“What’s going on?” the girl said, for the second time, “Who are you?”

“Just shut up and keep up,” I said.  

SHUT UP AND DANCE W– wait, no

We joined Senegal and Minor at the entrance to the hallway, then followed Brooks’s lead as he strode across the mall.  We got bogged down once more in the press of people dancing, jumping and grinding in the center of the mall.  We would have lost sight of Brooks, but he hopped up onto the side of the water fountain by the collapsed stairwell to get high enough for us to see him.  Minor and Senegal cleared the way for the rest of us.

Nice. Here we go, Bryce time.

“I’ll do the talking?” Lisa offered.

That sounds good.

“Sure,” I said.  It made sense.  If we did rescue Bryce, I didn’t want either him or his sister making a connection between Skitter and the girl in his rescuer’s group.

Oh yeah, good point. Better they think Skitter is Lisa, or that she sent some Coil mooks (67% true) in her place.

Taylor is like ‘BOW TO THE MIGHTY LADY OF THE NIGHT PEASANTS’ 

image

Ahaha!

I guess it was too much to hope that you guys wouldn’t end up finding Com’c, huh? Fair enough… Just know that these days I relate a lot more to Block than to my supposed author avatar. 😛

As people arrived and some ventured closer to the pile of boxes, one of Coil’s workers cast a wary glance over his shoulder, in my general direction.

Doesn’t seem comfortable with how close they’re getting. Maybe they’re worried Skitter and co. might lose control over the crowd.

I should have told Coil’s men not to look my way or show any uncertainty.  It would hurt the effect I had hoped to generate.

Ah, yeah, I suppose.

To dissuade people from taking the supplies, I set a cloud of bugs around the piles of boxes, enough to be obvious without obscuring what was there.

“Not yet. This is still Skitter’s.”

One of the guys with weapons approached anyways, and I had the swarm move towards him, condensing into a dark shape, buzzing loudly.  He backed off.

“NOT YET WE SAID”

Accounting for the illiterate, I put the bugs down in the shapes of basic food – a drumstick, a cut of cheese, a can.

Heh, not bad. And since they’re bugs rather than ink, you can do it in *advertisement voiceover voice* WONDERFUL THREE DEE

I knew I wasn’t the best artist.  I worried I was confusing matters with the pictures.  I could only cross my fingers.

Good luck, I suppose.

Today wasn’t one of the days my power was working double time, with double the range.  I’d wanted to make sure to reach as many as I could, so I’d started drawing the arrows and words with the bugs early.

Yeah, still no idea what’s up with those double power days.

Hm. I wonder if it could have something to do with whatever happened to Noelle? We’ve seen double power happen twice – in Hive and in Extermination. If I’m not mistaken, Hive wasn’t all that long before Noelle’s problem kicked in, and it’s been suggested that Noelle could have something to do with Leviathan coming to Brockton Bay in the first place.

The unfortunate downside of that was that it meant we were left with barely any time to set up after we arrived at our destination.

Ah, yeah, that could be an issue.

I’d knocked on the window to get the driver to stop at an intersection where the road was torn up and traffic was difficult for conventional vehicles.

That might be helpful if other villains try to crash the party with conventional vehicles.

There’s a lot of REALLY GREAT chapters in Worm. I don’t know if Regent’s Interlude is my favorite, but it’s easily top 5, and it’s a lot of other people’s favorites. Was excited to see you read this one. 🙂 Was also pleasantly surprised to not see you having a reaction of “OMG REGENT IS SO EVIL” like a couple other livebloggers have had.

It was certainly one of the better ones, yeah! Deliciously fucked up, and a Regent Interlude is something I’ve wanted for ages.

I guess I had a milder variety of that reaction, in different words. Mostly holy ones.

My Little Undersiders: Wildbow is Magic by ChromaCurves, submitted by defectivealtruist 😀 This is really cu– OH SHIT THEY HAVE PARASPRITES BROCKTON BAY IS DOOMED QUICK WHERE’S A TRUMPET *ahem* As I was saying, this is really cute! I love the little touches, like Taylor apparently controlling the parasprites, trying to put one on whoever that […]

Its NOT Imp who controls Shadow Stalker. Regent is the one who controls her. He’s the one who always calls Taylor dork and back at the fight with Leviathan, he asked Tattletale if he can use his “secret weapon”. So, his secret weapon was the ability to control a human being ENTIRELY. You still don’t know Imp’s power.

