He wouldn’t be able to distract the lunatic with words while he acted. He could only pray.
Good luck, I guess. I don’t think you’ll be able to kill him, but I guess you might be able to severely hamper him.
Don’t do it for me, God. I probably don’t deserve the chance. Do it for every soul this motherfucker would kill from here on out if I fail.
I guess he does care on some level. Good to know. 🙂
He thrust out the knife, swept it towards his opponent’s chest cavity. His hand stopped.
Hm?
With his vision in his good eye failing him, it took him a second to see why. Mannequin’s hand gripped his wrist.
Ah.
He pushed, as if he could beat this monster in strength. By some miracle, his hand moved a fraction closer to his enemy’s chest. He redoubled his efforts, and it moved still closer.
To beat this Mad Dummy, you gotta have DETERMINATION!
Mannequin slammed him into the wall with more strength than he might have expected the artificial body to have.
And there we go.
You officially poked the bear.
Or, uh, verbally assaulted the mannequin. Doesn’t sound as good, though, and it might cause a floating training dummy to attack you later, if you survive this.
…wait, he’s already being attacked by a “Mad Dummy”.
The blade came next, springing from Mannequin’s hand to pierce the shoulder that led to Colin’s stump of an arm and stick through the wall behind him.
Scrub’s power had torn through the clusters of Merchants during the fighting, and Bryce’s new ‘family’ was no exception.
Ouch.
The girlfriend was dead, her head and shoulders gone, muscle and fluids flowing out where the flesh had been annihilated.
♪ Head and shoulders, knees and void, knees and void. ♪
The girl’s mother was a goner too. She lay on her back, her face missing. Had she been behind her daughter, holding her, hit by the same blast?
Man, where’s that Greenfire guy from 8.3 when we need him?
Then again, it sounds like this one’s already pretty symmetrical.
‘Thomas’ was still alive, the black man with the scar on his lips. The man who had hurt Sierra’s friend from the church, who had literally torn the guy a new asshole, if I’d gotten Sierra’s meaning right.
It’s a bit of a different thing, morally speaking, when you’re not doing it on an Endbringer.
Thomas crawled slowly for the nearest arch, breathing hard, his face drawn with pain. A slice had been taken out of his arm, shoulder, and a section of his back, as though a guillotine had grazed him from behind.
ouch
I wasn’t quite sure how he hadn’t died yet, with the amount he was bleeding.
“Is he for real?” I looked to Lisa for an answer. “Can they do that?”
Going right into the “Taylor getting filled in” part, I see. 🙂 Helpful for anyone who’s forgotten about Upsilon at this point.
“Don’t think he’s lying.”
The crowd roared, and I turned to see why, just in time to see the aftermath of the first attack. One of the Merchants in the ring had just bludgeoned someone with a length of pipe.
I guess Lisa might not have gotten deep enough into the subject of case 53 to know about the Dealer yet. That’s fair – apparently it took quite a while for Faultline’s Crew to get that far.
Meanwhile, the brawl is on.
Backing away, he found someone he knew, and through some unspoken agreement, they drew together, each protecting the other’s back.
Nice, got some alliances in here. That works a lot better when there are multiple prizes.
Others were having similar ideas. Groups of friends were banding together, leaving others alone. One of the loners found another guy without any friends around, shouted something I couldn’t hear, and they drew together. His new ‘friend’ turned and struck him down from behind not two seconds later.
…good job.
The traitor got his just reward when three young men and a grungy looking old man tackled him to the ground and started beating him.
“I could have brought Pritt,” Lisa admitted, “But I’m more comfortable with there being more guys in our group. Chances are good we’ll get in a minor scuffle somewhere along the way, and way the Merchants operate, they’re going to respect guys more. Ready to head out?”
Yeah, I do think this logic is sound. A group like the Merchants is going to be rife with sexists.
She looked at her cell phone’s display. “Party starts soon, and we’ve got to walk.”
Wouldn’t want to be late!
Lisa removed the orange vest and name tag and then walked around to her desk to retrieve a series of colorful elastic bands. She snapped one around her left wrist, then handed two to Minor. She wore one yellow. He wore one yellow and one black.
Oh, yeah, nice thinking. I figured they’d just go as new recruits, but since you already have bands, why not use them to make things go a little smoother.
That done, she led the way out of the shelter, giving a sloppy salute to her ‘boss’ at the front desk. Together, we walked as a crowd.
Except she only gave herself and Minor bands, so I guess the narrative is that that Minor went to one of the arrangements, then brought his girlfriend to the next, and now the couple of them are bringing the rest of their friends along for a third.
