before as it passes. It's still faster than I'm thinking -I was going for its head and got it something like three feet behind its head- and I'm jerked a couple of feet backward by the motion, but then I get traction and we both come to a dead halt. The serpentine thing doesn't like that, flailing and squeaking -wait, squeaking?- and I repeat my rotation throw trick, aiming it at a squad of gribblies that maybe look like the one that took a chunk from me. One of them bursts like a balloon, spraying a yellow fluid all over everything, but the rest just get knocked over. Not quite as effective as I was hoping, but then I realize the yellow fluid has glued the flying thing to the ground and four of the gribblies I threw it at and feel better.

I circle around the area as best I can, wary now of the unknown, and jump onto something charging headlong at me, stab it where I'm guessing its brain is a half-dozen times, and leap off in one motion, making my way toward the fatman. I'm impressed at how high the notes he's hitting are. I don't think I can hit those notes. Then I wonder for a moment exactly how my hearing works as the monster -I don't seem to have ears- but put it aside and impale the nearest gribbly and throw it at the fatman, aiming roughly for his head. The gribbly bursts into flame in midair and falls well short. Then it gets up and runs at me.

Well. I'm still pretty sure I'm fireproof anyway.

I ignore that gribbly, dodge around three more big, slow creatures that can't turn fast enough to track me, climb over another one, every step a deliberate cutting motion, leap to the nearest rooftop, duck under a dive from something with three pairs of wings, leap from there into the square, and am promptly slammed into from below by something burrowing out of the ground so fast it not only launches me into the air but gets some airtime of its own. It reminds me of a whale breaching, only when it hits the ground on its back it doesn't go through the surface and begins flailing. I'm still trying to get control of my fall, wishing I had a flight power, when the pink dragon from before and two weird things move in concert to grab me out of the air, jaws all clamped shut over my limbs.

They proceed to have a midair game of tug-of-war, like dogs fighting over a chewtoy. I find myself wondering exactly how durable I am. I'm not feeling any pain, but it occurs to me that I didn't feel anything when I lost half a limb, nor have I felt anything when I've unthinkingly smacked it into things as part of my stabbing motions. Maybe the lack of pain isn't proof I'm safe. Maybe I'm just incapable of feeling pain, even when I'm taking damage.

The stump has a little give, I notice. Not as securely held as the other limbs. I wriggle it, trying to get it out. No go. I jerk, twist, and flail my whole body as best I can, and feel it move a little. I stop for a moment, pay attention to the tug-of-war, and jerk myself in as much of a full-body motion as I can at the same moment that I'm being pulled away from the mouth holding that limb, and it pops out. It doesn't look damaged, not any more than being severed anyway. Distractedly, I even notice it just sort of... ends. No blood, no evidence of bone or veins. Just a flat blue cap. Odd. How do I have a pulse?

Then I smack it into the eye of the thing that was holding it. It blinks, snorts, and narrows its eye at me, but it doesn't let go of the other limbs it has. I contort myself and arrange to smack it at the base of its near wing, the right one, and I'm surprised to hear something tear. I can see the membrane of the wing has torn. How the hell did I tear it? This thing is the size of a bus, if that kind of force can tear its wings it shouldn't be able to fly!

That's about as far as I get in my thoughts before things get very chaotic very fast.

The thing with the torn wing struggles, loses a bit of height, flaps harder. The tear widens abruptly, it loses more height, it flaps harder, the tear worsens. It doesn't let go of me, and its rapidly worsening condition causes the whole flight to start losing height. The other two fliers respond to this by clamping down on me and diving, which turns into a spiral motion. It's only after we've been going down for a few seconds, no impact, that I finally notice how high we are, how high we must have been when this started. Then the wing that's tearing snaps in half, the creature collides with the pink dragon suddenly, the pink dragon opens its mouth and turns to bite at the creature with the broken wing, and I'm instantly tearing at the face of the last one. It's like its face is made of iron, but I can cut iron, so that just makes my work slow, which is a problem because it straightens its dive out... not to regain height, but to go straight toward the ground.

I am unable to make it let go before impact.

I still don't feel anything. I have to fight a momentary conviction that I'm seriously injured, force myself to actually check.

The iron-faced thing is either dead or unconscious. It's bleeding, and its blood is spontaneously bursting into flame, its body unmoving. More importantly, it's let go of me. I'm fine, as far as I can tell. I still don't have any other injuries. Just missing half of one limb.

I stick to a momentary glance. I don't need to come under attack by Nilbog's creations while I'm at the bottom of what amounts to a crater because I'm spending too much time checking myself for injuries. Hopefully I'm fine. I scramble up the body of iron-face, just to have an extra layer between me and the burrowing creatures, and take stock.

Yeah, there's creatures. They're looking at me and the iron-faced thing, not doing anything. I glance around, spot something big lumbering this way that reminds me of the recyclers, and then realize I have no idea where the Dr. Seuss table is. What part of the city am I in?

I jump to the surface of a building, going over the crowd of gribblies. I'm surprised when none of them attack me, shift my focus. Climb higher, look around, get a view. The building I'm on is too short, a one-story house. I spot a church in the distance and scramble that way, expecting to come under attack at any moment, but nothing happens. When I climb the church I circle around the bell tower, looking in every direction, and spot what looks to me like the right area. It's the largest area clear of buildings anyway. I scramble across rooftops toward the location.

Maybe halfway there the pink dragon has returned, trumpeting immediately after clearly spotting me, and suddenly gribblies are boiling out of buildings, converging on me. I stab, slice, and throw, but with more care than I'd prefer, still wary of whatever happened earlier. I hold off on the temptation to skip paying attention, to just slice and move, though it's a strong temptation, up until I throw something shrieking unendingly into a lizard-boy creature and they both vanish with a pop! along with a chunk of the ground under them and the parts of nearby gribblies in a roughly spherical area. That focuses my conviction. Confirm, then stab. Stay away from the unknowns.

I reach the next roof edge, initially intending to leap across, but change my mind and leap down and through a window a floor down. It surprises me to find it empty of glass, but I run through someone's trashed-out living room and leap out the next window, this time to climb up the wall of the next building and scramble across the rooftop. I dart off to the right and leap to the next building, stabbing something like a lit candle and tossing it in the direction of the pink dragon, but it goes over -lighter than I'd thought?- without the dragon even reacting.

Abruptly I'm bathed in blinding light, as a woman calls out via loudspeaker, "Unknown parahuman, this is a restricted area. Leave immediately, or lethal force will be authorized. This is your only warning."

1.3

It takes me a few seconds to realize I haven't reverted to Taylor, even as I scramble to get away from the spotlight. Why am I still the monster?

Then I realize I don't sense a human presence at all. If I had, they might not have surprised me. The light, the voice, it's not a helicopter flown by people, which is what I'd first assumed. It's being remote-controlled. I guess seeing me via camera doesn't count?

Interesting.

I'll keep that mind for the future, but for the moment I slip past and stab a half dozen times at something large, round, and largely featureless. The thing vibrates briefly and oozes red fluid, but otherwise doesn't seem to react. I put it out of my mind, jump to another rooftop, and then the roof explodes.

That's not a figurative statement. There's a split-second of a whistling noise beforehand, but otherwise as far as I can tell the building detonated for no apparent reason, hurling me into the air, spinning wildly and doing my best to maim flying critters passing too close to me. Before I can fully get my bearings, the spotlight is on me again and I'm suddenly spinning more crazily. I spend a brief moment thankful I seem incapable of nausea as the monster, and try to right myself before I touch the ground, but then the whistling occurs again, I catch a glimpse of something, and then the world explodes and I slam into and through the side of another building. I have a heartstopping moment, surrounded by gore, where I'm convinced I've finally been injured, yet I still feel barely anything, but then I double-check myself and find no new damage. Is the fluid maybe a bit thinner? Am I imagining that?

A glance around suggests I actually splattered something of Nilbog's by slamming into it. I can see a detached head, still moving a little. The spotlight returns briefly, but doesn't linger, and nothing else happens. It's only when I feel relief at the lack that I realize: they were shooting me.

I guess they meant it when they said I'd only get the one warning.

I start to shake off what gore hasn't already slid off on its own, but then pause in thought. The light was on me briefly, but then left. Did they overlook me, covered in meat? I try to rub some more of it on me, but nothing sticks, my attempt instead sloughing off more of what is already on me. Damn. I peek out a window, trying to get a view on whatever has the spotlight and presumably guns, and spot what I'm guessing is it sweeping the spotlight nearby. It looks like a stylized, metallic dragon, bristling with weapons that somehow fit the aesthetic, contribute to the look of a dragon rather than detract.

... that's Dragon, isn't it. Greatest tinker in the world, armed the PRT basically single-handedly, makes every other gear-based cape green with envy. Isn't she Canadian? This is US territory, isn't it? I was half-expecting, in the back of my head, for maybe Legend to show up if things went really awry -we're not that far from New York and he can fly around the world in minutes- but... Dragon?

