If Tattletale was sitting next to me, I would have kicked her under the table.

Better not kick in that direction right now. Not only would she hit the wrong person, but the person she’d hit would be Bitch.

Noelle suddenly perked up, saying, “They want to hunt.  They’re predators.”

“Okay, how can we use that?” Trickster leaned forward to look at the screen.

…is she talking from experience as a “monster”?

“They want to be the predators, we make them prey,” Noelle said.  She was looking more animated again.

Sooo…

That implies hunting them down. Coming to them instead of letting them come to the Undertravelers.

That does give an element of surprise and preparation advantage, but I thought we were trying to avoid direct combat altogether. Hunting traps?

“Not sure that’s possible, but keep going.”

“It’s not possible because, um.  You described them like they’re chess pieces, and we’re thinking in terms of a chess game.  What if we changed the game?”

Okay, so I wasn’t expecting Wildbow to actually spell this out when I made the analogy to playing backgammon instead, but here we are.

I kinda wish I’d gone with my urge to use checkers instead. It’s played on the same board and can be merged with chess without much difficulty (one side has checkers pieces and wins by checkmating the king, the other side has chess pieces and wins by capturing all the checkers pieces), weakening the analogy’s focus on throwing the opponent’s assumptions out the window, but at least it’s a game I actually know how to play. It’d be easier to make further references to it.

“They want their ninth member,” I said.

“Right.”

“They want to hurt, scare and kill people,” Tattletale put in her two cents.

Ah, yes, that too.

“Why?”

“Reputation, entertainment,” Tattletale said, “These guys are monsters, and pretty much anyone who watches T.V., surfs the web, or reads the papers knows it.”

Yeah, they haven’t exactly made a secret out of what they are.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye.  Noelle’s expression shifted all at once from being animated and engaged to the same look she’d worn when the webcam feed first went live.

…uh oh. Bad word to use around someone who is a) a Slaughterhouse nominee in presumably a less ironic sense than Alec, and b) kinda turning into a monster in the more primal sense.

Disinterested, hurt, hopeless.

She’d been scouted.  Unlike Regent, it hadn’t been to mess with her.  It had been because a freak like Crawler legitimately thought she was one of them.

Yep. As far as we know, anyway – it’s not like Crawler got a chance to talk about it.

“Tattletale say that?” Noelle asked.

That’s not really Tattle’s role, though she is good at educated guesswork.

“Coil did,” Trickster answered.

Odd.  So Noelle was staying with Coil, but she didn’t know about Dinah?  Another secret or white lie from her team?

Yeeah, they may not want to tell her that there’s someone around who can give her the precise odds of fixing whatever is happening to her, and more importantly, that the odds are low.

“I can’t help but think of the Desecrated Monk scenario,” Noelle said.  I saw Trickster, Sundancer and Ballistic all nodding.

Is that like a codename for a specific type of situation they’ve trained for?

Desecrated Monk sounds like it refers to someone who can’t or won’t fight back with violence against the people who attacked them and their home.

When I turned to my team, they looked as confused as I was.  Was this Desecrated Monk someone the Travelers had gone up against at some point before they came to Brockton Bay?

I suppose it’s not the stupidest hero name, but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think she’d say “scenario” in that case.

“Go on,” Trickster encouraged her.

“The rules are unfair.  Half of our opponents are pretty blatantly cheating.  But we have to deal with them anyways.  So either we cheat back-“

Or we knock the board over and refuse to play?

“Which we can’t.”

“Or you guys handle it the way we did it before.  You don’t fight the way they want to fight.”

The Slaughterhouse members are like a set of chess pieces.

So let’s play backgammon.

In other words, let’s get back to chess analysis with Trickster!

Though he’s probably done now.

“It’s a thought,” Grue agreed, “Risky, but we don’t have many options.  Trickster, where does Bonesaw fit into your analogy?”

Trickster shook his head, “She doesn’t.  She’s relatively weak in terms of raw power, but her presence on the field threatens to change the rules.

Aaand the analogy breaks.

She’s definitely a knight in terms of personality, at least.

She’s a medical tinker.  The medical tinker.  So long as she’s in play, we can’t be certain of our enemy’s attack power, we can’t know that any enemy we clear from the field will stay gone, and there could be harsh penalties if they catch or kill one of us.  It sucks to think about, but if Bonesaw got her hands on, say, Sundancer, I’d be a hell of a lot more worried than if Hookwolf or Skidmark did.”

Yeeeeeeah.

Sundancer muttered something to Ballistic, but I couldn’t make it out.

“What about our side?” Noelle asked.

“Lots of playing pieces, not all cooperating, and we have one debatable advantage,” Trickster said, “We know in advance, pretty much for a fact, that if any of us, Undersider or Traveler, try to fight these bastards, we’re going to lose, and we’ll lose hard.”

At least if you fight separately. Probably still if you fight together, but we don’t know the numbers on that.

“I could use puppets to go after her,” Regent said, “But she can paralyze them with the kind of uncontrolled physical reactions I can’t cover with my power.  I am immune to her, for all the good that does.”

That does mean we’ve got one person who can go after her, confronting her up close with a gun or something.

“How far does her offensive range extend?” I asked.

“No clue.  I’d guess she can sense emotions across the entire city, which is how she’s finding people, but in terms of attack? I don’t have any basis to make a guess.  Farther than my dad, Heartbreaker, but not city-wide, no.”

Not quite at Shatterbird levels, but still terrifying.

“The ability to track us by our emotions is a good enough reason to take her out of action ASAP,” Trickster said.  “So long as she’s active, it’ll be that much harder to catch the others off guard.”

Yeah, that’s a good point.

“Maybe…” I started, then I hesitated.  Feeling the pressure of everyone’s attention on me, I said, “…Maybe my power will outrange hers?  Not in terms of what we see and sense, but in terms of who can do more damage from further away?”

Hm, could be the case! She did say she was just across the street when she took out Hatchet Face, didn’t she, and getting as close as she could without her power turning off?