Burnscar trudged through the expanding pool of water to enter Palanquin’s front door.  The club was empty, there was no power, no music.  Even the employees were attending to their personal lives.  It was just Elle and Burnscar.

Uh…

Hi.

Sorry about the, uh, bouncers.

It was a minute before the door to her bedroom opened.

“There you are,” Burnscar said.

Elle looked away.

There she is, yes.

Time to find out what Burnscar’s all about, personality-wise.

A horn… some kind of noisemaker.  A bell?  There was a bell in one area of the barren ruins, if she could only find it.

Not a bad idea, pulling an item out from one of the worlds to help her.

Burnscar dropped from the burning wall opposite Palanquin.

Oh hey, welcome back.

Did you leave Shamrock and Spitfire behind down the road? Or maybe Spitfire turned and ran back?

Retracing her steps.  She looked up at the window that Elle stood behind.

Does she really stand “behind” the window when, unless this is a different window than the one we’ve been looking through all this time, it’s shattered?

I guess you could just consider the hole in the wall to be a window, regardless of the state of the glass, but can you stand “behind” a hole like that?

She’s not after Spitfire.  She’s after me, Elle thought, with a moment’s despair.

Oh shit.

Labyrinth is pretty damn powerful on her bad days. I could see why they might want that on their side.

Once, twice.  It was hard to tell if the shots hit home, because Burnscar was already wreathing herself in flame, disappearing to appear from the burning wall nearest Spitfire.

Oh, huh. Well, I suppose falling from the wall is preferable to getting shot.

Spitfire ran, and Burnscar chased her.  Elle could see Shamrock hesitate, then leap through the curtain of water that poured from the urn, giving chase, hoping to help her teammate.

Good luck.

I don’t think you’ll ultimately succeed, though.

“No!” Elle shouted.  But her voice was drowned out by the sound of the water.  Soon the pair were gone.

Hm, looks like we won’t be finding out how that went right now.

Would be a shame if it turned out Shamrock was a charred corpse next time we heard about her.

Her phone.  She needed to phone them, let them know.  Where was it?

Let who know what, exactly?

In the kitchen.  Stupid.  She’d been in one of her momentary fugues when they’d been gathering dinner, she had to have left it there.

Welp. Fetch quest?

And if she ventured any further than the upstairs hallway, maybe the ledge above the dance floor, she would be losing any ground she’d gained with her power here.

Jeez, the limit really is quite small right now, huh.

There was a rumble, and water began pouring from the stump of one arm and the urn the statue held.

Oooh, elemental advantage! Good call using this, Elle.

It poured down around Shamrock, flooding out onto the street to quench the fires on the ground level.

You know what this means, right?

It means this is no longer a dry place. It’s like rule 35, but for water – if there isn’t a bunch of water there already (as per rule 34, but for water), there will be soon.

Soon it was only the patches of flame on the walls that remained.

Teleporting to those seems like a bad idea. That is, if she even can teleport when it’s like this. She can create her own from-fires, but can she keep one up for long enough to teleport when the statue is continuously pouring water?

Incidentally, I wonder if Elle made sure the ball went the wrong way to solve the puzzle and a flooding room would’ve been the punishment for messing up back in the other world it came from.

Shamrock raised her gun, aiming at Burnscar, and fired.

…

This gonna work?

Are they going to need two new Fellowship members instead of just the one?

Elle grabbed her chair and shattered her window.

Woah, drastic measures time.

Gripping the sides of the window, ignoring the glass that bit into her fingers, she screamed, “Shamrock!”

What can she do?

Both Shamrock and Burnscar looked up at her.

And yes, now you’ve alerted Burnscar to your location. Now she can stop your contraptions with much more efficiency.

She slapped the wall with her hand, leaving bloody fingerprints where the glass had cut her, “The ball needs to go right!”

I guess Shamrock’s luck manipulation is active, and she needs to know what is the lucky outcome for it to work?

Burnscar launched another fireball at Shamrock, and Shamrock leaped to one side.

Nice dodge.

“What ball!?”

