“Skitter!” a voice called out.

!

Someone remembers her name!

I stopped.

A blond girl, waving at me.

Victoria? Lisa?

Oh right, Lisa would be resistant to this, wouldn’t she. Just like she’s implied to be resistant to Imp’s power.

I drew my gun and leveled it at her.

Yikes.

The smile dropped from her face.  She brought both hands to her mouth as she shouted, “It’s me!  Tattletale!”

You say that, but…

I hesitated.

How tragic would it be if I shot my friend, so soon after I’d wanted to scream at the heroes for fighting among one another?

Very. Do not shoot your friend.

“How did you get here?”

“On the dog.  I don’t remember its name, but it wasn’t as affected as we were.  This effect is tailored for people.”

Makes sense.

I looked in the direction of the creature I’d seen.  Had that been the dog they’d come on?

They? So Trickster and maybe Sunny are here too?

I drew closer, but I kept the gun aimed at her.  I glanced around.  “Where are the others?”

“Most are hiding,” she said.  “My powers kind of let me work around this gas, I think.  I brought Grue, too.”

How is he working around it? Is he keeping a bit of darkness in contact with Lisa to borrow some of her awareness? Except it seems to me that Taylor would notice that.

I looked around.  What she was saying felt right, even if I couldn’t remember her powers, specifically.  “What is this?  Amnesia?”

Kind of.

“Agnosia.  We haven’t forgotten.  Just… can’t use the knowledge we have.

Huh. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Looking at the others, I think they’re hallucinating.  If it’s prions, like Bonesaw used with the power nullification darts, it fits.  Hallucinations would match with heavy prion exposure.”

Interesting.

If it was Crawler, and I acted like he was friendly, he’d tear me to shreds.  I could draw my gun to threaten him, defend myself… except that wouldn’t do a thing to slow Crawler down.

And she can still connect the name Crawler to his power, just not to his appearance.

If it was one of Bitch’s dogs sans rider, then there was little point in staying.  I didn’t even know if it was suffering from the miasma’s effect.  If it was Crawler…

The miasma didn’t appear to affect bugs, but bugs and dogs have very different brains.

I drew my bugs around me as a shroud, simultaneously forming decoy swarms.  I ran, my footsteps splashing, and called Atlas to me.  The second I was out of sight, I climbed on top of him and took to the air once again.

Yeah, time to go.

Couldn’t settle down, couldn’t stop.  I had to treat everyone I met as an enemy.

That’s how everyone is thinking, and look where that’s getting us.

I was beginning to see where the paranoia came in.

Yeah.

I felt lost.  Was I helping the enemy when I was propping someone up to make sure they didn’t choke on their own vomit or drown in a puddle?  If I used the plastic cuffs I had in the changepurse, would I be tying someone up, leaving them helpless against one of the Nine?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I checked my cell phone.  No service.

Well that’s helpful.

This is a satellite phone. What did they do to stop it? Do they have jammers of some kind? Or was the phone damaged in the fall?

I was alone here.  Everyone in the world was a stranger.

When it first started, Sundancer’s spiel about being alone seemed to come kind of out of nowhere, but it has turned out to be incredibly thematically important to the chapter. Well done.

Vibrations rocked the street.  I saw the wounded man stir in response.

What now? My first thought after the supposedly deceased Crawler was Behemoth, but I highly doubt he’s showing up right now.

Oh man, y’know, Dragon would be really good to have here right now. She’s immune to the miasma, and people might even not forget her the way they do most people, even if they don’t know why not.

A monster.  Bigger than a car, fangs, teeth, claws, and a thorny exterior.  It didn’t act like it had seen me.

Ooh, a hellhound?

…this could turn out badly.

One of Bitch’s dogs?  Or is it Crawler?

Apparently Taylor still remembers that someone named Bitch on her team has hellhounds.

But not that Crawler is supposed to be dead.

When I was free, I gathered my knife, baton and gun from where they had fallen and fit them into the few remaining elastic loops in my ruined utility compartment.

Oh, alright, she’s still getting some of it with her.

Cell phone was a yes, but I didn’t have a spot for it, so I tucked it in the chest compartment of my armor.

The cell phone is potentially useful for getting around the paranoia. It contains contacts that she can be reasonably sure are people she can trust to some extent.

Similarly, I stuck the epipens and changepurse through the space between my hip and the belt, wedging them in next to the straps.

I double checked that Atlas hadn’t been hurt by Legend’s lasers and then climbed on top of him.

