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.

The Merchants were responding to my bid for control.  Good.

Better to dive into it than crawl through it, I suppose.

Besides, it does imply they see you as a serious threat.

I sipped my tea and found it was lukewarm.  I took big gulps in the hopes of finishing it before it got cold.

Suddenly the coziness is fading.

One of the Merchants in the first group shouted something, loud enough for it to carry down the street, and fired a gunshot.  Impulsively, I tried to tune into my bug’s hearing and interpret what he was saying, but the strangeness of the noise stopped me.  It didn’t translate from a bug’s ‘ears’ to mine.

Hm. That’s interesting. Maybe try a different kind of bug? You’d probably run into the same issue, but maybe there’s a type that has slightly more similar hearing to humans?

The first group started running down the length of the street.  They scattered, with smaller groups of two people each heading to different buildings.

Hrm. That could be an issue. Good thing Taylor can largely fight them from where she sits.

Finding the windows boarded up and the doors locked or barricaded, they started tearing at the plywood and planks.  Some struck at the doors with their improvised weapons.

Good. Anything that slows them down helps.

To be clear, under the mental block hypothesis, the overdrive isn’t Taylor getting over the mental block temporarily, but rather her being in a state that weakens the block. If she were to actually get rid of it, her power might be waaay stronger.

I sat cross-legged in my chair on the second floor of my lair.

Hive it is!

A mug of tea was warm in my hands, and the room was dark.  Only a faint light filtered in through the slats at the top of the metal shutter that covered the window.  My mask rested on one knee.

This paragraph has a weird sort of mixture of cozy and dramatic. I like it.

My attention swept over my territory, with an emphasis on the centermost area near where I’d held my speech.

Via your power, I presume?

The reach of my power wasn’t quite good enough to extend to the outer edges of my territory, which left me anxious.

Hm, yeah, that’s not good.

I was craving one of those moments when my power would go into overdrive and increase its range.

For some reason.

I wonder if this could be a symptom of Taylor’s power actually being really fucking powerful, but restricted by something, such as a mental block. Perhaps if Taylor could get over that mental block somehow, she could control insects from an insane distance. Hell, maybe even worldwide if she gets really over it.

But what would this block be about? Hive (the Arc) and Extermination, the two examples of this sort of overdrive, have quite a few things in common. Mainly the truces, but also that the enemies were ones Taylor could go almost or entirely all out on without too many qualms. That being the reason behind the overdrive doesn’t quite work, though, because Purity’s lackeys fall under the same category as the ABB.

Maybe it has something to do with how much Taylor genuinely embraces what she’s doing? She joined in on the assault against the ABB because she wanted to. Same goes with Leviathan, even if it wasn’t exactly for the thrill of it. Meanwhile, Agitation was an act, Shell was a trap, Taylor was really against the gallery attack in Tangle, and Buzz… well, Buzz is a lot like Extermination in that Taylor wanted to help for the sake of the city and civilians. Hm. Maybe it just wasn’t intense enough, but that doesn’t sound right, especially if we’re comparing to Hive, so I guess that’s a bit of a spanner in this theory. Besides, Taylor did seem to be rather into what she was doing in the last chapter, even if she’s rather stressed right now over the Dinah situation.

Minutes passed as I followed my ‘subjects’ and did what I could to get to know them.

Like any true Big Skitter, gotta know who the subjects are.

My bugs remained on the backs of people’s elbows, at the small of their back, and I’d maybe put a small fly in their hair if it was long enough that they wouldn’t feel it.  Not enough to bother anyone, or that anyone would necessarily notice, but enough for me to track their movements.

Nice. 🙂