*internally screaming* KRIX FOR FUCK’S SAKES

I particularly find it insane how off the mark you got in this entire chapter. You are usually so aware of some character traits, that it flabbergasted me when you missed entire syntax and foreshadowing hints throughout this chapter and ones before it. Its Regent. He has a “secret weapon”. He is the “most dangerous Master in town” the only member of the Undersiders worth watching out for. A true son of Heartbreaker, going by a different identity ever since he left home. He’s a body snatcher.

Sooo, Regent spent the last couple hours doing something to Sophia. Something that Sophia knew about from reading Regent’s file, and was completely terrified of, and something which Taylor was kind of uncomfortable with. Now at the end of the chapter we see Sophia acting exactly like Regent. Your conclusion from all of this is that IMP is controlling her???

Between Regent saying his secret weapon takes a long time to use, Piggot telling Weld that only one of the Undersiders’ Masters is of any real concern, Sophia not knowing Imp was with the Undersiders despite having access to what Piggot told Weld, Sophia freaking out when she realizes she’s helpless in front of Regent, and Sophia calling Taylor by Regent’s nickname for her right after laughing in the same cadence as him, why do you think it’s Imp and not Regent controlling Sophia at the end?

I know Shark is probably going to wait until you’ve figured it out before showing you this. Oh Krix… never change. Why would you even think it was Imp? I don’t know how Wildbow could have made things clearer. Shadow Stalker is mirroring Regent, same laugh, calling Taylor “dork”. It’s kinda nice to see you using that nogging of your to almost manage to figure out that you completely misinterpreted something though.

Okay so in my defense…

First of all, I did realize that it could be Regent controlling Sophia rather than Imp controlling both of them. It just took a little longer than it probably should – I caught on in the end of chapter post, which was literally the next post after “dork”.

Second, the chapter had been spending time on establishing Imp’s personality, and I was expecting to possibly find out her powers in that chapter, too. Mix that with my guess that the name reflected a penchant for mischief, and it’s not that far-fetched that if Imp’s power had been multiple-person body snatching, it could’ve been introduced in the form of Imp playing an ill-timed prank on everyone by taking control of Sophia. On top of all this, I had already suggested that body snatching could be a power of Imp’s.

Third, we’ve known Regent for a long time, and the only concrete thing I’m aware of that indicated he could be far more powerful than we knew was the whole “secret weapon” thing, which I had forgotten about.

Fourth, re: “most dangerous Master in town”, unless I’m missing something, that was first mentioned in 10.3, after we found out for sure that it was he who was controlling Shadow Stalker. Also, Piggot mentioned that only one of the Masters in the Undersiders was worth watching out for. At the time, it was entirely justified to think she was talking about Bitch or Skitter.

So yeah, I see how it might seem dumb in retrospect given the evidence that makes sense to you guys now, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see something unprecedented happen and attribute it to the one whose power we don’t know yet rather than the one we’ve been following around ever since the end of Arc 2 and never seen anywhere near this level of power from.

End of Parasite 10.5

DRAMA! ACTION! Weird fetus cyborg thing??

This chapter had it all!

This was a good one, featuring a decent fight slash game of cat and mouse, betrayal, apparent plea for heel-face turn, sacrifice and weirdness.

It also set up some neat plotlines to go down, between the repercussions of Bitch trying to get Taylor arrested – whether the others believe Taylor or not (and they do have a solid lie detector on the team) – and Dragon trying to turn Taylor back to heroism and apparently intending to get in touch later.

Next time, Taylor’s probably got some choice words for Bitch. Also, we still need to get outta here – by the sound of it, the Protectorate has arrived, so might want to save the brunt of the arguing until you’re somewhere else. Doesn’t mean Bitch doesn’t deserve an immediate punching, though.

Until next time – sayonara!