Elle couldn’t tell her, not without letting Burnscar know.  She could feel the ball making its way down the last slope, dropping down the far left, to where the mechanism and the lower half of the puzzle had been devastated by Burnscar’s fireball.

Well. That didn’t work.

Shamrock would get a glimpse of the ball through the hole in the wall, as it dropped down… now.

Hm, or maybe it still can.

Elle felt the almost imperceptible influence of Shamrock’s power.  The woman was a telekinetic and clairvoyant on the smallest of scales, capable of making small changes and knowing how to use them to make big things happen.

Ohh.

Her luck hasn’t been working because it wasn’t luck. That’s just how she portrays it, much like how Grue claims his power is just darkness on the wiki (”It’s not wrong, but it does catch people off guard when they think they know what you can do, and there’s something more to it.”), or how Taylor made the Empire goons think turning into a bug monster was part of her power.

Makes sense.

The ball moved a few millimeters to the left, hit a splinter of wood and bounced toward the right, spinning.  It landed, and the spin of its rotation coupled with the help of an additional nudge carried the ball to the right, and down into the chamber behind the statue.

Nice work.

A fireball caught Newter in the stomach.  He was knocked from where he clung to the wall, falling to the ground.

Ouch.

He had to roll out of a patch of ground that was licked by orange flame.

A perfect example of stop, drop and roll.

Burnscar turned to Shamrock, who was waiting for the lever to emerge.

I see, so Shamrock has figured that the lever is going to do something beneficial? That, or she’s just willing to take her chances.

And hey, who better to do so?

A fireball was flung at the red-haired woman, who ducked too slowly.  The flame clipped her in the shoulder in its route to punch a hole in the wall, directly where the lever was.

So wait, did the shoulder hit cause it to not hit the lever? Because that could be construed as luckier than not getting hit, depending on what the lever does.

Pieces of the mechanism tumbled around Shamrock.

Ah, no.

You know, I’m generally not seeing much of the luck Shamrock is supposed to have in this fight.

…what if the powers that control hers have decided it’s luckier to be defeated (but left alive)? Possibly because of the risk of Slaughterhouse retaliation if they were to defeat Burnscar?

Gears, levers, paddles and fragments of the switch.

Shamrock narrowly dodges a screen and two JoyCons.

She had to focus.  The statue wasn’t enough.  She needed a mechanism.  The one that was attached to the statue in her mind’s eye didn’t work.

Well, that’s unfortunate. What else do you have?

Something else.  She searched. A portcullis with a wheel… no, too rusted, the chain too prone to snapping.  Ah, there.  A math puzzle, where a ball was set to roll down a series of tubes, with its path being determined by a series of levers, each moving a paddle that would adjust the ball’s route.

Neat. Burnscar doesn’t seem like the type for math puzzles, but maybe that’s a good thing here.

So frustrating.  On her worst days, the days when her view of the other worlds was so expansive that she could barely register the real world, she didn’t have to put things together like this.  She could shape things as she made them come into the real world, and they emerged as quickly as she wanted them.

Much like we saw at the mall, right?

Fitting everything into the statue, she had to use some of the math puzzle, the lever, some of the statue’s existing mechanism, positioning it all so that they fit together as she pushed it into existence.

Hm, interesting. She’s mixing and matching and making a new mechanism from the pieces. Who knows what this will result in? Maybe the statue will be able to move around like a mechanical robot?

Only Spitfire was largely untouched, helpless to do anything against an opponent that was not only fireproof, but who could walk through fires as easily as anyone else might use a doorway to move from one room to the next.

Spitfire has the benefit that Burnscar probably wants her unharmed, but the problem that Burnscar wants her.

This wasn’t right.  Her team, her friends, her family were all moments away from being obliterated.

Are you sure this is a good day?

I have a feeling we’re going to see what a bad day is like for Elle by the end of this chapter, her power getting stronger by her grasp on reality weaker, as a result of the events that are unfolding.

Bonus points to me if it happens when Elle’s thoughts turn to self-loathing, beating herself up about not being able to help and, ironically, becoming more able as a result. (That wouldn’t exactly be a great moral, but morals are not what someone should read Worm for in general.)