“You come with me, then.  Menja, Stormtiger, I leave it to you to see to my Chosen.  See if Othala is able to help.”

Seems like a good plan.

But, uh, what are you going to do? Just walk over to where you believe the Slaughterhouse Nine to be and be like “hey guys wtf”?

“On it,” Menja said.

She speaks! And only six Arcs after we first met her.

Thin trails of blood ran down from the points where glass splinters had pierced her skin, but the damage hadn’t gone any further.  She stooped down and picked up Stormtiger in her arms.

Sounds like she’s a bit bigger now than during the sparring match.

“Cricket,” he called out.  “You alive?”

I hope so.

I mean, all of these are shitty people, but Cricket’s one of the cool shitty people.

He heard a sound, movement, and turned. She was gingerly searching through the carpet of weaponized glass shards for her artificial larynx.  She found it and pressed the cylinder to her throat.  “Alive.”

I like this device, too. It’s a good example of how helpful even comparably simple tinkertech can be. 🙂

“You said something was wrong.  What did you notice?”

“Sound.  The glass was singing.  Still is.”  She pointed at one wall.

Hm, yeah, sounds like I was on to something last time with the power working via vibrations.

Hookwolf followed the line to a building across the street and a little ways to one side.

His ears were ringing, but he doubted that was it.  It would be something subsonic that Cricket noticed with her power, then.

Yep!

He strode across the room to the windows and gazed out at the city block surrounding the home base of the Chosen.  Glass was still raining down from the sky, glimmering in the orange-purple light of the setting sun.

Still? How tall are the buildings around here?

That said, this would be such a cool visual.

Every window in view was broken, empty of glass.  Car windshields, streetlights and signs had all been affected, and the surrounding surfaces of wood, metal and fiberglass all bore the scuffs and gouges of the fragile shrapnel.

Seems like she’s got pretty good range on her power.

I wonder if she has more than one setting, though. Like, can she tone it down if she wants to?

Every piece of glass in the room suddenly stood on end, points facing upward.

Uh-oh. Can she control it beyond just making it shatter?

He gave it a moment of his attention, then turned to the world beyond the window, hoping for some glimpse of his adversaries, a clue about where they were.

I suppose I didn’t explicitly say this yet, but of course I think there’s only Shatterbird, just because that’s how these Interludes work. It’s completely sensible for Hookwolf to assume they’re all there, though, and it’d be smart to act as if they probably were even if he had reason to believe they weren’t. Just in case.

Who else?  He wracked his brain.  Jack Slash was the brains and leader of the operation.  Not a threat unto himself.

Not to Hookwolf personally, I suppose. It’d just be metal against metal.

Shatterbird couldn’t harm him, he was almost certain.

Besides the layer of skin, but Hookwolf’s dealt with that already.

Bonesaw.  She was the wild card, the most unpredictable element in terms of what she could bring to the table.

Unpredictable does seem to be her thing.

Is her power as unpredictable as she is? Maybe it’s like Eidolon’s but random, like the power I made up for myself back in Extermination?

So often the case with tinkers.

Oh. Okay, so she’s a tinker too. I suppose that makes sense – didn’t Coil’s info on Mannequin state or imply that Bonesaw had helped out with his transformation?

As for her specialty… Medical equipment? I know that might sound weird, but a bonesaw is a surgical tool, and tinker-grade medical equipment would be a very varied category of tools (accounting for unpredictability), many of which could be used as weaponry as well. Especially if adjusted by a morally compromised tinker with her specialty in it.

More troubling were the Nine he couldn’t put down.  The Siberian was untouchable, an immovable object, invincible in a way that even Alexandria wasn’t.

Hm, interesting. We already know about the “immovable object” part, but the invincibility is new.

I guess if no part of her can be moved against her will, piercing or slicing attacks can’t force her flesh to part, and bludgeoning attacks do no damage either because they don’t push the flesh inward to squish things… I suppose invincibility to physical attacks, at the very least, is a logical consequence of this power.

Even if he were capable of hurting Crawler, he wouldn’t want to.

Interesting. So is that because of their power, or interpersonal stuff? I’m inclined to believe the former.

Although maybe it’s just that he doesn’t want to piss them off because of a scary offensive power. That doesn’t seem quite like Hookwolf though, and he’s considering this on the basis that he thinks the Slaughterhouse members are all attacking in the first place.

Mannequin, he wasn’t sure about.  He knew the crazed tinker had encased himself in a nearly indestructible shell.  As strong as Hookwolf was, he faced that distant possibility that any of these people could pin him down or set him up to be taken out by others.

Sounds about right, especially with the “unless he was forced to stay still” from the last paragraph meeting Siberian’s power.

Which is to say I’m resuming the chapter. Let’s go! 😛

Yo dawg I heard you like Worm so I put a worm in your Worm… and that worm is me.

“Shatterbird!” he roared, once he knew he was secure. 

Ah, so he recognizes the power. Makes sense – judging by Taylor and Danny’s reactions in 10.6 and 11.1, her power seems to be the most well known among the Nine, and it’s presumably the one they use to announce their presence to the public.

There was no reply.  Of course.  She was attacking from a safe position.

I wonder how much range she has.

Also, is it an area effect centered on herself, or can she pick a spot within line of sight to act as the center of the effect?

An attack from her meant an attack from the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine.  Daunting, but not impossible.

Hm. If you think you, Cricket, Menja and Stormtiger, especially in the states each of the others are in right now, can take on all of the Slaughterhouse at once… Eh, I wouldn’t bet on you. I suppose you do also have the remaining mundane recruits by your side, but let’s be real, a member or two of the Slaughterhouse could probably take out most of those without much trouble. Especially Jack.

He was virtually invincible in this form.  That left few that could actively hurt him.  Burnscar.  The Siberian.  Crawler.

Hm, interesting. Burnscar makes sense, since she can heat the metal, and Crawler’s battle form is probably all sorts of weird and powerful, but why Siberian?

There was Hatchet Face, the bogeyman of capes.

Huh. That’s quite a reputation.

With the exception of Hatchet Face, the group wouldn’t be able to do much harm to him unless he was forced to stay still.

I see… To be fair, Siberian is pretty good at restraining people.