Assassinating Jack could also be disastrous, but in a much less structured fashion.

Aisha moved quickly aside as a spider moved from the kitchen, past her and to the table.  Whatever cameras or artificial intelligence it used, it didn’t seem to notice her.

Oh, good.

Unless otherwise suggested, I’m going to attribute that more to the spiders not being tasked with watching out than to Imp’s power for now.

It handed Bonesaw a diet cola that the little girl opened with bloody fingers and drank.

Gotta keep hydrated while working!

With a little more confidence, Aisha moved further inside, giving a wide berth to Crawler and Burnscar’s foot-high images of flame.

Probably a good idea. I get the feeling they’d be more likely to notice Imp if she caught fire. Especially Burnscar, who can probably sense nearby fires.

Holding her weapons, Aisha stood next to Shatterbird, at one end of the couch.

See, this is where you could use that knife. Shatterbird is by far the most deadly Slaughterhouse member, but she’s fragile. You could probably stab her in the back easily, and maybe even get away with it unnoticed.

At least mechanically speaking. The emotional difficulty of assassinating someone is a whole other can of worms.

Also, assassinating one of the Nine other than Jack could be disastrous for the city, due to revenge and such.

Bonesaw stood over the dining room table, with a mechanical spider-thing on the opposite side of the table, assisting her.  A young man was on the table itself, his wrists and ankles tied down.

Aw, look, she’s working!

…alright, it’s not that adorable right now, but this is Bonesaw. It’s only a matter of time.

His torso was open from collar-bone to crotch, his ribs splayed apart.  Bonesaw and her mechanical spider were elbow deep in the contents of his torso. 

Usually when a character is red-faced in fiction, this isn’t why.

The spiders.

Ah, fuck. Robots. If the spiders have any semblance of sentience (not to be confused with them being AIs – they just need to sense and remember things, not be intelligent), they’re a risk for Imp just like Dragon was.

There is one circumstance where I can see Shatterbird accepting the lap thing, besides simply having a more chill side than we’ve seen so far.

The only problem is that this ship seems one-sided at best in canon, judging by Burnscar’s attitude in Labyrinth’s Interlude.

Third floor up, blood on the door leading into the hall.  More blood trailing down the hallway, stopping at one apartment.

There’s a lot of that stuff around here, huh.

She double checked that her power was active and pushed her way inside.

Only a few of the Nine were present.

Huh. So what’s up with the men outside, then? Hired guards disguised as a detective and some other people?

Crawler slept with his ponderous head on paws that were crossed over one another, his back rising and falling with each deep breath.

He was large enough that the highest part of his back rose nearly to the ceiling with each breath he drew in through his nostrils.  Only half of the eyes on his body were closed, covered with thick, dark gray lids.

I guess this is the semi-eldritch monstrosity equivalent of sleeping with one eye open.

Shatterbird and Burnscar were on the couch, Burnscar stretched out with her head on the armrest, her feet propped up on Shatterbird’s lap.

Is Shatterbird actually accepting that? She really does not seem like the type to accept that.

She held a graphic novel on her stomach with one hand and created flames in the other, shaping them to match the people she saw as she flicked from page to page.  Shatterbird was sitting upright, a novel in her hands.

Sorry, Imp, looks like you’ve got the wrong place. This is clearly a literature club.

The elevator wouldn’t be working.  She headed for the stairwell, only to find more blood.  It was as though a body had been dragged.

Again, probably Siberian.

So how recently did this happen? Was she feeding separately from the Merchant massacre?

Going forward was a stupid idea, she knew.  Brian and Skitter had gone into way too much fucking depth about the risks.   Still, that hadn’t stopped her before.

At least she’s somewhat self-aware? She’s not dismissing their points as wrong, she just doesn’t care, and she’s aware of that.

She got her taser and knife from her bag and made her way upstairs.

If it turns out Siberian’s still here – unlikely given the men standing outside – the knife ain’t gonna be much help as anything but a comfort item.

As for the taser, electricity in general might work on Siberian, but most tasers work by piercing the skin with electrodes. That won’t help. I guess the variants with “drive stun” functionality (which is what I’ve been assuming Regent’s scepter has, the kind you just press against the body rather than shoot with) might, though, since they don’t need to pierce the skin to stay in place.

It’s also worth noting that this functionality isn’t usually enough to incapacitate, only cause pain and involuntary nerve stimulation (have I mentioned how appropriate it is that Regent has one of these?), so it might not be very effective.

Looking around, she spotted a smear of blood on the side of a building, three stories up.

Siberian’s trail, I suppose. Boing!

Okay.  So maybe they’d gone this way.

The trail of breadcrumbs that the blood provided were slowly being eroded or masked by the light rain.  The water raised the oils from the cracks in the road, giving the ground a rainbow sheen.

Mr. Leviathan N. D. Bringer, the direct consequences of your visit are making this trail harder to follow. This is obstruction of justice – I’m gonna have to take you down to the station.

The signs of blood faded too soon, and Aisha could only guess whether she had taken the wrong road, gone too far or if the rain had cleared it away.  She might have given up right then, but she saw a group of men standing outside of an apartment building.

Hello, there. Just out of curiosity, would you happen to have seen the Slaughterhouse Nine running past here recently?

It was only when she got close that she saw the badge clipped to the front of one of their jackets.  A detective.

I suppose it’s possible that they (or he? might be only one detective here) too found the trail Aisha’s following.

There was blood on the door that led into the apartment lobby.

I think that means you’re supposed to pass over it. It’s little late for that particular holiday, though.

No.  If there was something to be found, it wouldn’t be here.  She headed to the edge of the scene, where the police cars had all stopped.  There were still spots and spatters of blood here and there, and bloody footprints, but not much.  She walked around the police and the cars to check each set out.  In every case, it seemed, the bloodied victims had either fallen where they lay or disappeared.  Ambulances?

Or perhaps Siberian. See any power armor nearby?

Having checked the area, she moved further down the street to see the next closed-off alleyway.  The same thing.  A few more bloody footprints, but nothing beyond that.

Seems like we’ve got some sort of trail, at least?

The third blockade offered something.  There was a spot where the blood was thicker, which didn’t match up with the other spaces.

Ahh – a little newer, maybe?

The trail extended further than it did elsewhere.

Yeah, here we go, trail acquired.

She’d hoped for a lead.  A piece of evidence, or an overheard tidbit of information from the cops.

No such luck.

Shame. So what’s your next plan?

There was an overabundance of evidence.  By the time the cops processed everything here and managed to identify the bodies, the leaves would be falling off the trees and the Nine would be long gone, one way or another.  The cops weren’t talking, either.  They were working silently, or the things they were saying weren’t interesting.

I would imagine this scene doesn’t put them in a talkative mood.

Catching the Nine wasn’t their job.  If they found something worthwhile, they would pass it on to the local capes, probably.

Makes sense. The cops aren’t really as equipped to take on enemies like these, even if the PRT supplies them with tinkertech.