On the other hand, Sophia probably knows that Skitter is aware of her secret identity, which could be a problem for Sophia.

Skitter.

😀

…

D:

shit, as far as Sophia knows, Skitter’s a villain, fuck

What?

Then another figure stepped out of the alleyway closest to them.  A girl, skinny, but not in the attractive way you saw in magazines.  Spindly.  Was that the right word?

Like a spider! 😀

Wait, is that word actually associated with spiders in English too? In Norwegian, one of the words for a spider’s web is spindelvev – essentially “spindle weave”.

Hm, looks like “spindle” is at least associated with threads made from fibers.

The girl was hard to make out in the gloom – there were no lights on the street, and the only light was what filtered from the moon and through the rain clouds.

I wonder if she’s in costume right now. If she isn’t, she’s made a bit of a mistake in not hiding better before using her power.

But yeah, Taylor’s costume is well suited for camouflage in the dark.

The girl glanced left, around the back of the truck, then glanced right, where she might have seen Shadow Stalker if she looked up just a little.

Probably the last person Taylor would like to see right now.

The lenses of her mask caught the moonlight, flashing a pale yellow.

Yep, costume confirmed. It was getting a little hard to defend Sophia not recognizing an uncostumed Taylor, even with the latter being “hard to make out in the gloom”.

Good to see you, Taylor. 🙂

The distraction afforded Miss Militia time to prepare and fire a mortar straight into Hookwolf’s chest.

Excellent.

As he collapsed backward, his chest cavity gaping open, her gun shimmered, split and transformed into a pair of assault rifles.  She unloaded clip after clip into the enemy ranks; rubber bullets, most likely.  

I’m rubber, you’re glue
You say ouch as I’m shot into you

The innate issues of the nonlethal ammunition were almost negligible in Miss Militia’s case.  She could reform the gun in a second if a gun jammed.

Pretty handy!

Shadow Stalker watched a crowd of Hookwolf’s Chosen move to flank, moving along the sidewalk, where the crashed truck blocked the view of the PRT forces.

Sneaky little chosenses.

Shadow Stalker raised her crossbow, hesitated.  She could jump down, take them down in close quarters combat.  It had been her entire reason for going out, after having to deal with the irritation of Vista.  She craved that catharsis.

I guess that confirms that the reason she’s doing this is to take out aggression. Not that that was very difficult to figure out, exactly.

She holstered her crossbow, prepared to dive into their midst, and then paused as she saw the Chosen stagger back, lashing out with their hands.

Hm? Did someone else show up?

This… kind of sounds like how someone might react to being attacked by insects that are too far away for the observer (Sophia) to see. Is Taylor around?

One shouted something, which was odd given how they had been trying to be stealthy only a moment ago.

Hm, yeah, something’s definitely up and I think that something might carry the name Skitter.

Instead, she settled for targeting the clusters of Hookwolf’s troops.  ‘Fenrir’s Chosen’.

Oh right, the mundane foot soldiers. I kinda forgot they were there.

Each of the thugs had white face-paint extending from forehead to cheekbone to chin, in a crude approximation of a wolf’s face.  She began dropping them at a steady rate, aiming for the biggest, the most aggressive and the ones who looked like they were in charge of lesser troops, the captains.

Sounds like good prioritization.

As the troops began falling, Hookwolf’s forces became unsettled, hesitating to advance.

Nice.

Hookwolf reared up on two legs, pointing and howling orders, likely demanding they attack.  His words were incomprehensible from the rooftop where Shadow Stalker crouched, but the tone left no mistake that he was threatening them to drive them back into the fight.

Sounds like something he’d do, yeah.

Shadow Stalker crouched at the corner of the roof, loaded her crossbow and fired a shot at Cricket.  It passed a half-foot behind the woman.

If she realizes you’re shooting at her, you’ve pretty much lost your chance to hit.

Her second shot was on target, and Cricket dropped a few seconds later, tranquilized.

Nice work!

Good – The woman’s radar might find Shadow Stalker if she wasn’t in her shadow state, and Shadow Stalker could be far more effective if the enemy didn’t see where she was attacking from.

Especially this particular enemy.

Who else?  Menja was classified as a breaker, the spatial-warping effect that surrounded her made incoming attacks smaller even as she simultaneously made herself bigger.

Called it! Menja and her sister being breakers, I mean.

So the spatial warping makes the attacks objectively smaller, not just relative to Menja? She’s even bigger relative to incoming attacks than she is relative to her surroundings?

The darts wouldn’t even be noticeable to her.  Stormtiger could deflect projectiles by sensing and adjusting air currents.

Hm, yeah, that’d be a problem.

And this leaves Hookwolf. He’s got fleshy bits sometimes, but how susceptible is his biology to tranquilizers?

With the right timing, so her shots came out of the shadow state as they arrived to make contact with him?  Maybe.

That could work. Seems like a very Flechette tactic.

But he was engaged in a fist fight with Assault, and she’d be risking tagging the hero.