That’s the second time Legend’s lasers have been tied to his name after she stopped remembering who’s who. But each time, she’s been thinking about something that happened before that point, just like the mention of Sundancer having issues with being alone (in the paragraph directly following the first instance of this). Does she remember that the name is tied to the power, but not that the person with that power is the one with that name?

There was destruction below, and signs of the mad fighting between capes.  Sheets of paper frozen in time, a mailbox destroyed, a light-post toppled, all still in the midst of the red water.

This is gonna be such a nightmare for Piggot to clean up, PR-wise.

Everyone had fled or been knocked out of commission.  The fighting had migrated to several scattered spots nearby.

I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I focused on helping the wounded, making sure they were okay.

But what if the wounded are members of the Nine? 😮

I turned an unconscious girl over into the recovery position, and started to drag a wounded man out of the middle of the road.  I stopped when he started struggling and fighting with me and just left him there.

“What if she’s a member of the Nine? :o”

I directed every curse word I knew at the belt and armor panels I’d placed around my hips as I tried to work myself free.

While this is better writing, I would honestly have enjoyed actually seeing this string of curses written out.

My hips and rear end were proving as difficult as my chest had been, and with my upper body being further away, I couldn’t get the same leverage push myself out with my arms.  Minutes passed as I grunted and struggled.

Surely this all is someone’s fetish.

I could hear inarticulate screams, shouted threats, screamed warnings and the noise of destruction on the street below as paranoia gave way to violence.

I doubt only the capes are affected, so I’m sure some of the civilians are fighting too.

I brought Atlas to my side, but even with his strength and his horn, he wasn’t strong enough to affect the concrete.

At least she remembers Atlas.

I used his help to squeeze myself out, bracing his horn against the lip of the concrete sheet and pulling.

Nice.

This wasn’t rational for him, it didn’t jibe with my knowledge of him.

What knowledge? That he’s knocking everyone out?

That could mean there was something about the miasma that was making him irrational.

Sure.

I waited for long minutes as he continued firing down on the others.  He cast me one sidelong glance, then flew off in pursuit of someone I couldn’t see.

This whole thing oddly enough doesn’t change that much between Legend and Taylor. He was already unsure what to make of her.

Even after I was able to start wiggling myself free, it was slow.  I measured my progress in half-inches.  My chest, small as it was, proved an issue.

Awkward.

…did I accidentally predict this predicament by opening this chapter’s intro post with “Let’s wiggle a bit”?

Coupled with the armor at my front and the remains of the armor at my back, it made getting free an issue.  Several times, I stopped breathing for a good minute before I forced myself back under the concrete sheet to be able to breathe again, then I did it again.

Damn, girl’s good at holding her breath.

As much through the wear and tear on my armor as anything else, I managed to slide my upper body out on the fifth attempt.  I took a second to breathe and rest, and then began the slow process of getting my midsection and hips past the mouth of the concrete shelf.

wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle

It would be impossible to mount any kind of defense against the Nine if we were fighting them as individuals.

I mean, to be fair, that’s exactly what you were trying to fly off to do. But getting affected by the miasma changes a lot.

The man with the blue and silver mask floated over to where I was, ready to dispatch me, to knock me out, just in case I was a threat.

Might wanna get the hell out of dodge, if you can.

“Help?”  I called out.  It was a spur of the moment response.  My mind raced as I tried to form a plan.

Yeeah, unlikely to work.

Even a bad one would serve.  I lied, “I’m stuck.  Break me out?”

It seems I was right back in Agitation: Knocking out Vista doesn’t revert what she’s done. Not immediately, anyway. Maybe killing her would, though.

I stared up at him.  His face was riddled with conflicting emotions, his body language tense.  There was a nervousness there that belied simple amnesia. 

Hmm. Paranoid or not, he is a hero at the core.

We’d been warned about drinking the city’s water.  It might mean the effects were more pronounced for the people who hadn’t been informed.  Or there might be side effects.

Hm, perhaps. But I doubt that applies to Legend?

“Stay,” he ordered.

He stayed at the level of the rooftop as he floated out above the street, aiming more blasts at the others.

Fair enough. Looks like he decided to trust her enough to believe she was stuck and couldn’t do much from there, but not enough to let her free. Basically, “I might not need to knock her out but I’m not going to give her free reign.”

I couldn’t make the mental connection between the Nine and their appearances or their powers.  If I didn’t have the benefit of being able to remember my actions over the past few minutes, it would have been impossible to say whether the two people here were allies or enemies.

Well, that’s something, at least.