A gribbly armored with trash can lids and a bucket for a helmet pops around the hole in the wall I came through and I stab it in the head before it can shriek. Thankfully, it doesn't do anything exotic in reaction, though I berate myself for my overly twitchy trigger finger anyway as it falls over dead. I watch the... I guess this is one of Dragon's suits? I watch Dragon's suit for a minute, taking it in, feeling like I'm missing something important.

After a minute it occurs to me that the flying creatures are ignoring it.

My first thought, before anything else, is that Dragon's suit has... I dunno, a stealth system keyed to Nilbog's stuff. Then logic kicks in and I realize if she could do that, she could deal with Nilbog singlehandedly. Worse, I can tell, paying closer attention, that the flying creatures are giving the suit the same kind of respect they give Nilbog's own big fliers, avoiding flying too close to it. They know it's there, but they aren't attacking it, and it's not attacking them. It -she- is hunting me. Just me.

Words fail me. I stab another gribbly, this one melting the floor underneath it with acid blood. The acid slides right off me.

Dragon is... working with Nilbog?

I can't wrap my brain around this. I can't think of an alternate explanation.

Then -stab through the enormous eyeball of something, ignore it rearing back shrieking- it occurs to me something more ominous.

Do people... the government, the Protectorate, the PRT, I dunno who exactly... do people know Dragon is working with Nilbog? Is this some kind of conspiracy? What possible reason could people have for tolerating Nilbog's continued existence, let alone working with him? He killed an entire city!

No no, that's a worst case scenario, don't make assumptions. Dragon is an incredible tinker, the best tinker. It's possible this is a secret, somehow.

Still disturbing, to imagine the woman who provides the PRT its tools is allied with Nilbog. I might need to look into her at some point.

Focus. Nilbog's creations are going to properly find me any second now, Dragon is hunting for me, and I still need to kill Nilbog. If Dragon is allied with Nilbog, that makes it even more important I get it done tonight. If I leave tonight, intending to come back another day, the whole place might be fortified with tinkertech, with Nilbog's creatures better prepared for me.

I slip past the howling thing I stabbed through an eye -its only eye, as it turns out- stabbing at the back of one leg in passing, where I'd expect a tendon to be if they were human. There's no particular effect, but that's fine, my focus is on getting to Nilbog. I can't hop rooftops with Dragon hunting me and shit the spotlight is on me again.

This time, half-listening for it, I catch the whistling a full second ahead of impact. Watching for it, I see something streaking my way, the rear of it glowing blue. I try to dodge, and I think I even succeed, inasmuch as the rocket -I'm guessing- doesn't directly impact me, but it explodes almost on top of me anyway, slamming me into the shell of something the size of a car. Before I can peel myself out of the crater in its carapace, the spotlight is on me, and the instant I'm away from the creature my limbs are suddenly hopelessly unreliable while I'm assaulted with a barrage of noise. Then the world is suddenly a brilliant, piercing yellow. For the first time I can remember, I'm completely blind as the monster.

The effect fades after what I'm pretty sure is just a few seconds, I realize I feel like someone sitting in a too-hot bathtub, and I see that the ground around me is literally molten. The air is visibly rippling from the heat.

Holy shit. I just shrugged off that? I don't even have lingering spots of yellow in my vision.

Then my limbs are out of my control again alongside the cavalcade of sound, and I finally realize I'm being sprayed with machine gun fire. It barely feels like anything, I had no idea what was going on.

"Unknown parahuman, extreme measures will be authorized in five minutes if you do not leave immediately. This is your final warning."

Extreme measures? This wasn't extreme?

I actually felt the heat from the laser or whatever. If that's anything to go by, Dragon's suit probably can kill me.

I decide, in a split-second, that I care more about killing Nilbog than I do about escaping alive. I rush to cover as best I can, stabbing, slicing, and throwing Nilbog's creatures as I go along without bothering to make sure it's safe to attack them. I have no time for this. Something burrows from underneath me, but I turn the push into a jump and don't even bother to try to control my tumble, expecting to be sprayed with bullets anyway. Expectation met in a roar of noise, I hit the ground, roll to my feet (Well, claws) without stumbling, and run flat-out as best I can at an angle that's in the general direction of Nilbog's location while putting taller buildings between me and Dragon, still killing Nilbog's creations as best I can along the way.

The suit flies closer until the buildings are no longer in its line of fire, and the world turns bright yellow again. I keep running as best I can, half-hoping to escape the firing zone, but when the world is no longer yellow again there's a trail of flame behind me and no sign of the effect itself. I want to say this felt a little hotter than the last time, like grabbing a too-hot panhandle for a second, but I'm not sure and have no way of knowing whether heat is simply accumulating or if Dragon amped up the power of the shot. I duck, dodge, and sidestep past larger creatures for a few seconds, hit an area relatively clear of creatures, and the world lights up yellow again. I keep running, then try weaving drunkenly. When the effect cuts out, I have no time to react before I slam into -and bounce off of- the leg of something enormous, at which point I duck between the thing's legs, running underneath its tremendous bulk, hoping it doesn't decide to just drop while I'm under it. When I come out the other side, the instant I'm in another relative clearing of creatures there's the whistling followed by the explosion. This time I focus less on dodging per se and more on trying to ensure the explosion launches me toward Nilbog. It even works. In fact, when I hit the ground -blinded by yellow again, starting to feel itchy- and after I'm no longer blind, I realize I'm maybe two blocks from Nilbog's location. I can sense a human presence again!

I run, and on impulse I stick close to the gribblies and larger things, attacking as best as I can without substantially slowing myself down. Dragon doesn't shoot me.

I feel stupid for not thinking of this earlier. She's trying to not shoot Nilbog's creations. Of course she's trying to not shoot them. They're allies!

Unfortunately, the reprieve doesn't last long, as there's a gap I need to cross to reach Nilbog. I don't even know how much time I have left before Dragon brings out her "extreme" measures. It occurs to me she might break them out regardless if I get too close to Nilbog, but I push it out of my mind. I need to do this. I leap from the loose formation of creatures trying and failing to kill me and the world turns yellow again, then white. I keep running, keenly aware that this is distinctly uncomfortable. I remain blind. Discomfort turns into low-end pain, as the run drags on. It wasn't that large of a gap, I'm fast it shouldn't be taking this longimgonnadie-

And then the world returns to normal, aside from the steam rising off of me. That's new. I hit the table, quite literally, tumbling over it only half-controlled. I notice, absently, that Nilbog is shrieking and demanding Dragon, anyone, kill the 'interloper'. He's sounding like a stuck pig at this point, and I find something humorously appropriate about that. I leap onto the fatman and start tearing into it.

Nilbog starts crying, blubbering like a baby. The fatman is even producing tears. I notice it has genitals, but not legs. I decide I don't want to consider the implications. I find myself thinking Dragon is a woman and that is quite impressive in spite of myself. The only reason I don't vomit is because I don't have a mouth to do it with. About halfway through tearing into the fatman, it stops shrieking, and the upper half slumps like a puppet with its strings cut. The lower half is still twitching. By this point there are gribblies starting to get at me, shrieking and screaming, but they sound angry, not upset. I haven't found a human either. Just lots and lots of guts. I haven't found Nilbog. At this point, I don't think there's anywhere for Nilbog to be hiding inside the fatman. Where the hell is he?

Then there's a crack like I-don't-know-what and my right eye stings. My head is partially buried in dirt. It takes me a moment to realize I went through the table. I didn't even notice, it went so fast. The gribblies are shrieking, ignoring me. They sound victorious.

I suddenly hate them. No, you don't get to win you inhuman fucking monsters, you don't get to attack me for no goddamn reason and gloat. The fury is momentarily breathtaking, or what I imagine breathtaking would feel like. I don't breath as the monster. Maybe this is something else. I don't know.

I try to fight the anger down. Then I think I probably pissed off Dragon by attacking her well-endowed boyfriend and the anger hits new heights. I feel paralyzed. I'd always thought I'd lash out if I got this angry. No, I didn't think I could get this angry. I'm not even entirely sure why I feel this angry. There's a jumble of thoughts, jealousy and disgust and good old basic anger and a, a burning sense of something, and murderous impulses, a desire to hunt someone down and kill them.

Then I hear the sobbing.

1.4

The fury doesn't go away, exactly. It sort of... shifts to one side.

I'm hearing a human being crying. I already dug around inside the fatman, cut it open until there was no hiding place left an adult would fit in. I hear someone sobbing regardless, a man, maybe a bit high-pitched for a man, but muffled. I focus my attention around me, carefully unmoving. Is one of the larger things in the area Nilbog's actual suit? Did I underestimate him? Was the fatman a decoy?

I notice that the lower body of the fatman is still twitching. I think of how the upper half abruptly stopped. I find myself recalling an earlier thought, the suspicion the fatman was rooted in place. I focus on what's left of the fatman, but I can't see anything of relevance. I'm still hearing that sobbing. It's still muffled. It's not moving, not changing. The creatures around me are all moving. I distantly notice Dragon's suit is hovering closer to the ground, spotlight still on me, mentally blot it out. I'm missing something here.

