clickntreat: shyfox: lifewithboris: While it may be easier to believe sensationalized, false “facts” about bully breeds that they attack unprovoked, most dogs do not. Dogs give very clear indications of their moods when they are encountering strangers or new situations. LEARN THE BODY LANGUAGE. YES. This essential for everyone who spends any time near dogs at any point […]
It seems there’s still plenty of the chapter left… I think I’m going to leave it for tomorrow (Friday). See you then!
Myrddin down, BX-9.
Presumably from a different attack than the one we saw earlier. It’s been too long to be explained away by the time it took him to fall down to the ground.
Laserdream carried us around the edge of the ‘lake’ that was still growing, if not quite so fast as it had been.
I suppose an answer to my question earlier about why Leviathan was going downtown might’ve been that he wanted to get close to a weak point in the aquifer. Granted, his powers are extreme-ranged anyway, but still.
I saw others gathered at the edge of the water, forming battle lines where Leviathan might have a clear path to make a run for it. If he wanted to make a run for it. As it stood, he was entirely in his environment, in the heart of the city, where he could continue to work whatever mojo he needed to bring more tidal waves down on our heads.
Lake Heroic is turning into a fantastic base of operations for a water-based monster intent on destruction of the city around it.
To my bug senses, Leviathan was deep beneath the waves, moving rapidly, acting like he was engaged in a fight. Against Eidolon? I couldn’t tell. Every darting, hyperfast movement dislodged a few bugs, made him harder to detect.
I guess we’re on a time limit as far as tracking goes.
She frowned.
“I know your arms are tired. Mine is too, and I was just hanging there. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you’ve done this much to help me, but we have to stick together, and you can fly low enough to the ground that you can drop me if you have to.”
“we have to stick together” is the one non-selfish argument Taylor has for going with Laserdream here. If Laserdream leaves without Taylor, Taylor’s going to need another flier to help her stay within range of Leviathan anyway.
“Fine, but we’re leaving the doll kid here.”
She laid Parian down in a recessed doorway, then pressed the ‘ping’ button on the girl’s armband.
Fair enough.
I held the Halberd out while Laserdream walked around behind me. She wrapped her arms around my chest and lifted us off. Uncomfortable, and she was jarring my broken arm, which hurt like a motherfucker, but I couldn’t complain after just having asked to come.
Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.
“Setting down again,” Laserdream said.
“But if there’s a tidal wave-”
“I don’t see one.”
Then what was the blinking about? A warning about the sinkhole?
I joined her in looking toward the coast. The water was as stable as it had been since the fight started.
“If it’s a trick-”
With a little anger in her voice, a hard tone, she spoke, “Either we set down or I drop you. I can’t hold on much longer.”
Flight or no flight, gravity can be a harsh mistress.
Although I believe Harsh Mistress died a couple chapters ago, so you should be fine.
“Right.”
She carried me two blocks away from the crater. The ground was wet, but no longer submerged, the road was torn up, shattered, covered with debris.
Laserdream checked her armband, “It’s one of the shelters. They sprung a leak, need help evacuating. I’m going.”
Welp.
Dad. It could be my dad.
“Bring me,” I said.
On one level, I absolutely understand Taylor’s desire to go there.
On another, what can she really do? She’d be moving away from Leviathan – hopefully – and thus unable to track him, she doesn’t have a power that can help evacuate people, and she’d be weighing down Laserdream.
As our footing dropped beneath us, Laserdream reluctantly grabbed at my hand and Parian’s belt, hauled us back up into the air.
Above me, her armband flashed yellow.
Hm? Do we know what that means? I don’t remember that being mentioned in Armsy’s walkthrough.
“Armband!” I called up to her. “Tidal wave?”
“Can’t see unless I drop you,” she responded, over the dull roar of the waves beneath us. With a bit of sarcasm and harshness to her tone, she asked me, “Do you want me to drop you?”
Ah, right, an alert for that kind of thing.
Also, hehe.
Right, I’d kind of messed with her cousins at the bank robbery. She counted me as an ally, here and now, but she wouldn’t be friendly.
Ah, right. Fair enough.
Myrddin and Eidolon moved from the coast to the ‘lake’ in the upper end of Downtown.
Might as well start thinking about what to name the lake if the city survives. Lake Leviathan? No, sounds too celebratory. How about Lake Heroic, to celebrate all those who helped fight against the threat that created it? Including the villains, though popular history might conveniently forget that detail.
I saw and sensed Leviathan leap from the water like a dolphin cresting the waves, moving no less than two hundred feet in the air, toward the pair, lashing out with his afterimage in every direction.