We were a block away from the shelter when Senegal put one hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer.
I wasn’t going to be able to have a conversation with this guy.
Pfft, yeah, no shit.
He doesn’t seem much for words.
Time for action, then?
“Fine. Don’t care. You’re threatening my people? You’d better be ready to take me on.”
“Not scared of you!”
Only the fearless may proceed. Brave ones, foolish ones, both walk not the, uh,road that involves not taunting Skitter.
I shrugged, “Prove it. Use that rusty thing on me. Stab me.”
‘Cause as we all know, trying to cut her outfit worked out well for Shadow Stalker.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Taylor’s costume is slightly weaker to piercing than slashing damage. It seems like something could get in between the threads more easily than it could cut them.
He looked around at the crowd, hesitated.
“What?” I asked him. “I thought you weren’t scared.”
Hehe. How does it feel to have your bravado challenged, big man?
To say I barely recognized myself was.. how could I put it? It was true, but I could also remember myself months ago, when I’d look at my reflection and I would be so focused on the flaws and the things I didn’t like about myself that I never felt familiar with the person I was seeing in the mirror.
I felt especially justified in pulling out that Undertale screenshot in the previous post because, like Undertale had a previous mirror near the beginning of the game that said “It’s you!”, Worm also had a mirror scene in the beginning, all the way back in 1.1. I think there’s a sort of connection between then and now, just like with the mirrors in Undertale.
However, maybe the other possible text for the later mirror is more appropriate here: “It’s me.” In which “me” is not the same as “you”. Without going too much into spoilers, this signifies that the protagonist doesn’t recognize themself in the mirror anymore, because their actions over the course of the game have changed them so thoroughly that the flavor text claims that it’s the narrator in the mirror.
In this way, mirrors can be damn effective literary tools for allowing a character to get introspective about the ways they’ve changed over the course of the story.
All that said… it actually sounds like Taylor approves more of what she’s seeing now than what she saw before.
It was as though it was always a stranger I was looking at, and I would be left vaguely surprised at the combination of features across from me.
Or at least not much less. She’s just…
She didn’t get the “It’s you.” on the first mirror.
Did I look different? My skin had a light tan, now. I’d spent more time outdoors in the past few weeks.
Taylor’s descent to the dark side, also known as “the ancient demonic realm of outdoors”, is beginning to show physically.
In the week and a half I’d spent in the shelter, I hadn’t exactly had books or TV, so I’d walked during the day, making my way across the city to check on the loft and to see the state of my dad’s house. I’d walked at night, too, when I’d been unable to sleep, but people hardly tanned doing that.
I wouldn’t know. What’s “the day”?
Also, good to hear Taylor’s taken the time to check on her old home. How is it doing? And more importantly, how is Danny doing (when he’s not busy being Coil in Taylor’s nightmares)?
I couldn’t pin down exactly how or why, but the definition in my face and body had changed. It was possible I’d had a growth spurt.
Perhaps. On top of that, you’ve gotten a lot of exercise.
Some of it was perhaps the tan giving more accent to the features of my body or face. Maybe it was that I’d been eating a pretty lean diet when I was staying at the shelter, coupled with the fact that I’d been so active over the past two months. I hadn’t spent six hours every day sitting around in school, I’d been in fights, I’d been running, and I’d ridden the dogs.
Yep.
I had some muscle definition in my arms, now, and I thought maybe I was standing straighter.
That one might be more mental than anything. This whole adventure has really boosted Taylor’s self-confidence.
Or maybe it was all those minor things helped by the simple fact that I was dressing differently, that my hair hadn’t been cut in a while, and that I wasn’t wearing my glasses.
One of the phones looked years out of date. The screen was scuffed so badly it was barely readable, and the plastic cover for the plug slot at the bottom was missing. The other was a touch screen smart phone.
I guess the older one might be part of her civilian identity.
He didn’t recognize the make or the model, and the interface when he turned it on and touched the screen was unfamiliar. Special issue from the Wards? Whatever. Not important.
It’s a WardPhone 3, running Android Sentinel.
Or maybe it’s the kind of phone you get in Undertale, with tinkertech allowing it to turn into equipment like a gun or a jetpack.
The smart phone was password protected. That was more Lisa’s thing, but he did have one trick up his sleeve. Holding her fingers above the keypad, he let them follow through with the most natural feeling sequence of numbers, ingrained into the mind-body connection through the habitual repetition of a sequence of movements over weeks or months. Muscle memory.
Niice.
It took two tries. The first felt slightly off at the end. The second was spot on, and was rewarded with a vibration of the phone and a menu.
This Arc and all the opportunities to make hacker voice jokes…
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