Breathe in, breathe out.  I was having to consciously maintain my breathing.  Whatever her dust had done to me, it had also jammed up the part that handled the more automatic things.

Hm, I wonder if that’s important somehow.

My pounding heart wasn’t in sync with the speed of my breathing, and I was beginning to feel dizzy and disoriented.  Or maybe that was the powder.  Or fear.

I mean, to the functionality of the gemma or to the escape. It’s obviously important to Taylor in the moment.

“But I haven’t been able to find it.  It’s not physically there, or it’s so small that I haven’t been able to track it down.

Maybe it’s not enough to look up, down, left, right, back and forwards. Maybe it’s attached along the fourth dimension we can’t look in?

If your ‘passenger’ is strong enough to let you work around a disabled Gemma, if your powers work without your say-so, maybe it’ll be easier to spot.”

So not only did the subconscious command not take out Bonesaw, it gave her an objective.

She began feeling around my mask for a seam, buckle or zipper, searching.

So, uh, how did you attach this, Taylor?

She talked as she grabbed the part of my mask that bordered my scalp and tried to peel my mask down towards my chin.  “So you can see why I find it very interesting that you still have the ability to control bugs, even when your Gemma is out of order.”

Makes sense. Gotta find that subconscious controller.

She gave up on pulling my mask down.  The armor panels made it too difficult, and the fabric wouldn’t tear.  She snapped her fingers, and one of her mechanical spiders stepped close.  She removed one of the tools at the tip of the spider’s leg – a small mechanical circular saw.

“…getting this mask off is clearly not a job for human hands alone.”

It buzzed like a dentist’s drill as she turned it on.  She began taking my mask apart, thread by thread.

Time for a face reveal, it seems. And quite likely a brain reveal, if Taylor’s unlucky.

“I’m ten times as excited to take your brain apart, now!  You might give me a clue about the passenger.

I guess that’s her nickname for the part responsible for the subconscious or instinctive use of powers?

See, I think it’s something that’s hooked into your brain.  It was alive up until your powers kicked in, it helped form the Corona, then it broke down.

Ohh, interesting. She seems to be suggesting that the Dandelions left something behind.

I’ve seen it at work when I’ve provoked and recorded trigger events, seen it die after.  But I’m pretty sure some kind of trace is still there, linked in, cooperating with us and tapping into all those outside forces you and I can’t even comprehend, to make our power work.”

Sounds about right, honestly.

She angled my head and stared into my goggles with her mismatched eyes.  “Dealio is, the Corona’s way too small to be doing what it’s doing.  As parahumans, our brains are doing these amazing things.

“Dealio”.

And yeeah, there’s a limit to how far you can stretch the scientific explanations of these powers.

The framework, all the details our minds are using to decide what works and what doesn’t, the sheer potential, even the energy we’re using, it’s too much for our brains to process, and it’s waaaay too much for a growth that’s no bigger than a kiwi.

That’s still bigger than I was imagining, but I suppose it’s a reasonable size.

All of that?  It’s got to come from somewhere.  And the other reason you can’t just carve out the Corona?  If you do, the powers still work on their own.  The person just can’t control them.  It becomes instinctive, instead.”

Eyy, called it!

She tilted my head back and felt around the edges of my mask, trying to find the part where she could pull it off.   “I’m really good at figuring out where the Corona and the Gemma are.  I can even guess most of the time, if I know what powers the person has.  And I can pry it wide open, make it so the powers can’t be turned off, or I can temporarily disable it, or modify it.  The powder I blew into your face?  It has the same prions I put in the darts I shot your friends with.

Prions?

Assuming that’s just a more specific term for the things that make the power stop working, we kind of already figured that out.

Cripples the Gemma, but it leaves your powers intact.  Can’t experiment with your abilities if I’ve fried your whole Corona Pollentia, right?  Right.”

She has a point there.

“It’s interesting,” she said.  I felt small hands on me, and she heaved me over so I was staring at the ceiling, and at her.  Clouds of what looked like steam were rising around her.  From the test tubes?

Yeah, looks like Taylor’s going first.

It was having the same effect on my bugs that the aerosol had.  She’d erected some kind of gaseous barrier.

Ahh.

“See, there’s this part of the brain that people who study parahumans call the Corona Pollentia, not to be confused with the Corona Radiata.

Pollentia… just looking at the word without looking it up, it sounds like it might have something to do with growth or reproduction, possibly in a metaphorical sense.

It’s a part of the brain that’s different in parahumans, and it’s the part that’s used to manage powers, when the powers can be managed.

Nice. We’re going there, explaining some of the biology behind this stuff.

More specifically, there’s this part of the Corona they call the Gemma, that controls the active use of the power, the same way there are parts of the brain that allow us to coordinate and move our hands.”

