Krixwell Liveblogs

I followed the mass of people into the defunct factory that was next to the ambulances.

Sheets and cloths were pulled from machinery and laid atop boxes and on the ground, so people had places to sit and lie down.

I guess the factory functions as a makeshift hospital.

Gradually, people set about the process of marking the types of wounds and the presence of glass, buried or otherwise.

“Disinfectant?” a woman asked me.

Oh yeah, got any of that in the Hive?

I turned.  She was older, in her mid-fifties, roughly my height, and she had a pinched face. “What about it?”

“You’ve been pulling things out of the clouds of flies,” she told me, “Can you produce some disinfectant for us, or are you limited to art supplies and candles?”

Hah, I was right about how it looked! And it’s sort of backfiring. :p

I got the impression of a strict schoolteacher from her.  The kind who was a hardass with even the good students and a mortal enemy to the poor ones.

Eesh.

I’m just gonna go ahead and headcanon that she’s also the founder of a wrestling club, based on one of the hardass teachers I had.

It took some time for everyone to get moving, but they did.  My bugs passed me some candles and a lighter and I started handing them out with the pens and markers.

And then they went into the factory, set down the candles, used some chalk to draw on the floor, and summoned a demon who promptly destroyed them and all of Brockton Bay. The end.

Worm was a good story, guys! So let’s see, where do I find Ward…

He nodded and took the pen, turning to the not-quite-as-old man beside him.

Good luck!

I addressed the crowd, “Remember, dotted line around the wounds if you can see the glass or if you’re absolutely sure there’s no glass in there, circle if you can’t tell.  Once you or someone else has drawn the dotted line, you can take out the glass if it’s smaller than your thumbnail.  If it’s bigger, try to leave it alone!”

Sounds reasonable. Glass that’s smaller than a thumbnail probably doesn’t go much further than the skin. Though there is the risk of long pieces that look small on the surface.

“We need some elbow room,” the paramedic told me.  His blue gloves were slick with blood.  People were standing within two or three feet of him, watching what he was doing, trying to be close enough to be the next to get help when he was done with his current patient.

Skitter: *brings down an enormous swarm of flies over the paramedics, causing the crowd to back up*
Skitter: “Better?”

“They probably haven’t,” I replied, using my swarm to augment my voice, but not to carry it to the crowd.

“Probably not.  But we have to ask, and time we spend asking is time we could spend helping them.”

Exactly.

I grasped the hand of a grungy old man who stood next to me, stretching his arm out.  “Have you had your shots?”

He shook his head.

I used the pen to draw a ‘T’ on the back of his hand, circled it and drew a line through it.  I pressed the pen into the old man’s hand, “You go to people and ask them the same question.  If they haven’t had their shots, draw the same thing.  If they have, just draw the T.”

Seems like a good pair of symbols to use. Quite straight-forward.

I saw a glimmer of confusion in his eyes.  Was he illiterate?  I turned his hand over and drew a capital ‘T’ on his palm.

Huh. Alright.

“Like that, if they have had their shots” I said, raising his hand for people to see, then turned it around.  “Like that if they haven’t.”

And by doing this, she’s ensuring that people know he’s coming and what to expect. Good. 🙂

“Or at least, glass as fine as the shrapnel that hit you,” I corrected myself.

Now that might be a different story.

A shrug and a nod from the paramedic.  I got my mental bearings and continued, “If you’re pulling the glass out of your cuts and wounds and you lose track of which ones you’ve tended to, they’re going to have to explore the wounds to investigate, queue you up for x-rays and maybe even cut you open again later, after the skin has closed up, to get at any pieces they missed.”

Ahh, yeah, that makes sense.

I could see uneasy reactions from the crowd.  I raised my hand, just in time for the first of my swarm to arrive.  I closed my hand around a pen as the cloud of airborne insects delivered it to me.  They dispersed, and the pen remained behind.

I wonder if the pen was visible through the swarm before it dispersed, or if it just looked to the crowd like Skitter just made a pen out of bugs.

“I’m going to give some of you pens and markers.  We’re going to have a system to make all of this easier on the doctors.  Dotted lines around any injuries with glass sticking out.  Circles around wounds where the glass may be deeper.”

I like this plan.

The paramedic waved me over.

Ah, yeah, I suppose it would make sense for him to have some input on this.

I moved briskly through the crowd to the stretcher.

“Tetanus,” he said, when I was close enough.  “We need to know if they’ve had their shots.”

I don’t know what tetanus is – a disease or infection, I presume – but adding more information to the system is a good idea. The more they can tell just by looking, the better.

When I was done, I called the swarm to me.

Minus the non-roach crawlies, I would assume? Since they can’t go through the water.

I turned my attention to the injured who were clustering around the ambulances.

“Listen!” I called out, using my bugs to augment my voice.  “Some of you have been picking the glass out of your skin!  I understand it hurts, but you’re slowing things down!”

How so? By not doing other things?

I got some confused and angry looks.  I held up my hand to forestall any comments or argument.

