Over here, the weather is… well, dark. Can’t see shit, capt’n.

How’s the weather?

Little bit sleepy from questionable sleep schedule choices over the last few nights, but otherwise I’m doing good. 🙂

I’m having a good time!

So, how are you guys doing tonight?

Then I waited, keeping the swarm-figures remaining as motionless as possible.  If it weren’t for the man still thrashing on the ground, screaming, it would have been eerily still and quiet.

Yesss. Build up the antici…

Roughly half of his ‘friends’ laughed at him.  Lots of laughter.  Were they all on something? 

Honestly, considering who they are, chances of that are good.

What, though? Could they be using a drug that might actually be a combat advantage?

The remaining four people hurried to his side and tried to claw the masses of bugs away from him.  As they got bitten and stung in retaliation, they backed away, brushing the bugs off of their arms and legs, leaving him to his fate.

Nice.

The bugs I had in the area coalesced into another vaguely humanoid shape.  Then another.  In moments, I had a half-dozen figures in a loose ring around the group.

This is exactly the kind of ominous shit you need to do to really intimidate them. First show them what you can do with one of these things, then pop up a scary number of them.

Good job, Skitter. 🙂

I moved them forward, and my enemies backed away from them.  I used this to herd the Merchants until they stood back to back in a tight circle, surrounded.

Niiice. Now it’s pretty much just a matter of coming down on that circle, isn’t it?

They had their weapons raised, but they had to know how ineffectual the baseball bats and guns would be.

Sometimes people just like to hold weapons because they feel safer with them, even if they know the weapons are ineffective. A toy gun can be surprisingly comforting.

I dismissed that line of thinking and gathered the swarm into a vaguely humanoid shape with a head, arms, and a torso.  I tried to balance it on two columns like legs, but I erred in favor of dissolving that into one column for the lower body over risking having it fall over.

Pfft, nice.

Whenever she did this in the past, I figured it was just a really dense cloud of flying bugs, but I suppose it does make more sense to have them balancing on top of (or clinging under, in the case of arms) each other while cheering on their favorite sportsball team. Not least of all because they won’t buzz as much that way.

A good thing the ground was mostly dry, there, or I would have required far more bugs to maintain the shape with the lowermost critters constantly drowning or being pushed away by the motion of the water.

Oh yeah. Wait, there’s dry ground? I thought that was but a myth.

I piloted the swarm-figure slowly towards the first group.  Someone noticed and turned away from the door he was trying to smash down with his makeshift club.

Maybe they’ve got someone from the former Empire who decided to join the Merchants instead of one of the E44s, and who’s heard of Skitter’s ability to turn into a bug person.

Either way, though, I doubt that club’s going to help that much, at least as long as Skitter has spare bugs.

He shouted and laughed, drawing the attention of others.

Drawing said attention away from getting into the houses, and away from potential attachs from the back.

Running forward, he swung the club at the swarm like he was trying to hit a home run.  The head was scattered, dashed to pieces, and he laughed again.

gg, dude, but that head’s probably about to grow back.

Until the rest of the swarm dogpiled him.  Then he started screaming.

Or that. That works too.

There were people inside two of those buildings.  Not many, but still.  Those were my people.

Right, fuck. I was thinking about the potential difficulty of fighting with Merchants on twelve sides around you (this was before it hit me that she could just fight from where she’s sitting), but this is really undesirable too.

At least we’ve got priority targets now?

Using my swarm on them would have been easy, but this wasn’t just a question of taking the Merchants down.

It’s also about protecting those people… and the one problem I see with prioritizing some of the Merchants is that it tells observant Merchants where Skitter doesn’t want them to go.

I needed to do it so effectively and undeniably that they would hesitate to come back.

Ah, right, that too.

If I did it well enough, ideally, word of mouth would help keep others from trying anything similar.

That would be helpful indeed.