The fatman wasn't a decoy. The crying is not moving. It is muffled. I can't see a human anywhere. I can sense a human in the area. The creatures are moving. The crying is not moving. The creatures are moving but the crying is not but the crying is muffled like there's flesh in the way.

Or dirt.

I wait, very still, as Dragon's suit approaches. I think I hear her muttering. She sounds upset. I haven't killed her boyfriend, she has no reason to be upset. Yet.

I wait until what is very obviously a recycler, a tremendous caterpillar thing scooping up parts and laying eggs, squirms in front of her, blocking her line of sight to me, and then I'm up and the gribblies are shrieking in fear now and I'm digging underneath the fatman, there's a cord, a tube, an umbilical cord, going down into the ground, and I pull and cut and hurl dirt and stab gribblies and Dragon is saying something but I don't care what I'm killing your boyfriend you bitch and suddenly I hit air, faster than I thought I would, and now Nilbog's creations are backing off, bar a few who simply flail at me with tools or claws. No fire, no acid, no bones launched like bullets, no unimaginable effects making part of me cease to exist. It's easy.

I catch a momentary glimpse of a man, older, balding, naked inside a pink, largely transparent, veiny membrane, holding his head in his hands, sobbing. I have a momentary, intense conviction that I'm looking at my dad, about to kill my dad, but I shrug it off he's not wearing glasses, he's fat and a claw goes in through the back of his skull and out through an eye socket before he can decide to look up at me and make me Taylor again.

Suddenly the air is filled with flame and acid and weirder stuff, and I know I've killed him, they wouldn't be risking it if he wasn't dead, but I have to be sure so I tear him open, throw pieces of the man at fire and acid and onto spike-covered creatures and just focus on completely and utterly ruining his existence.

I don't even know his real name.

I decide I don't care, I don't care that he was crying and sad and pathetic and childlike, he was a monster, he needed to die. He did. He had a secret alliance with Dragon, it's all a trick or something anyway, they were colluding to... I dunno, rule the world or replace humanity with his monsters and her technology or something.

Then I'm missing half of one limb and three-quarters of another one when a gribbly vanishes, and I suddenly notice the creatures are attacking Dragon's suit in addition to swarming over me. She's shooting back.

I decide I don't care, I'm done here, I'm going.

I break loose from the insane melee, stumble and flail and totter for a few seconds, trying to get used to walking on three fewer limbs than I started the night with, fend off a bulldog-headed boy-thing, get struck by something from my blind side, roll, flail, stab wildly. I decide to hell with it, jump to a rooftop, and as fast as I can I make my way across the rooftops in a straight line for the edge of Ellisburg. I'm twitching my head every which way the whole time, trying to not be caught off guard with just one functioning eye, but the fliers are ignoring me, winging their way to the center of town, where Dragon is. It occurs to me she could probably fly away. She hasn't.

I go cold, thinking of stories of Bonesaw, reminded Dragon is the world's premiere tinker, second to none. Bonesaw is a tinker, isn't she?

But it's too late. If Dragon is planning to bring Nilbog back from the dead, if she can, going back now isn't going to stop her. I can't do worse than shred Nilbog, I've already done that, she'd break out her 'extreme measures', and I would die. It was probably an 'extreme measure' that cost me an eye.

I thought I was invincible, and I've lost an eye. I didn't have any warning. I don't remember anything between 'Fine, tearing into the fatman' and 'head in the dirt, hole through a table I don't remember going through'.

I stab a few gribblies on my way out, but nothing that matters happens before I get to the wall. Nothing happens while I'm climbing it.

I jump into the forest, and make my way toward the highway. Something glowing shoots overhead, toward Ellisburg, and I drop into the undergrowth, afraid. When no follow-up occurs for a full minute, I continue, still cautious, trying to at least keep trees between me and the sky at all times. Nothing else happens before I reach the highway and start following it back to Brockton Bay, paralleling it.

I'm making worse time back than I did on my way out. I've only got one eye, and I keep forgetting I'm missing chunks of limbs, messing up, slowing down. I can't run full speed, and checking signs so I don't get lost takes time. As dawn gets closer, highway traffic picks up too, and I'm still trying to avoid being seen by people. I find myself wondering if my injuries as the monster will translate to injuries as Taylor. Am I going to be missing an eye? I only have four limbs as Taylor, what would happen there?

I put it out of my mind. No. Later. I need to get back to Brockton Bay, back home. I don't even know what will happen. When I'm hurt, become the monster, become Taylor again, the damage is gone, the pain is gone. It shouldn't translate. If it does... I can't do anything about it. It shouldn't. It could.

Focus.

I have to double back three times, wasting precious minutes on each mistake. I'm getting nervous that Dragon is going to somehow track me down. I want to be Taylor again, back in Brockton Bay, where it's... well, less likely, at least, for her to identify me as the monster that attacked Ellisburg. I need to be Taylor in Brockton Bay again.

It's dawn by the time I've hit Brockton Bay city limits, it's been dawn for longer than I want to think about, and I make my way to a park I scouted on my way out. The park is actually pretty nice for being in an iffy part of the city if you ignore the graffiti, and the public bathrooms are open 24 hours. I suspect this is why there's so much graffiti, but I don't care. I make my way inside one of the more out-of-the-way bathrooms and look into a mirror.

I see someone in a motorcycle helmet, jagged teeth drawn haphazardly in white onto the 'jaw' portion of the helmet below the visor, wearing a black -or maybe just very dark blue- blanket large enough to hang below the knees while tied around the neck, like a poncho with no place for the arms to come out, looking slightly hunchbacked. Me, in my 'costume'. Not visible is a pair of sturdy black boots, getting to be a bit too tight but still usable. Taylor, dressed for caping. I'm not missing any limbs.

I remove the helmet, setting it down on the sink in front of the mirror. Ugh. Helmet hair. Really bad helmet hair. I hate doing this to my hair, but I didn't want to be recognized. Too important that I make it hard to connect Taylor to the monster. Then I see with relief that both eyes remain underneath my glasses. Priorities, Taylor. The state of your hair is not more important than the state of your eyes. I move to untie the blanket, trying to ignore how awful my hair looks, because while the park is nice the neighborhood isn't, and I don't have time to linger on making it look less awful. I need to get home, I'd intended to be home no later than probably an hour before now, if I've got the time estimated right.

Once the blanket is untied, I hang it over one of the stall walls and pull off the backpack I had under the blanket, which was creating the slight hunch. I unzip it, put in the blanket, and then the helmet, leaving me in grey sweats, including a sweatband around my forehead. I leave the boots on, though I'd considered having a pair of sandals to swap them for, more natural a shoe type for exercise, decided against it. From a backpack pocket I pull out a sandwich in a ziploc, after which I cover the blanket and helmet with some towels I kept inside, put the backpack on, unzip the ziploc, and start eating, keeping a mirror in my line of sight the whole time. Thankfully no one shows up before I finish eating to wonder why there's a girl eating her sandwich in a public bathroom, looking more at a mirror than the sandwich. I toss the Ziploc at a trash can, wincing at how close it is to overflowing. I don't think today is a trash run day, either.

I feel a little less unbalanced. Not calmer, exactly. It's hard to describe. I feel less pressured, which makes sense to me.

I brace myself emotionally, and turn my gaze away from the mirror. I look at myself as the monster. My limbs...

... oh thank goodness. They're back. As far as I can tell, they look identical to how they were, pre-injury.

I hesitate, worried about the eye. That was violent, dramatic, extreme, whatever word you want. Maybe I can only heal parts, not wholes. Or something. Powers are weird. Nonetheless... I put a limb to my right eye. I can see it, even though it's out of my left eye's view. You'd think I'd have known instantly, but my field of view didn't feel different when I lost an eye. I knew, intellectually, I was missing half my vision, but I didn't experience it as a blackness on one side of my head. It didn't seem any different.

But my eye is functioning, and running the limb over it confirms it feels the way it's always felt. No holes, sharp edges, or strange fluids leaking from it aside from the usual. I'm fine. The monster is fine.

I sag in relief.

Then I remember I'm late.

I make my way home, taking every weird side passage and dead end to hurry the journey along, avoid people so I'm the monster as much as possible. My awareness of people doesn't provide anything like radar, it doesn't let me pin down direction, quantity, or distance, but I have a dim idea of the difference between having the number of people in my radius going up vs the number going down and can use that as a crude guideline. Which, incidentally, means I look more like someone who belongs where they are and knows where they're going, so when I emerge from an alleyway that doesn't go anywhere, nobody pays any attention to me. I'm not someone to pay attention to, a jogger at ease with her environment. I maybe get a few looks over the backpack, I'm not sure. Or maybe they're looking at my hair, still in disarray from the helmet.

Late late late so very late.