So does that mean there’s a part for the passive, subconscious use of the power? Maybe something’s wired up backwards for Imp.

She ran her fingers over my exposed scalp, massaging it, as if she were feeling the shape of my head.  “The size, shape and location of the Corona and the Gemma changes from parahuman to parahuman, but it tends to sit between the frontal and the parietal lobe.  Beneath the ‘crown’ of the head, if you will.

Alright, so fairly centrally.

They can’t really lobotomize the Corona in criminals.  Some of that’s because the location and shape of the Corona depends on the powers and how they work, and trial and error doesn’t work with the scary bad guys who can melt flesh or breathe lasers.”

Ah, yeah, that might be a problem.

And then there’s potential side effects.

Like, what if the corona only keeps their control of the power, not the power itself, making the power go haywire after the removal? Or what if removing it damages other parts of the brain?

“And I can turn pain off like I’m flicking a switch.  Don’t want to do that on a permanent basis, but it does make this easier to deal with.”

Huh, neat.

So I wasn’t even hurting her.  Damn it.

“It’s still annoying.”

Well, fuck, you may have just made yourself the first patient.

Or maybe the last. It depends on whether or not she sees her operation as a punishment or as a privilege.

I could feel my bugs congregating on her as she put the aerosol down and fumbled around inside her pockets.  Test tubes: I could feel the long, smooth glass. She dropped something into each, then stabbed the aerosol can.

…something to make it more effective?

The smoke that plumed out killed most of the bugs in the area.  I couldn’t follow what she did with the can and the test tubes.

Probably nothing good.

“This is annoying,” I heard Bonesaw comment.  I couldn’t see her in my field of view, which was primarily limited to the floor, Imp’s mask and if I looked as far to my left as I could manage, the fridge that held Brian.

How well are your protections holding up?

I do suspect that this alerting Regentesis is going to be the more important consequence of this attack.

Few of the bugs were getting past that spray, and even the droplets of the spray that had settled lingered on Bonesaw’s skin, hair and clothing were enough to kill or incapacitate them on contact.

This spray is really serious business for the bugs, huh.

(By the way, I think Wildbow missed a word he meant to erase.)

I was unable to respond to her statement.  I focused on breathing, and taking in every detail I could.  My eyes could still move, my fingertips could twitch, but nothing else.

Man, the damage Ballistic could do with a couple twitchy fingertips if his power wasn’t suppressed.

“Just so you know, I’ve rendered myself immune to all those pesky little venoms and allergens,” she said.

Ah, makes sense.

This is working better than expected, but it still feels early.

She noticed almost immediately, drawing the can of aerosol spray she’d used to wipe out the first swarm I’d set on her.  One hornet managed to sting her, and with my power as limited as it was, I couldn’t stop it from contracting its body in such a way as to inject its venom into her.

Why would you stop it?

…oh, right. Grue. Need her alive.

I wouldn’t have if I could.

Ah, okay.

(Seriously, I genuinely stopped right before that.)

The rest of the bugs died on contact with the spray, their bodies shutting down.

There’s gotta be a limit to how many bugs it can help against, right?

Except my order was a continuous directive, much as my calling my bugs to me had been when I’d passed out while fighting Bakuda.  It worked on its own, without my direction.

I feel like the parallels are intentional. The entire situation is parallel to her encounter with Bakuda, and now she’s using a technique she found out she could do in the aftermath of that? That’s gotta be on purpose.

So what are the metanarrative reasons for these parallels? Is there something about Taylor’s growth since Arc 5 that Wildbow is trying to point out here? Or is it just a result of what Bonesaw would naturally do?

It was eerie to track their movements, to see just how much initiative they took without my conscious mind guiding them.

It does seem like they’re targeting specifically Bonesaw, at least.

They spread out, navigated past obstacles, they organized into ranks and tried to attack her from behind, while she was spraying the ones in front of her.

So if this is running off of Taylor’s subconscious, that suggests this is the kind of thing she doesn’t even really need to think about to do anymore.

Some of the flying insects were even dropping spiders onto Bonesaw.

Nice, they’ve even got the teamwork going.

If the commands could be analogous to words in my head, this was a shout.  There was no control, no guidance or direction.  I didn’t have the facility.

Doesn’t sound like she did.

I guess everyone’s getting stung, then, except maybe Skitter herself.

Better that than at Bonesaw’s mercy, I suppose.

Still, every bug in reach, within a range of five or so city blocks in every direction, began to converge on our location, veering towards Bonesaw.

Sweeeet.

Oh, and even if it doesn’t work on Bonesaw, this ought to alert Regent and Genesis. Regent is controlling Shatterbird, so he could have her escape Hookwolf’s alliance in the confusion, follow the bugs and attack Bonesaw using her.