by wildbow
“She’s pulling something!” Tecton shouted. He raised his voice to be heard by the other capes, “Get back!”
Everyone moved away, excepting Young Buck, who was frozen, hands to his wound. Grace retreated, holding onto the incinerated young hero.
When Noelle vomited, the slurry came out as one stream, a geyser that extended six or seven hundred feet. Rachel steered Bentley out of the way before it hit, and the others danced off to either side to avoid getting splashed. Grace got clipped, and went sprawling, almost glued to the ground under the weight of the fluid, the cape in her arms falling.
A dozen bodies began climbing free of the vomit. Ten or so clones had been deposited on the street, along with a real Leet in civilian clothes. One of the clones was a Circus, folding herself into her pocket dimension.
“She’s walking on the bodies,” Tecton said. “Incoming!”
The bodies. She vomited bodies into the pit to keep stuff from sliding underfoot.
Young Buck charged through Noelle, but he wasn’t flying when he finished his maneuver. He tumbled to the ground, rolling after he landed.
I could hear armbands informing others of the fallen.
My arm jerked in pain, and I slapped at a hornet. One of Noelle’s.
Noelle advanced on the burned cape and Grace. Tecton slammed the ground, but the effect was muffled. He’d shattered the ground for blocks around, had maybe killed or eliminated several of the two dimensional clones, but his piledriver gauntlets wouldn’t be as effective on this soft surface.
Two of the Southern Wards opened fire from above, pelting Noelle with laser fire. I could sense her growing tall, or rearing up on her hind legs, and she vomited a stream into the air. Chronicler and the other cape were splashed, caught by the clotted liquid and a flying body. Chronicler’s power remained, the hologram images sustaining the same fire at the same angle, not adjusting as Noelle moved to one side.
Eidolon made his move. My bugs could sense the air growing heavy and humid. Vomit dried, and clones staggered and fell.
The humidity increased to the point that I could feel the moisture flowing through the air in thick clouds, rising from every surface, heavy off the bodies of the clone, off Noelle and the streams of vomit.
My bugs were dying. The flying insects were first to die, their wings crinkling. The ones closest to me were alive, but they were suffering too.
Dessication.
“You’re killing Grace!” Tecton bellowed at the sky. I doubted Eidolon would hear from his vantage point. I had only his word to go by. Grace was in an area my bugs couldn’t reach.
“Acceptable losses,” Grue said. Tecton whirled around to face him. Grue’s voice was calm, “His plan isn’t working. Tattletale said he wanted to experience enough danger to get a power boost, and I’m not getting the feeling he’s had that. He’s too experienced to panic, but with everything he’s seen, everything he’s done over the past decades of work, maybe he’s thinking he has to do something here, and he’s decided he can’t let there be another Endbringer. Can’t let there be another monster in this world.”
“She’s on our side! She’s one of the good ones!”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “Eidolon might be assuming she’s already dead.”
I’d positioned some bugs so that they could distinguish Noelle’s vague lumbering frame against the background of the dimly lit sky. Her flesh was drying and flaking off in chunks as the moisture was pulled out with force.
But the ground still rumbled with the vibrations of her steady advance, and for all the dried flesh that was falling free, she wasn’t getting noticeably smaller to my bugs’ senses.
Eidolon hit her with a gravity slam. More flesh came free. I saw a change, with that, but the edges of the silhouette filled in.
“She isn’t dying?” I asked, my voice a murmur.
“She’s regenerating,” Grue said.
The effects of Eidolon’s dessication were starting to get to me. The air was too dry. I coughed once and briefly held my breath to keep from succumbing to another fit.
There was a sound like a firecracker taking flight, and Noelle lurched. Even with my bug’s less than stellar sight, I could see the aftermath. A hundred slightly different angles. Noelle’s true body, the human half perched on top of the monster, arched her back, her chest out, head turning toward the sky. A spray of blood and gore marked a small explosion ripping out the front of her chest.
And another, a shot from behind, tearing through her cranium.
My bugs ventured into the dessicated area. They would only last for a minute at best, but they’d serve to scout, to give me eyes. They found Ballistic.
He hadn’t come alone. Scrub was with him, and Trickster swapped rubble out of the area to move his teammates in. He swapped himself in for Grace, appearing in the middle of the vomit-slurry.
I opened my mouth to speak, coughed at the dry air instead.
“You decided to help?” Grue called out.
“She’s our responsibility,” Genesis said. “We made a promise to each other. To get home, no matter what it took. But there were other parts to it. Things we added on when the whole situation became clear. Fixing Noelle was one of those additions.”
Getting home?
“We knew it was fucked up,” Sundancer said. “But we promised ourselves that if it came down to it, we’d step in before it got bad. And this is bad. So we’re acting on it.”
Her orb burned above her head. Its crackle sounded slightly different in the dry air.
Noelle’s growl was accented by a noise from one of the larger canine mouths. “Traitors.”
She’s alive. Shot through the heart and brain, and she’s talking.
“If you were thinking straight, you’d agree with us,” Genesis said. “You’d agree this is right. That we can’t let people get hurt, just for your revenge.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Noelle said.