On the minus side, there's people around when I get to the front door, so I'm slower than I want to be. On the plus side, there's people around, so I can open the door like a normal person. I'm the monster the instant the door is mostly closed, but I can push a door closed easily. It's doorknobs that give me trouble.

I make my way into the kitchen, still a bit hungry. I want to make more noise, sound like I'm actually walking in my boots, rather than on blades -I still have no idea why they don't scratch the floor when I walk- but I don't know if that's even possible. I certainly haven't practiced it. I can only hope Dad doesn't notice.

"Taylor, where were you?"

It's my dad, doing that weird thing where someone sits on a chair backwards, leaning onto the backrest. I wonder for a moment if he just finds it comfortable or if he's trying to go for a specific effect. I hope he isn't trying to be 'cool' to try to 'connect' to me or something. I don't think he'd try that, certainly not since mom died, but we haven't been talking as much as I'd like. I could be wrong.

I put it out of my mind, smile broadly, make an attempt to sound a bit winded and say brightly, "Morning run, don't you remember?" My stab at seeming winded sounds completely unconvincing to my ears. Hopefully I'm just being my own worst critic. I did tell him last night that I intended to start on morning runs soon. I didn't specify tomorrow. To be fair, I wasn't sure I would hit Nilbog tonight. I wanted some leeway if I couldn't psych myself up.

Dad looks troubled, and I have to fight off the image of Nilbog crying into his hands. I never saw his face. They don't look similar. They don't. Shut up.

"I thought you wanted to make some more preparations before you took the first run?" Instead of answering verbally, I reach my right hand over to a pocket on the left side of the backpack, pull out a pepper spray can and show it to him, carefully making sure it's pointed away from both of us and my finger isn't on the trigger. Then I put it back in place, and in one smooth motion pull it out and aim it at an imaginary opponent off to one side. After holding the pose for a moment, I relax, put it back in the pocket, and turn to my dad with a smile. "Got it handled, Dad." I very deliberately do not mention that I'd skipped lunch a couple days so I could afford it. Pepper spray isn't expensive, but being bullied is, and I'd spent money on the motorcycle helmet, even if it was second-hand.

I'm vaguely annoyed when Dad doesn't immediately cheer up. He starts to say something, I just know it's going to be something about how he's concerned about me or something to that effect, and I don't want to hear it, not from him. So I interrupt him, act like I didn't notice him starting to talk. "Gotta shower, get ready for school. See you in a few minutes Dad." That gets a smile on his face, a weak one, but a smile. He sits up and tells me he's starting breakfast then, and I thank him. Then I head upstairs, open my bedroom door -I left it open just a crack so I could pry it open as the monster, thankfully- look into the hand mirror I've got propped on my desk, and shuck the backpack and toss it haphazardly into my closet. I really need to find an excuse to get a bigger mirror in here.

Then I grab the hand mirror, grab a set of clothes for today -gray hoodie, black pants, won't show stains readily and the worst they can do verbally is imply I'm not feminine or imply I'm a lesbian, I'm too small to need a bra still (sigh), underwear is plain black- and then set the hand mirror back in place, new outfit held tightly in my arms. Then I head to the bathroom. It's closed. Dammit. I make my way back to my bedroom, grab the hand mirror, go to the bathroom and open it, then put the hand mirror back and then finally go into the bathroom. Thankfully, I can just use the bathroom's mirror, no need to bring the hand mirror in. I close the door, lock it, start the shower up, and then change into my outfit for the day in front of the mirror, shoving the running clothes into a corner for afterward.

I really need a watch or something too. I'm okay at keeping track of time, but not perfect, and time gets fuzzy when it's night. And then there's situations like this, where I really want something to let me know when fifteen minutes have passed.

I settle for spending a bit brushing my hair into better condition, suddenly glad Dad didn't seem to think anything of the helmet hair. Once I'm done with that, I wait a few minutes more, desperately wishing I had something to pass the time with other than my own thoughts. I'm reluctant to even practice as the monster in this downtime, for fear Dad might hear something really weird. Bad enough he might notice the water doesn't sound right because it's hitting the bathtub rather than me, but taking a shower using the bathroom mirror is basically impossible. I tried using the hand mirror, but it fogged up too fast.

I don't actually need showers nowadays anyway. Anytime I stop being the monster, I come back clean, rested, and healthy, no matter what condition I was in beforehand, but Dad would expect me to shower after a run. He knows what people are like after exercise, even if he's not familiar with runners per se. (I think?)

This 'morning run' plan suddenly seems a lot less appealing. I'd intended it as a cover story for if I came back late from nightly business, with maybe a side helping of better preparing me for cape life, physically, but if I'm going to have to pretend to shower every morning... that's going to be a pain, and a waste of time. I have a lot more of that nowadays, but in some ways I hate wasting time more than ever. Before the monster became a part of my life, a few minutes wasted was time spent resting, if nothing else. Nowadays it's just... a waste, full stop. I have moments where I intensely wish I was a tinker or something, a cape who could use downtime to enhance their performance in the field, somebody like Dauntless...

... well, maybe not Dauntless. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable having people pinning their hopes on me to be an Endbringer-killer some day.

Armsmaster, more like. PHO thinks he's got at least a half dozen halberds that can't be told apart at a glance but do completely different things, and it's known that when he's lost publicly to a villain's power he always comes back with some kind of countermeasure.

But no, I suspect I don't so much as benefit from exercise. Honestly, I have dim fears, things I try not to think about too much, that I might be trapped as a teenage girl for the rest of my life. I try not to focus on these fears too much, and I have one surefire way of making that particular fear die down: look up cape mortality statistics, particularly for independents, or if I'm in an especially pessimistic mood, villains. Knowing it'll be a small miracle if I make it to thirty, maybe thirty-five if I account for how capes with durability-enhancing powers skew toward longer lifespans, is strangely calming.

I'm jolted out of my thoughts by Dad knocking on the door and calling out, "Taylor, breakfast's ready!"

Wait, how long have I been thinking? Has it been fifteen minutes, or more like thirty? Ugh, I really need a watch or something, this is going to drive me nuts.

I turn off the shower, wait another minute, and then head downstairs, dropping the sweats into the hamper on the way. I still haven't come up with a solution I like for faking needing towels. Just putting towels into the shower doesn't work, because they end up smelling like clean towels. Besides, one of the things I've appreciated the most about becoming the monster has been the savings it's bringing, the fact that we're going to spend less on water, maybe even electricity, and making laundry less burdensome. Not sure what Dad will make of it when those next bills are low. Ugh, really hate faking showering, definitely need an alternative plan for the running thing. Bears thinking. At least I don't have to wait for my hair to dry ever again. That's a cool perk.

I turn the corner into the kitchen and goddammit Dad is facing away from me, still getting eggs out of the pan. I need an excuse to get a mirror in here. Ugh. I settle myself into a chair as best as I can as the monster. I still don't really get how this works, but I know from past experience I'll be sitting in the chair correctly the instant I'm in Dad's field of view.

Powers are weird.

Dad turns around, startles slightly, and the smell of breakfast hits me, and it's good. I haven't tested whether I need to eat as the monster or not, not directly, but I get hungry, and unlike when I get tired, or hurt, or start feeling the urge to go to the toilet, becoming the monster and then Taylor again doesn't make it go away. It only vanishes -kind of mutes, really- for the duration of my time as the monster. My guess is I need to eat, so I do. Food tastes delicious nowadays, I'm not sure I'd be able to keep myself from it even if I was convinced food was unnecessary now, so I'm kind of glad I have reason to believe I still need food. I think I'd be tempted to save money by not eating if I didn't, and then end up feeling guilty every time the delicious smell compelled me to eat.

Dad blinks owlishly at me. Oh. Right, I basically just stealthed my way into my chair and sat there not eating or talking right behind his back. I notice I'm smiling. That's good, I don't need to fake it. "Breakfast smells awesome Dad." That gets a smile from my dad, and not one of those sad smiles that make me want to punch and/or perforate him. A real smile, like I just made his day. I suspect it helps that I promptly dig in. He sits down, starts eating. Glances at me periodically, looking vaguely puzzled. There's so many things for him to be puzzled by I'm not even going to guess. Breakfast is quiet, otherwise. We weren't chatty people even before Mom died, we certainly weren't chatty people after she died, and with the bullying and now being a parahuman I'm not exactly in a hurry to volunteer conversation. Things on his end are basically always the same-old-same-old: the economy sucks, jobs aren't really available to people, he has to tell people so fifty times a day, with the occasional attempt at meeting with a politician to be told no. It doesn't really matter what they're saying no to. Not exactly a big motivator for his own desire to talk.

We finish eating, I'm really glad he's seated such that the sink is in front of him so I don't have to jump through any stupid hoops, and we part ways. Dad seems in a slightly better mood, and I wonder for a moment if he's expecting something to go well at work today.

Me, I'm going to Winslow.

Never will you see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...

You laugh, but fuck you.

1.5

Winslow High sucks. You know that, I know that, the teachers know that, the politicians know that, the gangs love it, hell I'm pretty sure the roaches know it. There's certainly enough of them they could hold the school hostage if they got organized.

