Krixwell Liveblogs

Broken tooth?  No.  When I’d kicked Cherish earlier, hadn’t she said that Bonesaw had reinforced her teeth?

…fuck, that’s a good point. Is Bonesaw intentionally enraging Parian further?

Surely the psycho would have done the same for herself.

She was lying.

And there was nothing I could do to alert Parian.

Are you sure? Maybe your subconscious can find a way, using the bugs.

Parian picked up one of the scalpels Bonesaw had placed near me.  Her hand was trembling even after she had it in a white-knuckled grip.  “I don’t want to do this.  I never wanted to fight.  But I can’t let you walk away.  That’s the most important thing.

Imp, internally: “Yeah, no, that won’t work.”

I guess this is why Bonesaw’s lying. She’s hiding her protections to catch Parian off-guard with them.

I’m willing to compromise what I believe in, compromise myself, to do that.”

Willing to kill?

Bonesaw rolled her eyes.

Wall!  Barrier!

What do you mean to accomplish? Get in Parian’s way so she doesn’t foolishly run into Bonesaw’s close melee range?

My bugs left Bonesaw’s presence to form a barrier between her and Parian, but they were too few.  Too many had died against Bonesaw’s bug killing smoke.  Parian ignored them.

I wonder what Parian thinks of the bugs. Is she aware of Skitter at all, besides as an unknown victim of Bonesaw lying around here?

In one motion, Parian stepped close and stabbed the scalpel into Bonesaw’s throat.  Then she did it again, and again, stabbing over and over, hysterical.

Well, this probably ain’t ending well.

It wasn’t enough blood.  I knew it, and Parian had to know it.

Yeeah, this isn’t working.

Parian flung one hand in Bonesaw’s direction.  I didn’t see what happened next, but the bugs that were still drifting in Bonesaw’s direction to attack her were telling me that there were threads stretching between the two of them.

Ooh, nice!

A bug settled on the point of a needle where it had impaled the side of Bonesaw’s neck.  Twenty or thirty needles with attached threads extending between them and Parian’s sleeve.

Get the point yet, Bonesaw?

Bonesaw crunched something in her mouth, “You’re playing so rough.  Ow.  I think you broke one of my teeth, with your dinosaur.”

Clearly she doesn’t. 😛

Parian ignored her.  A twist of her hands, and Bonesaw was lifted into the air, spread-eagled.  Bonesaw’s skin stretched where the needles pulled at it.  Parian advanced towards the villain.

Hey, Bonesaw? You fucked up.

*boops readers’ noses*

Let’s get back to it!

She wasn’t a fighter, I remembered.  She had held her own against Leviathan, but she didn’t have experience.  I wanted to scream at her, to make her stop talking, to do something to Bonesaw.

Sorry, Taylor, not everyone is as straight-to-the-point as you are.

(Although I suppose Parian isn’t exactly “straight” to anything.)

“If it makes you feel any better, some of them might still be alive.  We didn’t kill them all.”

That’s the closest she’s said to anything actually comforting, but that’s only until you remember what they did to the ones they didn’t kill.

Parian snapped her attention to Bonesaw, “What?”

“Some we left alive, so I could give them five-minute plastic surgery.  My spiders handled most of it.  Implants under the skin, some chemical dyes for hair…”

Of course, Bonesaw doesn’t realize that Parian ain’t gonna take that all that much better.

Also damn, she did that stuff in five minutes?

“Plastic surgery?”  Parian shook her head.  “What?  Why?”

“To make them look like us.  They’re all running around out there, drawing enemy fire and freaking out.  It’s funny.

“Oh your family might still be alive, thought they look like us now and they might get Purity’d sooner or later.”

And of course, it’ll take a dozen visits with doctors less talented than I to get something even resembling their old faces back.  Can you imagine how many people are going to double take when they look at them, before they’ve all been fixed?  Like, ‘Oh no, it’s Siberian!’, except it isn’t.”

You’re really not helping your case. 😛

She started up the saw and pressed it against my skull.  The horror of what she was doing was compounded by the most god-awful noise, and a grinding vibration of my skull.

You know what just occurred to me?

She might not be Panacea, but Parian at least ought to be able to stitch Taylor’s forehead up a bit.

If it hurt, I didn’t register it, because the noise of the tool had drawn the stuffed animal’s attention.  It charged for us, slamming through the glass sneeze guard of the dining hall’s serving counter.

Huh. So there is some sensory input through them. That, or Parian’s hiding spot is close.

It’s a possibility that she’s inside the thing. It makes for a decent hiding place, using it as an armor. The deflating and inflating doesn’t have to be by range, that might just be a thing she can choose to do in order to play dead.

It struck Bonesaw, hard, and the saw slid across my head, cutting through my hairline.  I didn’t care.

Honestly that’s just a minor inconvenience at this point.

My rescuer was some kind of cartoonish dinosaur made of black and blue fabric.  I could see the logo of this health club repeated several times over the stuffed animal’s exterior.

I guess you take what’s available.

Though it’s still possible that she made it. She might’ve worked for the health club before Leviathan struck.

The stuffed animal had stopped in the middle of the cafeteria.  Either it didn’t hear Bonesaw or something else had its attention.

I think for this to be effective, Taylor will need to use spider string to direct Parian. Problem is she can’t do that consciously, and first she needs to realize how Parian is sensing things.

I could feel that not unfamiliar sensation of darkness creeping in around the edges of my vision.  Was I passing out?  How much blood was I losing?

I take it it’s not Grue finally using his power.

I blinked three times.  Stall.

Who knows how she’ll take that. “I have more to say”?

“No, no.”  She stroked my hair, and my forehead lit up with a burning pain where she’d cut.  “We should get this done before you drop dead.  Don’t think I can’t see the changes in your breathing and pupil dilation.”

Right, sure.