Ah. Yeah, we don’t want that.

Hookwolf?  No point.  He was currently in the shape of a gigantic wolf made of whirring metal blades.  Even if the dart did penetrate something approximating flesh, which it wouldn’t, his entire biology was so different that she doubted he would be affected.

Figures.

Seems you’re out of targets, unless there’s someone hiding around here somewhere.

In this fashion, she kept pace with the trucks, which weren’t moving slowly but weren’t going full-bore either, likely because of the condition of the roads.

Oh yeah, Brockton Bay roads aren’t exactly Formula 1 tracks these days.

It was five minutes before trouble arrived.

It was Menja that made the first move, stampeding out of a nearby alleyway, standing at a height of twenty feet tall.  She drove her spear into the engine block of the lead truck, stepped in front of the vehicle and wrenched her weapon to tip the truck over and arrest its forward momentum.

Who knows whether Menja thinks this is a supply truck or a Coil vehicle. Either way, she has reason to attack it.

The truck immediately behind tried to stop, but the flooded pavement made it impossible to get enough traction.  It skidded and collided into the back of the foremost truck.

Ouch.

Miss Militia was climbing up out of the lead truck’s passenger door in an instant, hefting a grenade launcher to blast Menja three times in quick succession.

Hiya! Supply vehicles it is, unless Hannah neglected to tell us something fairly important in her Interlude. 😛

The giantess stumbled back, raised her shield – her sister’s shield – to block a fourth shot.

I guess that’s her way of preserving her sister’s memory.

Fenja did die, right? She wasn’t just “down”, she was “deceased”…? *checks* Yeah, 8.4, first person to get both “down” and “deceased”.

Hookwolf, Stormtiger, and Cricket all joined the fray, followed by their foot soldiers.  On the PRT’s side, the trucks emptied of PRT troops and one more cape, Assault.

Aaand it’s officially a brawl.

They mobilized to defend, and the noise of gunfire rang through the night air.

Here we go.

But the movement of air through her body made her feel just as alive, more alive, in a very different way.  The material and gravel of the rooftop were still warm from the day’s sunlight, even submerged beneath a thin layer of water from the rain.  This rising, heated air from this surface offered her an almost imperceptible added buoyance.

Cool!

The rest of her ascent was carried out by the momentum from her leap and the fact that she was nearly weightless.  Jumping fifteen feet in the air to a rooftop one story above her was almost effortless.

Not bad.

She turned solid long enough to land.  Changing back brought a sudden, thunderous restarting of her heart, a shudder running through her entire body as her bloodstream jerked back into motion.  It only lasted the briefest of moments as she bent her knees and threw herself forward.  The moment her feet left the ground, she entered the shadow state once again, sailing across the rooftop.

It sounds like a jarring experience, but she’s been doing it long enough that she’s completely used to it.

I wonder how she reacted the first time it happened.

She used one wispy foot to push herself out further as she reached the roof’s edge, so she could glide just above one rooftop without even touching ground.

Pretty handy for getting around rooftops, this power. No wonder she was so much faster than Flechette.

She realized she was still holding the phone, and the noise of a television or music told her Emma was still on the other line.  “Something’s going on.  Going to see if it leads to anything interesting.”

Good luck, I suppose.

“Call back when you’re done, give me the recap.”

“Right.”  She hung up.

Sounds good.

Leaping into the air, she entered her shadow state, every part of her body shifting gears in the span of a half-second.  Her lungs automatically stopped taking in air and her heart stopped beating.

Usually not a good sign, that, but this isn’t usual for anyone but Sophia.

She was suddenly hyperaware of changes in the atmosphere, movements of air as it passed through her body.  She had enough solidity for her body to seize the air molecules as they passed through her, and in this manner, each of her cells nourished itself.

Huh, neat.

It was strange, to feel so still.  She lacked even the most basic processes and routines that normally kept the body going, things people rarely gave a second thought to.  There was no near-silent roar of blood in her ears, no need to blink, no production of saliva in her mouth or movement of food and water in her gut.  She just existed.

tfw you disassociate so hard your body stops being solid

She was a ‘predator’, whether she was Shadow Stalker or Sophia.  Few would deny that, even among her own teammates.

Naturally.

A convoy of trucks on the road below caught her attention.  Each vehicle was painted dark, and two had the look of army vehicles, with gray-black mottled cloth or canvas covering the cargo or personnel at the rear.  They had their headlights off to avoid drawing attention.

Hm. Coil?

There were two good possibilities for who they might be.  The first was that it was a shipment of supplies.  Food, water, first aid and tools, which would mean there was a small contingent of capes inside one of the trucks or in the immediate area.  The second option was that it was Coil and his troops.

And the former doesn’t have quite as much reason to try to avoid drawing attention. Though there have been all those villain attacks on the supply vehicles.

Using vehicles reminiscent of those carrying supplies seems like a double-edged sword. On one hand, it might get you past the heroes, but it might also attract attacks from other villains.