Coil took the stairs two at a time as he descended to the ground floor, Trickster, Oliver and Sundancer hurrying after him.

Hey, Crawler, you stand out there and count to 200…

“You,” Coil called out, not even bothering to recall the employee’s name, “The vault door.  Open it.  Squad leaders, organize your groups!”

Why? Shouldn’t they be coming in too? I don’t know if they need organizing for that.

There was a faint crash in the distance, and a vibration rippled through the complex.

Hello! Please, come in.

Don’t forget to wipe your claws on the welcome mat!

Coil turned and swept her up in his arms.  Her skin crawled at the contact of her body against his.

Ugh.

She didn’t say or do anything about it, in part because she wasn’t able, too sick, hurting too much.  The other reason was because she had seen the numbers shift each time she flinched away from his touch or made her disgust known.  Little differences.

Hm, that’s odd. The numbers do seem to already incorporate Dinah’s possible actions like everyone else’s, so is this a side effect of Coil’s power?

He was angrier with her, more curt, if she pulled way, if she complained about it.

Yeah… Classic abusive behavior, training her into not complaining.

There was safety in the numbers, in following the rules she set on herself.  It kept her power in order, it ensured Coil was tolerant with her, and it meant she didn’t have to go without her candy for even a short time.

The rules?

“Noelle’s room,” Trickster said, an instant before Dinah put the pieces together.

“How many of us, pet?”

How many are there room for?

“Everyone here was there,” she looked towards the soldiers.

In other words, it’s getting further reinforced that they shouldn’t even bother trying to defend the base.

“Is she in there?”

“She was.  Yes.”

Also, this. I got the sense last time that there was a risk of Noelle having bursts of violence, and that was why they kept her in the vault to begin with.

Hm, I suppose it does make sense that if the vault is built to keep Noelle in, it might also keep Crawler out.

Dinah tried to recall what she’d seen.  “Darkness.”

Even in a timeline where they survived? We don’t have time to bring in Grue, even if his power could help out, so are we going for some form of dark hiding spots? I wouldn’t think it’d be an escape tunnel, unless the chance of survival if they leave has drastically increased.

“You mentioned that earlier, pet.”

“We were in the dark, and it smelled like meat.  It smelled like sweat, too.  And we were all pressed in close together.”

Hm, yeah, looks like it. Meat, so some form of pantry for the base kitchen?

Sweat could be just from the amount of people in there, but I suppose some rooms in the base could naturally have that scent. Like the training area’s lockers, or the laundry room.

“Where?” Coil asked.

“There was a metal door in front of us.  Big.  The vault door downstairs.”

…they’re hiding with Noelle?

I suppose that would be a good opportunity for some more clues as to what’s going on with her.

Then again, if Crawler has a high chance of going for Noelle first, wouldn’t that be the worst hiding place, as long as he can tell where she is?

“I know, but pressuring her won’t help anything.”

A smell hit her.  Like the bitterest black chocolate in the world and overly strong coffee, the odor so thick on the air that she could taste it.  With her already upset stomach, it made her want to retch.

Would this be Crawler?

“Smells bad,” she said.  “Make the smell go away.”

“She’s conscious.  Is this smell a clue?” Trickster turned.

Hm, does he not smell it himself?

Is it all in her head? Maybe something from the future she looked into?

“No.  It’s a symptom,” Coil answered him, not turning to look at her or them.  “She may be dizzy, dazed, or she may rub or scratch at herself until she fully recovers.  Don’t let her scratch her corneas or rub herself until she bleeds.”

…

He’s done this before.

It’s unclear whether Dinah remembers him doing this before, whether she’s been through this at his command before, but he’s done it.

Enough that he’s so aware of the symptoms that it’s like he’d read up on it on some medical website.

How many alternate Dinahs did he do this to?

But she did it, because as much as it would hurt, it would hurt more if she didn’t get her candy.  If Crawler got his hands on her, it wouldn’t hurt at all after those first few moments of pain, but that was bad too.  It meant dying.

Yeah, that ain’t ideal.

She focused hard on that scene, taking it from an image small and vague enough that it could have fit on the end of a pencil to something full size.  Her head exploded with pain.

How big is “full size” relative to the end of a pencil, though? For physical representations of images, that term could range all the way from an A5 sheet of paper to a full school board, or even bigger.

She caught fragmentary images as she felt herself double over and heave the contents of her stomach onto the metal catwalk and Sundancer’s legs and feet.

Whoops. Doubt Sundancer’s super happy about that. It’s better than dying, though.

Sundancer could have yelled, but she didn’t.  Instead, she fell to her knees and grabbed Dinah by the shoulders to steady her.

Sundancer is a good.

It was just in time, because Dinah felt fireworks erupt in her brain, felt her body go spastic.  Too much, too fast.  The image was overly sharp and detailed, overwhelming her senses, shredding all sense of time and present.

I suppose if she looks at a full section of timeline at once, that’s a bit like making her brain deal with interpreting a huge number of moments at once, instead of just the one present moment we deal with at a time. No wonder it gets fried.

(Well, technically the brain does attempt to predict the future to deal with delays such as the one between the eyes and the brain. I’m kind of including that in the present moment, I suppose.)

Let’s do this thing! The thing that I was doing, but then stopped doing, because I had done that thing for a while. That thing.

What was that thing again?