Krixwell Liveblogs

Floorboards creaked as they ascended the stairs.

Rude.

“Hello?” one of them called out.  I tensed.  I didn’t recognize the voice.  They were right by my dad’s bedroom.  I heard my dad respond and swore under my breath.

I guess they’re not going for stealth, at least. Good sign.

My knife was still strapped in against the back of my costume, which dangled around my knees.  I bent down and drew it from beneath my sweatshirt.

Hopefully she won’t need it, but who knows.

Voices.  One of them murmured something, and my dad replied.  I couldn’t make out anything in terms of the words or the tone of what they were saying.

“lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”

“uhuh”

“Okay,” he said.  “I’ll need my sandals, downstairs.”

I was using my power to find them by the time I was standing again.  I found something else.  There were people in our kitchen.

…

Now what is this. PRT? Or did some S9 member(s) decide to follow Skitter for some reason?

The Slaughterhouse Nine?  Had they followed me here?

My dad was unable to see, thanks to the blood.  I drew my bugs together into a cluster, hid them in the folds of my costume, which I had tied around my waist.  I crossed the hall to my room and found a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants from when I’d had a bit of a belly and a wider waistband.

I suppose slimming down a little might’ve been a result of the hero training. Maybe.

I zipped up the pants and tied a sweatshirt around my waist to hide the rest of my costume.  I could sense them approach.  One of them waved at a fly that flew too close to their head.  Both were men.

So it’s not two of the S9 members from the encounter earlier, then. Jack was the only man among them.

I think PRT or medics is much more likely than S9, but I don’t fully trust it. Who else could it be? Chosen or something? I don’t see why the Chosen would care about entering this house immediately after the Shattering, though, and not everyone was aware that it was coming, so most people wouldn’t enter to seek shelter in-between Skitter running in there.

…Skitter running in there. If they’re PRT, they might be after her, having been following her since she heard the sirens.

“Can you move your toes?”

There was a pause.  “Yes.”

Ah, good. 🙂 Let’s hope it extends to the rest of the legs. I don’t know if the reverse of what I just described can happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me all that much.

I breathed a sigh of relief.  “Then the next biggest issue is possible internal bleeding.  We need to get you to a hospital.”

Ah, yes, the hospitals. They’re in for a busy night, that’s for sure.

Especially since a lot of their equipment – both for management and for actual medical procedures – is going to be broken now.

“They hit the entire city?”

“I think so,” I told him.  No use letting on exactly how much I knew.  It would only cause the both of us more distress in the long run.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Alright, fine, it’s pretty likely. It’s distress I wouldn’t mind reading about though.

“The hospitals will be overcrowded.”

“Yeah.  But not going isn’t an option.”

Not a good one. But if you go, Danny will probably be low priority.

I didn’t add the question about toes for no reason. It’s very much possible to have a spinal injury that causes you to lose feeling in and fine control of some or all of your toes but not the legs/feet they’re attached to. That is the case for my dad.

His hands fumbled blindly for my wrists, seized them.

DANNY! 😀

Hiya, man, how you doing?

He couldn’t see me with the blood in his eyes.  That fact didn’t make me happy or relieved in the slightest, however it might have kept him from discovering my costumed identity.

…maybe.

“Taylor?”

“I’m here.  Don’t move too much.  I’m going to see what I can do.”

“I might have to call in help from this one guy I know who’s really good at burning people’s faces off. He should be done burning off Lisa’s by now.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not even scratched.”

“How?”

“I was protected by some widows down the street.”

I could see him sagging with relief.

“You were right,” he said.  He tried to stand, and I pushed him back down.

That she was – somehow…

“Stay still,” I said.  “At least until we can be sure there’s nothing more serious.”

“Right,” he mumbled.  “You took that first aid class.”

You have no idea how handy that’s been these last few months, Danny!

So much blood.  Two thirds of his face was covered in blood that looked more black than red in the gloom.  Darker lines marked where the blood was welling from.  Cuts across the side of his head, the edge of his forehead, his temple and cheek.  His ear had been almost cut in half.

Hm. Looks like we need Greenfire again. Dude’s taking regular trips to Brockton Bay these days. Tells his teammates he’s going to “practice medicine”, to their confusion.

So we’ve established that things are looking bad. But is he breathing?

There was a rattling from the window.  I looked and saw strips of shredded duct tape.  It looked like the tape had been taped around the edges, then taped in an asterisk-like pattern.

Yes! Good man, Danny, taking his daughter’s warning seriously and doing his best – if perhaps not enough, as foreshadowed in 11.1 (Taylor commenting on Danny’s glasses not being that much safer in his pocket) – to make things safer.

He’d taken my warning seriously.

I investigated further.  More blood at the back of his head.  Had the glass penetrated into his brain?  No, I could feel the edges of the glass.  It had stopped at his skull, maybe splintered under the surface of his skin.  I had no way of telling.

It doesn’t sound like he might be alive from the way Taylor is acting. But this is also not how I expected her to behave if she found him dead, so??

I tore at the straps connecting my armor to my back as I ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, pulled the zipper down as I ran down the hallway.

Ah, okay, so she is taking the whole costume off. Fair enough.

Getting my arms free of the sleeves, I tied the inside-out arms around my waist.  It wasn’t nearly enough to seriously hide my costumed identity, but I wasn’t about to delay for another second.

It might’ve been easier to explain why she was in here as Skitter than as Taylor, but I think she wants to have her true face out, not have the barrier of secrecy that is Skitter’s mask in between her and Danny.

Almost none of which matters if he’s dead, of course.

I pulled open his bedroom door and hurried to his side, glass crunching under my feet.  I gingerly peeled away the layers of blankets that had draped over my dad as he was thrown from the bed.

That is bad news. To be thrown from the bed, he would have to be hit hard by the glass.

I don’t have high hopes for what Taylor is about to find under those shrouds, uh, I mean, blankets.

The moment I was sure it was over, I was on my feet, running around the back to the kitchen door.  I tore off my mask as I made my way there, and some bugs helped guide my hand to the latch as I reached through the broken window of the kitchen door and opened it.

It’s been a long time since we last saw Taylor enter here.

Also, she has clearly thrown away all concern for her secret now, going in to check on Danny while wearing the costume but not the mask.

Unless she stops to take off the costume and devise an explanation for why she’s all of a sudden in the house, this is probably going to end one of two ways: Either Danny’s about to find out – or have confirmed – that Taylor is Skitter, or Taylor is going to find her dad badly hurt or dead.

I’m somewhat leaning towards the latter as far as what I think is going to happen, but I can’t deny that I’m hoping for the former. Not just because I like Danny, either, but because I think there’s more interesting story potential in Danny finding out what sort of life Taylor has made for herself, while him dying would’ve been more interesting four or five Arcs back.

There was a cloud to the east, where the beaches were, reaching up to the cloud level, like some pale wall.