Bonesaw crouched so her face was level with mine.  “This is going to be fun.”

Oh, I’m sure it will be. 🙂

It took long minutes for us to get there.  I could hear faint rumbles of the ongoing battle and Bonesaw’s humming.  It was all I could do to keep breathing.  It was like my body had forgotten how, and it demanded my constant attention to maintain that simple rhythm.

This sounds like it would feel similar to drowning to some extent. Not that I’ve tried that.

With the aid of her spiders, she stacked us like logs.  Ballistic and Trickster went on the bottom.

Pfft.

I couldn’t even grunt as the spiders leveraged me onto the pile alongside Tattletale.  I stared down at the mask of the third person below us.

That makes it sound like it’s not Sundancer. Parian, perhaps?

Imp.  She’d got Imp.

Oh.

Welp.

Guess we know what happened to her, then.

I had almost got the spider off me when another caught me from behind.  A third and fourth caught me an instant later, seizing my head and shoulders and my legs, respectively.

Alright, maybe not something different in each, but still.

There’s a certain irony to Skitter being restrained by spider-like things.

Bonesaw exhaled a second cloud of dust into my face.

Well, fuck.

End of chapter?

I held my breath for as long as I could, but there was a limit.  When I did breathe, my chest seized up, and my ears immediately started ringing violently, a headache settling into place.  The muscles in my arms and legs locked up.

Looks like the powder does roughly the same thing as the darts. Maybe the darts were tipped with the powder, for that matter.

She sprayed an aerosol around herself, killing my bugs.  Not that it mattered.  My facility with my power was getting clumsier and clumsier as the headache increased in intensity.

Ahh, I suppose that’s part of the extra. Weakening their access to their power to make them truly paralyzed. Thereby not doing it halfway.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

“Bring them,” she said.  The mechanical spiders leapt to obey.  Within moments, me, Tattletale, Trickster, Sundancer and Ballistic were being dragged inch by inch towards the dining hall.  Towards Grue.

No, no, no.

You fucked up.

My bugs served to give me a half-second of early warning as they felt her jam one hand into the side-pocket of her dress.  I turned on my heel, the burn on my leg screaming in pain as I did it, and threw myself to the right as she brought one hand to her mouth and blew a billowing cloud of powder into the space I’d been occupying.

That’s probably worse than poisonous, so yeah, better dodge that.

I got my feet under me and lunged forward again.  I didn’t get two steps before I was tackled to the ground.

By one of your allies?

It was a mechanical spider the size of a large dog.

Ah, fair enough.

Hey, time to figure out whether they’re arthropod-like enough to be controlled. 😛

It had been folded up inside one of the bodies.  Its legs latched around me.

Huh, so not only did Bonesaw herself hide in the bodies, she’s hidden other things in them. How many bodies are left? I suspect she’ll have something different in each.

There wasn’t much strength in them, and even with my less than fantastic upper body strength, I managed to pry the first two legs apart.

Nice.

I’d let Brian’s name slip.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  I wasn’t thinking straight.

It’s very understandable, given the situation.

“But no, I’m not going to do that,” she said.  “I don’t censor my art because it offends people.”

oh my cod she’s so precious ahahaha

“I could convince you,” I told her.  My swarm flowed forward, and she backed away.  Her eyes, one green and one blue, flashed as she took in the breadth of the swarm, the composition of it.

Eyy, she did do the heterochromia thing!

She was probably already brainstorming some solution.

That or studying the movement of the bugs in order to figure out how the power works.

I wasn’t going to give her a chance.  I drew my weapons, one in each hand, and charged through the swarm, straight for her.

Don’t forget the protection she’s given herself.

At least you’re on relatively equal footing thanks to the silk costume, but I really would not underestimate Bonesaw’s melee skills after her moves in 13.6.

“What did you do to them?”

Oh, right, the darts may very well not just put people to sleep.

“Paralyzed them, obviously.  Living flesh is so much easier to work with.”

Hmm.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the Manton effect, if that’s even a thing.

Paralyzed.  I glanced at my teammates.  Why couldn’t I have finished their costumes?  Stupid.  I’d spread myself too thin.  I should have finished one costume, then moved on to the next.  Maybe then I would have saved someone.

I suppose that does make sense, but there’s no way you’d be able to predict this. Don’t beat yourself up too much about it. You’re doing that with too many things already.

“Oh, and I dosed them with a little something extra.  Because Jack said there’s no point in doing anything halfway.”  She gave me a sage nod, as if sharing some universal truism.

Right. Now what the hell kind of something extra did she add…

“You’re going to give them an antidote to whatever you injected into them, then you’re going to go to Brian and you’re going to fix him.”

“Oh… do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, fiiine.”

Incidentally, Bonesaw might not understand who Skitter is referring to as “Brian”.

“Brian?  Oh!  You mean the boy we put in the freezer!

Well, I suppose there weren’t too many options.

I’m still trying to figure out where his power comes from.  The darkness comes from inside him, but what’s the source?

The edgy, dramatic answer would be his heart, I suppose.

Besides the usual, I mean.  So I took everything apart to see, but he wasn’t cooperating.  I told him I’d make the pain stop forever if he would just show me, but he was so stubborn!”  She stamped one foot.

This explains a lot about the state he’s in.

I glanced down.  Three pea-sized darts with flesh-toned feathering were stuck in the fabric of my costume.  One in my dress, one in a panel of armor on my chest, and another in the side of my stomach.

“You know, shooting me with these is also kind of rude. Not to mention turning my teammate into a freezer room.”

“Bonesaw,” I growled.

Taylor goes for the less bantery approach, of course.

“Skitter, was it?  Bug girl!  I really want to find out how your power works!

That’s not a good thing, for Skitter anyway.

I’ll take your brain apart and find the mechanism so I can copy it!  Is your costume spider silk?  That’s awesome!  You know the right materials to work with!  No wonder my darts didn’t work!”

Hey, at least she appreciates good work when she sees it!

I gathered my bugs, directing them her way.

Wait.

Are you sure that’s actually her?

“Wait!”  Tattletale cried out.

Once again, this Arc is named in a way that implies traps.

I turned to see her stagger.  I whipped around to see Bonesaw.  She was whirling around in response to Tattletale’s shout, her eyes wide.  There was a chain stretching from her wrist to the base of the window.

Yeah, that ain’t Bonesaw.

Not Bonesaw.  Decoy.

Which of course raises the question: Where is the real Bonesaw?

Tattletale crashed to the ground, followed soon after by Trickster.

I think the answer might be “too close for comfort”.

Sundancer and Ballistic crashed to the ground a second later. 

This is bad. This is really, really bad.

“Why won’t you go down!?”  The voice was petulant.

Hm, interesting. Is Skitter somehow immune to whatever way Bonesaw is doing this?

I followed the voice and saw one of the corpses move, rising to its feet.  Bonesaw unzipped the covering of dead flesh she’d covered herself in and shucked it off.

Ahaha, nice disguise!

She was wearing a yellow sundress and yellow rubber boots with a short blue jacket, but her hair and each article of her clothing were stained dark brown with the blood that had been on the corpse.

It’s probably a wonder you can even see that they used to be yellow and blue.

A small tube was in one of her hands, “I shot you with three darts!  It’s rude!”

Ah, yeah, darts that couldn’t penetrate the costume did actually cross my mind. I’m not sure why I didn’t write it.

Better not allow the temporary changes to the costume to reveal any skin, or turn the back of your head towards Bonesaw.

Also I love that Bonesaw thinks it’s “rude” to not go down when being darted. Best antagonist, hands down. 😛