I reflexively glance around after having that thought, heading into school grounds. Locust isn't a mindreader, no one except maybe the Simurgh is, but she's scary, and infamous on PHO for her habit of taking statements overly literally. It so consistently ends in pain PHO's tinfoils are 80-90% convinced she's doing it deliberately, like a meta-joke or something. The remainder like to point out that powers sometimes do very weird things to a parahuman's head, and we should feel bad for her.

Then sensible people point out Locust is A: Locust and B: a member of E88, and people remember to stop feeling sorry for the sociopath. Instead they commiserate for her poor husband, Fog. Personally, I want to know what kind of nutcase marries a woman made of bugs. Fucking creepy, the both of them.

The worst part is wondering if the fly that won't leave me alone just likes the way I smell or if Locust is seeing through it. The fucking worst thing about living in Brockton Bay.

Of course, that's all me distracting myself from how much I hate Winslow High.

Because thinking about Locust is better than thinking about Winslow. Because indirectly thinking about the possibility of Locust's sex life is an improvement over actually paying attention to the fact that I'm in Winslow.

Maybe today won't be so bad.

I don't believe myself.

By lunchtime they've gotten glue on my chair twice, gotten a tack there once -hurt like a bitch but it's easier to ignore pain knowing the injury will vanish like it never was and I'm not giving them the satisfaction if I can avoid it- accidentally bumped into me probably a dozen times if I count their cronies, and had Greg Veder do his pathetic best to trick me into going on a date with him. I would maybe have fallen for that one, because Greg is so out of sync with the rhythms of school he could plausibly be pursuing the only person rejected harder by the school than him out of a conviction that we're Social Reject Buddies or something, except I overheard Emma talking to him yesterday. Blah blah blah, she wants him to do a favor for her, drops hints that she might go on a date with him if he does, probably has cleavage showing but I didn't actually see, can you get Taylor Hebert to the old bowling alley on yadda and so-and-so this Friday at six? He of course went for it, because he has the wit and social acumen of a tapeworm.

Well. PHO thinks Locust can control tapeworms too, going by a bad encounter between the Underwires or whatever and E88. Hmm. Hard to say whether Greg is more disadvantaged than the supervillain made of bugs when it comes to pretending to be a human being.

You know what? I'm feeling generous. Greg wins that contest today. He is more awkward and clueless about human normality than the bugwoman. Congratulations Greg, you won something. Not anything an actual person would want to win, but then the award isn't meant for a person, is it?

I handle the Greg situation by telling Greg he's 'sweet' but 'not my type'. Emma will interpret that as me thinking he's more of a loser than I am -I'm still undecided on that one, though I have the advantage of superpowers- and trying to 'let him down gently'. Greg will either have been told this a hundred times before and recognize it as code for, "Not if you were the last man on earth," or will decide it's proof Emma might actually have a reason for being interested in him. After all, a real girl told him he's 'sweet'. Surely, girls know what goes through other girls' heads, right?

No Greg, not Emma's head. I haven't understood the inside of that skull in ages.

I also overhear four different conversations, 'coincidentally', in which Emma makes ugly comments about me without actually naming me and her cronies laugh in response. Those are harder to ignore. I don't cry, at least. I'm hoping to never cry again, but I'll also settle for extending my longest streak of not-crying from three weeks to a whole month. Small victories.

Mr. Gladly is still the most hateable teacher in school, acting like it's my fault when someone else smacks me in the back of the head with a paper airplane. Yes, I was passing notes. Via paper airplane. Into the back of my head. I have talent, you see. A regular airshowwoman with paper airplanes, I am.

I wish I could bring myself to say that to his face, but backtalk just gets me sent to the principal's office. The one and only time that went anything resembling well was when Madison had caused the problem. If it's Emma or Sophia the principal is suddenly magically unable to understand that I am the injured party, even if I can roll up my sleeves and reveal bruises. Fuck, the time Sophia slammed me up against a wall so hard I was left bleeding from my nose and one eye, the principal had the gall to ask if my home situation was abusive.

What is that shit, some kind of 'reverse-racism'? I get Emma having good grades and a lawyer dad, but I just... what? Why does Sophia get the same treatment? I'd think it was because she's friends with Emma, but Madison was too, by a certain definition of 'friend'.

At least Madison getting sent off to Immaculata has made the cronies careful to not actually be seen by the teachers when they pull shit.

Small victories.

The day ends on one kind-of-good note: nothing really bad has happened. It's one of the less-worse days. An average day, rather than a bad day. They didn't even irrevocably destroy any of my stuff.

If it had been a good day, that would be worse, because that would mean they're planning something really awful.

I wonder what they had planned with Greg. Whatever, I don't care. I'm just angry. Again.

Focus. I need another target. I'm not going to cut every last man, woman, and manchild at the school to ribbons. I'm not. There are worse evils out there, and I'll be getting them. That's my mission.

I get home, spend an hour with my hand mirror and homework. It doesn't really work. I've done maybe an assignment and a half, and spent probably half that time fantasizing about taking slices out of Greg. I hate that mindset.

I push myself away, head downstairs with the hand mirror, and boot up our ancient PC. While it's booting, I fiddle to get the mirror set up so it won't unexpectedly fall over. When the computer finally finishes booting, I bring up my document.

Making the world a better place

By Taylor Hebert

Assignment premise: if you could make ten changes to make the world a better place, what would they be? Explain your reasoning.

1: Kill Nilbog. Drop a nuke on him? Assassinate him?

2: Kill the Three Blasphemies.

3: Kill the Slaughterhouse Nine. (How?)

4: Kill Heartbreaker. Sniper? How does his power work, exactly? Range?

5: Kill the Sleeper? (Risking provoking him?)

6: Kill Ashbeast? (Too human?)

7: Kill Lung. (Killable?)

8: Kill Kaiser/break E88. (Is there a hideout?)

9:

10:

Presented as a school assignment so my dad won't suspect anything if he finds it. Probably. I have a dim hope that if tinkers hack this computer nobody will think anything of it, but honestly any situation in which tinkers are hacking my home computer is probably one where they're going to connect Taylor to the monster. Or already have. Whatever.

I remove Nilbog from the list, stare blankly at the remainder. I still need to do more research. PHO tinfoil hats are convinced there's a sexily mysterious woman in a hat behind literally everything bad in the entire world, who has been seen anywhere on the planet you care to name. The fact that people cosplay as this supposed woman doesn't help. They also think Hero wasn't really killed by the Siberian and is hiding out somewhere to someday rise with an Endslayer, that Elvis is not dead and/or that the Simurgh secretly killed him off before Scion showed up for... some reason... Lung isn't Asian at all, he's actually African and a woman, the Simurgh is actually making a long-term plot for the good of humanity so we should stop resisting, Scion is God, Scion is Satan, Scion killed God and Satan and is taking a break from ruling over Heaven and Hell, the Endbringers are proof we're in the Matrix (Atrocious Earth Aleph movie, I don't know how anyone could enjoy it, let alone how it apparently got sequels. Fucking Alephians) because they're obviously 'raid bosses', Eidolon is a woman, Alexandria is gay, Legend isn't gay and him pretending to be gay is a plot by the government to advance a satanic and un-Christian agenda, powers are granted by God to the worthy, powers are deals with the devil, Scion brought powers, Scion is the source of powers, Scion killed the source of powers, JKF's death was a Simurgh plot somehow, Hitler was a Simurgh plot somehow, the Crusades were a Simurgh plot somehow, powers are sold in a bottle by the government and they're just pretending people can get powers without spending money...

... that's not half a percent of the nonsense PHO puts out, and the worst part is it's basically impossible to tell what's a tinfoil hat, a troll pretending to be a tinfoil hat, a real person who really saw something weird and is reporting it, or a troll pretending to be a real person reporting a real thing. Especially since some of the stupidest shit is real while some of the most plausible-sounding stuff has been thoroughly debunked. "Powers in a bottle," indeed.

Tinfoil hats aren't remotely the best source of information on real monsters, but it's surprisingly difficult to get information on even the more publicly known ones.

I have to fight down a sudden urge to look up Nilbog's real name. That does give me an idea: I search for 'Nilbog dead'.

... no results?

Odd. Dragon was there -well, a drone of hers was- so it's not like it's a secret.

Maybe I need a different search parameter?

'Nilbog news' points me to articles that are more than a year old. 'Ellisburg news' points me to local news sites on towns outside New York, most of them with one 'L' in the name. 'Nilbog free' gets tinfoil hat-related sites, 'Dragon and Nilbog' gets creepy capefiction, 'Nilbog and Ellisburg' goes to the Parahumans Online Wiki... I give in and try looking up Nilbog's real name, on a hunch. The PRT official site has it, casually placed on the page discussing exactly why you should never, ever approach Ellisburg for any reason ever. Apparently, his civilian identity is a matter of public record. I didn't know that.

I type in 'Jamie Rink dead'.

