My head was starting to pound, my power getting more sluggish.  Where possible, I used my bugs to find, catch and kill the bugs Amy had altered with her power.  It wasn’t enough; my power was still getting steadily weaker.

“God d’Amyt!”

Amy fell again, climbed to her feet and swatted her good hand through the swarm, disabling those bugs who stayed on her skin for any longer than a second.

Quick work!

Man, Siberian is being downright civil at this point by not seizing this opportunity.

Maybe they’d see letting Skitter help her catch the prey as a form of cheating.

It was also making it harder to sweep the area for Siberian’s real body.  There were pockets of people here and there.  I needed to keep tabs on the ones who fit Cherish’s description; middle-aged, male, probably unkempt, thin.

Found anyone fitting that yet?

Unfortunately there might be multiple. That ought to throw a spanner in the works a bit.

What made it trickier was that I had to find him without him catching on and sending Siberian after us.  There was one man nearby, but he was fit.  Another there: fat, startling and trembling at the distant sounds of Siberian tearing through the landscape in her pursuit of Amy.

Clues like that last thing would be useful for telling them apart from the other middle-aged thin men around, though.

I found another, but he was clutching a small child to him, and she clutched him back.  Father and daughter, no doubt.  The little girl wasn’t Bonesaw, either.  Too small.

Aww.

In the next cluster of people-  I had to stop and press my fingers to my temples.  It hurt.  Damn that girl. 

Use your ability to talk through the swarm, Taylor! Tell her that you’re trying to help!

Maybe not loud enough for Siberian to hear, though.

Her second reaction, beyond the knee-jerk fear, was to use her power to start shutting mine down.

Wait, you meant you put a swarm on Amy? She’s got touch range to the bugs, that’s way closer than I was imagining.

“Idiot,” I hissed the word.

Seriously, Taylor, what are you even doing? Are you going to put decoys around, make it a shell game?

You’re not selling the “trust me and stop fighting me” very well.

“What?”  Tattletale asked.

“I’m trying to save her life, and she’s turning my power against me.”

Really, Taylor, look at what you just did from Amy’s perspective.

Two ways this would go.  Either she clued in that I was trying to help, or she died.  I was really hoping it wouldn’t be the latter.  I didn’t like her, but she didn’t deserve to die.

I do!

So maybe make it a little bit clearer to her what you’re doing.

There were very few people in the world who deserved to die like this.

That’s true, even in a world like the Wormverse.

Or maybe Siberian was waiting for Amy to break, mentally.  How long could she put up with this before she lost all hope and surrendered herself to a fate of being eaten alive?

Fuck, that’s also quite possible.

Using my power, I began to gather a swarm around Amy.  Her initial reaction was to freak out.

Reasonable.

Not everyone’s super used to having swarms of bugs flying around and automatically thinking “oh that’s just my friend Skitter messing around”.

And right now, for all she knows, Skitter might be trying to mess her up for some reason, and she really can’t afford to get messed up.

She thrashed, stumbled, and fell.

Y’know, like that.

She landed in the shallow water with her good hand thrust out to prevent herself from landing face first.

Hoo boy, better get out of the water quickly.

She wanted to give Amy a head start.

Amy wasn’t bleeding as much as she should have been.  I knew she couldn’t use her power to affect herself, or this fight would be playing out much differently.  But maybe she was using her power to affect microbes on her hands?

Oh man, that’s a clever way to get around this problem.

Changing them into something that could breed, coagulate, and staunch the wounds?

It was what I’d be doing.

Yeah, it’s a very Taylor solution. And we do know Amy can manipulate microbes (or at least sense, but there’s no reason to believe that doesn’t indicate she can manipulate them like any other living being).

This probably prompted at least one fanfic writer to think “what if Taylor had Amy’s power”. Although I’m guessing that was already a thing, since you guys have told me that alt-power Taylor is a common Worm fic trope, Amy had been around for a long part of the story, and she was almost one of the main characters.

In fact, I’ve got a good feeling that if she were, she’d absolutely be using her power in clever ways like this. It’s something Wildbow is good at writing, and I suspect he’d want his main protagonist to be doing that kind of thing regardless of who it was.

Hell, maybe Taylor was partially inspired by his practice run with Amy in Guts & Glory. They’ve got a lot of both similarities and contrasts. (If Guts & Glory didn’t have bits from both of their POVs, I’d bet it’s mainly Amy’s.)

Fuck, I’ve just talked myself into very much looking forward to the day I read Guts & Glory.

Wait, are they just split up, like in the assault where they captured Cherish and Shatterbird? That would make sense. I started this post to question how they got Bitch to let them have two of her dogs without Bitch herself coming along.

The fourth time she closed the distance, she leaped up to a spot behind Amy and caught hold of Amy’s wrist.  Amy jerked as the hold interrupted her forward momentum.  She screamed, her legs buckling under her.

Well, fuck.

Siberian took her time, grabbing at Amy’s other wrist, then prying at her fingers.  Three were already missing segments, and Siberian seized the index finger.  Slowly, inexorably, she guided the finger to her mouth, her lips parting.  Amy thrashed, but couldn’t free herself from Siberian’s grip.

Looks like Siberian is getting the point.

“Shouldn’t we do something?”  Sundancer asked.  Her hand trembled as she lowered the binoculars.

Ah, okay, so this is visible.

I wasn’t sure how useful Sundancer was going to be, on several levels.  Our group consisted of Trickster, Grue, Tattletale, Sundancer and myself, with two of Bitch’s dogs to get us from A to B.

I mean, Siberian’s monochrome body is immune to Sundancer’s power, and it’s prone to causing collateral damage, but maybe something about her knowledge or personality could be worthwhile.

What I’m curious about is why Ballistic isn’t here. He sounds very useful for taking out Siberiman if the bugs fail, like how he was supposed to take out Cherish.

Maybe they don’t trust him to go through with it after that failure, not realizing he was being manipulated?

The seven of us were gathered behind the wall of a ruined building, a considerable distance from Siberian.

Oh, good, so they’re not completely without cover.

She could have closed the gap and gotten her hands on Amy at any moment, but she didn’t.  She was a cat with its prey, and Amy didn’t have anything that could help her get away.

Right. After Crawler’s adorable side, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that Siberian is also catlike.

Well, tigerlike, but there’s not much difference, and it might be partially an act to make the monochrome stripes make thematic sense.

Amy ran and created some distance, getting just far enough that she might think she’d escaped, then Siberian would appear in front of her, or to one side.  It happened once, twice, then three times.  Each time, Siberian drew closer.

Siberian also has another trick on her side: She can, for many intents and purposes, teleport. Though she might only be able to go back to where their real body is.

I’m not sure if I actually mentioned this yet (I don’t think I did), but not too long after it was revealed that the monochrome decoy was her power, it occurred to me that this would be how she got past the blockades unseen in the Case 01 video: She’d dismiss the decoy and resummon it, like Grue did at one point.

Though in retrospect on the retrospect, it is possible that their power is constantly on, and Grue just severed his connection to the power and then reconnected.