The same instant I had that thought, I started everything in motion.  Every flying insect near my lair headed indoors to gather what I needed.

I made a mental note to make a more easily accessible opening to my lair, so I could do this faster in the future.

Sounds like a good idea.

I made another mental note to set up a clock with ticking hands, so I could have bugs ride the three hands and have a precise way of tracking time when I was in my territory.

…that’s actually super clever.

I supposed it would have to be an old-fashioned clock, since Shatterbird had screwed up everything else.

Yeah, probably.

I had to guess.  Roughly two minutes until I could start my plan.

As I lay face down on the floor of the factory, I tried to control my breathing so he wouldn’t notice I was still alive.  The beat of my heart in my chest was so intense I was worried it would give me away.

I’m more concerned about her body heat, but I guess corpse!Skitter probably shouldn’t have cooled down much yet anyway. It’s only been a few minutes at most.

Bugs dealt with threats that were encased in hard shells all the time, didn’t they?  They dealt with other species of bugs.  There were a hundred solutions there, if I was willing to look for them.

This once, it would make sense to send bugs up the orifices, but he doesn’t seem to have any.

That was the spark of inspiration I needed.  In a matter of seconds, I had a plan.

Fuck yes, let’s go!

It wasn’t a good plan, but it was something.  As a just-in-case measure, I could try some other smaller plans, on the off chance that they might distract or even work.

You’ve got my attention either way.

Having those options, if nothing else, would make me feel better.  Mannequin had just brutally and unquestionably kicked my ass in the span of fifteen seconds, and it was going to be at least two minutes until I could even begin my plan, judging by how long it had taken my bugs to deliver the supplies from my lair.

Ooh, it’s a plan that involves more resources, huh. Interesting.

If I were him… I would have spent hours carefully balancing the ‘ecosystems’ of each individual part of my body.  Something that exacting and that fine tuned would be sensitive, fragile. 

Ah, yeah. If you can just get past the protective shell, it’s probably not hard to mess it up.

They’d be resistant to impacts, I wouldn’t go around getting into fights if they weren’t.  But heat and cold?  A crack in that exterior of his?  It could wreak havoc.

Absolutely!

I like this logic because it’s entirely in tune with what biospheres are and what they do. This is exactly why I thought it was logical for a biosphere cover to be impact-resistant. You don’t want it to be damaged in any way, because you risk messing up the life inside if you let something in or out that isn’t supposed to go in or out.

Okay.  I was getting a sense of him, maybe.  That said, none of that mattered if I couldn’t hurt him in the first place.  Maybe I was thinking about this all wrong.

Hmm.

His torso was the biggest section of his body.  It wouldn’t have his heart, lungs or any of that, because he didn’t have a circulatory system.  More likely, it contained his brain, his sensory organs/system, and whatever mechanism he was using to remotely control his arms, legs, hands and feet.

That does make a lot of sense. Gotta have a little extra space for those.

And didn’t his torso have a little window on the front? (Which I guess has to regularly survive Shatterbird, so it’s probably not made of normal glass.) That might be the weakest point available, though probably not a weak point.

It’s also worth noting that the torso can split in two. I wonder if he keeps the halves of his brain separate?

Unless he didn’t want to put all his items in one basket.  It was easily possible for some of that stuff to be in his thighs and forearms.

His brain definitely needs to be connected to the remote control stuff, but maybe it’s remotely connected to the main center for that?

Putting myself in his shoes, I had to think of his motivation.  Why this form?  I’d make myself resemble a doll or a store mannequin because… it was an eternal reminder.  Didn’t his wife and kids die when the Simurgh attacked?  There was a story there.

…ooh, I think we might be in for some more details on what the Simurgh does, beyond my suspicion that she represents a hurricane via aerokinesis. There has to be more to her than just the suspected aerokinesis for her to get that reputation that she creates more trouble in the aftermath.

I kind of figured the mannequin form was a symbol of false humanity. Maybe that’s still the case, that whatever happened made him feel like he wasn’t fully human? But I’m not sure that’s quite what we’re going for when it’s an “eternal reminder”.

But what else?  Why resemble a human?