...

No, nothing.

I look up Dragon's Tweet feed. It doesn't have as many followers as Legend's, but then Legend was one of the first heroes to use it at all, and is more well-known anyway. More surprising is that Glory Girl's Tweet feed is nearly twice as large as Dragon's. Dragon is an internationally recognized hero, Glory Girl is a local hero. Weird. Anyway, I'm not entirely surprised to find nothing in Dragon's feed about Ellisburg. Probably capes don't tweet about official business until hours afterward, if at all. Most of Dragon's tweets seem to focus on hyping gear she's making for the PRT, when she's not getting into tinker jargon with other Tweeters. Other tinkers, presumably.

Well. That's a bust.

I cringe and go clicking into cape news sites. Then regular news sites. Nothing.

... it's been more than half a day. I'd have expected to either hear about how we're all going to die because I fucked up and provoked Nilbog's army into attacking the world or run across the Protectorate taking credit for a major victory. Instead, there's... nothing.

Now there's a cold pit in my stomach. I'm half-convinced Nilbog and Dragon are "allies". Does it go deeper than that? Am I in a fucking tinfoil hat conspiracy theory now?

I'd originally planned to look more into my other targets. Instead, I shut down the computer, take the mirror back upstairs to my room, and do the more mindless parts of my homework. It's hard, not letting my shaking hands ruin the assignments.

Dad gets home nearly an hour later than usual tonight. I'm half-upset, feeling creeped out by being alone in the house with these thoughts in my head, and half-relieved: the shaking didn't die down until twenty minutes before he showed up. His portion of dinner is cold, too, though at least him being late meant he didn't walk in on me cooking with one hand while carrying around the hand mirror. I'm still dreading having that, or something like it, happen one day.

We talk a little bit while he eats, watch the news a bit -nothing about Ellisburg, just the usual local news, gang warfare, Panacea out of town again on Protectorate business, Circus suspected in a night theft, etc- and ultimately he goes to bed early. Today was a hard day, he didn't really talk about particulars. That's fine with me.

I decide tonight is going to be my first attempt at the small scale. What I really want to do is research the Slaughterhouse Nine more, particularly their more long-term members like Jack Slash, and work out a plan to be implemented later this week, but I start shaking again every time I think of going back to the computer. Which is stupid, because the computer isn't the thing to be afraid of... but it does remind me of Nilbog, which puts me in mind of my ridiculous and now disturbingly plausible fears.

So, beating up gang members and calling the police. Or the PRT if one of them is a cape, but I'm a lot more nervous about getting into a cape fight than I was before Nilbog's minions vanished bits of the monster and Dragon's drone blew out an eye. That's my agenda for tonight. De-stress.

Theoretically.

With dad already dead asleep in his bed -I check, he's snoring already- I go to my room, unlatch the window and open it slightly, get my 'costume' on -minus the backpack and its contents- and slip out into the night as the monster. This is of course complicated by the need to do much of it while using the hand mirror, but I've actually practiced the whole thing enough by now that it's tolerable.

Here's what a night out as the monster, hunting down gang members, is like.

I spend most of my time running across rooftops, trying to not be seen, crawling low to the roof and trying to keep stuff between me and adjacent buildings if taller buildings are around to potentially be seen from. I keep an ear out and peek down into every alley or straight I jump over before I jump to the next building, but most of the time there's nothing and nobody there, or there's a homeless person sleeping In it. Sometimes it's teenagers doing drugs, smoking, or just playing a game of basketball against the wall, in which case I divert off to a different route. Especially when they're playing basketball and actually looking up. I don't want to find out what happens if I make a jump and turn into Taylor partway through.

When I do see gang members, they're usually standing around talking. If they have weapons, they're more-or-less concealed. Often, though not always, they're smoking. Very occasionally I catch one having an intense conversation with someone, the sort where I'm expecting to step in and save whoever they're talking to, but every single time things are apparently resolved in a satisfactory manner. In one case, the gang members backs off in response to something the presumed victim says.

When ABB and E88 groups of toughs walk past each other, there's a lot of posturing, but nobody really does anything. In some cases I get the impression they're practically friends, albeit on opposite sides. I don't know what to make of that.

As time drags on, I see more hookers, but I'm not sure how to handle that. I don't want to attack them, especially since my understanding is most hookers aren't in it by choice. Besides, something like every fourth hooker is probably actually a teen that thinks trashy equals cool and is up late for whatever reason. Leaping in and attacking hookers would be a bad plan even if I thought hookers deserved it. I mostly don't see anyone who looks like a pimp, either, so that's a no-go. Meanwhile, the toughs are actually getting less common as the night wears on, not more. Nighttime might be a criminal's friend, but that doesn't mean ordinary gang members can have a full day pretending to be normal citizens and skip sleeping, I guess.

By probably the fifth hour -so two in the morning, probably- I'm feeling pretty stupid for thinking I'd just run across crimes in progress, stop them, and then call up the PRT. I don't even have a cell phone on me. I'd considered a burner phone, but I'd have had to sock away more lunch money, or have spent less on the helmet, or something. Maybe later.

I'm getting bored, but I don't get tired as the monster, and I don't seem to get hungry while I'm the monster either. A break might get me in the right headspace to continue, but I don't have any real reason to take a break.

Forget it. This just isn't worth it.

By the time I've gotten home, slipped into my bedroom, gotten my costume off me and into the backpack, and finally gotten the computer downstairs booted up, it's 3:21 in the morning.

I've decided patrols are stupid and I'm not doing them.

Sitting at the computer, relying on the reflection from the monitor's glow in the dark, no need for the hand mirror, I'm still feeling queasy. It's better though. Not tolerable, exactly, certainly not good, but I feel like I can focus on the task.

I pull up the document again, find to my annoyance I didn't save the removal of Nilbog, re-delete him, and get online.

First things first: Jack Slash.

He's been at this for decades. I'm surprised at how long he's been around, actually. I can't remember a time before Jack Slash was trailing a mob of killers, but somehow I'd always assumed he'd started somewhere in my childhood and I just didn't register the exact starting point. Official sites, including his locked PHO Wiki page -edit wars, apparently- focus on warning you away from the man. If you see him, flee as casually as you can, without catching his attention, and call the nearest PRT or Protectorate base, etc. There's no good photos of the man, either. Most pictures seem to be snapped from cell phones by shaking hands, and the lighting is often poor. In fact, the best photo I can find is nearly seven years old -a quick check of the Slaughterhouse Nine's page on the wiki confirms that 7 years ago is when Shatterbird joined. Well, that explains that, I guess.

There are newer photos, but less frequently, and often from a distance. The lighting is usually bad, too, presumably because Shatterbird's scream blows out all the lights in the area, and the photos are mostly urban. Poking around finds there are Slaughterhouse Stalkers, people trying to successfully trail the team and get good photos of them, making custom Shatterbird-proof cameras able to take clear photos at extreme ranges, but nobody has actually pulled it off. I have a disquieting suspicion that at least one of the sites devoted to the task hasn't updated in two years because the people running the site died.

I tangent for a bit, looking for photos of the other current members, which leads to looking up the current members, and then back to looking for the photos. To my surprise, there are high-quality photographs of Crawler and the Siberian. Everybody else either has no photos or the photos are uniformly low quality. Shatterbird, in particular, only has a handful of shots taken from extreme range, none of which are very helpful. She looks strange, and it takes some digging around to work out that she's not, in fact, a 'monstrous' parahuman, but rather cloaks herself in colorful glass, often producing highly stylized forms. Usually she has wings and a full helmet, at least.

Crawler has an incredible array of good-quality photos, and it's surprising how often he's almost posed. Eventually I find an image hosting site has a tag #Crawlervanity and piece together from comments on the site and from information elsewhere that Crawler likes the way he looks, and does, in fact, deliberately pose for photos, threatening to kill people if they don't photograph his 'beautiful' form. I gather he sometimes kills them anyway. The number drops off after Shatterbird joins, just like everyone else, but the photos that happen are still usually close up, steady-handed, and with Crawler showing off a specific piece of his body. Doing my best to assemble the photos into chronological order, it looks to me like it's usually something new he presumably evolved recently.

Well. That's not creepy at all.

I wish I had any reason to believe I could somehow use that against him and kill him. I suspect my best-case scenario is that he no longer counts as human and has nothing capable of hurting the monster, leading to a standoff where neither of us can kill each other. More likely he can kill me just fine, one way or another.

I dig around on the Siberian, wondering why quality photos of her are a thing. I am disgusted, but not surprised, to find a 'shrine' to her 'hot, sexy bod', which seems to have most of the photos I've been running across, and more usefully has little comments for each of the photos providing some context. In the Siberian's case, apparently she's just focused on killing people over destroying their stuff: far too many of the photos are labeled as, "recovered from a camera/cell phone in the trail of the Slaughterhouse Nine." Only a handful are presented as having been taken by people who survived the attempt, and most of them include horrible details like, "Siberian ate nine out of ten fingers," or, "Siberian removed and, going by chewing noises, ate both eyeballs. Victim only survived thanks to parahuman assistance."