“I know,” Trickster spoke. He looked up toward the sky, tilted his head, and then Eidolon disappeared. I could sense Eidolon’s new location, a few blocks away. He tried to fly closer, and Trickster teleported him again, keeping him a distance away. Eidolon had given up his power invulnerability.
“I… I’ll use my sun, Noelle,” Sundancer said. “We’ll burn you. It’ll be complete, thorough. And this ends. There’ll be no more hurting people. And we put all this behind us, remember you the way you were. It’s better if it’s us.”
“I don’t want to be a memory,” Noelle said.
“You already are,” Ballistic said, from behind her.
She turned, and a low growl sounded from one of her lower mouths, deep enough I could feel the rumble of it.
Ballistic shook his head. “The old Noelle’s long gone. Do you think she would have survived getting shot like that?”
Noelle didn’t answer.
“You have her memories, nothing more,” Trickster said.
“Krouse,” Noelle said. “You turn on me like this?”
“I don’t know what else to do.” He teleported Eidolon away again. This time Eidolon stayed put. Choosing a new power?
“You did this to me. This? The old Noelle disappearing? It’s your fault. You know it. You created me.”
He’d created her?
He’d dosed her.
“Yeah,” Trickster said. He lit a cigarette, put it in the mouth-hole of his mask.
“And I listened to you. I bought your promises. Your hollow assurances. I listened and cooperated when you said I should be locked up. I listened when they shut me in that vault, in the dark, alone, with that fucking beeping that wouldn’t let me sleep. I waited all this time because you said I could get better.”
“I know. It eats away at me. But I don’t know what else to do.”
“I spent the past two years listening to you. Doing what you wanted. Just do what I want here, and I’ll let it all end. I’ll let her burn me, and then you guys can find your own way home.”
“I know what you want,” he said. “But the consequences—”
“—Don’t matter,” she said. “It’s not our world. It’s… it’s as screwed up as the things I make. They’re just dark twisted copies of people in this dark, twisted, fucked up world.”
“No’—” He started.
“You owe me this.”
Trickster sighed, spat out the barely-touched cigarette. Even though I couldn’t identify tone, I felt a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Shit,” I said. “Grue—”
Trickster was already turning. Grue was only beginning to raise a cloud of darkness around us when he disappeared, Trickster standing in his place.
“Grue!” I screamed. He was where Trickster had been, half a city block away from Noelle.
Noelle lunged. Trickster could have moved out of the way fast enough. Grue wasn’t so lucky. The shattered ground under her feet shifted, and she slammed into him, her lower body catching Grue, adhering to him.
He was giving her us.
Trickster was already gone from the midst of our group. There was gunfire and incoherent shouting as people tried to identify his location. Ballistic was gone, replaced by a piece of rubble. He was taking the most immediate threats out of the picture. Eidolon, Ballistic, Grue…
Who came next on that hierarchy?
Me.
I found myself only five paces away from Noelle, plucked from the midst of my cloud of bugs. There were too few to hide me from Trickster’s sight, with the way the dessication had thinned their ranks.
She caught me with the back of one claw. There was a sound like a gunshot going off, my ribs feeling like my bones had turned to white-hot brands, and I stuck. She set her claw down on the ground, and my back exploded with pain as I struggled to contort my body, get in a position where I wasn’t being folded in half under the weight of an eight ton monstrosity.
I was spared being snapped in two not by my own struggles, but by the pull of her flesh as it folded around me. It simultaneously consumed me and pulled on me, as if by a hundred hands. The process was smooth and inevitable, flesh flowing around me like hot candlewax, even as I was drawn upward and inward.
I could sense Regent appearing nearby. Noelle turned to face him. He didn’t fight, didn’t try to run. He said something, but I couldn’t make out the words, couldn’t hear them with the dark, hot, rancid-smelling flesh that had enveloped me.
The last of the flesh closed behind me, my power stopped working, and I was left with only absolute darkness and the pounding flow of Noelle’s blood in my ears.
Interlude 18 (Donation Bonus #4)
Dr. Jeremy Foster was woken by the sound of a distant gunshot. He sat straight up in bed.
Another gunshot.
He reached over to his bedside table and found the remote. A press of a button illuminated his bedroom. He opened the drawer to grab the handheld radio and pressed the button. “Report.”
Silence.
“Captain Adams, report.”
It wasn’t Captain Adams who responded. It was a woman. “Stay put, doctor. We’ll be with you in a moment.”
He was out of bed in a flash. Remote in hand, he turned off the light and opened his bedroom door.
There were two figures in the hallway, cloaked in shadow, one large and broad, the other narrow. The smaller one saw him and broke into a run.
He slammed the bedroom door and locked it in the same motion. There was a crash as the figure threw himself against the door. If the door were the usual wood chip and cheap cardboard, it might have broken, but Jeremy valued quality, even with the things one normally didn’t see. His doors were solid wood.
The doorknob rattled as the doctor crossed his bedroom. He reached for the underside of one shelf on his bookcase, pulled a pin, and then pulled the bookcase away from the wall.