Sheesh.
I didn’t see how it turned out, because Laserdream carried Parian and me away.
At least we haven’t heard any deceaseds or downs from the armband since the sinkhole started.
I could sense the Endbringer through the bugs that had made their way deepest into his wounds, the ones that had found spots where his afterimage couldn’t flush them out each time it manifested. With my power, I could track him beneath the water.
Sweet! Now to make that useful by warning when and where he’s about to breach.
He was moving so fast that it was almost as though he were teleporting, finding the drowning and executing them.
Scalder deceased, BW-8. Cloister deceased, BW-8. The Erudite deceased, BW-8. Frenetic deceased, BW-8. Penitent deceased, BW-9. Smackdown deceased, BX-8. Strider deceased, BW-8
Oof. There they go.
A hand seized the pole of the Halberd, heaved me up, changed its grip to my right wrist and pulled me up and free of the waves.
Ooh!
I’m gonna guess that this is Grue.
When I blinked my eyes clear of water, Laserdream was above me.
Ah, no. Alright, Laserdream’s good too. Better, in fact, as far as Taylor’s survival goes.
She faced the epicenter of the growing depression in the ground, flying backwards. Her other hand clung to an unconscious Parian. It seemed like the two of us were too much for her to carry alone, because she hurried straight for a nearby rooftop, carefully lay Parian down.
Is she going to be in any way “safe” up there, though? It’s only a matter of time before the sinkhole takes the building too.
We hadn’t set down for more than ten seconds before the building shuddered and began to collapse.
See what I mean?
The ground beneath the building cracked and tilted, no doubt because the underlying soil and rock was being drawn away by churning water. The flooding in the streets was diverted into the deepening bowl-shaped cavity Leviathan was creating, filling it. It was almost a lake, now, three city blocks across and growing rapidly.
Another piece of damage that’s gonna be hard to repair. If Brockton Bay survives, they’re probably gonna have to live with having a new lake downtown, at least unless they find some highly powerful terraforming parahuman.
Only fragments of the taller buildings in the area stayed above the waves; some buildings were already toppled onto their sides, others half-collapsed and still breaking apart as I watched.
Should’ve invested in house boats.
Some capes were climbing out of the water and onto the ruined buildings, with the help of the more mobile capes. Velocity and Trickster were working in tandem, Velocity running atop the water’s surface to safe ground, trickster swapping him for someone who was floundering, rinse, repeat.
Cool!
Trickster’s kind of a dick as far as we’ve seen and heard, but his power is neat.
I realized with a sudden panic, that I wasn’t making headway against the waves and the ground that was giving way underfoot. The growing crater was continuing to spread well past me, rising above me as the ground I stood on descended.
Not good.
Very not good.
“Need help!” I screamed, as water began falling atop me from a higher point, spraying into me with enough force that I began to stumble back, fall.
The ground in front of and above me folded into a massive fissure. The movement of the cracked sections of road created a torrent of water that washed over me, engulfed me and forced me under.
Extremely not good.
The impact and pain from the force of the water on my broken arm was enervating, drew most of the fight out of me when I very much needed to be able to struggle, get myself back above the surface. I tried to touch bottom, to maybe kick myself back up, but the ground wasn’t there.
What bottom?
(I am quite certain there is not, nor has there ever been, a bottom in this hole.)
Feeling out with the pole of the Halberd, I touched ground, pushed, failed to get anywhere.
Oh, that bottom.
The Endbringer descended, and the area around him quickly became a massive indent, ten, fifteen, thirty, then sixty feet across, ever growing. The force of the water pouring into the crater began to increase, and the ground underfoot grew increasingly unsteady as cracks spread across it.
I have a sinking feeling about this.
That top-heavy body of his toppled forward, and it was only his right claw, slamming down to the pavement, that stopped his face from being driven into the ground. The impact of his claw striking the ground rumbled past us.
The rumble didn’t stop.
Shit.
Shiiit.
I have a feeling he’s not just pulling up the storm sewers again.
“Run!” I shouted, my cry joining the shouts of others. I turned, sloshed through the water to get away, not sure where to get away from, or to.
Leviathan and the ground beneath him sank a good ten feet, and water swirled and frothed as it began pouring to fill the depression.
Yep.
It begins.
He used his arm to shield himself as Purity fired another blast from above. As the ground beneath him continued to sink, the water lapped higher and higher around him.
So is he trying to escape down into the aquifer by staying in the sinkhole?
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