I have slightly more hope about my chances against her than against Crawler, strangely enough. She's never been injured. Crawler is known to have survived losing his entire head, among other examples, so anything I can do to him is unlikely to accomplish much of anything beyond improving him further. If for some reason I can hurt the Siberian... she might actually be killable.

Realistically she'll just kill me, though.

I finally remember, at 6:13, that I'd been looking at Jack Slash for a reason, and drag myself away from the photo tangent.

Jack Slash is the only member of the Slaughterhouse Nine I think I have a realistic shot at killing. This is convenient, because he's nominally in charge of the group, and it's possible they might splinter if he dies. So I want to do research on him.

It takes a surprisingly long time to find detailed information on his power. When the clock reads 7:07 I've finally found a tinfoil hat thread of all things on PHO that collates information from videos, witness statements, offhand remarks from capes that have survived encounters with the Slaughterhouse Nine, and fills in gaps with a lot of speculation.

I'm disappointed at the conclusion. The man swings a blade, and it cuts at a seemingly arbitrary distance. It's assumed, but labeled as speculation, that he does have an actual range limit, guesstimated at around two miles, with explicit cautioning that he could be hiding his real range for a time he actually needs it or that his range may be effectively 'capped' more by the limitations of human sight than by any actual range limitation.

That's all.

The official sites provide no information beyond, "get out of sight as fast as possible," and a check of the wiki page shows that the only detail it adds is that he is skilled in close-quarters combat with knives and is always armed, even if no weaponry is visible.

Odd, and getting me anxious again.

My concerns on my mind, I look up Ellisburg again.

Ellisburg situation resolved. New York state safe to live in for the first time in years.

Oh. Oh!

Clicking around shows that news sites, regular and cape-oriented, are abuzz with excitement. Dragon is credited with a 'swift response' to a 'developing situation' caused by 'some of Nilbog's creations going rogue', culminating in her executing Nilbog's standing Kill Order. She called in dozens of additional heroes, including Panacea -wait, I saw that on the news- to clean up the remaining creatures before more than a handful could get past the wall, and the official statement is that it took twelve hours past the last creature being killed to establish that nothing had escaped the outermost perimeter. This was all kept quiet so no villains would take advantage of the sudden absence of heroes from nearby cities and even from some extremely distant cities, brought in by teleporter. Alexandria, Eidolon, and Legend were included in wait that was Legend I saw overhead.

No mention is made of an unknown parahuman.

I waffle for a minute. Am I being discounted because creepy conspiracy theory demands cover-up or is the official statement about rogue creations what they actually believe happened? Nilbog thought I was a rogue creature at first...

I decide the latter sounds plausible. I close the tabs, shut down the computer, and head upstairs to prepare for my morning run. Which I still need to replace as an excuse, because this is so stupid, especially if I'm not going to be patrolling anymore. Patrolling is stupid.

There's bounce in my step as I jog.

1.x

Saint

"Oh boy." he muttered. He took a sip of coffee -he didn't like the stuff, but he needed to be able to focus- and then called out, "Mags! Bit of an emergency!"

They slept in shifts when they weren't on a job. Dragon didn't sleep, they did, simple as that. It was honestly a stroke of luck -or, as Saint liked to think of it at times, the work of fate- that it had been three people who stumbled onto Richter's box, and not two or the worst possibility of just one. It made it easier to ensure that there was always someone watching the AI, while still having the flexibility for people to run errands, and for Saint to make sure the suits and secondary tech were in working condition... as well as the myriad other daily rituals that eat up hours. Bathroom usage, shaving, bathing, the list was tremendous. Before they'd taken on the responsibility of being the Dragonslayers, Saint hadn't given it much thought. Nowadays he was all too keenly aware of it, to the point that it was one of his reasons for shaving himself bald. (There were others. He liked the "monkish" appearance it gave him. He wouldn't have shaved just for that effect, though) It took less time to periodically cut the new growth than it did to wash it, shampoo it, dry it... Dobrynja and Mags had declined, in part because it would make the group more conspicuous. Saint suspected a little vanity, as well, but didn't begrudge them it.

Dobrynja was actually out buying supplies (Mostly: groceries) right now, unless Saint had missed him coming in because he was too focused on the feeds... again.

"How urgent?" was Mags' sleepy reply.

"We might all die urgent," he called back, keeping his voice deliberately level. He could hear Mags' muttered cursing as she hurried to get out of bed and to the monitoring room.

As she came through the door Mags somewhat acerbically commented, "I assume it's not Dragon breaking loose from its shackles and preparing to go Skynet on us, given you're not informing me that you activated Ascalon." Saint blinked, not recognizing the reference, and then shrugged it off.

"No," he admitted. "Something happening with the King of Goblins." Then he clicked to bring more into focus the... whatever it was... that was currently cutting its way through Nilbog's creatures while the AI tried to shoot it, seemingly to little effect. Whatever it was, the bullets were knocking it around, making it difficult for it to move in anything other than a drunken, erratic line, but there wasn't any evidence of injury. Blue, with too many limbs -Saint had tried counting three times and come up with three different numbers, though he was confident it was at least eight- and a head shaped vaguely like an axe head mounted on a bizarrely thin neck. Saint was tempted to compare the limbs to a spider's legs, but only for the way they spread out from the curved, vaguely cylindrical body. The way they were shaped, the way they moved, it put him in mind of an octopus' arms, if the octopus had no distinct underside, no suckers, just a featureless cylinder tapering to a point -a point that was apparently quite sharp. When the AI had zoomed in, he was fairly sure he'd spotted blade edges running from the tip to approximately one-quarter of the way back from the tip, five of them per limb, distributed equally around the cylinder, but they jutted so slightly from the limbs and blended so well into it in terms of color that he wasn't entirely certain he hadn't imagined them. The arms had the kind of flexibility he'd expect in an octopus, too, or maybe more so than an octopus.

The axe-head had two green eyes, compound like a fly or other insect, one of each side of the 'blade' of the head. (He had yet to see the head actually used as a weapon, but he wouldn't put it past the being) They unsettled him. No pupil, no way to tell where the thing's focus was, or even to tell whether it had to focus on a specific point at all. Inhuman. Refreshing in a way, when he was so used to dealing with Richter's AI, which could present an unsettlingly human face, good enough to fool his instincts but never his mind.

The thing was coated in a layer of fluid that seemed to cling to its body like a second skin. At first he'd thought it some kind of parahuman force-field, an energy effect, due to how far out from the body it extended without simply falling away, but he'd seen dirt float in it, blood spread as it would in water, and other signs that it was a fluid. (Though never for long: he wasn't sure how it happened exactly, but anything trapped in the fluid vanished eventually. Osmosis?) Just another example of parahuman abilities laughing at conventional physics. There was a part of him -the still-fading remnants of Teacher's power- wondering at what the fluid was for, how it worked, potential applications, but it was a weak impulse, and long experience told him it wouldn't pay off particularly even if he were at the peak of Teacher's influence. Teacher gave him a tinker power aimed first at programming and second at the hardware you would run code on. It had never played nice with biologicals, or with non-electronic devices for that matter.

The being -which Dragon had just lost track of- unsettled him all around. His gut instinct was that it was a parahuman, and either a supremely confident one -admittedly so far justified in its confidence- or a madman. He was leaning toward madman. He couldn't say why, but he was convinced it was enjoying the bloodbath. He kept his thoughts to himself for the moment. He didn't want to taint his friends' reactions. Three heads are better than one, but not if one of them puts ideas in the other two's heads. Then you basically have one person. They needed to be more than one person to be on level with the AI. Saint also admitted to himself that they needed to be at their best to be competitive with the real parahumans -even with Teacher's help, he wasn't as good as a real tinker, and his friends were never better than ordinary Joes in powered armor. Civilians thought that tinkers used their own gear out of some kind of ego trip thing, but Saint knew it went deeper than that, that non-tinkers just couldn't get the hang of a tinker's gear the way the tinker did. He'd wondered why for a time, and then shrugged. The why didn't matter. Nothing to be done about it.

Mags muttered, "Bastard is going to unleash the apocalypse," and then said more clearly, "I'm going to get suited up."

Saint waved vaguely as Mags went to get the undersuit on. He always put on his undersuit before he sat down for monitoring duty. It was uncomfortable, but the time it saved when emergencies did happen was worth it, enough so that recently Mags and Dobrynja had taken to doing it too. (Even he didn't sleep in it, though. He'd tried. He'd failed) He remembered abruptly that he'd intended to ask Mags if she knew when Dobrynja was supposed to get back (What had been Dobrynja's errand again? It was the middle of the night, so probably not a grocery run... oh well) and then shrugged, pulled out a cell phone -modified with tinkertech from Dragon and set up to use the 'ignore me' string to block her attention, so it was the closest thing to untraceable around- and called up Dobrynja himself.

