The darkness slipped away, retracing its steps through my body, undoing its passage between my organs and joints, through and inside my blood vessels.
See ya, darkness.
Maybe. For all I know, this might’ve been Grue’s last hurrah.
A clearing formed. An expanse of dim light, lit only by one shaft of light that managed to come in through the corner of a window. Burnscar’s head was pulverized, unrecognizable.
Damn.
She lay limp, unmoving, dead.
One down!
(Two if you count Hack Job.)
“Interesting,” Jack said, looking down at his fallen teammate.
Cold as fuck, dude.
“Yes! I’m almost positive I got this on record!” Bonesaw squealed.
Through the darkness? …I suppose it makes sense she’d try to develop a way to record through the darkness while testing it.
Or maybe she means just when the darkness started flowing, so she can figure out where it came from.
But I could still see through my bugs. I could still feel what they felt. They’d gathered for the barrier I’d tried to erect between Parian and Bonesaw, and they’d dispersed in the time since, touching everyone present.
Nice.
Burnscar had put out her flame, was cradling her hand to her chest. I could feel Bonesaw and Jack, standing a short distance away.
Yeah, looks like they felt something, plus whatever is going on with Grue’s power.
I could feel Trickster, Sundancer, Tattletale, Parian, Ballistic and Imp. I could feel Grue, hanging from the wall of the walk-in freezer.
Roll call!
I could feel another person, someone who hadn’t been there a moment ago. A man standing in the darkness.
…hello there, mister ominous.
Are you some sort of… avatar of Grue or something, a new body made of solid darkness?
I’d speculate on it being another member of the Nine, but the Nine don’t actually have any properly humanoid men right now besides Jack.
I doubt it’s Regent.
…yeah, no, “Grue’s new body” is actually my strongest guess right now.
The man strode forward, uncaring about the darkness. He caught Burnscar around the face with one broad hand, and he brought it down hard against the counter.
Friendly, can seemingly see in the darkness… I feel like I might be on the money here, as drastic as my theory might be.
I was dropped to the ground. Burnscar fell across me, limp and unmoving, and the man flickered out of existence.
Huh. Is he going to show up again somewhere else in the darkness?
But somewhere in the course of forming and finishing the thought, I’d broken away from whatever it was I’d seen. It was slipping from my mind.
Aww.
I’m looking forward to seeing whether or not the Nine are as out of it as Taylor after this, though.
The void I was in was not the world of the entities, but Brian’s world. Brian’s power.
Wait, wh- oh. Oh, he’s flooded the room, hasn’t he? At least up to Taylor’s eyes.
The darkness coiled around me, through me. It was different, slithering past my skin to brush against my heart, tracing the edges of my wounds, the gouge in my skull that Bonesaw had made with her saw, slithering over and through my brain.
Is… that a good thing? I don’t think darkness entering your brain is usually a good thing, at least symbolically speaking.
I could feel my power slip just a little out of my reach, my range dropping, my control over the bugs just a touch weaker.
So did his power just get upgraded so he could block out people’s powers with it too?
Coming to a consensus, it transmitted a decision. Destination.
So this would be why we haven’t seen them come to our world. They decided on the Wormverse.
The reply was almost immediate. Agreement.
More signals passed between them, blatant and subtle. A melding of minds, a sharing of ideas, as intimate as anything I’d seen. They continued to communicate, focusing on that one world, on the possible futures that could unfold, committing to none, but explored the possibilities that lay before them.
And being along for the ride, I suppose that means Taylor also gets to explore the possibilities.
They broke apart, the two massive beings that spiralled together, and I gradually lost my glimpse into what they were thinking, what they were communicating.
Interesting. So maybe these visions happen specifically in relation to two of them meeting?
Whatever view they’d had of the future, they were losing it. It was too much to pick through on their own.
And it communicated with its partner. Signals transmitted not through noise, but wavelengths transmitted across the most fundamental forces of the universe. In the same way, it received information, it worked with its partner to decide the destination.
I suppose if they shift between realities, they just need to figure out which reality to shift into in the end?
It viewed a world, one point in time in the present, and in a heartbeat, it took in trillions of images. Billions of individuals, viewed separately and as a tableau. Innumerable scenes, landscapes, fragments of text, even ideas. In that one heartbeat, I saw people who were somehow familiar.
But does that mean they’re truly familiar to Taylor, or familiar to the Dandelion whose senses she’s borrowing?
A young man, a teenager, out of place among his peers, men who were burly with muscle. They were drinking. He was tan, with narrow hips, his forehead creased in worry above thick glasses, but his mouth was curled in the smallest of wry smiles over something one of the men was saying.
I focused on one of them, and I got the sensation that this wasn’t a scene I’d seen before.
You’ve seen what they do when there’s a trigger event. But that might not be what’s going on this time.
I could see what it saw. It was looking forward, but not in distance. Ten thousand pictures at once.
Forward in time?
If Taylor can see what it sees, maybe this is the Dandelions reaching out to her to bestow a prophecy? Warn humanity about the future threat Dinah predicted?
Seeing situations where it arrived at its final destination. Earth. The farther forward it looked, the broader the possibilities. It was looking for something.
This seems similar to Dinah’s ability, and I’m not surprised. The Dandelions have shown traits similar to powers we knew of before, with them wiping out memory in a way similar to Imp’s power.
I wonder if the Dandelions could do some of the other powers we’ve seen, like teleporting things around or firing bendy lasers or empower doggos. But honestly, I don’t think so. The Dandelions seem to be more about empowering others to fight for themselves.
