She stopped yet again, choking on her words.

I had a hard enough time keeping afloat in a conversation when I was Taylor.  How was I supposed to do it as Skitter?  What was appropriate, what was expected?  I hadn’t figured any of this out, yet.

Yeah, you’re gonna need to learn that if you’re going to hold this position.

I put a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.  I left the hand there, and I measured out my words.  “Trust me when I say I have that handled.”

Capsaicin stings to the rescue!

And maybe some dog bites too, if you can get the other Undersiders in on this.

She looked at me, and I gave her a small nod.

Very reassuring.

“God,” she muttered.

Heh. Can’t believe you’re actually doing this?

“Tell me more about them, and tell me anything about your brother that might help me identify him.”

Ah, yes, that would be good to know. Especially if it’s something about his shape, so Taylor doesn’t need to see him to know not to sting him.

She startled, as if shaken from a daydream.  She reached into her pocket and handed me a folded picture.  It was hard to pin down the kid’s age.  He was skinny in a way that suggested someone who was going through a major growth spurt but hadn’t yet filled out.  He had large, blue eyes and a snub nose.  There wasn’t a hair on his face, and his black hair was spiked so the top stuck up in every direction.  Like so many guys, he didn’t seem to know how to style his hair.  He ignored the sides and back in favor of overdoing the parts he could see when he looked in the mirror.

Sounds like a bit of a mess, to be honest… at least he seems very recognizable. Although I kinda doubt the Merchants let him spend much time styling his hair.

The boy could have been a tall eleven year old and he could have been a young-looking sixteen.

That’s quite the range.

“Not about what they did, I mean, do you understand what I’m saying about these assholes, these… I don’t even have words to describe them… to say how much I hate them.  God!”

Oh yeah, absolutely. They’re pretty disgusting.

“Keep going,” I urged her.

“I don’t know you.  I barely know about you.  I heard something about you in some bank robbery around the time I had exams-”

Yeah, that is pretty much Skitter’s only real claim to fame outside the cape community. That and the PRT fundraiser, which I think was supposed to be televised? I didn’t see any cameras mentioned there though, so maybe that particular part of the fundraiser wasn’t.

“That was me.”

“I don’t know how you operate.  I don’t know your methods, outside of what I just saw back there.  But I want you to know that I’ve always considered myself a pacifist.  I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve always tried to stand up for people and give them the benefit of a doubt, to be fair and never do anything to hurt another person, even with words.”

Hm, makes sense – fits with the way her first instinct when the Merchants attacked was not to counterattack, but to minimize damage.

I guess this is mainly Sierra trying to explain why she’s willing to ask a villain for help, though, with that comment about benefit of a doubt.

And maybe also that she doesn’t want Skitter to hurt too many people if she doesn’t have to? Though maybe the Merchants have made themselves an exception to that, and Sierra does seem to be fine with asking Skitter without actually knowing how she’s likely to go about this.

“The Merchants?”

She nodded.  “They attacked the church.  Nine or ten of them.  We outnumbered them, but they had weapons, and they caught us by surprise.

Welp.

One of them threw a molotov cocktail through a window.  There were other families there, families with kids, so I grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to stop it from spreading.

That seems like an odd thing to do if they were actually trying to take over the church. I guess either that wasn’t actually their goal, or they thought they could take it over quickly enough to stop the fire themselves.

Spraying around- I couldn’t put it out, didn’t want to try in case I just spread it around, so I just contained it, for all the good it did.”

At least you tried.

I take it the church isn’t the target of the mission? It kinda sounds like it’s going to have gone from ashes to ashes by now.

She shook her head, “They came through the doors and began attacking people, one of them grabbed my brother, I- I panicked.  I used the extinguisher to spray towards them and tried to pull him away.

Shame that wasn’t containment foam.

…

I wonder if containment foam would be effective at extinguishing fires. Probably dangerous to try, though. Don’t want to get stuck in it by accident with a fire raging around you.

We do know it’s not flammable, at least, or they wouldn’t have used it on Lung or on prisoners sharing a wagon with him.

I couldn’t, and others were approaching, so I left him and I escaped through the broken window where the bottle had been thrown inside.

Some might criticize Sierra for giving up and running away, abandoning her brother, but I honestly think it’s a good thing. She recognizes when she’s not able to do something about it herself, when to flee to seek help. That’s much better than getting captured alongside her brother and being unable to do that.

When I got back an hour later, there were fire trucks and police and ambulances there.  My brother was the only one missing.

Well, that’s something at least.

The others were there, but badly hurt.  Burned or cut up, beaten.  Derrick, the man who’d invited me to stay there-”

Ouch.

But yeah, maybe the fate of Derrick isn’t super relevant?