But yeah, this kinda puts a major spanner in the works for your main objective in this chapter. 

Everything suddenly made sense.  The infighting, the tactics they were using, the mixture of hostility and paranoia.  Legend was attacking with nonlethal blasts because he couldn’t be sure if he was attacking a teammate or one of the Nine, so he was striving to take everyone out of action with as little permanent damage as possible.

Yeah, sounds about right.

Sundancer’s worries about being alone struck me.  We were all alone, now.  Every single one of us.

Huh. It’s interesting that Taylor manages to connect that to the name Sundancer.

And yeah, I don’t remember if I said anything about it – if I didn’t, I should have – but I realized at some point during yesterday’s session the connection Taylor is pointing out here. It’s a good throughline.

From teams to individuals, everyone was fending for themselves because they couldn’t afford to trust the others.

And it would ruin us.

Yep. This is a pretty damn harsh punishment by the Nine and I love it.

I struggled, wiggling to try and free myself from the hump of solid concrete.  I could inch myself out.

Oh nice, so she’s not entirely stuck until this wears off or Vista undoes it.

I’m guessing Vista has run off by now? But Legend is probably still a threat.

What would my mom think to see me now?

“Does my daughter wrapped in concrete count as a sandwich?”

I tried to picture her expression.

Again, that gap, the chasm.  Nothing.

Hm. Can she not remember their faces? Or is it specifically the idea of how her mom would act, designed to make her not know if she could trust her mom not to take advantage of the situation in some way?

I could have been hit by five more of those laser blasts on ‘stun’ and it wouldn’t have hit me as hard as the realization that I couldn’t remember my mother.  Couldn’t remember her face, the details, her mannerisms.  Even the happy memories we’d shared, the little moments I’d clung to over the past two years, they were gone.

All she has is the name.

And even that might slip soon.

There was only an empty void where they should have been.

I couldn’t remember my dad, either.

This is a really heavy chapter and I love it.

The other Undersiders, their faces, their costumes, their personalities and mannerisms, all gone.  I could remember what we’d done: the bank robbery, fighting Purity’s group, lazing around in the old loft, even the general progression of events from the moment I’d met them.  But the people were blanks waiting to be filled in, and I couldn’t go from thinking about one name to thinking about the events that were related to it.

In other words, she has no idea who anyone is. And by the sound of it, she’d know there are enemies in town, but not who any of them are. The way this all leads to the reaction of “that’s what they would say!” is becoming clear.

I felt a rising panic as I struggled to work myself free.  I didn’t know the people who were on the rooftop with me: the man who floated in the air, wearing a sturdy hazmat-style firesuit and a blue and silver mask that left only his mouth, chin and wavy brown hair exposed.  I couldn’t recognize the girl he was shooting in the back.

Ah, shit, he did it. I guess it’s time for Legend vs Vista, full power.

I saw her fall face first and writhe with pain.  He shot her two more times, and she went limp.  Out cold.

…or that can happen.

Hey, at least this way we get a solid answer to something I questioned back in Agitation: Does knocking out Vista immediately undo her changes?

Was I suffering from brain damage?  Another concussion?

And there goes the knowledge that Bonesaw is behind this.

Maybe the space girl did it! Or the pew pew guy! 😮

I did a series of multiplication, addition and subtraction in my head and found no problems on that front.  Not general brain damage, apparently.

Amnesia?

Sort of, yeah. Very specific amnesia, targeted to make you feel a certain way about everyone around you.

My name is Skitter, I thought, Taylor Anne Hebert.  Sixteen.  Born in Brockton Bay.

Oh hey, got some new information here. Taylor got a middle name after, presumably, her mom (Annette to Anne is not a big leap), and apparently she’s sixteen rather than fifteen like I’ve been thinking. I suppose it makes sense she would be, considering this started in the later half of the school year and the school year how I worked out the age. My mistake on that part.

Also, I like how she’s putting her cape name before her civilian name now. It fits with the way her cape life has taken over.

Student at Winslow High.  Ex-student.  Member of the Undersiders.

Yeeah, I don’t think you can really call yourself a student there anymore. It’s been at least a month or two since you were last there, and you don’t seem to have any intentions of going back.

No problems on that front.

My line of thought continued absently, as if I wanted to reassure myself that I was mentally intact.  My parents are Dan Hebert and Annette Rose Hebert.

I’m gonna go ahead and headcanon that Taylor’s maternal grandmother’s name was Roseanne and giving daughters a shortened version of their mother’s first name as a middle name is a tradition from that side of the family.