The remote fit into a depression on the stainless steel door that sat behind the bookcase. He made sure it was positioned correctly, then hit a button. There was a click, and the door popped open a crack. He had to use both hands to slide the door open.
The doorknob rattled again, then there was a heavier collision. The bigger man had gotten close.
Safely inside, Jeremy pulled the bookcase tight against the wall, felt it click into place, and then shut the metal door of his panic room.
Monitors flickered on, showing his estate in shades of black and green. At any given time, he had seven armed men patrolling the grounds and an eighth keeping an eye on the security cameras. He could count seven fallen, including the man in the security office. They lay prone on the ground, or slumped over the nearest surface. One struggled weakly.
He picked up the phone. There wasn’t a dial tone.
The cell phone, then. He opened a drawer and picked up the cell. No service. There was only static. They had something to block it.
There was no such thing as ‘security’. However much one invested in safes, in armed guards, in panic rooms and high stone walls, it only served to escalate a perpetual contest with the people who would try to circumvent those measures. Raising the stakes.
Helpless, Jeremy watched the invaders making their way through his house. He was already mentally calculating the potential losses. Pieces of artwork worth tens of thousands, valuables not secured in the safes…
The Magnes painting at the landing between the second and third floor, overlooking the ground floor foyer. Jeremy winced at the realization. He’d only picked it up two months ago. The two million dollar price tag might have given him pause, but it was insured. He’d bought all the furniture for foyer to complement the work, and now he’d have to find another painting to take its place and buy new furniture to match.
Except they were walking by the painting as though it weren’t even there.
A part of him felt offended that they hadn’t even stopped to admire it. Philistines.
No. There was a very good chance they were coming for him.
One by one, they entered his bedroom. It was a blind spot of sorts. He’d wanted his privacy, so the only ways to turn on the security camera in the corner of the room would be to unlock or open the balcony doors, break the glass or input a particular code.
He stepped over to the computer, typed in the code. Simonfoster19931996.
The screen flickered to life, but it wasn’t his bedroom in the picture. A field with four walls approximately where his bedroom walls had been, the six invaders waiting very patiently in the middle as walls stripped away to become tendrils, tendrils became vines and vines twisted together into treelike forms.
The window went quickly. The ‘field’ of knee-length grass rippled as the wind caught it.
The bookcase was slower to degrade. Books were rendered into leaves, shelves into vines. He watched the image on the camera with an increasing sense of dread, glanced at the door.
The screen went black.
“No, no, no, no,” he said.
A crack appeared in the door. Floor to ceiling.
He grabbed the handgun from the counter, double checked it was loaded.
Another crack crossed the door, horizontal, nearly six feet above the ground.
He disabled the safety.
With the third crack, the door fell into the panic room, slamming against the ground. He fired into the opening of the doorway, and the acoustics of the metal-walled room made the shot far, far louder than it had any right to be.
There was nobody standing in the doorway.
He looked around. The layout of the room wasn’t set up for a firefight. Especially not a firefight that involved parahumans. He crouched, kept the gun pointed toward the door.
They didn’t make a move. The floor of the panic room was being finely etched with markings that overlapped and wove into one another. Where lines drew to a taper, points were curling up, strands slowly rising, dividing into finer growths and flaring at the top with the vague cat-tail like ends of wild grass. He could see the clean-cut edges of the door curlin
g, twisting into tendrils. Some had teardrop shaped bulges on the end.
“Elle,” he called out. “Labyrinth?”
All together, the bulges on the tendrils unfurled into tiny, metallic flowers, framing the doorway.
“She’s having one of her bad days, doctor,” the woman who had been on the other side of the radio called back. “She’s not feeling very talkative as a result. If you have something to say, say it to me. I go by Faultline.”
* * *
Faultline pressed her back to the ‘wall’. Not that it was really a ‘wall’. Labyrinth’s power was slowly working on the metal, gradually twisting it into gnarled textures and branches. Shamrock was beside her, clad in a costume of skintight black leather with a green clover on the chest, her red hair spilling over her shoulders, a combat shotgun directed at the ground. Gregor and Spitfire were on the other side of the door, holding similar positions.
Newter sat with Labyrinth on the bed, his tail circled around the girl’s waist, keeping her from wandering. The bed was barely recognizable, nearly consumed by waist-high strands of hardwood-textured grass.
A cool summer breeze blew in through the opening that had once been the window, scattering dandelion seeds and leaves throughout the room’s interior.
“I don’t know what she told you,” the Doctor called out. “I always treated her professionally, to the best of my ability.”
“We’re not here for revenge on her behalf, Doctor,” Faultline responded. “We’re looking for information.”
“I’m not working with the Asylum anymore. It’s been over a year.”
“I know,” she replied.
“Protocols have changed. I can’t get you past security or anything like that.”
“The Asylum doesn’t really interest me,” Faultline said. “Not why we’re here.”
“Then why?”
“Because we’ve been trying to track down people who can give us answers, and you stood out. Spending a little too much money.”
“I’m a good doctor, that’s all!”
“Doesn’t account for it. Comparing you to your coworkers at the asylum back then, you were spending too much money. Just enough that I think someone was bankrolling you.”