She broke off, and she stopped walking, turning away so her head was facing away from me.

I waited patiently.  When she’d turned back so I could see her face and started walking again, I gently asked, “Dead?”

Less relevant or not, though, worth letting her talk about it. Listening is a severely underrated way of helping people.

She shook her head.  Quietly, she said, “They cut him up with a broken bottle.  The doctor said they bent him over and shoved it between- he’ll have a tube running out of his stomach and into a bag for the rest of his life.  And he might never walk again.  You understand?”

Eesh.

So why did the Merchants attack? To hurt people just for fun? For resources the people inside were living off of?

“I think so.”  Not that I wanted to.

Heh, yeah, that’s fair.

I wondered if this was pertinent to what happened to her brother, or if she was just really wanted someone to talk to.

Perhaps both?

I didn’t want rush her, but I did try to get her on track,  “So your parents and brother got sick.”

She does seem to have a tendency to go down tangents.

I can relate.

“And I was left alone.  I guess I was saved by the long hours at the shelter, I wasn’t spending half as much time in the house where they got exposed to the mold.

Ah, yeah, that makes sense.

I had to find a new place to stay.  A guy from the shelter heard my story, offered to give me a room in the church.  Near here.  I was grateful, I took it.

I see. And your parents sent Bryce along with you, while staying in the basement themselves?

My brother got out of the hospital, and he came to stay with me.

Oh, right, they were hospitalized. Close enough, though.

He got the cot, I got the floor.  A day and a half later, they came.”

Aaand they just can’t catch a break, can they.

She stopped talking, and I didn’t push her, giving her time to compose herself.  Had she been close to her uncle?

Perhaps… she didn’t explicitly indicate it much, but she does seem affected by his death.

“By the time we heard the news, Mom and Dad were sick too, and Bryce was showing symptoms.  It wasn’t a cold.  It was more like the flu, but with what happened to my uncle, we didn’t want to take any chances.

Yikes, that sounds like a really unpleasant moment. Learning that your uncle died of his sickness mere days after the rest of the family got sick with something similar? Not fun.

None of them could keep anything down, sinus problems, pounding headaches, tired… we went to the doctors and they said it could be toxic mold exposure.

Eesh.

Leviathan, did you really have to make such a mess of things?

The moisture, always being cold and damp, and not having enough to eat, being in that basement, with the foundation possibly cracked or the mold disturbed by the vibrations and damage in the attack… Um.”

I guess I was wrong to describe the basement as one of the mythical drier places. In my defense, though, I had to for the joke.

She put a hand to her face, “I’m rambling.”

You do seem to be giving a lot of information that may or may not be relevant to the mission, but lots of information is what Skitter asked for.

“It’s fine.  Better that you give me too much information than not enough.  Keep going.”

Yeah.

“My uncle got sick fast.  He had a cold just days after Leviathan came, and it got complicated after, became pneumonia.

Ah, yes, here we go. Maybe he’s not dead yet, but this isn’t a good sign.

The hospital sent him out of town for medical care, and we got word he’d died just two days after that.

Yep.

RIP.

Respiratory distress or something.  Drowning in his own lungs.

That sounds about right given the pictures on Wikipedia’s page on pneumonia that indicate fluids in the lungs.

Less than a week from the time he got the cold to the time he died.”

Ouch.

“Thank you.  We- we stayed in a family friend’s basement, and they had another family there as well, on the upper floors, so it was crowded.

The living conditions after Leviathan’s attack manage to be sea-related even in the few, mythical drier places.

Also barrel-related.

But it was better than the shelters, or so we thought.  My dad, my uncle and I worked with one of the cleanup crews.

Uncle’s still alive, for now at least.

I’m halfway expecting him to either die or turn out to be a piece of shit by the end of this story.

Trying to get things normal again.  Until word got out that one of the crews had been attacked, the women assaulted.  Um.

So they told me I couldn’t work with them.

Yikes.

I worked for one of the shelters instead.  Handing out sheets, making beds, keeping track of names and passing on requests for stuff like insulin or other meds that people needed.  Long hours, thankless…”

But very much necessary. You did good.

I nodded.

“Then Leviathan came.  The sirens woke us up early in the morning, we hurried to the shelter, and by the time it was midday, we were standing in front of what used to be our house.

RIP.

Actually, maybe I should save that until I know whether the uncle survived. That “we” could very easily be just Sierra and Bryce.

Flattened, everything we ever owned was gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

I’m guessing Sierra wasn’t exactly expecting to hear that either.

From the look on her face, it seemed like I’d surprised her again.  What kind of image did she have of me?

What kind of image did you have of villains until you became one? This isn’t a new situation to you, you’re just on the other side of it now.