That’s the biggest spanner in the idea that it represents outright inhumanity. It’s why I say false humanity instead – it’s like a human, but not, as opposed to something blatantly inhuman like Crawler or Night’s unseen form.

To mislead?  Maybe the configuration of ‘my’ organs and parts wasn’t human in the slightest.  I might have gone the Aegis route and built-in redundancies for everything I could spare.

That does sound reasonable. For all we know, his brain could be in his leg.

I wouldn’t need a heart, kidneys, or a conventional digestive system, bone marrow or any of that stuff.

Hmm. Maybe not a heart per se, but he’d still need something to distribute the energy to where he needs it. That, or his entire body would need to accept the energy.

Everything I could strip away would be more room for equipment, more room for all the pieces and parts that help turn ‘my’ individual body parts into perpetually self-sustaining systems.

Hm, but yeah, everything is supposed to be separately self-sustaining, so I guess that would have to be the case anyway. So then all the pieces would have the most vital portions, making him hard to kill without killing every piece?

But then we’re back to the issue of where his brain is. Does he even have just one brain, or do each of his limbs think separately? He doesn’t act like they do, so I’m inclined to guess he only has one that somehow transmits signals to the other pieces. Radio signals?

What would I do in his shoes, with his power?

Hmm.

No offense, Taylor, but I don’t think you’d be the type to do things on quite the same scale as Sphere.

I wouldn’t leave any vital openings uncovered.  That was a given.

Oh, right, she meant nowadays, when he’s Mannequin.

Another good question might be “what would I not be able to do?”

My focus -Mannequin’s focus- would be on designing way to make himself a completely closed system.  It wasn’t just sensible, it was the whole point of his transformation.  He’d have perfect recycling of all waste, dissipation of excess energy by diverting it to mechanical movement, intake of energy by absorption of heat.

Absorption of heat, you say? That’s the one thing here that’s not closed – maybe it’d be possible to somehow take advantage of that?

I’m not sure how, though. Locking him in a freezer until he passes out isn’t really an option here.

Could that be a clue as to how he sensed the world around him?  Heat?  Or was it something completely different?  Radiation?  Radio waves?  Electromagnetics?

It might be all of the above. We do know he uses electromagnetics to keep a couple parts of his body attached, though.

It’s worth noting that sensing the world via radio waves would technically count as a form of sight, probably.

If I was going to attack, I needed to find a weak point.  But he was smart.  Before the disaster that had turned him into this, he had been on the brink of solving many of the world’s crises.  Overpopulation, renewable energy, effective recycling, world hunger.

Once again, this man… it’s such a shame what he became.

Even with tinker abilities offering the means, it took someone special to manage that and actually make progress.

Yes, exactly! He wasn’t just greatly powered, he was a great man in terms of ambition and ideas and drive to actually follow through on his big plans. The powers just made that possible.

It was a given that he wouldn’t have any blatant weaknesses.  Any measure he didn’t think of himself, he would have shored up by now, by virtue of being a longstanding member of the Nine.  He’d fought heroes and villains better than me, and he’d learned and improved in the process.

Yeah… this ain’t gonna be easy.

In that respect, perhaps, he and I weren’t so different.  I’d developed in much the same ways.  The difference was that he had years more experience.  That, and he was batshit insane.

Hehe. Just give it time, honey, I’m sure you can become both experienced and batshit insane one day. 🙂

Did he use radar, like Cricket?  It would be my first assumption, except my bugs hadn’t heard anything of the sort.

Nope.

No.  This line of thinking wasn’t accomplishing anything.

I heard him sharpening his blades against one another with the sound of steel on steel.

At least it’s not steel on flesh yet.

I could sense the movement, from the bugs that were drifting down onto him.  A man in the crowd whimpered, and Mannequin turned towards him.

…yet.

The metal singing in the pauses between the scrapes of blade on blade.  Mannequin was standing still, observing.

…hmm? What is he observing, exactly? He’s turned towards the crowd…

I had to come up with a plan of attack, or others would pay the price.  My deadline was the point, I suspected, that someone lost their nerve and tried to run.

That seems likely.