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.
It was worse than she’d expected. She ducked under the police tape and pushed one officer out of her way as she stepped into the area.
Oh yeah, I suppose they’d want to investigate the carnage from Jack’s Interlude.
Police cars and PRT vans had formed a broad perimeter, with police tape strung between them. She momentarily wondered why they didn’t have the wooden barricades. It was flimsy as security went.
Humans will just see this and walk away!
It was drizzling, and the small amounts of rain did little to clean the streets of the blood that spattered it. Water soaked into the white and brown sheets that had been draped over the bodies that still waited for someone to clean them up. The brown, she realized, was dried blood.
Nasty stuff.
Aisha picked her way through the fallen. The worst of the carnage was at the edges, as if some invisible line had been drawn that nobody was permitted to cross, and in the center, where the masses of people had gathered before being murdered together.
There may be some truth to the invisible line thing. I don’t recall it specifically mentioned, but there were eight psychopaths to keep track of, so who knows, maybe one or more of them made sure nobody would get away.
Will Imp succeed in her espionage mission, or will she be captured or worse? Will Taylor get back to her territory in time to stop Mannequin? Does Jack Slash have a secret crush on Miss Militia?
We need answers, and fortunately,
Let’s read some Worm.
Small things. Nothing she couldn’t have bought in a well stocked convenience store, maybe. But she would operate best if she was relaxed, and having some personal items made her feel better.
Makes sense. Especially since it just hit me that a natural reaction to fear would be to instinctively tell her power to hide her more effectively, which apparently makes it weaker – if Imp is startled or frightened, it might make her more noticeable.
That only left the problem of finding them.
Yeah, that’s gonna be the tricky part, unless she gets super lucky. I guess the luckiest thing short of stumbling over all of them would be running into Bonesaw without Siberian present. Bonesaw would be easier than many of them to follow and less likely to put Imp in the crossfire of an attack without noticing her than Jack or Burnscar. Though it’s possible that Hack Job would sense Imp’s power and disable it if she got too close to him.
They’d attacked the Merchants, and observing her mom had given her the chance to find out where. It was a starting point.
I suppose it’s better than nothing.
■
I guess we’re skipping ahead in her efforts.
Around the girl guide stuff, she found a small tape recorder and an old pair of binoculars. After finding an old backpack that had never been emptied of the school supplies, she found some notebooks that had only been filled in about a third of the way.
Spying equipment? You going ahead and looking for the Nine, Aisha?
She tore out those pages and tucked the notebooks under one arm.
Good idea tearing out that stuff. If the notebook were to be lost and found by the Nine, it might’ve contained enough information to identify her as its owner.
Everything went into a compact black handbag, along with her taser and knives.
Hey, at least she’s going prepared. This still might end badly if she gets too close to Cherish (which isn’t very close), but still, she’s trying.
Also, it’s entirely possible that the power does work on Cherish’s more unusual senses. The Dragon thing was most likely a result of her brain being silicon. Hell, Mannequin might be more dangerous, since we don’t know how his brain still works – he might’ve integrated it into some artificial internal system that could mess with Imp’s power.
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