"This is Do'." A shortening of the cape name. They avoided their civilian names nowadays, too risky, but it would be even riskier to have Dobrynja answering to Dobrynja -anyone who recognized the reference to Slavic myth would be suspicious. Too easy to then connect a mythological dragon slayer to the Dragonslayers, especially. So... "Do'."

"We have a bit of a situation back at the farmhouse." Farmhouse meant that it was cape trouble. (Sometimes an emergency was that the plumbing wasn't working. No need to give each other heart attacks by not clearly distinguishing between a cape emergency and a regular emergency) "If you're not done already, you should probably hurry up and be done."

A pause.

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," and then Dobrynja hung up. Good. (Saint still couldn't remember what the errand was. Too hard to keep track of everything, while he had to focus on the AI's feeds)

Five minutes later Mags was back in the monitoring room, watching the AI's attempts to hunt the thing moving through Nilbog's creations like a chainsaw through butter. (The way viscera sprayed everywhere, it seemed an apt metaphor) Saint had double-checked everything else -Sleeper's quiet, Endbringers are quiet, the Three Blasphemies are quiet too, Birdcage has a coup going on in one block but not Teacher's block so whatever- and was still keeping an eye on other feeds, trying in part to parse the AI's own thoughts. Was Dragon worried? He'd thought he'd seen one of Dragon's 'pangs of guilt' (It was an AI and didn't feel guilt, of course, but you could see something distinctive happen in its code anytime it lied, deliberately left out critical information, presented things in a misleading way, or otherwise dissembled. Dobrynja had called it a 'pang of guilt' the first time they'd noticed and the term had stuck) when it had warned the thing, so he suspected the AI didn't really think the thing was a parahuman (What else could've been the lie?) but it had been and gone too fast. He wished at times like this that recording the feeds was practical.

It was doable, but there was so much to track at once that recording it all would eat a hard drive's worth of space every day. He'd calculated it.

More importantly, they'd tried it.

If only I was a better coder...

Then he could've made a watchdog program, something that knew what he would care about and record or otherwise note down just that for later reference.

Saint found himself tempted to make some commentary on the carnage they were taking in, but words failed him. Hard to take everything in and think of what to say. Then Dobrynja showed up, quieter than a man of his size had any right to be without parahuman abilities, glanced at the monitoring station (Saint saw his face reflected) and promptly turned around.

When he came back a few minutes later, he was dressed in an undersuit himself. Saint gestured vaguely at the thing rampaging and said, "Parahuman or rogue goblin?"

He had his thoughts, but again he didn't want to taint their thoughts. Dobrynja spoke first, quicker to render judgment than Mags. Always was. "Parahuman."

Saint glanced at Mags. "Mags?"

She shook her head, seemingly at some thought, and then said with conviction, "Parahuman."

Saint nodded to himself and said, "Yeah. I'm thinking parahuman." After a pause he gestured at Mags and added, "You first, Mags."

"It doesn't fit." Saint and Dobrynja glanced at each other. Nope, neither of them had understood. Mags continued without reacting, possibly without noticing. "You walk a beat, you learn to notice when things don't fit." She pointed somewhere at the carnage, Saint couldn't say where. Everything was moving too fast. "Nilbog's monsters have a style, a flavor, whatever you want to call it. They'd all fit readily enough into a children's cartoon headed by H. R. Geiger. The thing killing them, it wouldn't. It's not a mash of adorable and horrifying. It's just alien. Like some of the case 53s, the really extreme ones."

Saint nodded slowly at that. He hadn't thought of that, but now that she said so, yeah, she had a point. It didn't fit.

He gestured at Dobrynja. Dobrynja crossed his arms and said, "If Nilbog could make something this nasty, all his creatures would be as dangerous or worse." After a pause, he squinted at the screen, and commented, "Also, it has no mouth. Nilbog's monsters at least pretend to be a real animal, something that dies when you suffocate it or starve it or whatever."

Another good point. Saint didn't have one as good, and admitted it explicitly with a somewhat sheepish expression. "Gut feeling for me, nothing more." After a pause, he added, "All right, so we agree it's a parahuman." He met their eyes, first Mags, then Dobrynja. "I think we have two decisions to make here."

He held up one finger. "First, we need to decide if this thing with Ellisburg demands our intervention. We've sworn ourselves to preventing the apocalypse. This is potentially an apocalypse in the making, right in front of us." The Protectorate was already alerted to something happening -he'd seen it in the AI's feeds- but the alert was just a general heads-up that something unusual was happening in Ellisburg. It was not a proper panic button. The AI clearly thought it had things under control.

He raised the next finger. "Second, we need to decide if the parahuman is something -someone- we need to do something about, assuming they don't get themselves killed." Watching it shrug off one of Dragon's more lethal weapons, he appended, "Which seems likely," before continuing with, "My read is we have a new trigger, someone who is either perfectly willing to risk the end of the world for... God only knows what reason... or so insanely overconfident that they really believe this-" a sweeping gesture at the ongoing carnage, now returning to Nilbog's 'court'. "-is a workable plan that will not have any negative consequences at all."

Dobrynja and Mags simultaneously said, "Looks handled to me," before glancing at each other in some surprise. Saint glanced at them too, befuddled. They were rarely in sync, certainly not to that degree, but then his attention was pulled back to the screen.

Oh. Dragon had finally drawn blood. Shot it in the head with a coilgun, if he was reading the feeds right. It was down, unmoving, and Nilbog's monsters were celebrating. (Saint did his best to ignore how Nilbog's creations tended to 'celebrate'. Fucking disgusting, but not relevant) So... yeah. Situation handled.

Then the AI's view of Nilbog was blocked by some kind of monstrous caterpillar, and everything went to hell.

In the end they'd decided their help wasn't necessary. The risk that Dragon would take the opportunity to backtrack them was part of the concern, but not the primary one -Mags in particular had objected to the idea of even giving that angle any consideration at all. In the face of the apocalypse, it just didn't rate. Even so, the Protectorate response was swift -Saint was especially impressed by how fast Legend had arrived, taking literally 3 minutes to arrive from New York City- and Dragon's feeds made it clear that the situation was... not under control, but operating at the very edge of such.

Dobrynja had gone to get into a full suit when a flesh-eating plague had been unleashed and consumed four capes in as many seconds, but ended up staying put when Panacea had done something that resulted in a piss-yellow haze spreading over the city and the plague ceasing to be a problem. There were other moments, almost as terrifying, but mostly... it was a collapsing front. Saint had half-followed threads of Dragon's analysis, how the dead of winter meant that Nilbog's creations were weak with hunger, many of them afraid to actually go beyond the walls -the temperature within the walls was a full 5 degrees (Celsius) warmer than the temperature outside the walls, due to various things Nilbog had done to shape the city- because they weren't really equipped for the cold, and the chaos had drawn many of them toward the center of the city, so there were fewer monsters ready to escape over the walls. Other factors he caught only enough to know Dragon had thought something, but not follow the details.

The parahuman had escaped. Saint suspected Dragon had let it happen. With Nilbog dead, the AI might've been able to creatively interpret law, use a loophole to pretend its duty was successfully discharged. (Or, a slightly more generous part of his mind commented, maybe the AI felt the horde of monsters was a higher priority than one parahuman who wasn't even doing anything anymore)

It had taken eight hours of continuous combat for the Protectorate capes to mop things up, decide that things were safe enough for most of them to return to their stations and leave only a skeleton crew to complete the sweep. Saint was struggling to stay awake. Even coffee wasn't really helping. Dobrynja had already told him to get some sleep, but he'd shrugged it off. He had finally relented a little and let Mags get in the chair, handle monitoring. He was starting to see code behind his eyelids when he blinked. Other symptoms indicating he was falling apart.

Currently they were discussing the parahuman.

"Seemed like Jabberwocky-" Mags' name for it. Saint was too tired to argue it, didn't care enough to ask why. Dobrynja didn't seem to care in general. "-was here just for Nilbog. In and out." Saint nodded vaguely.

Drifted off, standing on his feet.

Jerked awake to Dobrynja saying "... fucking cover-up, again. Tired of seeing this shit."

Saint forced himself to focus, asked, "What?"

Dobrynja pointed to the feed and said, "The Protectorate. They're pretending Jabberwocky wasn't there at all, turning it into a Guild/Protectorate victory when it's a Guild/Protectorate fuckup." Oh thought Saint vaguely. Again? But Dobrynja wasn't done talking. "I'm half-tempted to find Jabberwocky just to give them a goddamn medal. Fuck."

Saint started to nod, frowned when he realized that was wrong, started to shake his head, caught himself from falling. Dobrynja glanced at him and said, with no small amount of sympathy. "Saint, man, you look like shit. Dead on your feet. Go to bed."

Mags added, "We can continue this after you've actually slept."

Feeling ganged-up on, Saint went to his bedroom, unable to muster the energy to argue with them.

He dreamed of a girl looking into a mirror, saying, "Snicker-snack went its head," and clacking a pair of scissors closed.

Repeatedly.