Earth being their final destination is interesting. I’ve figured they were sort of ethereally over the planet, but I guess that’s too literal. I suppose they’re out in space somewhere, connecting psychically to the humans they appear for, and slowly making their way to Earth. Possibly in order to deal with the upcoming threat.
It’s also possible that Earth is their dying ground, given Karahindiba.
I’m fairly convinced the Dandelions are benevolent, or at worst neutral and looking out for themselves by empowering humans to take out what would be a threat to them, but if Taylor remembers any of this, it’s possible she’ll conclude that the Dandelions are the threat.
The scene was familiar. At the same time, I couldn’t have said what happened next. It was like a book I’d read years ago and promptly forgotten, too strange to commit to memory.
Okay, yeah, definitely Dandelions.
Two beings spiraled through an airless void, past suns, stars and moons. They rode the ebbs and flows of gravity, ate ambient radiation and light and drew on other things I couldn’t perceive.
There be whales here.
They slipped portions of themselves in and out of reality to reshape themselves. Push further into this reality to ride the pull of one planet, shift into another to ride that slingshot momentum, or to find some other source of momentum elsewhere.
Taylor is getting better at comprehending the Dandelions. This would be at least the third time she’s had this sort of experience, even though she never remembered them, so maybe that’s to be expected.
Ten thousand thousands of each of the two entities existed simultaneously, complemented each other, drew each other forward.
There were two of them last time too.
And back then they arranged another meeting. I wonder if these might be the same two, and this the same meeting they arranged then.
Hell, maybe there only are two, total.
They shrugged off even the physical laws that limited the movement of light, moving faster with every instant. The only thing that slowed them was their own desire to stay close, to keep each other in sight and match their speeds.
I also wonder whether there’s some form of mating ritual going on, or if they’re just “friends” or “family”, in whatever sense those terms may apply to them.
Yet somehow this movement was graceful, fluid, beautiful even. Two impossible creatures moving in absolute harmony with the universe, leaving a trail of essence in their wakes.
I’ve said this before, but I still love the way Wildbow describes the Dandelions.
“You had your chance, little b. You got distracted.”
Heh, Little B and Big B.
I could feel the heat of nearby flame as Burnscar manifested a fireball in one hand.
Another problem with this for the protagonists: If Grue does flood the place with darkness, the flame will be much easier to hit the targets with as long as they get Jack and Bonesaw out of the way first. Not because it lights up the darkness, which it wouldn’t, but because it’s an area effect.
Darkness rolled over Burnscar’s feet, a carpet. There was no direction to it, and very little volume. It pooled on the ground and spread.
I guess Bonesaw did limit his power.
“Yes! He’s doing it! Can I look? I just want to get the hard drive!”
Hard drive?
“No.”
“But-”
I could feel my heart pounding, pounding, then stop. The pain was gone. I was gone too. I had no body, only perception.
…what?
Is.
Is this a Dandelion thing?
There’s no one here who could be having a regular trigger event, but a) the idea of potential subsequent triggers has been brought up before (if it’s that, I think it would be Grue having it), and b) it’s possible this is a separate kind of Dandelion moment, perhaps tied more to Taylor’s attempts to empower her “passenger” than to anything else here.
Alternatively, maybe this is what the edge of death looks like in this ‘verse? But a genuine out-of-body experience not tied to the Dandelions or a power seems a bit too… paranormal for Worm.
“You don’t want to see your sister die, huh? That’s sweet,” Bonesaw said. “Maybe you should have taught her the basics. Don’t have to see her if she’s going to walk straight into a modified wolf trap. Did you know?
Oof.
Wait, wolf trap… a Wolfsangel, perhaps? Were you hoping to catch Hookwolf with the trap he’s named after for the irony of it?
She turned off her power just so she could beg for help. From us. She’s not very bright.”
…I’ll give you that one. I can understand the desperation but damn that was a bad move.
He made a sound that might have been a growl or a howl of rage, but there was no volume to it, and it was more high-pitched than anything else.
A growl or howl would be quite appropriate given the involvement of a wolf trap.
“Don’t worry!” Bonesaw said, “I’ll take good care of your friends.”
No you won’t.
I felt a hand pat my cheek.
But I do think she genuinely believes what she’ll do with them constitutes taking good care of them.
“Come now, Bonesaw,” Jack said.
“It’s just so funny, watching him react. His heart beat faster when I touched her.”
This fueled the remaining Brian x Taylor shippers, didn’t it?
“It did. But we should go. Burnscar? Torch the ones we’re not bringing.”
That’s probably faster than having Bonesaw do it anyway.
“Yes! Then we’ll go from first to last. The girl with the horns.”
Imp?
If you’re gonna find a solution here, you’d better do it quickly.
The small circular saw started up with its high-pitched whine.
Then it stopped. I could hear a strangled noise.
What?
Is the paralysis wearing off on Imp or something?
“Aw. Look at his heart beating! So fast!”
Oh! I guess the strangled noise was from Grue?
Burnscar turned, and I could tell they were looking at Brian.
Another strangled noise, trying and failing to form words. It was so forced and ragged that it made my own throat seize up in sympathy.
Is there anything he can actually do from there? Maybe he could cover the entire room in darkness (Bonesaw hasn’t stopped him from using his power, since that’s what she’s been trying to get him to do) so the Nine can’t find their targets as easily?
That would still leave Skitter, Tattletale and Trickster in their clutches, but it might save the rest.
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