“Any paramedic, nurse or doctor that helps you has to make absolutely sure that you don’t have any glass embedded deep in your body.  I don’t believe x-rays can detect glass-”

That would make sense. X-rays are a form of light, and glass is translucent, at least to the visible range.

I paused as a paramedic snapped his head up to look at me.  Okay, so I was wrong.  I wished he hadn’t reacted, though.

Ah, okay. Fair enough!

I suppose even if the glass is translucent to x-rays (which I don’t know), that would still be detectable because flesh isn’t as translucent to them?

People were paying attention to the paramedics, they’d noticed, and it wasn’t critical that these people know the exact details of the treatment they’d get.  If he’d just let me lie or be wrong, this would have gone smoother.

Yeah, but I can’t fault a trained medical professional for reacting to medical misinformation.

More people returned with the injured.  I administrated my bugs while I gave new directions to the rescue parties.

Just carrying the things on a tide of bugs wasn’t going to work.  The crawling bugs couldn’t pass through the water, and there was no way to have flying bugs carry things – too many of the objects were too heavy, even with the flying insects gathered on every inch of their surface and working in unison.

Dang it.

And even water-walking insects can’t do that while weighed down.

Minutes passed as I tried different configurations and formations of bugs, trying to wrangle things like the small bottle of hydrogen peroxide with my swarm.

This plan… might not work out.

Then I saw the woman with the maxi-pad eyepatch and a man of roughly the same age carting someone to the ambulance using a blanket attached to two broomsticks as a stretcher.

Ohh… Inspiration! I guess flying insects might be able to lift things if a mini-stretcher were to make it possible for more of them to help out?

I could do the same thing.  I called on my black widow spiders, drawing some out from the terrariums where I had them contained.  Wasps carted them to the necessary spots, and I had them spin their silk around the objects in question and tie that silk to the necessary bugs.

Niiice.

Silk looped around the neck of a marker, then around a series of roaches, who could then be assisted by other bugs.  I did the same for the other things, the iodine, markers, pens, candles and more.

So do the roaches act as the stretchers here, with the items tied to them so they don’t fall off?

I had to use my bugs.  That wasn’t so simple when the things I was retrieving weren’t small.

Yeah, figured they wouldn’t be. If they had been, the bugs would’ve probably been her first choice.

I had a box of pens and markers in my room, for sketching out the costume designs.  I also had first aid kits in my bedside table upstairs and in the bathroom on the ground floor.

Hm, yeah, that sounds useful. Especially the first aid kits.

Bringing all of that stuff here meant opening the boxes and retrieving everything I needed, carting them here on a wave of crawling bugs, past puddles and flooded streets.

Finally the pens, markers and first aid kids can experience the joys of crowdsurfing!

I collected markers, pens, bandages, ointments, iodine, candles and needles.  Especially needles.  Smaller bottles of hydrogen peroxide.  At least, I hoped it was the iodine and hydrogen peroxide.

Hard to tell without reading the labels.

So “materials” meant mainly medical supplies. No wonder there weren’t many around, besides the ones in use by the paramedics.

I couldn’t exactly read the labels.  The bottle shapes felt right, anyways.

So here’s a thing – if she’s gotten better at processing audio input from the bugs, enough to recognize the kind of music someone was listening to while in a stupor, could something similar have happened with visual input? Maybe she would even be able to read if she tried?

Though if you go by the theory that she got better at listening through the bugs because she subconsciously tried to understand Grue using them, there wouldn’t be a clear reason for the same to have happened to sight. Yet.

“Those are probably okay to remove,” I told her, “But avoid disturbing any close to the arteries, here, here and here.”

Yeah, glass in the arm is better than bleeding until he can get help from someone who can patch him up.

“He doesn’t have cuts there.”

“Good,” I told her.  “But you should know for later, for when you’re helping others.”

Good thinking. And Taylor’s implicitly saying “you’ll be doing this for other people too, riiight?”, putting more of that social pressure on the woman by implying that her helping others is something that should be taken for granted.

She pointed at her leg.  Sand had flayed the skin of her foot and calf and turned the muscle a dirty brown color.  “I can’t really walk.”

Then others should come to her. Simple as that.

“You won’t need to.”

A plan was coalescing in my mind.  A way to give people something to do and give them some indication they’d eventually get help.

See: distracting them. 🙂

But yes, by putting them to use, she keeps them away from bothering the paramedics, while at the same time getting the benefits of more people doing useful things.

The problem was, I needed materials to carry this out, and there wasn’t much nearby.  It meant I had to get the materials from my lair.

Hm. Alright. What sort of materials do you need?

I wasn’t willing to leave for any length of time, though, and I didn’t want to spare Charlotte, either.

And Sierra’s off at the hospital, probably making sure her family is alright.

Would’ve been nice to have some Coildiers around right now.

So I guess bugs are the best remaining option other than informing someone from the crowd on how to get into the Hive, which I doubt Taylor wants to do.